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While her mother, Gillian, hobbled painfully round the tiny kitchen of their council flat on crutches and tried to tidy up, Letty made a cheap but nutritious evening meal for her family. Her two brothers sat at the table in the living room, both of them engaged in homework. Tim was thirteen and Kyle was nine. Letty considered her half-brothers marginally less useless than she considered the rest of the world’s men.
There were no towering heroes in Letty’s depressing experience of men. Her father, Julian, had been a handsome, irresponsible lightweight, incapable of fighting his addictions to toxic substances. He had lived with her mother and her only once and for a brief period, after a more than usually successful stay in a rehab facility, but within months he had fallen off the wagon again and that had been the last Letty had seen of him.
Yet, tragically, meeting Julian Livas had derailed her mother’s entire life. Gillian had been a middle-class schoolgirl at the exclusive co-educational boarding school where she had met Julian. A teenage pregnancy had resulted and when Gillian had refused to have a termination her parents had thrown her out and washed their hands of her. Letty had always respected the hard struggle Gillian had faced, simply to survive as a young mother. As a single parent, Gillian had subsequently trained as a nurse and life had been stable until Gillian fell in love again.
Letty grimaced as she thought of her stepfather, Robbie, a steady worker and a likeable man but, underneath the surface show of decency and reliability, a hopeless womaniser. When Gillian could no longer live with his lies and deceptions, they had had to move on and inevitably their standard of living had gone downhill with the divorce. In his own way, Robbie had been as feckless as her father, although he did maintain a stable relationship with his two sons.
Letty had worked very hard at school, determined that she would never have to rely on a man for support. And what good had it done her? she asked herself ruefully. It had given her a scholarship to a top sixth form college and the chance to study medicine at Oxford but, within a few years, just as Letty was starting to stretch her wings into independence and the promise of a satisfying career, misfortune had rolled back in and her family had needed her back at home to bring in a living wage.
She had been three years into her medical degree when Gillian’s worsening arthritis had forced her to give up work and live on benefits. Undaunted, Gillian had retrained as a drug and alcohol counsellor, who could work from a wheelchair, but all it took was a broken lift in their tower apartment block—and it was frequently out of order—and she was trapped indoors and unable either to work or to earn. That one very bleak Christmas, when Letty was in the fifth year of her course, Gillian had got involved in the murky underworld of unsecured loans and had fallen into debt as the interest charges mushroomed.
Letty rode into work on the elderly motorbike she had restored. Parking her bike and securing it, she walked into the Sunset Home for the Elderly, where she worked as the permanent night shift manager. She was on a good salary and had no complaints about her working conditions or colleagues. She had every intention of completing her medical studies as soon as it was possible but, right at that moment, that desired goal seemed worryingly distant. Her mother was too frail to be left alone with two active boys until she received the double hip replacement she needed. Sadly, the waiting lists for free treatment were too long and private surgery was unaffordable. In the short term, more accessible accommodation would have much improved Gillian’s lot and her ability to work but the large debt that she had accrued with that iniquitous loan had to be cleared before moving could even be considered.
As Letty changed out of bike leathers into work garb, her phone started ringing and she answered it swiftly, always fearful of her mother having suffered a fall, which would exacerbate her condition. But it wasn’t one of her brothers calling to give her bad news, it was, amazingly, her grandfather.
‘If you’re willing to do whatever it takes to help your family, Leo is the man to approach. I will text you the phone number. Furthermore, if you were to reach an agreement with Leo, I will invite you into my home and introduce you to Greek society,’ the older man informed her loftily in the tone of someone who believed he was offering her some great honour.
‘Er…right. Thanks for that,’ Letty responded ruefully, wondering why her grandfather would think that she was interested in being introduced to Greek society and what sort of agreement he believed she could reach with this guy, Leo, that was likely to benefit her or her family. Maybe the older man wasn’t as cold a fish as she had assumed, and he was genuinely trying to help her. She was too much of a cynic for a wannabe doctor, she scolded herself, she really had to start trying harder to see the good in human beings.
The next morning, before she headed home to bed after her shift, she took out the number and phoned it.
‘VR Shipping,’ a woman answered.
‘My name is Letty Harbison. I have to make an appointment with someone called Leo?’
‘If you will excuse me for a moment…’ the woman urged.
Letty groaned at the sound of voices fussing in the background. Was this Leo likely to offer her better paid employment? He was obviously a businessman in an office environment. When she got home, she would look him up online, although she would need more than his first name to accomplish that, she reflected wearily.
‘Mr Romanos will see you at ten this morning at his London office.’ The woman then read out the address of his building.
