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To say that Ilios Manos was not in a good mood was to put it mildly, and, like Zeus, king of the gods himself, Ilios could make the atmosphere around him rumble with the threat of dire consequences to come when his anger was aroused. As it was now.
The present cause of his anger was his cousin Tino. Thwarted in his attempt to get money out of Ilios via his illegal use of their grandfather’s land, he had now turned his attention to threatening to challenge Ilios’s right of inheritance. He was claiming that it was implicit in the tone of their grandfather’s will that Ilios should be married, since the estate must be passed down through the family, male to male. Of course Ilios knew this—just as he knew that ultimately he must provide an heir.
Ilios had been tempted to dismiss Tino’s threat, but to his fury his lawyers had warned him that it might be better to avoid a potentially long drawn-out and costly legal battle and simply give Tino the money he wanted.
Give in to Tino’s blackmail? Never. Ilios’s mouth hardened with bitterness and pride.
Inside his head he could hear his lawyer’s voice, saying apologetically, ‘Well, in that case, then maybe you should think about finding yourself a wife.’
‘Why, when Tino doesn’t have anything resembling a proper case?’ Ilios had demanded savagely.
‘Because your cousin has nothing to lose and you have a very great deal. Your time and your money could end up being tied up for years in a complex legal battle.’
A battle which once engaged upon he would not be able to withdraw from unless and until he had won, Ilios acknowledged.
His lawyer had suggested he take some time to review the matter, perhaps hoping Ilios knew that he would give in and give Tino the one million euros he wanted—a small enough sum of money to a man who was, after all, a billionaire. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that Tino thought that he could get the better of him by simply putting his hand out for money he hadn’t earned. There was no way that Ilios was going to allow that.
He had been attempting to vent some of the fury he was feeling by felling branches from an old and diseased olive tree when he had seen a taxi come down the road to the headland, stopping to let its passenger get out before turning round and going back the way it had come.
Now, still wearing the old hard hat bearing the Manos Construction logo he had put on for protection, his arms bare in a white tee shirt, his jeans tucked into work boots, he walked out from the tree line and watched as Lizzie looked out to sea, his arms folded across his chest.
Lizzie turned back towards the flattened ground where the apartments had been, shock holding her immobile as she saw the man standing on it, watching her.
‘You’re trespassing. This is private land.’
He spoke English! But the words he had spoken were hostile and angry, challenging Lizzie to insist with equal hostility, ‘Private land which in part belongs to me.’
It wasn’t strictly true, of course, but as a partner in the apartment block she must surely own a percentage of the land on which it had been built? Lizzie didn’t know the finer points of Greek property law, but there was something about the attitude toward her of the man confronting her and challenging her that made her feel she had to assert herself and her rights. However, it was plain that she had done the wrong thing. The man unfolded his arms, revealing the outline of a hard-muscled torso beneath the dirt-smeared tee shirt tucked into low-slung jeans that rode his hips, and strode towards her.
‘Manos land can never belong to anyone other than a Manos.’
He was savagely angry. The hardness of the gaze from golden eagle eyes fringed with thick dark lashes speared her like a piece of helpless prey.
Lizzie stepped back from him in panic, and lost her footing as she stumbled on a rough tussock of grass.
As she started to fall the man reached for her, hard fingers biting into her jacket-clad arms as she was hauled upright and kept there by his hold on her. The golden gaze raked her with a predatory male boldness that infuriated her. He was looking at her as though … as though he was indeed a mythical Greek god, with the right and the power to take and use vulnerable female mortal flesh for his own pleasure as and when he wished. Sex with a man like this would be dangerous for the woman who was drawn to risk herself in his hostile embrace. Would he take without giving, or would he subjugate a woman foolish enough to think she could make him want her by overpowering her with his sensuality and leaving her a prisoner to it whilst he remained unmoved? That mouth, with its full bottom lip, suggested that he possessed a cruel sensuality that matched his manner towards her.
Lizzie shivered, shocked by the inappropriateness and the unfamiliar sensuality of her own thoughts. She tried to concentrate on something practical.
Somehow as he’d moved he’d also found time to push back the protective hard hat he was wearing, so that now she could see the thick darkness of his hair. She was five foot six. He was much taller—well over six foot—and of course far more powerful that her. Lizzie could see that the effort of holding her had hardly raised the biceps in his powerful arms, but that didn’t stop her from trying break free of him.
