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‘The answer to both those questions is no. Not that it is any of your business, or relevant to our discussion. There is no way I can find the money to repay you. The only thing I own that is my own is my body …’
‘And you wish to offer that to me in payment?’
Lizzie was horrified.
‘No! Never!’
Her immediate recoil, coupled with her vehemence, inflamed Ilios even further. Was she daring to suggest that she was too good for him? Morally superior to him? Well, he would soon make her change her tune, Ilios promised himself savagely.
‘You deny it now, but the offer was implicit in your declaration that your body is the only thing you have.’
He was determined to humiliate her. Lizzie could see that. Because he had somehow sensed her sexual reaction to him?
‘No. That is, yes—but I didn’t mean it the way you are trying to suggest. I only meant that I do not own anything via which I could raise the money to pay you.’
‘Except your body.’
‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ Lizzie repeated, mortified. ‘I just meant that …’ She lifted her hand to her head, which was now pounding with a mixture of anxiety and despair. ‘I can’t pay you.’
Ilios had had enough. His temper was at breaking point. He would have what he was owed—one way or another.
‘Very well, then,’ he began, causing Lizzie to go weak with relief at the thought that he was finally going to accept that there was no point in him continuing to press her for money.
‘If your body is all you have with which to repay me, then that is what I will have to take—because I promise you this: I will have repayment.’
CHAPTER THREE
LIZZIE’S head jerked back on the slender stem of her neck as she looked up at Ilios in shocked disbelief.
‘You—you can’t mean that!’ she protested. But even as she protested, something fierce and elemental was flaring up inside her—a desire, an excitement, a wild surge of female longing that shook her body with its force and shamed her pride with what it said about her. She couldn’t want him—and most especially she could not want him under circumstances that should have been making her recoil with revulsion.
‘I do mean it,’ Ilios assured her.
‘I can’t believe that anyone could be so … cruel and inhuman, so lacking in compassion or understanding.’
The sudden explosion of sound from Lizzie’s mobile phone, announcing the arrival of a text message, momentarily distracted them both.
Watching the way Lizzie reached frantically for her mobile to read it, Ilios gave her a look of cold contempt.
‘You are obviously eager to read your lover’s message, but—’
‘It’s from my sisters,’ Lizzie interrupted him abstractedly, without lifting her gaze from the small screen. ‘Wanting to know if everything is all right.’
‘And you, of course, are going to reply and tell them all about the my so called cruelty and inhumanity.’
‘No,’ Lizzie told him. ‘If I did they’d worry about me, and that’s the last thing I want. I’m the eldest. It’s my job to look after them and protect them. Not the other way around.’
Ilios digested her response in silence. An eldest sister determined to protect her younger siblings wasn’t the way he wanted to think about this woman.
‘The light’s fading,’ he told her, gesturing towards the horizon where the winter sun, half obscured by clouds, was starting to dip below the horizon. ‘Soon it will be dark. I have to return to Thessaloniki. We can continue our discussion there.’
Over her dead body, Lizzie thought rebelliously, suddenly seeing an opportunity to put some much needed distance between them. She hated the thought of running away instead of staying to fight and prove her innocence, but with a man like this one, hell-bent on extracting payment from her—in kind if he could not have cash—the normal rules of engagement didn’t seem the best course of action.
‘Very well,’ she agreed, reaching for her mobile again.
‘What are you doing?’ Ilios demanded.
‘Telephoning for a taxi,’ Lizzie answered.
Ilios shook his head. ‘There’s no point. You won’t get one to come all the way out here—and anyway it isn’t necessary. You can travel back with me.’
‘No! I mean, no, thank you. I prefer to make my own arrangements,’ Lizzie insisted, whilst her heartbeat raced in panicky dread in case he guessed that the reason she was so reluctant to travel with him was not that she was afraid of the intimacy between them it would entail, but that she was afraid a part of her might actually welcome that intimacy.
‘You can drop the prim stance,’ Ilios told her. ‘I can assure you that I have no intention of using my car as a makeshift brothel—and besides, the amount you owe me would require far more in repayment than a single fumble in the back of a car.’
