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‘Hell will freeze over before I lift a finger for you again.’
He gave an ironic shake of his head at her defensiveness. ‘It is funny how your mouth tells me one thing but your eyes and body the other.’
It was with great delight that she slammed the car door in his face.
When her front door was closed and locked for good measure she stood with her back against it, trying to breathe properly.
Being on home soil hadn’t changed a thing.
* * *
The knock on the front door Carrie had been anticipating for the past ten minutes still made her jump and set her already skittish heart thrumming maniacally.
She took one last look in the mirror and smoothed her hair, then breathed deeply as she walked down the stairs. Her shoes were ready by the front door and she slid her feet into them and removed her coat from the hook before she opened it.
After a mere five days in London it was time to get her passport out again.
Andreas stood at the threshold, dressed in a sharp navy suit with an open-necked white shirt, that wicked, wolfish grin on his face. ‘Good morning, matia mou. You look as beautiful as ever.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Cut the cheesy lines, there’s no one to hear you.’
Over the past five days they’d been on four ‘dates’, all in restaurants where the paparazzi liked to camp out. As he was a man who had always kept his private life discreet, the paparazzi responded to Andreas’s presence as if he were Father Christmas bearing early gifts.
The lengths she had gone to in the past to keep her face hidden from public view, like all journalists who worked undercover, had been for nothing. That the Greek billionaire Andreas Samaras was dating the respected journalist Carrie Rivers had generated more excitement than even she had expected.
Her name would be linked to his for ever.
‘It cannot be a line when it is the truth.’ The pulse in his eyes shot straight through her flesh and into her bloodstream. ‘You are beautiful.’
Heat rose inside her, a now familiar throbbing ache.
When they dined out together he would stare at her with that same look, his eyes holding hers as he probed her with questions about her job and her interests, drawing her into conversation as any other dating couple behaved.
She’d been surprised at how…easy it had all been. She’d expected there to be awkwardness between them but Andreas had carried all the conversations with an easy-going wit, always keeping talk in safe territory, displaying a droll humour that often made her laugh without her having to fake it for the paparazzi lenses.
There had been moments when she had forgotten why they were there, forgotten that she hated him. Forgotten why she hated him; struggled to reconcile him with the man she’d spent three years dreaming of destroying.
And underlying everything lay the strange chemical cocktail that snaked between them. Always she refused to drink wine with their meals; his intoxicating presence enough for her to fight against without adding alcohol to the mix. She had to keep her defences up as much as she could, not blithely allow herself to lower them.
‘Are you packed?’ he asked.
She blinked sharply to clear her head—it seemed she was always having to clear it when with him—and nodded. ‘My case is in the kitchen. Give me a…’
‘I’ll get it for you,’ he interrupted with a wink, then swept past her and into the house. ‘I have some papers for you to read through before we leave.’
Carrie couldn’t help the laugh that burst out of her.
Until that moment, she had continued to refuse him admittance into her home. This was her territory, her sanctuary away from him, the one place she felt safe from all the turbulence that her life had become and the wild emotions he continually evoked in her.
She sighed and rolled her eyes. She had only been delaying the inevitable and, frankly, she was surprised she’d been able to keep him out of her home for this long. Andreas had proved himself to be a steamroller when it came to getting what he wanted done. Even at the registry office the other day when they’d gone to book their wedding, the date he’d wanted had been fully booked and yet somehow the registrar had been able to accommodate him for that particular date and for the exact time he wanted.
Carrie followed him down the long hallway behind the trail of his tangy cologne.
Breathing in his scent drove away her momentary amusement and replaced it with the tell-tale flutters of panic and with it a certainty that she would never be able to walk down this hallway again without thinking of him…
How could she know that?
Stop being so melodramatic, she chided herself grimly.
‘This is nice,’ he commented as he stepped into the airy high-ceilinged kitchen. ‘It’s much bigger than it looks from the outside.’