He stopped her with contemptuous ease, pulling her closer to him. He smelled of earth, and hard work, and of being a man. From somewhere deep down, in the place where she kept her most special memories, she had a sudden mental image of being held in her father’s arms in the garden at her parents’ lovely house in Cheshire, laughing in delight as she looked down from that height to where her mother was kneeling beside her two younger sisters. Those had been such wonderful years—years when she had felt safe and secure and loved.
But this man was not her father. With this man there would be no safety, no security, and certainly no love.
Love? She was so close to the dirt-streaked tee shirt that she could see the dark shadow of his body hair through it. She could almost feel the force of his hostility towards her. And she felt equally hostile to him. That was why her heart was banging into her chest wall and why her senses were recoiling from the intense awareness of him that his proximity was forcing on her.
What kind of awareness? Awareness of him as a man? Awareness of his maleness? Awareness of his sexuality? Awareness that within her something long denied, something starved of the right to express itself, was pushing against the barriers she had erected against it. Because of this man?
No, of course not. That was impossible. Her heart was thudding even more frantically, pumping adrenalin-fuelled denial through her veins. Why was she reacting to him like this? She had no interest in his sexuality. She must not have any interest in his sexuality. She must not want to stay here in his arms.
The panic caused by her own feelings had Lizzie demanding fiercely, ‘Let go of me.’
Ilios wasn’t used to women demanding to be set free when he was holding them—quite the opposite. Normally women—especially women like he knew this one to be: selfish, shallow, self-seeking women who cared nothing for others—were all too keen to inveigle themselves into situations of intimacy with him. Which was, of course, why he felt so reluctant to release her.
When she pulled back against him the movement of her body released the scent she was wearing, delicate and light. Deep down inside him something visceral and unfamiliar jerked into hot molten life. Desire? For a woman like this? Impossible. He released her abruptly, stepping back from her.
‘Who are you?’ Lizzie asked unsteadily, struggling for balance both physically and emotionally.
‘Ilios Manos,’ Ilios told her curtly.
This man was Ilios Manos? The man who had sent her that letter? Lizzie’s heart thumped into her ribs, its sledgehammer blow fired by shock.
‘Ilios Manos, the owner of this land on which you have no right to be, Miss Wareham,’ Ilios told her grimly.
‘How do you know who I am?’ The question had been spoken before Lizzie could stop herself.
‘Your name is on your suitcase strap,’ Ilios pointed out curtly, gesturing towards the brightly coloured strap wrapped around the handle of the small trolley case she had abandoned in the shock of discovering that the apartment block had gone.
‘What’s happened to the apartments?’
‘I gave orders for them to be knocked down.’
‘What? Why? You had no right.’ Her shocked disbelief deepened her anger, and also in some illogical way her awareness of him—as though she had developed some unwanted new sense designed exclusively to register everything about him and make her intensely receptive to that information. From the way the narrowing of his eyes fanned out fine lines around his eyes to the shape of his mouth as he spoke and her extreme awareness of the powerful maleness of his body.
‘I had every right. They were on my land. Illegally on my land.’
Lizzie struggled to clamp down on her awareness of him.
‘The land belongs to my partner, Tino Manos, not you.’
‘My cousin has ceded his right to the land to me.’
‘But you can’t just knock down a block of apartments like that. Apart from anything else, two of them belonged to me.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘they did.’
There was something about the way he was looking at her that made Lizzie feel extremely uneasy—as though she had unwittingly stepped into some kind of trap.
‘Tell me, Miss Wareham, what kind of greed makes a person ignore the normal rules of law to grab at something even when they know it must be fraudulent?’ His voice was deeply cynical, his whole manner towards her menacing and iced with bitter contempt.
‘I … I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Lizzie protested truthfully.
‘Of course you do. You were in partnership with my cousin. You have said so yourself. You must have known about the building regulations that were broken, about the suppliers and workmen left unpaid in order to build the apartments at a minimum cost to your partnership, and for the maximum ultimate profit.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ Lizzie insisted. But she could see that he didn’t believe her.
‘Have you any idea of the damage your greed has caused? The hardship it has inflicted on those you cheated? Or do you simply not care? Well, I intend to make sure that you do care, Miss Wareham. I will make sure that you pay back everything you owe.’
Ilios was angrier than he could ever remember being. His cousin had systematically tried to cheat him and manipulate him at every turn, and now Tino was even daring to challenge his legitimacy to what was rightfully his. Ilios could feel his fury boiling up inside him. His cousin might not be here to pay for what he had done, but his partner in crime, this Englishwoman who actually dared to lie to him, was here, and she would bear the brunt of his fury and his retribution, Ilios decided savagely.