‘I’m sorry, I’m a night shift worker and it would need to be a little later in the day,’ Letty began apologetically.
‘Mr Romanos will not be available later. He is a very busy man.’
Letty rolled her eyes. ‘Ten will be fine,’ she conceded, reasoning that it was only sensible to check the man out because her grandfather could genuinely be attempting to do her a good turn. And pigs might fly, her inner cynic sniped as she remembered the single cup of black coffee she had enjoyed in the fancy restaurant where she had met her father’s father for the first time for a twenty-minute chat which had consisted of his barked questions and her laboured replies.
It had been a painful meeting because she had truly hoped that there would be some sense of family connection between them, but there had been nothing, only an older man, evidently still very bitter about his only son’s early death. Even worse, any reference Letty had made to her family’s problems had only seemed to increase her grandfather’s contempt for her and her mother and brothers.
Dragging herself out of the recollection of that disheartening conversation, she checked the time and suppressed another groan. There was no way on earth she could get home, freshen up and change and then catch the bus to make that appointment in time. Oh, to heck with that, she thought in sudden rebellion, she would attend the appointment as she was, in her bike leathers, and explain that she had just left work and had nothing else to wear. After calling her mother to warn her that she would be late back, Letty climbed back on her bike.
‘Have you a parcel?’ the receptionist asked Letty on her arrival in the building.
‘No, I have an appointment with Mr Leo… Romanos, is it? At ten,’ she recited uncertainly because she had been so drowsy when she had made that initial call that her concentration and powers of recall were not operating with their usual efficiency.
The top floor receptionist’s eyes rounded as she took in Letty in her biker leathers because she was a gossip and, according to the grapevine, Leo Romanos had unexpectedly cancelled a very important meeting to clear a last-minute space for a female visitor. The usual lively speculation about his sex life had duly erupted in a frenzy. Only, sadly, Letty did not fit the bill because Leo was a living legend for his taste in beautiful women, who were invariably models or socialites, spiced with the occasional actress. Nobody looking at Letty could possibly have placed her in any of those categories.
Letty sank down on a squashy and very comfortable sofa in the reception area and the exhaustion she suffered by never ever getting enough rest simply engulfed her in a drowning tide. Her sleepy eyes executed one last final sweep of the ultra-modern, very luxurious floor of offices and wonderment assailed her. Why on earth had her grandfather sent her to such a place? Yes, she had the usual office skills but she seriously doubted they would be on a par with the kind of commercial skills employees needed to have in a business environment. Even worse, she was dressed all wrong, had only just managed to get out of the lift before being asked if she had brought the pizzas someone was awaiting. She had been mistaken for a takeaway delivery person.
‘Your ten o’clock appointment is asleep in Reception,’ one of Leo’s assistants informed him.
Asleep? Theos…how was she contriving to sleep on the brink of potentially meeting her future husband? It did not occur to Leo that Isidore Livas would have been foolish enough to send his granddaughter to see him without that all-important proposal having being outlined in advance. He hadn’t expected to meet her quite so quickly, however, had assumed it would take at least a week to set up such a meeting. He was allowing the necessary time for Letty to make whatever effort she could to look her best to meet the expectations of a billionaire seeking a bride.
Leo strode out to Reception, disconcerting everyone, turning every head, and then he saw her, lying full length along the sofa, very nearly merging with the black upholstery in her leathers. Leather? Why was she dressed from top to toe in leather and wearing chunky motorbike boots?
Bemused, Leo came to a halt and stared down at her, noticing the long messy ponytail, so long it almost brushed the floor. She had long honey-blonde hair. All the Livas tribe were some shade of blonde, he recalled abstractedly as his roaming attention mounted the curve of a lush pouting derrière sleekly outlined by leather and a long slender thigh. Her face was pillowed on her hand, sleep-flushed, her lips full and pink. She wasn’t very tall. In fact she was short in stature, another Livas trait. She might be lucky to reach his chest, even in high heels. But she wasn’t plain and she certainly wasn’t plump. She was simply wonderfully curved in all the right feminine places and only a man with a wife and a daughter the size and shape of toothpicks could have deemed Letty plump, Leo reflected wryly. Involuntarily, he was still staring because he wanted to know what lay below the leather jacket she had zipped up tight and he was ridiculously tempted to scoop her up and just carry her into his office. Courtesy, however, would be the wiser choice and Leo was usually wise.
‘Letty…’ Leo intoned in his deep dark drawl. ‘Letty…’
Theos, he hated that name, which was more suited to an Edwardian kitchen maid and Juliet was so much prettier. He would call her Juliet.