As he finished speaking Ilios reached for Lizzie’s trolley case, his swift possession of it leaving her with no option other than to nod her head in unwilling acceptance of his offer.
‘This way,’ Ilios commanded.
He had walked over the headland from Villa Manos, and it would be easier to walk back there rather than him leaving Lizzie here whilst he went for the car. And besides, he didn’t trust her not to try to cheat him a second time by attempting to leave without paying her debt.
The path was narrow and single track, climbing over the headland, and Ilios was making it plain that he expected her to go first, Lizzie could see. In normal circumstances she would have enjoyed such a walk, in the crisp early evening air, and even as it was when she reached the top of the incline she couldn’t help being tempted to take a few steps off the path towards the edge of the headland, drawn there by the magnificence of the scenery.
Ilios watched as the wind buffeted Lizzie, whipping her hair into a tangled blonde skein, and then he realised what she was doing.
Lizzie had only gone a few feet when she heard Ilios commanding, from behind her, ‘Don’t move. Stay where you are.’
It was too much to be denied such a small pleasure on top of everything else, so Lizzie ignored him, determined to defy him and have her moment of small rebellion and triumph even though she had been forced to give in to him on the bigger issues.
When Lizzie ignored him and continued to head for the edge of the promontory, Ilios let go of her case and raced after her.
Too late, Lizzie learned the reason for Ilios’s command. The ground was shifting beneath her feet, moving. The edge of the headland was falling away—and she was going to fall with it. She was falling, in fact—but not, Lizzie recognised with relief, into the sea with the rock and earth. Instead she fell onto hard, firm ground, clear of the headland, wrapped in Ilios Manos’s arms as he grabbed her in a flying tackle, dragging her backwards with a speed and force that sent them both falling to the ground. He had saved her life.
‘Are you crazy? What the hell were you trying to do?’
‘Not throw myself off the cliff, if that’s what you thought,’ Lizzie answered. ‘Apart from anything else, I haven’t got any life insurance. So there wouldn’t be any point in trying to kill myself.’
‘So you weren’t planning some dramatic gesture, claiming you’d rather have death before dishonour?’ he taunted her. ‘That’s just as well, because you’d have been wasting your time since you have already dishonoured yourself with your debt to me.’
‘I wasn’t trying to do anything other than look at the view.’ Lizzie defended herself. ‘I didn’t know it was dangerous. There aren’t any warning signs.’
‘There don’t need to be any. It’s private property, exclusively mine, for my own use and pleasure.’
Lizzie was still in his arms, with the weight of his body pinning her to the ground. She should try to move, she knew, but those words he had used—private property … exclusively mine … for my own use and pleasure—had set off a trail of lateral thinking inside her head. Applied to herself, in the context of his insistence on her repayment of the debt she owed him, they were now conjuring up the kind of sensual scenarios that turned her body weak with a reckless longing and filled her with excitement and apprehension.
She wasn’t used to feeling like this about any man. She didn’t want to feel this way about any man—especially not Ilios Manos, who would, she felt sure, take her desire for him and use it against her to punish her. Wanting a man she barely knew wasn’t something she had ever imagined would happen to her—her whole way of life, her entire way of thinking, was diametrically opposed to such a possibility. Not for her own protection, but for the protection of her family. To have such feelings now alarmed and terrified her. Lizzie desperately wanted to ignore what she felt, to deny it completely if she could. But it wouldn’t let her. It was too strong for her, too determined to make its need felt.
Her heart was thudding under his hand, Ilios recognized, like the beat of the wings of a trapped bird, frantic for its freedom. But, like this land and everything on it, she was his by rights so ancient they were imprinted on every cell of his body. She was his. He was still holding on to her, and against the palm of his hand he could feel the soft, warm swell of her breast, more rounded and fuller than her slenderness had suggested.
