ABBY GREEN - The Virgin's Secret

‘Are you thinking about what it would feel like if my mouth was to touch yours right now?’

Angel’s gaze flew up and clashed with pure molten gold heat. An answering heat invaded her lower body, and she felt the urge to clamp her legs together, as if that might dampen the strange ache building up there.

Before she could articulate a response his hand had cupped her jaw and cheek, and suddenly there was no distance between them, only him, so tall and close that he blocked out the sky, and his head was descending, coming nearer and nearer. He smelt musky and hot . It was something so earthy that Angel could feel the response being tugged from her down low in her belly, as if she recognised it on some primitive level. Dimly she wondered if this was what people meant when they talked about animal attraction.

Desperately trying to cling onto something, anything rational, Angel brought a hand to cover his, to pull it down, to stop him, to say no…But then his mouth was so close that she could feel his breath feather there, mingling with hers. Her mouth tingled. She wanted…she wanted—

Abby Greengot hooked on Mills & Boon® romances while still in her teens, when she stumbled across one belonging to her grandmother, in the west of Ireland. After many years of reading them voraciously, she sat down one day and gave it a go herself. Happily, after a few failed attempts, Mills & Boon bought her first manuscript.

Abby works freelance in the film and TV industry, but thankfully the four a.m. starts and the stresses of dealing with recalcitrant actors are becoming more and more infrequent, leaving her more time to write!

She loves to hear from readers, and you can contact her through her website at www.abby-green.com. She lives and works in Dublin.

by

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Cover Page

Excerpt ‘Are you thinking about what it would feel like if my mouth was to touch yours right now?’ Angel’s gaze flew up and clashed with pure molten gold heat. An answering heat invaded her lower body, and she felt the urge to clamp her legs together, as if that might dampen the strange ache building up there. Before she could articulate a response his hand had cupped her jaw and cheek, and suddenly there was no distance between them, only him, so tall and close that he blocked out the sky, and his head was descending, coming nearer and nearer. He smelt musky and hot . It was something so earthy that Angel could feel the response being tugged from her down low in her belly, as if she recognised it on some primitive level. Dimly she wondered if this was what people meant when they talked about animal attraction. Desperately trying to cling onto something, anything rational, Angel brought a hand to cover his, to pull it down, to stop him, to say no…But then his mouth was so close that she could feel his breath feather there, mingling with hers. Her mouth tingled. She wanted…she wanted—

About The Author Abby Green got hooked on Mills & Boon® romances while still in her teens, when she stumbled across one belonging to her grandmother, in the west of Ireland. After many years of reading them voraciously, she sat down one day and gave it a go herself. Happily, after a few failed attempts, Mills & Boon bought her first manuscript. Abby works freelance in the film and TV industry, but thankfully the four a.m. starts and the stresses of dealing with recalcitrant actors are becoming more and more infrequent, leaving her more time to write! She loves to hear from readers, and you can contact her through her website at www.abby-green.com. She lives and works in Dublin.

Title Page The Virgin’s Secret by

Acknowledgements This is for my lovely editor, Meg, who shines a torchlight into the dark corners where I’ve tied myself into knots, and helps me unravel it all again into something coherent. Thanks for everything—you’re a star. I’d also like to dedicate this book with special thanks to Anne Mary Luttrell, whose waiting room is a magical place where many a plot has been incubated. Thanks for your healing hands (needles) and words.

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Copyright

This is for my lovely editor, Meg, who shines a torchlight into the dark corners where I’ve tied myself into knots, and helps me unravel it all again into something coherent. Thanks for everything—you’re a star.

I’d also like to dedicate this book with special thanks to Anne Mary Luttrell, whose waiting room is a magical place where many a plot has been incubated. Thanks for your healing hands (needles) and words.

LEONIDAS PARNASSUS looked out of the window of his private plane. They’d just landed at Athens airport. To his utter consternation his chest felt tight and constricted—a sensation he didn’t welcome. He was curiously reluctant to move from his seat, even though the cabin staff were preparing to open the door, even though sitting still and not moving was anathema to him. He told himself it was because he was still chafing at the reality that he’d acquiesced to his father’s demand that he come to Athens for ‘talks’.

Leo Parnassus did not carve out time for anything or anyone he deemed a waste of his resources and energy. Not a business venture, a lover, nor a father who had put building up the family fortune and clearing their shamed name before a relationship with his son. Leo grimaced slightly, his face so harsh that the steward who had been approaching him stopped abruptly and hovered uncertainly. Leo saw nothing though but the heat haze on the tarmac outside and the darkness of his own thoughts.