Letty shifted position and her lashes fluttered as she forced her unwilling body back to wakefulness when all it wanted to do was sleep. She began to push herself up on her arm and her eyes widened on the man poised at the end of the sofa. He was so disconcerting a vision that she blinked, expecting him to vanish like the illusion he had to be. But he stayed steady, a very tall, lean and powerful figure, garbed in a business suit so exquisitely tailored to his exact physique that he looked like a model, a male supermodel who would have looked more at home with the backdrop of a vast yacht behind him.
He had black cropped hair, razor-edged cheekbones and a perfect nose and mouth. As for the eyes, well, Letty, who never went into raptures, could’ve gone into raptures over those dark deep-set eyes glimmering with rich honey accents and framed by ridiculously long lashes. Letty wasn’t even surprised that she was staring, she, who never stared at a man, unless it was in an attempt to intimidate him. He was an outrageously beautiful male specimen and quite dazzlingly noticeable.
He stretched down a hand. ‘I’m Leo Romanos,’ he informed her with quiet hauteur.
She couldn’t wait to look him up online and find out all about him, although it was clear that he shared her grandfather’s arrogance even if he wore it differently. Leo Romanos, she sensed, was a man accustomed to having others leap to do his bidding and he took it quite for granted. Isidore Livas, however, didn’t project quite the same level of expectation and intimidation, and felt the need to frown and pitch his voice louder to make a similar impression.
‘Letty Harbison…’ Letty said, belatedly recalling her manners, heated embarrassment momentarily claiming her as she realised she had been sleeping full length along the sofa in a public place. Then, in common with most junior doctors, Letty could’ve fallen asleep standing up on one leg, particularly after several sessions spent observing, fetching and carrying in a busy emergency unit.
‘Is there somewhere I could…freshen up?’ she asked, evading that shrewd dark gaze of his, her defences kicking in because she had stared at him—she didn’t stare at men and didn’t feel comfortable with the fact that she had stared at him.
He indicated the cloakroom behind the waiting area and she shot upright, learning that he was even taller than she had suspected and surprised even more to learn that there were men around who could make her feel positively small and dainty.
She vanished into the cloakroom at speed, grimacing when she caught her pink and tousled reflection. In an effort to tidy her hair she tugged off her hairband and it snapped, leaving her with a wealth of honey-blonde tresses spilling untidily over her shoulders. She cursed and threw her head back to shift her mane of hair down her back before unzipping and removing her jacket because she was much too hot. She washed her hands, briefly wished she had brought a lipstick with her and suppressed the idle thought again. It would take more than a dash of lipstick to make her look like an efficient and elegant office worker in VR Shipping, where even the receptionist resembled a Miss World contender.
‘This way, please…’ another employee greeted her when she emerged. ‘I’ll show you to Mr Romanos’s office. Would you like some coffee?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ Letty responded warmly, thinking that coffee, which she rarely drank, might wake her up because, after that short burst of sleep, her brain cells felt as though they were drowning in sludge. ‘I take it black, no sugar.’
Leo had a vague unrealistic hope that Juliet would reappear looking rather more conventional and even wearing a little make-up and carting a bag of some kind like a normal woman. Instead, she came through the door, carrying her jacket with her hair loose. And what hair it was, Leo marvelled, watching the luxuriant honey-blonde strands flick against her shapely hips as she turned to shut the door behind her. She spun back, eyes as green as fresh ferns in sunlight, alert and questioning now, and she gripped her jacket even closer to her chest, as though she was trying to conceal the undeniably magnificent swell of her breasts below the plain black T-shirt she wore.
Leo liked curvy women, but he loved the female breast in all sizes and, as she settled down in the chair set in front of his desk, he was enchanted by the very slight bounce of her bosom as she sat down. Natural curves, he was convinced, not bought and paid for, shaped by some talented surgeon. Encountering her gaze, Leo went as hard as a rock and it shocked him, sincerely shocked him, because that didn’t happen to him any more in public. He strode around his desk to take a seat, disconcerted by that juvenile response to a woman who was fully clothed, bare of make-up and, so far, not even a little flirtatious or suggestive.
His assistant entered with a tray of coffee and poured it.
‘I don’t usually drink coffee, but I need it to wake me up this morning,’ Letty admitted with a rueful smile that lit up her oval face. ‘I apologise for not being more smartly dressed but I only finished work at eight and there wasn’t time to go home and change and get back here in time.’
‘Why the biker leathers?’
‘I use a motorbike to get around. It’s cheap to run and perfect for getting through rush hour traffic,’ Letty explained, sipping the coffee she held between her cupped hands. ‘I don’t know why my grandfather insisted that I should come and see you. Do you have some sort of work that I could do? A job to offer?’
