Page 4 of The Petrakos Bride

Giannis stroked the vibrant coppery hair back from her smooth white brow. He pressed his mouth there very softly, and then wondered what he was playing at—because he had never been into all that fake, lovey-dovey cuddling stuff. Stung by that awareness, he lifted his handsome dark head again as if he had been burnt. The instant she shifted away from him, however, he automatically pinned her back beneath a hair-roughened powerful thigh. He wanted more of her. More and more and more, he acknowledged in a sensual daze of anticipation.

He had never had sex that amazing. Something that had become a rather boring routine, like a morning shower, had suddenly become full of exciting erotic possibilities again. She was a magnificent discovery. With subtle movements he shifted her across the mattress and covertly kicked aside the sheet so that he could examine it. There was a bloodstain on the linen. She had been a virgin. A one hundred per-cent-genuine virgin.

On one level he was sincerely shocked that he had taken advantage of so inexperienced a girl. On another, he’d hit a total erotic high and felt very smug about the fact that she had surrendered her innocence to him. Not much given to pointless regrets, Giannis suppressed the rare guilt factor and revelled in the erotic high instead. He had found her, he had awakened her…she was all his. He decided not to comment. Why make a big deal of it if she didn’t?

The phone by the bed lit up and vibrated. Giannis answered it. It was Nemos, reminding him that the jet was on standby for his flight to Berlin.

Listening to the swift exchange in Greek, Maddie was depth-charged out of her stasis and fully and fatally restored to awareness again. Consternation gripped her. She was genuinely appalled and confused by what she had allowed to happen between them. Raised by a grandmother who had taught her to believe that it was a woman’s job to set the moral boundaries with a man, she immediately felt that most of the blame had to be hers.

Only as Giannis cast aside the phone did he register a reality that shook him out of his complacency. His ebony brows pleated in displeasure. ‘The condom split.’

Sitting up, desperate to make an escape and already measuring the distance to the door, Maddie froze at that information. She had still to look anywhere near him.

‘Are you using anything that might prevent conception?’ Giannis enquired without expression, picturing the potential impact of such a calamity and barely managing to repress a shudder.

In no fit state to deal with the risk of an accidental pregnancy, Maddie had turned pale as parchment paper. It seemed to her that the punishments for her wanton misconduct were already piling up thick and fast, threatening to bury her alive. What was shame and humiliation in comparison to a life-changing event like conceiving a child?

‘No,’ she muttered tightly.

Giannis noticed that she was as far away from him as she could get and still be in the same bed. ‘I’m sure we’ll be okay. Accidents do happen, but there’s no reason why this one should lead to a disaster.’

‘I’m sure,’ she agreed hastily, but her mortified sense of hurt had deepened. No, she didn’t want to be pregnant either, but his response underscored her cringing belief that she had made the biggest ever fool of herself and acted like a slut. Naturally it would be a disaster if someone like her got into the family way because of someone like him. She reached down to snatch up her shirt, which was lying on the floor, and dug her arms jerkily into it. Her only thought was of flight.

‘Madeleine—’

In frantic haste she was gathering up her discarded apparel, a glow of shamed pink illuminating her downbent face. ‘There’s nothing to talk about,’ she muttered in apologetic interruption, eager to forestall the threatening intimacy of discussing anything with him and to make good her escape. ‘I’ll be totally fine.’

Unaccustomed to being interrupted, Giannis sprang out of bed just as Maddie vanished into the bathroom. The door closed. Elegant brows lifted in surprise, he heard the lock turn.

Behind the door, Maddie was engaged in the act of feverishly reclothing her shivering body. Her hands were all fingers and thumbs and her mind was throwing up distressing images and unwelcome realities. She had just gone to bed with a man she barely knew. And whose fault was that? She had made one mistake after another, right from the moment she had failed to conceal the fact that she found him incredibly attractive. Naturally he had registered that, and was it any wonder that he had got the wrong impression of her? When she’d had the effrontery to enter his inner sanctum with the offer of a coffee he hadn’t asked for, he had interpreted her approach as an invitation. A sexual invitation, she conceded sickly. How could she have been so utterly stupid? An arrestingly handsome and wealthy male must often receive such physical advances—and what young, single guy said no to such an opportunity?