‘Everything I owe?’ Lizzie objected, her heart sinking. ‘What do you mean? I don’t owe anybody anything.’
Her determination to continue lying to him hardened Ilios’s resolve to inflict retribution on her. She was everything he most disliked and despised in her sex. Dishonest, and attempting to cloak her dishonesty with an air of pseudo-innocence that manifested itself in the way she was dressed—simply, in jeans worn with a tee shirt and a plain jacket—and in her face with its admittedly beautiful bone structure, free of make-up.
Just as that damn elusive scent she was wearing had made him want to draw her closer, to pursue it and capture it, so the pink lipstick that deliberately drew his attention to the fullness of her mouth made him want to capture her lips to see if they were as soft as they looked. Where another less skilled woman might have tried to use artifice to mask her deceit, Elizabeth Wareham used art—the art of appearing modest, honest, vulnerable. Well, it wouldn’t work on him. Anyone who did business with his cousin had to be as dishonest and scheming as manipulative as Tino was himself. Like attracted like, after all. She could try using her sexuality to disarm him as much as she liked. He wasn’t going to be taken in.
When Ilios Manos didn’t respond, Lizzie stiffened her spine and her resolve and repeated, as firmly as she could, ‘I don’t owe anyone in Greece any money, and I don’t understand why you think I do.’
‘I don’t think you do, Miss Wareham. I know you do—because the person you owe money to is me.’
Lizzie gulped in air and tried not to panic. ‘But that’s not possible.’
Ilios was in no mood to let her continue lying to him. ‘You owe me money, Miss Wareham, because of your involvement with the apartments built by my cousin on my land. Plus there is also the matter of the outstanding payments for goods and services provided by local suppliers to you.’
‘That isn’t my fault. The Rainhills were supposed to pay them,’ Lizzie defended herself.
‘The contract supplied to me by my cousin states unequivocally that you are to pay them.’
‘No—that can’t be possible,’ Lizzie repeated
‘I assure you that it is.’
‘I have my copy of the contract here with me, and it states quite plainly that the owners of the apartments are to pay the suppliers direct,’ Lizzie insisted.
‘Contracts can be altered.’
‘And in this case they obviously have been—but not by me.’ Lizzie’s face was burning with disbelief and despair.
‘And you can prove this?’ Ilios Manos was demanding, the expression on his face making it plain that he did not believe her.
‘I have a contract that states that my clients are responsible for paying the suppliers.’
‘That is not what I asked you. The contract I have states unequivocally that you are responsible for paying them. And then there is the not so small matter of your share of the cost of taking down the apartments and returning the land to its original state.’
‘Taking down the apartments?’ Lizzie echoed. ‘But that was nothing to do with me. You were the one who ordered their destruction—you told me that yourself …’
Lizzie badly wanted to sit down. She was tired and shocked and frightened, but she knew she couldn’t show those weaknesses in front of this stone-faced man who looked like a Greek god but spoke to her as cruelly as Hades himself, intent on her destruction. She was sure he would never show any sign of human weaknesses himself, or make any allowances for those who possessed them. But there was nowhere to sit, nowhere to hide, to escape from the man now watching her with such determined intention on breaking her on the wheel of his anger.
‘I had no choice. Even if I had wanted to keep them it would have been impossible, given their lack of sound construction. The truth is that they were a death trap. A death trap on my land, masquerading as a building constructed by my company.’
As he spoke Ilios remembered how he had felt on learning how his cousin had tried to use the good name of the business Ilios had built up quite literally with his own bare hands for his nefarious purposes, and his anger intensified.
His company. Lizzie automatically looked at his hard hat and its logo. She remembered Basil Rainhill smirking when he’d told her that Manos construction was ‘fronting’ the building of the apartments, and that they had a first-class reputation. Then she had assumed his smirk was because of the good deal he has boasted about to her, but now …
‘I don’t know anything about how the apartments were built. In fact, I don’t understand what this is about. I was contracted to design the interiors of the apartments, that’s all.’
‘Oh, come, Miss Wareham—do you really expect me to believe that when I have a contract that stages unequivocally that payment for your work was to be a twenty per cent interest in the apartment block?’
‘That was only because the Rainhills couldn’t pay me. They offered me that in lieu of my fee.’
‘I am not remotely interested in how you came by your share in the illegal construction my cousin built on my land, only that you pay your share of the cost of making good the damage as well as what you owe your suppliers.’
‘You’re making this up,’ Lizzie protested.