Leo froze, belatedly registering that Isidore had not done the footwork for him. ‘I have a proposition that you may wish to consider.’
‘Did Isidore mention that I’m in need of money?’ Letty had to force herself to ask, her creamy skin turning pink with self-consciousness.
‘Your grandfather asked you to call him Isidore?’ Leo remarked in surprise.
‘Oh, he didn’t invite me to call him anything,’ Letty parried with rueful amusement. ‘To be frank, he didn’t want to acknowledge the relationship.’
‘That must’ve been a disappointment,’ Leo commented wryly.
‘Not really. I wasn’t expecting a miracle but, considering that my father never paid any child support, it’s not as though I’ve cost that side of my family anything over the years,’ she responded quietly. ‘My mother has always been very independent but right now that’s not possible for her, so I’ve had to step in…’
‘Which is where I enter the equation from your point of view,’ Leo incised. ‘Your grandfather wants to amalgamate his shipping firm with mine and retire, leaving me in charge. For me, the price of that valuable alliance is that I marry you.’
A pin-drop silence fell.
‘You would have to marry me to get his shipping business?’ Letty exclaimed in disbelief. ‘I’ve never heard anything so outrageous in my life! I knew he was an out-of-date old codger, but I didn’t realise he was insane!’
‘Then I must be insane too,’ Leo acknowledged smoothly. ‘Because I am willing to agree to that deal, although I also have more pressing reasons for being currently in need of a wife…’
Letty felt disorientated and bewildered. ‘You need a wife?’ she almost whispered, wondering why there wasn’t a stampede of eager women pushing her out of their path to reach him and then suppressing that weird and frivolous thought, irritated by her lapse in concentration.
‘Six months ago, my sister and her husband died in a car crash. I am attempting to raise their four children. I need a wife to help me with that task,’ Leo spelt out succinctly.
‘Four…children?’ Letty gasped in consternation.
‘Aged five and under.’ Leo decided to give her all the bad news at once. ‘The baby was a newborn, who was premature at birth. Ben and Anastasia were on the way to pick him up and finally bring him home from the hospital when they were killed.’
In the stretching heavy silence, Letty blinked in shock. ‘How tragic…’
‘Yes, but rather more tragic for their children, with only me to fall back on. They need a mother figure, someone who’s there more often. I work long hours and I travel as well. The set-up that I have at the moment is not working well enough for them.’
Letty shrugged a slight fatalistic shoulder. ‘So, you make sacrifices. You change your lifestyle.’
‘I have already done that. Bringing in a wife to share the responsibility makes better sense,’ Leo declared in a tone of finality as though only he could give an opinion in that field.
‘And you and my grandfather, who doesn’t really want to be my grandfather,’ Letty suggested with a rueful curve to her soft mouth, ‘somehow reached the conclusion that I could be that wife?’
‘You are Isidore’s only option, his sole available female relative. His daughter’s about to get engaged.’
‘So, my Aunt Elexis wasn’t ready to snap you up,’ Letty observed.
Leo compressed his wide sensual mouth at her slightly mocking intonation. ‘Isidore first approached me on her behalf six years ago. I said no.’
‘You said no,’ Letty echoed weakly, struggling without success to get into the thought patterns of rich Greeks, prepared to marry purely to unite their companies and families.
‘I’m only willing to marry now to benefit the children,’ Leo told her.
‘But marriage is a lot more intimate in nature than an agreement to raise children together,’ Letty pointed out.
Leo lounged fluidly back in his chair. ‘In our case, it would be less intimate. Sex wouldn’t be involved. I would satisfy my needs elsewhere.’
Letty turned bright red and she didn’t know why. After all, she knew everything there was to know about the mechanics of sex, hormones and physical needs, even if she did lack actual experience. ‘So, you wouldn’t require sex from your wife?’ she checked, not quite sure she could credit that.
‘No. I keep a mistress for that purpose. It’s more convenient,’ Leo informed her without shame or an ounce of embarrassment.
Letty shook her head as if to clear it. Possibly it was to convince herself that this unusual conversation between her and a man she had met only minutes earlier was actually taking place. ‘Well,’ she breathed thoughtfully, ‘you’ve told me what you would be getting out of such a marriage—another shipping company, presumably greater wealth, a dutiful mother to your sister’s children and the continuing freedom to sleep with whomever you like. That’s a lot.’
Leo surveyed her with dark golden eyes and slowly smiled, his chiselled dark features more appealing than ever. ‘It is…’
‘I can see why the arrangement would appeal to you. But what would I be getting out of it?’ Letty asked gently.