As silently as she could, she released the lock, opened the door and crept out.

Giannis collided with wide green eyes full of dismay, and registered that his continuing presence appeared to be unwelcome to her. As no woman had ever looked at him in that way, he assumed that the impression was misleading. ‘I have a flight to catch.’

‘Of course,’ Maddie mumbled, striving to edge past him.

‘We’ll talk when I get back to London,’ Giannis declared, even while knowing he had not the slightest intention of breaking his lifetime rule of never, ever discussing anything in the way of relationships with a woman.

‘I—’ Before she even knew what she planned to say, long brown fingers framed her flushed cheekbones.

His black hair still enticingly tousled by her clutching fingers, he bent his arrogant dark head and claimed a brief, devouring kiss that momentarily silenced her. ‘I’ll call you,’ he told her with customary casualness.

‘No…no, don’t,’ Maddie countered tightly, her lips tingling and her cheeks burning with colour. She was furious with herself for standing still and accepting that final kiss without so much as an attempt to turn her head away.

Halfway into the bathroom, Giannis paused, frowned, and turned his bold profile back to her, wondering if he had misunderstood.

‘I know you must want to forget this happened,’ Maddie added in an uneasy rush.

‘Not in this case. I’ll be in touch, glikia mou.’ And with that indolent reply, Giannis dealt her a wolfish smile of amusement and headed back into the shower.

His confidence was unshakeable: women always responded to him with eager encouragement. She’d hardly been able to meet his eyes, but her soft mouth had surrendered beneath his in an indisputable response. Had she thought he needed an excuse not to see her again? He almost laughed out loud while he marvelled at her naivety. Possibly she was feeling a little overwhelmed by him, and the swift passage of events. She would get over that sensitive streak soon enough, he reflected with innate cynicism. With his input her ordinary life would, in the near future, change into something very much more stimulating. She would be the starring attraction in his bedroom for quite some time to come…

CHAPTER THREE

EMERGING from the CEO’s office suite into the corridor, Maddie was relieved to discover that the majority of the staff had already gone home. At a fast trot she collected her bag and her jacket, and was about to get into the lift when she was intercepted by Nemos.

‘Mr Petrakos asked me to ensure that you get home safely,’ the Greek security man informed her. ‘A car is waiting downstairs at the side entrance.’

Startled by his appearance, because in spite of his size he moved with remarkable stealth, Maddie was still more dismayed at the unexpected offer of a lift home. An agonised flush blossomed in a betraying burst of scarlet beneath her fair skin. She could not bear to think that anyone else might have guessed what she had so lately been engaged in.

‘No, thank you,’ she gasped in an agitated undertone, and, as Nemos gazed down at her in frank surprise, she hurriedly slid past him and into the lift before the doors could close again and leave her marooned.

Maddie didn’t breathe again until she had left the building. She knew that she would never willingly set foot in Petrakos Industries again. All the way home on the bus she was tormented by the aftermath of shock—regret and self-loathing.

What on earth had possessed her to behave in such a way? To give her body to a guy who was almost a stranger?

Yet Giannis hadn’t felt like a stranger, and it seemed to her that foolish false sense of familiarity had stifled all her wit and common sense. She had behaved like a starstruck groupie, she thought painfully. Nine years had passed since she first laid wondering eyes on Giannis Petrakos. She had been just fourteen years old when he’d visited her sister Suzy in hospital. At the age of twenty-two, when—ironically—he’d been getting loads of bad press for being a wild and womanising hell-raiser, he had been quietly giving considerable time and cash to the cause of terminally sick children.