Automatically, of its own accord, as though divorced from his thoughts and answerable only to its own need, his palm curved closer to her flesh, the pad of his thumb-tip moving experimentally over a nipple soft at first, but rising immediately to his touch. He cupped her breast fully, stroking her nipple, and his other hand tightened its hold to draw her closer. His body moved so that he could thrust one thigh between the jean-clad flesh of hers.
The world—her world, the world she had thought she knew—had gone crazy, Lizzie acknowledged. The heat burning through her body was surely global warming gone into overdrive. Her breasts—both of them, not just the one he was caressing—were aching to be enjoyed, whilst the knowing male thigh thrusting between her own made her want to lean against it, move against it, open herself to it and to all the delicious sensual possibilities its presence signposted.
This man was …
This man was her enemy!
What was he doing? Ilios had never had any taste for casual, meaningless sex, and yet here he was touching this woman who was lying beneath him as though he was starved for the sensation of her female flesh beneath his hands—as though the desire he could feel pounding through him was so strong, so all-important and demanding, so beyond his own control, that he had no choice other than to submit to it.
As Lizzie pushed him away Ilios released her, infuriated both with himself for his unacceptable and inexplicable need and with her for being the cause of it.
‘You had no right to do that,’ Lizzie told him fiercely, desperately anxious to establish that she was not the one who had started what had happened.
‘That wasn’t what your body was saying.’
Of course he was bound to have known what she was feeling, a man like him, with that aura he had of sexual power and knowledge. Lizzie’s face burned hot with self-conscious awareness of how he had made her feel. She wasn’t going to allow him to get the better of her, though. She couldn’t afford to.
‘You can think what you like,’ she told him defensively. ‘But I know the truth.’
Of course she did. And the truth was …
She didn’t want to think about what the truth was, or what it had felt like to be held in his arms, to be touched by him, to have her senses set alight and her defences laying down their arms in willing surrender. She didn’t want to think of anything other than putting as much distance as she could between herself and Ilios Manos as fast as she could.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘WHERE are we going?’ Lizzie asked uncertainly, once she was back on her feet and Ilios was a safe distance away from her.
‘Not to some secluded grotto so I can imprison you like some Greek nymph awaiting the gods’ pleasure, where you will be obliged to answer to my every sensual need, if that is what you are imagining. We are merely returning to Villa Manos, which is where I left my car.’
‘Villa Manos? That is where you live?’ Lizzie queried—after all, it was far safer talking about a villa than it was thinking about the dangerous effect his previous comments had been having on her.
‘No. I have an apartment in Thessaloniki, at the top of the Manos Construction office block. The villa is very old, and the building has fallen into disrepair. It was Tino’s hope that he could insist that it be bulldozed, because it might present a danger to the holidaymakers visiting the complex he planned to build here—but then I am sure that you already know all about that, since you are partners.’
They had almost reached the top of the incline now, and even though she was slightly out of breath Lizzie turned to face him, her normally calm grey eyes sparkling quicksilver-bright with temper as she objected. ‘I have already told you. I have never even met your cousin, never mind been the recipient of his confidences with regard to his business plans.’
‘Business plans which included manipulating me into selling him my half of our grandfather’s land once he had forced me to remove our ancestral home from it.’
Ilios had started to climb the last few feet of the path, so Lizzie did the same, coming to an abrupt halt as she saw what lay below them, bathed in the last dying rays of the day’s light.
At the far end of a long straight drive, lined with tall Cyprus trees and surrounded by Italianate gardens, slightly elevated from the surrounding terrain, set like a pearl against the dark green of the Cyprus and the blue of the Aegean Sea beyond it, perfectly framed by its surroundings was—
‘Villa Emo,’ Lizzie announced breathlessly in a slightly dazed voice as she stared at the building. She turned to Ilios to say in disbelief, ‘It looks exactly like Villa Emo—the house Palladio designed for the Emo family outside Venice.’
To either side of the main house long, low, arcaded wings—which on the original Villa Emo had been farm buildings—extended in perfect symmetry, capped at both ends with classically styled dovecotes, whilst the main building itself was a perfect copy of the Italian original.
