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‘Thank you for coming,’ Jace said brusquely to Eleanor when the last of the mourners who had attended his mother’s funeral departed. He had organised a small gathering of close friends at the house after the service to commemorate Iliana’s life. It had struck him that he was the last Zagorakis. Neither he nor his parents had had siblings, and the only distant relative of his father had died a few months ago.
‘I was glad to come,’ she said quietly. ‘I was fond of your mother.’ She hesitated. ‘It’s a sad day and I didn’t want you to go through it alone.’ She turned away from him, murmuring that she had left her jacket in the orangery.
Jace watched her walk away from him and his jaw clenched.Alone.The truth was that he could be in a roomful of friends and feel alone. A yawning chasm had opened up inside him in the two weeks since he’d stood by and allowed Eleanor to walk out of the villa. He told himself that he could not have prevented her from leaving. He couldn’t give her the fairy tale she longed for. But the idea that she might be looking for love, and maybe she’d already met Mr Right, kept Jace awake at night. He had put his inability to sleep, eat or function in any meaningful way down to grief for his mother. Or it could simply be sexual frustration, he thought with grim self-derision.
Today was the first time he had seen Eleanor since his mother had died peacefully in her sleep a week ago. She looked elegant and stunningly beautiful in a silk shift dress that couldn’t make up its mind if it were green or hazel—the same as her eyes. In front of the guests they had continued with the pretence of being happily married. Except that it hadn’t been pretence, Jace brooded. He had felt the happiest he had ever been when Eleanor had shared his life. And he was fairly sure that she had been happy too. Why hadn’t it been enough for her? Why did women always want more?
Why was he running away from the best thing that had ever happened to him? Jace’s heart slammed into his ribs as he was finally honest with himself. Eleanor had signed the Pangalos over to him, and before he had met her last year he would have sworn that the hotel was everything he desired. But he could not laugh with a hotel, or talk to a hotel. He had been driven to claim the Pangalos by a desire for vengeance. Now all he cared about was claiming the only person who understood him—his wife.
She must be out of her mind, Eleanor thought as she stepped into the master bedroom. What she was doing defied common sense, but her heart ached as she remembered Jace’s sombre expression when his mother’s coffin had been lowered into the grave. He was hurting. Oh, he hid it well, and at the reception after the funeral he had been his urbane and charming self. But she knew it had been an act. Jace Zagorakis, self-made multimillionaire with a playboy reputation and more friends than there were stars in the sky, had looked utterly alone.
No doubt he would say it was how he liked to live his life. A lone wolf without emotional commitments, without emotions. But Eleanor was not fooled. He had loved his parents, who were now both dead. He cared deeply for his close friend Takis, who had been at the funeral, looking grimmer and more unsmiling than ever.
Jace had the capacity to love and it broke her heart that he would never love her. But he needed her tonight. Her fingers shook as she ran the zip on her dress down and the silk shift slithered to the floor. After a second’s hesitation, she unclipped her bra, tugged off her knickers and slipped beneath the sheets. The shutters at the window were open, and the moonlight cast a pearly glow into the room and over the bed.
The bedroom door swung open and she heard Jace expel a ragged breath. He lounged in the doorway, as tall as a giant, his muscular body silhouetted against the light in the hallway.
‘Well, well...’ he drawled.
‘I don’t want to talk,’ she said fiercely.
He gave a rough laugh as he walked into the room and closed the door behind him. ‘Talking is not at the top of my list either.’ His hand moved to his belt as he approached the bed. Eleanor’s gaze locked with his, and the chemistry that had always simmered between them blazed. She shifted position so that she was kneeling on the mattress and slowly lowered the sheet.
The air felt cool on her naked breasts and her nipples hardened and jutted provocatively forwards. Jace made a low growl when she cupped her breasts in her palms before skimming her hands lower to the vee of tight curls at the junction of her thighs. It was empowering to play the temptress, and the feral gleam in his eyes as he halted next to the bed evoked a flood of sticky warmth between her legs. With a sultry smile, she slid her finger into her feminine heat and saw his eyes darken as he watched her pleasure herself.
‘Witch,’ he said thickly. ‘Are you sure...?’