Born though Giannis had been, into a world of unimaginable wealth and privilege, he had sat down to chat to Suzy as if it had been the most natural thing in the world. When he’d discovered that Suzy idolised the lead vocalist in a famous boy band, he had brought the singer to the hospice where Suzy had spent her final weeks. He’d made her sister’s wildest dreams come true. Suzy had been so thrilled that she had still been talking about that momentous day right up until a few minutes before she died.

Maddie had never forgotten how happy Giannis Petrakos had made her twin. Now she recognised how she had idealised him and begun imagining that she knew him when she did not. She felt she had been too quick to seize on Annabel’s concerns as an excuse to approach Giannis and talk to him alone. Why hadn’t she immediately backed off when she’d realised that he was only semi-clothed? His apparent interest in her had gone to her head like strong spirits. She had not had the strength of will to withstand temptation. And he had been unutterably, wildly tempting. The dulled throb between her slender thighs lingered to remind her of her weakness and her sense of shame increased. Passion had made her betray her values.

Only as Maddie reached her bedsit did she remember the accident with the contraception, and her skin turned clammy with instinctive fear. She could only hope that Giannis would be proved right in his belief that there would be no repercussions in that field. She was appalled at the idea of conceiving after the equivalent of a one-night stand with a male who would regard the development as a calamity. Any child forced to deal with such wounding knowledge of its beginnings would have a right to be disgusted with her. How the mighty have fallen, she reflected, with painful new self-knowledge.

The days passed for Maddie at a painfully slow pace. She was restless, worried and unhappy. The sense of peace she had taken for granted had been replaced by inner turmoil. Nothing that she was feeling was quite what she felt it ought to be, either. Every time her phone sounded she jumped and snatched it up. Either it was a call from the temping agency or from the supermarket where she did weekend shifts. When she finally grasped the fact that she had been waiting to see if Giannis would phone, she was even angrier with herself. It was already painfully clear: she had been bedded and discarded as if she had no more worth than an old newspaper.

The following Saturday morning, however, someone rapped on her door. Looping her tumbling hair back from her face as she answered it, she stilled in astonishment when she recognised that her caller was Giannis’s security chief.

‘Mr Petrakos wants you to join him for lunch,’ Nemos announced with precision. ‘He’ll pick you up in an hour.’

Her delicate brows pleating, Maddie stared up at the big man. It took her a few seconds to absorb that most unexpected message. Not so much a message as a royal summons, she registered, watching Nemos clatter back down the stairs again without even waiting for her response. Evidently there was a strong assumption that nobody ever said no to an invitation from Giannis Petrakos.

Maddie leant back against the door as she closed it. Her knees felt a little wobbly. A giant wave of incredulity was washing over her. He had ignored her existence for the rest of the week and now he was issuing a last-minute offer of a lunch-date on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Naturally she would be leaving it. For a tiny, tiny fraction of a split second she had felt a leap of joy that he had not totally forgotten her existence, but she swiftly crushed that shameful reaction. Where did he get the nerve to act as if she was some servant at his beck and call?

You gave him the nerve, a little inner voice jibed. He hadn’t even had to ask her out to get her into bed. She had been a push-over—a sure thing. Evidently he expected her to drop everything and run the instant he chose to beckon. And why not? She had set no limits and demanded no respect that day at his office. It hurt her to acknowledge it, but she had behaved like a slut. Now he was treating her with a careless, casual indifference to her feelings that could only wound her even more.

Inwardly cringing at the hard lesson she felt she was being taught, she got changed for her shift at the supermarket. Slowly and surely, however, anger was starting to lace her turbulent feelings.

When a knock sounded on the door again, Maddie was ready for it. Before Nemos could even speak, she said tightly, ‘I’m not coming. I don’t want to see your employer again. It’s up to you how you tell him that.’

Disbelief followed by consternation flickered in the older man’s craggy features before he turned on his heel. The depth of her anger dismayed Maddie, for she had always believed that she had the most placid, even-tempered nature. When yet another rap landed on the door, her backbone stiffened and she flung it wide. It was Giannis, and his appearance right there on her doorstep startled her—because she had assumed that Nemos had arrived merely to chauffeur her to some restaurant. Evidently the Greek tycoon had been waiting in his limousine.