‘It’s so beautiful,’ Lizzie whispered, awestruck by the wonderful symmetry of the building and wondering how on earth Palladio’s beautiful villa for the Emo family had somehow transported itself here, to this remote Greek Macedonian promontory.
‘A deadly beauty, some might say, since it was someone else’s desire to possess it conflicting with my grandfather’s determination to keep it that cost my father and Tino’s father their lives.’ His voice was openly harsh with bitterness.
Without waiting to see if Lizzie was following him he started off down the steep path towards the house. Automatically Lizzie followed him, unable to stop herself from asking, once she had caught up with him, ‘What happened—to your father?’ She had lost her own parents, after all, and she knew the dreadful pain of that kind of loss.
‘What happened?’ Ilios stopped so abruptly that Lizzie almost cannoned into him, only stopping herself from doing so by placing her hand on his forearm to steady herself. She snatched it back again for her own safety and peace of mind as she felt the now familiar surge of sensual longing that physical contact with him brought her. How was it possible for this one man to do what no other man had ever done, without actually doing anything to arouse the desire she felt for him? Lizzie didn’t know, and she didn’t really want to know either. She simply wanted it not to happen.
Ilios was speaking again, and she forced herself to concentrate on what he was saying and not what she was feeling.
‘The ruling Junta at the time believed that since my grandfather would not agree to sell the villa to one of their number he should be forced to make a choice between the villa and the lives of his sons. They misjudged my grandfather, I’m afraid. He chose the villa.’
‘Over his own flesh and blood?’ Lizzie couldn’t conceal her horrified disbelief. ‘How could he do something like that?’
They had reached the gardens now, and were taking a path that skirted past them, but instead of being disappointed at not being able to see them in more detail Lizzie was too appalled by what Ilios was telling her to think about them.
‘He had no other choice,’ Ilios told her as they emerged from the shadow of a tree-lined walkway into the gravelled courtyard where he had left his car.
‘So what happened—to … to your father?’ Lizzie had to ask the question.
‘He was shot. They both were. But not at the same time. Tino’s father, the younger of the two, was set free initially. It seemed he had convinced the Junta that if they set him free he would persuade his father to change his mind. When he couldn’t, the only difference it made to their ultimate fate was that my father was blindfolded and shot by the firing squad he was facing whilst my uncle was shot in the back trying to escape them.’
Lizzie couldn’t stop herself from shuddering.
‘How awful—your poor mother.’
‘I doubt she cared very much one way or the other. She and my father had only been married a matter of months—a dynastic marriage of sorts—and by the time she had given birth to me the Junta had been overthrown.’
Lizzie was appalled.
‘So you never knew your father?’
‘No.’
‘And your mother?’
‘She remarried—a cousin with whom she was already in love. I was handed over to my grandfather.’
‘She gave you away?’
The pity that had been growing inside her with every terse answer Ilios had given her had grown into an aching ball of shocked compassion. She and her sisters had known such love from their parents, had had such happy childhoods, and Lizzie couldn’t help but feel the contrast between her own childhood and the one Ilios must have had.
‘As she saw it she had done her duty in marrying my father and producing a son, and so she deserved to follow her own heart, which did not lie with me.’
‘Where is she now? Do you see her?’
‘She and her second husband were killed in a freak storm when they were out sailing.’
Lizzie could understand why a person would want to keep such a beautiful home in the family—but surely not at the price of one’s own children? How could a man have sacrificed his own sons the way Ilios’s grandfather had?
‘Villa Manos isn’t just an inheritance, it is a sacred trust,’ Ilios told her coldly, obviously guessing what she was thinking. ‘It was said by our ancestor when he had it built that as long as it remained in the hands of the Manos family our family would survive and thrive, but that if it should be lost to the family our line would shrivel and turn to dust. It is the responsibility of the Manos who holds the key to Villa Manos to ensure that there is someone for him to pass it on to. Since he is the elder or the two of us my cousin grew up believing—as I did myself—that our grandfather would pass on the key to him.’
‘So why didn’t he?’ Lizzie couldn’t resist asking.