‘ You are daring to call me a liar?’ Ilios grabbed hold of her, gripping her arms as he had done before. How had she dared to accuse him of lying? His desire to punish her, to force her to take back her accusation, to kiss her until the only sound to come from her lips was a soft moan of surrender, pounded through him, crashing through the barriers of civilized behaviour and forcing him to fight for his self-control.
She had said the wrong thing, Lizzie knew. Ilios Manos was not the man to accuse of lying. His pride lay across his features like a brand, informing every expression that crossed his face—and, Lizzie suspected, every thought that entered his head.
He was still holding her, and his touch burned her flesh like a small electrical shock. Her chest lifted with her protesting intake of air. Immediately his gaze dropped to her body with predatory swiftness—as though somehow he knew that when he had touched her, her flesh had responded to his touch in a way that had flung her headlong into a place she didn’t know, brought her face to face with a Lizzie she didn’t know. Her heart was thumping jerkily, her senses intensely aware of him, and her gaze was drawn to him as though he was a magnet, clinging to his torso, his throat, his mouth.
She swung dizzily and helplessly between disbelief and a craving to move closer to him. Beneath her clothes her breasts swelled and ached, in response to a mastery she was powerless to resist. How could this be happening to her? How could her body be reacting to Ilios Manos as though … as though it wanted him? It must be some weird form of shock, Lizzie decided shakily as he released her, almost thrusting her away from him.
‘I’m not calling you a liar,’ Lizzie denied, feeling obliged to backtrack, if only to remind herself of the reality of her situation. ‘I’m just saying that I think you’ve got some of your facts wrong. And besides—why aren’t you demanding recompense from your cousin, instead of threatening and bullying me?’ she demanded, quickly going on the attack.
Attack was, after all, the best form of defence, so they said, and she certainly needed to defend herself against what she had felt when he had held her. How could that have happened? She simply wasn’t like that. She couldn’t be. She had her family to think of. Being sexually aroused by a man she had only just met, a man who despised and disliked her, just wasn’t the kind of thing she had ever imagined being. Not ever, and certainly not now.
Determinedly she martialled her scattered thoughts and pointed out, ‘After all, I only owned twenty per cent of the apartment block. Your cousin, from what the Rainhills told me, owned the land, most of the apartments and was responsible for the building work. I never even met him, never mind discussed his business plan with him. I was given the apartments and made a partner in lieu of payment for the work I’d done. That’s all.’
Ilios knew that that was true, but right now it didn’t suit his mood to allow her any escape route—especially now that his cousin had increased his fury by continuing to plot against him. Ilios wanted repayment, he wanted retribution, he wanted vengeance—and he would have them. Ilios hated cheats, and he hated even more being forced to let them get away with cheating.
‘My cousin has no assets and is heavily in debt. The Rainhills, as I am sure you have discovered yourself, have disappeared. And, whilst you might only own twenty per cent of the apartment block’s value, the partnership agreement you signed contains what is called a joint and several guarantee—which means that each partner is both jointly and severally liable for the debts of the whole partnership. That means that I can claim from you recompense for the entire amount owing.’
‘No, that can’t be true,’ Lizzie protested, horrified.
Ilios looked at her. There was real panic in her voice now. He could see that she was trembling.
An act, he told himself grimly. That was all it was. Just an act.
‘I assure you that it is,’ he told her, ignoring her obvious distress.
‘But I can’t possibly find that kind of money.’ She couldn’t find any kind of money.
‘No? Well, I have to tell you that I intend to be fully recompensed—not just for the money I am owed, but also for the potential damage that could have been done to my business. A business for which I have worked far harder than someone like you, who lives off the naïveté of others, can ever imagine. You own your own business?’
‘Yes,’ Lizzie acknowledged. ‘But it is almost bankrupt.’
Why had she told him that when she hadn’t even told her sisters just how bad things were? That every spare penny she had had been placed into their shared joint account to ensure that the mortgage was paid, the household bills met, and food put on the table at home.
She looked really distraught now, Ilios could see, but he refused to feel any sympathy. Showing sympathy was a sign of weakness, and Ilios never allowed himself to be weak.
‘You have a property? A home, I assume?’ he pressed
‘Yes, but it is mortgaged, and anyway I share it with my sisters, one of whom has two small children and is dependent on me.’
Lizzie didn’t know why she was admitting all of this to him, other than because she was in such a state of shock and panic. She wasn’t going to let herself think about the last few months of long nights, when she had lain awake worrying about how she would manage to protect her family and continue to provide for them financially. They knew that things were bad, she hadn’t been able to hide that from them, but they did not know yet just how bad.
‘Your sister does not have a husband to support her and her children? You do not have parents?’