And she thought, I’m not asking that—seriously I’m not. I can’t possibly be considering such a crazy proposition from a man I don’t even know! An unscrupulous, immoral man at that, one who prefers a mistress to a wife in his bed and makes no bones about it either! Absolutely and utterly shameless in his honesty.
Leo studied her, wishing he could read her better, but the smooth oval of her face was unrevealing. Indeed, they could have been discussing something as bland as the weather.
‘Let me tell you the benefits of becoming my wife,’ Leo urged in that husky accented drawl of his, which was both exotic and sensual.
CHAPTER TWO (#u48948b63-fcbe-511e-bd22-6d5ef3751fe9)
‘I DON’T KNOW how important money is to you,’ Leo remarked deadpan.
‘When you don’t have money, but you need it, it’s very important,’ Letty countered with a toss of her head and a lift of her chin because she was telling the truth and didn’t care if he judged her for it.
Leo rose from his seat and spread his lean brown hands in an expressive gesture that was wonderfully fluid. ‘If you marry me, you will be able to have anything that you want. I am a very rich man,’ he told her bluntly. ‘I assume that you would want to organise private surgery for your mother and find a safer place for your family to live. You will also want the thugs, who are harassing your mother for payment of her loan, dealt with. Those are the difficulties that I can easily settle on your behalf. Only you can tell me what else you would want.’
Letty was astonished by how much he already knew about her life and her family’s problems. ‘Where did you get all that information? From Isidore?’
‘From a very discreet investigation agency. I had to know exactly who you were before I could consider allowing you near the children,’ Leo pointed out without a shade of remorse.
Annoyed by his invasion of her privacy and yet simultaneously understanding his reasons for doing so, Letty was bemused. ‘And what did you think that you learned about me?’ she prompted.
‘That you put family loyalty over personal ambition and that no one you have worked with or studied with or enjoyed a friendship with has anything bad to say about you,’ Leo recounted levelly. ‘I was very impressed and immediately keen to meet you. Such fine qualities are rare.’
Not entirely untouched by that accolade, Letty coloured and watched him move restlessly across the room. He drew her eyes to him, no matter how hard she tried to look away. He had an intensity to him she had not met with in a man before. Leo Romanos was so much more. He emanated physical energy in an aura of power. A very strong character, a mover and shaker, a pretty dominant personality, but it would be a dominance laced with intelligence and control. Emotional, very emotional—she had seen that emotion flashing in his eyes when he’d referred to his late sister and the children in his care. When he was in a bad mood, she imagined people walked on eggshells around him. Women, she imagined, fell in the aisles around him, stunned by the raw sexual charisma he exuded.
And no, she was not impervious to his masculine appeal, she conceded ruefully. She doubted that many women were impervious to Leo and she was no different, her attention veering involuntarily to the pull of fabric across his long muscular thighs as he moved, the swell of his broad chest below his shirt as he breathed, the muscles there evident. Even fully clothed he was a disturbingly physical man, who would always attract attention and admiration.
‘You talk about acquiring a wife much like you’re shopping for a fine wine,’ she commented quietly. ‘It’s not the same.’
‘Isn’t it? I can purchase the finest wine at the highest price and I still may not like the taste of it,’ he fenced smoothly.
‘I consider marriage to be,’ Letty murmured levelly, ‘a sacred bond between two people.’
‘Yes, you are a practising Christian.’ Leo acknowledged that detail, shifting his expressive hands again. ‘But you are practical as well and you must know that sex causes a lot of grief in relationships. Take the sex out of the marriage and you have a working, reasonable partnership.’
‘And an unfaithful husband,’ Letty chipped in, again inwardly denying that she was having such a dialogue with him while wondering how she could possibly be intrigued by his attitude.
Leo shrugged a wide shoulder. ‘Is that so important in the grand scheme of things? It’s not as though you’re in love with me. It’s not even as though you know me.’
Letty’s head was beginning to ache with the stress of the meeting to which she had walked in totally unprepared. She was too tired to think with clarity and her mind was increasingly awash with irrelevant but seductive images, such as her mother able to walk again, her brothers attending a less crowded and tough school and being able to eat what they liked, rather than what was cheapest. Lack of money, she registered unhappily, controlled their lives, limited it and removed all the choices. But the escape that Leo Romanos was offering carried risks as well.
‘I’ve been up almost twenty-four hours,’ Letty admitted. ‘I need to sleep to process all this.’
Leo swung back to her, spectacular dark golden eyes locking to her. ‘But you’re not saying no out of hand,’ he breathed with satisfaction.