‘I said no talking.’ He would never say the words she longed to hear, and she could not tell him how she felt about him. But tonight she would show him with her body the secret she held in her heart. Tonight she would make sure that he never forgot her.
She undid the buttons on his shirt and pushed it off his shoulders, running her hands over his bunched biceps before moving to his chest and exploring the defined ridges of his muscular physique. His skin was warm satin beneath her fingertips, the whorls of black chest hair slightly abrasive against her palms. She followed the arrowing of hair down to the waistband of his trousers and unzipped him, deliberately brushing her hand over the bulge of his arousal.
He bent his head and pressed his mouth to her neck, trailed hot kisses along her collarbone and moved down to her breasts, laving each pebble-hard nipple in turn until she trembled with need. Eleanor cupped her hands around his face and dragged his mouth up to hers. The kiss exploded between them, wild yet sweet, a sensual feast as their tongues tangled.
Jace stripped off the rest of his clothes and she pulled him down on top of her, spreading her legs so that his hard shaft pressed against her opening.
‘I want you now. I can’t wait,’ she told him urgently. He made a harsh sound in his throat and lowered himself onto her, easing his erection deep inside her. It was bliss after two weeks without him and Eleanor moaned softly when he drew back and thrust slowly into her again, filling her, completing her. She speared her fingers into his hair and pressed her face against his throat, licking the slight saltiness of his skin before she nipped him with her teeth.
His primal groan of desire sent a shiver of feminine triumph through her. She pushed him off her, and when he rolled onto his back she straddled him and took his thick length inside her.
‘You are incredible,omorfiá mou,’ he rasped as she rolled her hips to meet his powerful thrusts and the rhythm became faster, harder until they soared together to a place of exquisite pleasure that was uniquely theirs.
For a long time afterwards, Eleanor did not move while she stored every detail, every sensation of Jace’s lovemaking in her mind. The steady rise and fall of his chest told her that he had fallen asleep. Moonlight highlighted the sharp edges of his cheekbones and the sensual curve of his mouth. His eyelashes made dark crescents on his skin. In sleep he looked younger and she glimpsed the boy beneath the man.
‘Goodbye,’ she whispered against his lips. ‘I will always love you.’
Jace woke to the pale light of dawn and for a moment he wondered if he had dreamed, as he so often did, of Eleanor. The languorous ache in his muscles told him that she had been real and not a figment of his imagination. She had seduced him and made love to him with an unguarded passion and he felt disappointed, but not surprised, that she had gone.
He reached for his phone and called the security team he’d tasked to ensure her safety. Not because he wanted to stifle her independence, but for his peace of mind, needing to know that no harm would come to her. After a brief conversation he ascertained that Eleanor had arrived back at her apartment late the previous night, and she had left again in her car half an hour ago. Jace had a good idea where she was heading, and he strode into the bathroom to shower, determined that he would not let her go again.
Unless she wanted her freedom. He felt the sensation of a lead weight dropping into the pit of his stomach, knowing that he had no right to keep her in a marriage that he’d insisted on for all the wrong reasons. Guilt cramped in his gut. And something else. Fear. What if he was too late to finally recognise the true reason why he had wanted Eleanor to be his wife?
He stared at his face in the mirror and grimaced as he ran his hand over the stubble on his jaw. His eyes looking back at him were dull, their bleak expression reflecting how he felt when he imagined a future without Eleanor. It would be nothing more than he deserved, he acknowledged. But he was hanging onto hope. It was all he had. A whispered promise against his lips that he might have dreamt, but perhaps had been real. There was only one way to find out.
The sliding glass doors in the bedroom at the villa on the Pangalos resort were open. The view of the turquoise pool and the sea beyond it was spectacular, but Jace’s gaze was fixed on Eleanor. She was sitting at the top of the pool’s stone steps and had her back to him.
He felt a tug in his chest as he paused and drank in the sight of her in a skimpy bikini, remembering how she used to cover up her body because she’d felt self-conscious about her scoliosis scar. When he walked noiselessly across the terrace he noticed a new mark on her back, close to her scar, and saw that it was a delicately inscribed tattoo. Just one word:Warrior.
She heard his footsteps and jerked her head in his direction, a wealth of emotion in her eyes before her lashes swept down, and Jace sensed that she was hastily erecting her defences.
