Michelle Reid - The Greek's Forced Bride

The hurt tears gathered all the stronger at his ruthless barrage. Feeling as if she’d just been knocked over by a bus then kicked for daring to let it happen, ‘I thought he loved me,’ Natasha managed to push out.

‘Which is why he was enjoying your sister over his desk when he should have been attending my board meeting, defending himself.’

‘Defending?’ she picked up.

Leo didn’t answer. Clamping his lips together, he climbed out of the car, annoyed with himself for wanting to beat her up for Rico’s sins. Rounding the car bonnet, he opened her door, then reached in to take hold of one of her wrists so he could tug her out, even though he knew she didn’t want to get out. Her phone started ringing again, distracting her long enough for him to get her into his house.

He pulled her into the living room and pushed her down into a chair then strode off to the drinks cabinet to pour her a stiff drink.

His hands were trembling, he noticed, and frowned as he splashed neat brandy into a glass. When he walked back to Natasha, he saw that she was sitting on the edge of the chair, all neat and prim with the bag on her lap as he’d predicted she would do.

Fresh anger ripped at him. ‘Here.’ He handed her the glass. ‘Drink that, it might help to loosen you up a bit.’

What happened next came without any warning at all that he was about to receive his just desserts when Natasha shot to her feet and launched the full contents of the glass at his face.

‘W-who do you think you are, Mr Christakis, to dare to think you can be this horrid to me?’ she fired up. ‘Listening to you, anyone would be f-forgiven for thinking that it had been you who’d been betrayed back there! Or is that it?’ she then shot out. ‘Are you being this downright nasty to me because you wished it had been you doing that with my sister instead of Rico—is that what your foul temper is about?’

Standing there with brandy dripping down his hard golden cheekbones, Leo Christakis, the dynamic and cut-throat head of one of the biggest companies in the world, heard himself utter…

‘No. I wished it had been you with me.’

CHAPTER TWO

IN THE thick, thrumming silence that followed that mind-numbing declaration, Natasha stared up at Leo’s liquor-drenched face—and wished that the brandy were still in the glass so she could toss it at him again!

‘H-how dare you?’ she shook out in tremulous indignation, eyes like sparkling blue diamonds darkening to sultry sapphires as the tears filled them up. ‘Don’t you think I’ve been h-humiliated enough without you poking fun at me as if it’s all been just a jolly good joke?’

‘No joke,’ Leo heard himself utter, then grimaced at the full, raw truth in his answer. There was definitely no joke to find anywhere in the way he had been quietly lusting after Natasha for weeks.

No, the real joke here was in hearing himself actually admit to it.

Turning his back on her, Leo dug a hand into his jacket pocket to retrieve the never-used handkerchief his various housekeepers always insisted on placing in his suits. Wiping the brandy from his face, he flicked a glance at the way Natasha was standing there in her neat blue suit and her sensible heeled shoes but with her very expressive eyes now blackened by shock.

‘You have a strange idea about men, Natasha, if you believe that the scraped-back hair and the buttoned-up clothes stop them from being curious about what it is you are attempting to hide.’

She blinked at him.

Leo laughed—oddly.

‘We don’t all go for anorexic pop-stars barely out of the schoolroom,’ he explained helpfully. ‘Some men even like a challenge in a woman instead of seeing it all hanging out and handed to us on a plate.’

His gaze dropped to the rounded shape of her breasts where they heaved up and down inside her jacket. It was pure self-defence that made her pull in her chest. His eyes darkened as he flicked them back to her face and Natasha knew then what it was he was talking about.

‘You want to unwrap yourself and fulfil my curiosity?’ he invited. ‘I didn’t think so.’ He smiled at her drop-jaw gasp.

‘Why are you doing this— s-saying these things to me?’ she whispered in genuine bafflement. ‘Do you think that because you witnessed what I witnessed it gives you the right to speak to me as if I am a slut?’

‘You would not know how to play the slut if your life depended on it,’ Leo grimly mocked. ‘It is a major part of your fascination to me that with a sister like yours, you are like you are.’

Natasha just continued to stare at him, trying to work out what it was she must have done to deserve any of this. ‘Well, you are being loathsome,’ she murmured finally. ‘And there is nothing in the least bit fascinating about being that, Mr Christakis.’

Her bag had fallen to the floor when she’d jumped to her feet. Natasha bent to recover it, then with as much dignity as she could muster, she turned to leave.

‘You’re right,’ he responded.

‘I know I am.’ She nodded, taking a shaky step towards the door, and heard him suck in his breath.

‘All right,’ he growled. ‘I’m sorry. OK?’

For mocking her situation just to get the clever quips in?

Straightening her trembling shoulders, ‘I didn’t ask you to bring me here,’ Natasha pushed out in a thick voice. ‘I have never asked you to do anything for me. So my sister is a slut. Your stepbrother is a slut. Other than that you and I have nothing in common or to say to each other.’

With that she took another couple of steps towards the door, just wanting to get out of here as quickly as she could do now and willing her legs to continue to hold her up while she made her escape.