Giannis ran his devouring gaze over her lovely face, his attention lingering on her vivid green eyes and the pillowy fullness of her pink mouth. Her lily-white skin and the long curling streamers of crackling Titian hair falling round her shoulders drew him like a magnet. Every time he had relaxed his mental discipline in the past couple of days she had featured in an erotic daydream, and he was not disappointed now, with the reality of her lush, extravagant femininity. Even without couture trappings she was a total babe.

He took immediate advantage of her distracted backward step to press the door wider with a fluid skim of his fingers and stroll in. But he was taken aback by his first view of the poorly furnished, dingy bedsit in which she lived. It had been a long time since he had had contact with such poverty. The chasm between their respective social positions had never been more obvious. But Giannis was where he wanted to be, and it would take the equivalent of an avalanche to send him off course.

Maddie was transfixed by his arrival. He towered over her like a golden Greek god. The pace of her heartbeat rose to a pounding thud in her eardrums. From the ebony darkness of his hair to the gilded bronze of his eyes, set above the smooth, high jut of his stunning cheekbones, he utterly dazzled her. His slate-grey designer suit was the epitome of perfect grooming. He looked devastatingly handsome. He also made her remember the disturbed nights she had endured and the wicked forbidden dreams that constantly replayed the passion she was desperate to forget. Her mortification at the tenor of her thoughts was intense.

‘Nemos declined to explain your non-appearance,’ he proffered lazily.

The rich, dark timbre of his accented drawl snapped Maddie out of her nervous paralysis. Affronted by the acknowledgement that she had been gaping at him like a country hick, she lifted her chin at a challenging angle. ‘What explanation do you need? I don’t want to have lunch with you—’

From the first, Giannis had appreciated her beauty, but her plain speech and lack of affectation had added to her attractions. Now, sensual impatience lanced through him. He found her behaviour incomprehensible when all he wanted to do was get her back into his bed again. He was eager to sate the savage ache of desire that had built up while he was abroad on business.

‘I told you that I didn’t want you to call me,’ Maddie completed doggedly, her hands curling into tense fists by her sides.

‘You also kissed me,’ he countered, brilliant dark eyes lowering with slow, measured provocation to her luscious pink mouth.

Her pale, perfect skin flamed and her silky brown lashes dropped to screen her guilty eyes. ‘That…er…that, like everything else that happened between us, was a mistake—’

‘Nonsense, glikia mou,’ Giannis proclaimed in unapologetic disagreement, his tone of command and conviction as instinctive as his inability to accept defeat.

His cast-iron confidence incensed Maddie. ‘It was a mistake for me!’

Giannis elevated an ebony brow. ‘You have a boyfriend?’

Maddie was insulted that he could think her capable of such a betrayal. ‘No! If I had had, I wouldn’t have behaved as I did with you.’

‘Of course you would have. All women cheat…when a better prospect comes along,’ Giannis incised with immovable cynicism.

Her angry distaste made her stand even straighter. ‘Maybe the kind of women you’re used to mixing with. I am not like that.’

His lean, darkly handsome features turned taut and hard. ‘Perhaps not. After all, you do harbour the distinction of having had me as your first lover.’

That he had registered that she had been a virgin came as a shock to Maddie, and an embarrassing one at that. To have that truth flung in her face hurt, and his insolent attitude could only heighten her regret over their short-lived intimacy.

‘I don’t regard it as a distinction.’ The flame of anger she had been controlling in a forlorn effort to be dignified had been fanned into a blaze. ‘Nor is it a fact I’m likely to want to talk about. No woman would want to boast about having slept with a guy as insensitive as you are!’

Giannis had come into contact with that word ‘insensitive’ before, but it had only been hinted at, or whispered playfully, and at the first suggestion of a frown had been swiftly smoothed over with plenty of sex. Never before had it been flung at his even white teeth. A warning glint of simmering gold entered his usually level black gaze.

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