He was Greek through and through, and yet he’d never set foot on Greek soil. His family had been exiled from their ancestral home before he was born, but his father had returned triumphantly just a few years ago; finally realising a lifelong dream to clear their name of a terrible crime and to glory in their new-found status and inestimable wealth.

Bitter anger rose when Leo remembered his beloved ya ya ’s lined and worn face. The sadness that had grooved deep lines around her mouth and shadowed her eyes. It had been too late for her to return home. She’d died in an alien country she’d never grown to love. Even though his grandmother had urged him to return as soon as he’d had the chance, he’d condemned Athens on her behalf for breaking her heart. He’d always sworn that he wouldn’t return to the place that had spurned his family so easily.

Athens was still home to the Kassianides family who had been responsible for all that pain and sadness, and who were suffering far too belatedly and minutely for what they had done. They had cast a long shadow over his childhood which had been indelibly marked by their actions, in so many ways.

And yet, despite all that…here he was. Because something in his father’s voice, an unmistakable weakness had called to him, in spite of everything that had happened. It had touched him on some level. In short, he’d felt compelled to come. Perhaps he wanted to prove to himself that he was not at the mercy of his emotions?

The very thought of that made him go cold; at the tender age of eight he’d made an inarticulate vow never to let any intensity of emotion overwhelm him, because that’s what had killed his mother. Surely he could handle looking his ancestral home in the face and turn his back on it once and for all? Of course he could.

But first he had to deal with the fact that his father wanted him to take over the Parnassus shipping business. Leo had denied his inheritance a long time ago; he’d embraced the entrepreneurial American spirit, and now ran a diverse subsidiary business that encompassed finance, acquisitions, and real estate, recently snapping up an entire block of buildings in New York’s Lower East Side for redevelopment.

His sole input to his father’s business had been a couple of years before when they’d tightened the noose of revenge around the neck of Tito Kassianides, the last remaining patriarch of the Kassianides family. It was the one thing that had joined father and son: a united desire to seek vengeance.

Leo had taken singular pleasure in making sure that the Kassianides’ demise was ensured, thanks to a huge merger his father had orchestrated with Aristotle Levakis, one of Greece’s titans of industry. That victory now, though, when he was faced with the reality of touching down in Greece, felt curiously empty. He couldn’t help but think of his grandmother, how much she’d longed for this moment and never got a chance to see it.

A discreet cough sounded, ‘I’m sorry, sir?’

Leo looked up, intensely irritated to have been observed in a private moment. He saw the steward was gesturing to the now open cabin door. Leo’s chest clenched tightly again, and he had the childishly bizarre urge to tell them to slam the door shut and take off, back to New York. It was almost as if something outside that door lay in wait for him. Such a mix of emotions was rising to the surface, and it was so unwelcome that he stood up jerkily from his seat as if he could shake them off.

He walked to the cabin door, very aware of the eyes of his staff on him. Normally it didn’t bother him, he was used to people looking at him for his reaction, but now it scraped over his skin like sandpaper.

The heat hit him first, dry and searing. Strangely familiar. He breathed in the Athens air for the first time in his life and felt his heart hit hard with the intensifying of that absurd feeling of familiarity. He’d always felt that coming here would feel like betraying his grandmother’s memory, but now it was as if she was behind him, gently pushing him forward. For a man who lived by cool logic and intellect, it was an alien and deeply disturbing sensation.

He concealed his eyes behind dark shades as an ominous prickling skated over his skin. He had the very unwelcome sensation that everything in his life was about to change.

At the same moment on the other side of Athens.

‘Delphi, just take a deep breath and tell me what’s wrong—I can’t help you until I know what it is.’

That just provoked more weeping. Angel grabbed another tissue, a trickle of unease going down her spine now. Her younger half-sister said brokenly, ‘I don’t do this kind of thing, Angel, I’m a law student!’

Angel smoothed her pretty sister’s fall of mahogany hair behind one ear and said soothingly, ‘I know, sweetie. Look, it can’t be that bad, whatever it is, so just tell me and then we can deal with it.’

Angel was absolutely confident when she said this. Delphi was introverted, too quiet. She always had been, and even more so since a tragic accident had killed her twin sister about six years ago. Ever since then she’d buried herself in books and studies, so when she said quietly, after a little sniffly hiccup, ‘ I’m pregnant…’ the words simply didn’t register in Angel’s head.

They didn’t register until Delphi spoke again, with a catch in her voice.

‘Angel—did you hear me? I’m pregnant. That’s what…that’s what’s wrong.’

Angel’s hands tightened reflexively around her half-sister’s and she looked into her dark brown eyes—so different from her own light blue ones, even though they both shared the same father.