Her mobile phone started ringing.

It was like chaos arriving to further agitate havoc because yet another telephone started ringing somewhere else in the house and Natasha’s feet pulled her to a confused standstill, the sound of those two phones ringing shrilly in her head.

Behind her he wasn’t moving a muscle. Was he—was Leo Christakis really as attracted to her as he’d just made out? Her jangling brain flipped out.

Then a knock sounded on the door and the handle was turning. Like a switch that kept on flicking her brain from one thing to another, Natasha envisaged Rico about to walk in the room and her feet were taking a stumbling step back. Maybe she swayed, she didn’t know, but a pair of hands arrived to clasp her upper arms and the next thing she knew she was being turned around and pressed against Leo Christakis’s shirt front.

‘Steady,’ his low voice murmured.

Natasha felt the sound resonate across the tips of her breasts and she quivered.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, Mr Christakis,’ a female voice exclaimed in surprise. ‘I heard you come in and assumed you were alone.’

‘As you see, Agnes, I am not,’ Leo responded.

Blunt as always. His half-Greek housekeeper was used to it, though her eyes flicked curiously to his stepbrother’s fiancée standing here held against his chest. When Agnes looked back at his face, not a single hint showed in her expression to say that what she was seeing was a shock.

‘Mr Rico keeps ringing, demanding to speak to Miss Moyles,’ the housekeeper informed him.

Natasha quivered again. This time he soothed the quiver by tracking a hand down the length of her spine and settling it in the curvy hollow of her lower back. ‘We are not here,’ Leo instructed. ‘And no one gets into this house.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The housekeeper left the room again, leaving a silence behind along with a tension that grabbed a tight hold on Natasha’s chest. Just totally unable to understand what it was she was feeling any more, she took a shaky step away from him, confused heat warming her cheeks.

‘Sh-she’s going to think w-we—’

‘Agnes is not paid to think,’ Leo cut in arrogantly and moved off to pour another brandy while Natasha sank weakly back down into the chair.

‘Here, take this…’ Coming to squat down in front of her, he handed her another glass. ‘Only this time try drinking it instead of throwing it at me,’ he suggested. ‘It is supposed to be better for you that way.’

His dry attempt at humour made Natasha flick him a brief guilty glance. ‘I’m sorry I did that. I don’t even know why I did.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’ Leo’s smile was sardonic. ‘I am used to having my face slapped in car parks and drinks thrown at me. Loathsome guys expect it.’

He added a grimace.

Natasha lowered her eyes to watch his mouth take on that grimacing tilt. It was only as she watched it settle back into a straight line again that she realised it was actually a quite beautifully shaped mouth, slender and firm but—nice.

And his eyes were nice, too, she noticed when, as if drawn by a magnet, she looked back at them. The rich, dark brown colour was framed by the most gorgeous thick, curling black eyelashes that managed to add an unexpected appeal to his face she would never have allowed him before. That pronounced bump in the middle of his nose saved his face from being a bit too perfect. A strong face, she decided, hard hewn and chiselled yet very good-looking—if you didn’t count the inbuilt cynicism that was there without her actually knowing how it was there.

OK, so he was a lot older than her. Older than Rico by eight years, which made him older than her by a very big ten. And those extra years showed in the blunt opinions he had no problem tossing at people—her especially.

But as for his looks, they weren’t old. His skin was a warm honey colour that lay smooth against the bones in his face. No age lines, no smile lines, not even any frown lines, though he did a lot of frowning—around her anyway.

Unaware that she was taking short sips at the brandy as she studied him, Natasha let her eyes track the width of his muscled shoulders trapped inside the smooth fit of his jacket, then let them absorb the fact that his torso was very long and lean and tight. When standing up, he was taller than Rico by several inches and his dark hair was shorter, cut to suit the stronger shape of his face.

She was asking for trouble, Leo thought severely as he watched that lush, pink, generous mouth adopt a musing pout while she looked him over as if he were a prime piece of meat laid out on a butcher’s slab.

‘How old are you, Natasha?’ he asked curiously. ‘Twenty-six—twenty-seven?’

Her spine went stiff. ‘I’m twenty-four!’ she iced out. ‘And that is just one more insult you’ve hit me with!’

‘And you’re counting.’ His eyes narrowed.

‘Yes!’ she heaved out.

With her blue eyes flashing indignation at him she looked pretty damn fantastic, Leo observed as he knelt there, trying to decide what to do next.

He could leap on her and kiss her—strangely enough she seemed to need him to do that. Or he could gently remove the glass she was crushing between her slender fingers, ease her down on her knees in front of him, then encourage her to just get it over with and use his shoulder to have a good weep.

Something twisted inside him—not sexual this time, but an ache of a different kind. Did she know how badly she was trembling? Did she know her slender white throat had to work like crazy each time to swallow some of the brandy and that her hair was threatening to fall free from its knot?

‘I th-think I w-want to go home now,’ she mumbled distractedly.

To the apartment she shared with her sister? ‘Drink the rest of your brandy first,’ Leo advised quietly.