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Her heart started thumping very fast inside her, a memory stirring of Eros arriving late at the country house one Friday evening, having attended a banking dinner he couldn’t avoid. Heat washed up over her dismayed face and she ducked past Eros and darted straight into the limo, only unfortunately nothing could drown out her recollection of having had mad passionate sex on the sofa in the drawing room with him that night. She had been shocked by how desperate he had seemed for her and then foolishly pleased, deeming it a sign of deeper attachment. She hated looking back with hindsight, seeing how stupid she had been, continually mistaking sex for love.
‘What’s wrong?’ Eros asked, studying her rigidity.
‘Nothing’s wrong!’ Winnie proclaimed, dry-mouthed with tension, thinking wildly of an excuse to explain her discomfiture. ‘It’s all the wedding stuff...such a fuss. I can’t think straight.’
‘I thought all women enjoyed that sort of thing,’ Eros admitted.
‘Me...not so much,’ she said truthfully, even knowing that once, had it been a real, proper wedding backed by love and need, she would have been overjoyed to be marrying him. That time was past, gone, she recalled, furious with herself for even thinking along those lines.
‘It won’t last long,’ Eros said soothingly, trying not to remember the planning insanity of his first wedding. ‘We’re getting married the middle of next week on Trilis.’
‘Trilis? Where’s that?’
‘A private island in Greece where the Nevrakis family started out as olive farmers and also ran a small hotel.’
‘I assumed I’d be getting married at Grandad’s house.’
‘My family always get married on the island,’ Eros countered smoothly.
Winnie swallowed hard on the objections brimming on her lips, wondering how much harder it would be to leave an island after the public wedding show was over. She had no doubt that her grandfather had already factored in that added difficulty to his plans because he was not a man to leave anything undone. But guilt gnawed at Winnie’s conscience because Eros was taking the wedding as seriously as though he were a real bridegroom...
My family always get married on the island.
She wondered if he had married his first wife there and then punished herself for that inappropriate piece of curiosity by reminding herself of how he had threatened to harm her entirely innocent sisters. Eros Nevrakis did not deserve her guilt, she told herself urgently. He was as ruthless as a killing machine in shark form, taking what he wanted without care for what it might cost someone else.
Stam Fotakis had already helped her and her sisters a great deal and she owed the older man not just gratitude but loyalty, she reminded herself firmly. She had to choose sides, there was no other option and every instinct warned her to choose her family and put them first. Perhaps then she could pursue her dream of establishing a closer relationship with her grandad.
Eros took her, not to his apartment, which relieved her, but to an exclusive club where they were seated in a very private velvet-lined booth that was screened-off from the crowd. She had noticed the attention he received on arrival, the subtle straightening, turning of heads that all signalled the arrival of an envied, highly attractive and very wealthy alpha male. Female heads turned even faster and lingered on Eros, glancing at her, brows lifting because she didn’t look glamorous enough to fit the expected mould. People were probably wondering if she was a niece or the daughter of a friend or even an employee.
After what had felt like a very public entrance, the booth felt too cosy and he felt too close, her spine tingling at the dark timbre of his accented drawl, gooseflesh rippling across her skin when he carelessly brushed her hand with his as he passed her the menu. Iridescent sea-glass eyes enhanced by lush black lashes surveyed her levelly from across the table, his lean, dark, classically handsome features so strikingly flawless that, for a split second, she couldn’t rip her attention from his spectacular bone structure.
His obvious relaxation taunted her simmering tension. Winnie could feel every breath she drew along with the wanton tightening of her nipples and the lick of pulsing heat curling between her thighs. It was unnerving that he could still awaken those responses in her treacherous body and it made her hate him more than ever for destroying the idealistic, romantic innocence that had been hers before she met him.
‘You’re incredibly quiet tonight,’ Eros remarked lazily. ‘I used to like that about you.’
‘But a quiet woman is less of a challenge.’
‘By the time I met you I had had enough of being challenged,’ Eros admitted, lashes dipping, evading her scrutiny as if he already feared that he had revealed too much.
Challenged by his wife? Possibly Tasha had discovered his infidelity, although she had not appeared remotely suspicious of Winnie when she’d arrived at the country house and Winnie had behaved like an employee for Tasha’s benefit for the first time in weeks. She had made a meal for his wife and it had hurt her pride to play the servant, driving home the lesson of how very foolish she had been to get into bed with a man whom she knew next to nothing about. It hadn’t helped either to see a wife very much more beautiful than she was herself. Tasha was a sleek, shapely blonde with lively blue eyes and a pronounced air of energy, chattering into her phone constantly to rap out instructions to an employee and answer queries in a variety of languages. Beautiful, accomplished and confident, everything Winnie was not.
Winnie had packed and left that house and her job that same day, filled with shame and regret. Memories could be so cruel, she registered abruptly, realising that she had carried that demeaning sense of being less and second best ever since that humiliating day.
‘We will make this marriage work,’ Eros told her arrogantly over the first course of the meal. ‘It has to work for Teddy.’
Chilled inside by that insistent statement, Winnie toyed with her food, thinking about Teddy, who was perfectly happy with his mother and his aunts. But for how long will that phase of his childhood last? a little voice prompted her for the first time. Children grew up fast and developed more complex needs. Eros would still have visiting rights though, and Teddy would learn to value his father and divide his loyalties as all children of parents who lived apart had to do. He would be fine, absolutely fine, she told herself bracingly.
‘This is very important to me,’ Eros intoned in the smouldering silence. ‘Why do I get the impression that you’re not even listening?’
Winnie faked a yawn with her hand. ‘I’m sorry. I’m very tired.’
It would be the first time a woman had fallen asleep on him, Eros reflected grimly, exasperated by her silence, her seeming refusal to make the smallest effort. What was the matter with her? This was not Winnie as he recalled her, but then she had walked out on him, become a mother alone, struggled to survive and the experience was bound to have changed her. Yet if they were to stay together, they had to find a bridge between the past and the present. Sex? He knew he couldn’t wait to have her under him again, over him, in front of him...just about any way he could have her.
No, that hadn’t changed, he acknowledged reluctantly, that raw driving hunger to possess that she incited and which he had never understood or accepted. It had hurt his pride, it had exasperated him with her, with himself because he distrusted anything he couldn’t control and he hadn’t been able to control the fierce need she provoked. Yet he had repeatedly tried to explain it to himself, talk himself out of those urges, constantly challenging himself with self-denial while he fought to get his discipline back.
Unarguably, however, the truth remained that Winnie sat there in an ugly cloaking black dress that revealed nothing of her very sensual curves and with only the smallest encouragement he would still have spread her across the table and fallen on her like a sex-starved animal.
