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She stretched out her hand, moving her fingers in the air above the curve of his shoulder, fighting the compulsion to touch him, to tug the sheet that was lying low across his hips farther down. She was amazed that she could have these thoughts and feel no sense of embarrassment. It had been the same when she had undressed for him—it had just felt right and heart-stoppingly exciting.
No fantasy had ever matched the fascination she felt for his body. Her stomach muscles quivered in hot, hungry anticipation of exploring every inch of his hard, lean body again.
‘Totally beautiful,’ she whispered again, staring at the man sharing her bed.
His name was Alex. When he’d asked she’d told him her name was Angelina, but that nobody ever called her that. Apparently when she was born her father had said she looked like a little angel and it had stuck.
She tensed when, as if in response to her voice, he murmured in his sleep before rolling over onto his back, one arm flung over his head, his long fingers brushing the headboard.
Angel felt a strong sensual kick of excitement low and deep in her belly as she stared, the rapt expression on her face a fusion of awe and hunger. She swallowed past the emotional thickening that made her throat ache. He was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen or imagined.
In the half-light that now filled the room his warm olive-toned skin gleamed like gold, its texture like oiled satin. A tactile tingle passed through her fingertips. Perfect might have seemed like an overused term but he was. The length of his legs was balanced by broad shoulders and a deeply muscled chest dusted with dark body hair that narrowed into a directional arrow across his flat belly ridged with muscle. There wasn’t an ounce of excess flesh on his lean body to disguise the musculature that had the perfection of an anatomical diagram. But Alex was no diagram. He was a warm, living, earthly male, and he was sharing her bed.
A dazed smile flickered across her face as she felt all the muscles in her abdomen tighten. Last night had been perfect—perfect, but not in the way she had expected. There had been hardly any pain and no embarrassment.
Angel has still failed to grasp the concept of moderation. There is no middle ground—she is all or nothing.
The words on her report card came back to her.
Her form teacher had been referring to her academic record littered with As and Fs, not to sex, but there had been no middle ground last night either. Angel had held nothing back; she had given him everything without reservation.
* * *
‘I know this is bad timing, but there’s a problem.’
The words had been music to Alex’s ears. ‘Tell me.’
They had and he had acted. Crisis management was something he excelled at—it was a simple matter of focusing, shutting out all distractions and focusing.
He had gone straight from the funeral to his office, where he’d pretty much lived for the past month. He’d washed, eaten and slept—or at least snatched a few minutes on the sofa—there. It made sense, and it suited him. He had nothing to go home to any longer.
Then the crisis was over and Alex had been unable to think of any reason not to go home, where he had, if anything, less sleep. He did go to bed but by the small hours he was up again, which was why it felt strange and disorientating to wake up after a deep sleep and find light shining through the blinds of...not his room... Where the hell?
He blinked and focused on the beautiful face of the most incredible-looking woman. She was sitting there looking down at him wearing nothing but a mane of glossy dark hair that lay like a silky curtain over her breasts—breasts that had filled his hands perfectly and tasted—
It all came rushing back.
Hell!
‘Good morning.’
His body reacted to the slumberous promise in her smile, but, ignoring the urgent messages it was sending and the desire that heated his blood, gritted his teeth and swung his legs over the side of the bed. Guilt rising like a toxic tide to clog his throat, he sat, eyes closed, with his rigid back to her. This was about damage limitation and not repeating a mistake no matter how tempting it might seem.
She was sinful temptation given a throaty voice and a perfect body, but this had been his mistake, not hers, and it was his responsibility to end it.
‘I thought you’d never wake up.’
His spine tensed at the touch of her fingers on his skin. He wiped his face of all emotion as he turned back to face her.
‘You should have woken me. I hope I haven’t made you late for anything...?’
‘Late...?’ she quavered.
He stood up and looked around for his clothes. ‘Can I get you a taxi?’
‘I...I don’t understand... I thought we’d...’ Her voice trailed away. He was looking at her so coldly.
‘Look, last night was... Actually it was fantastic but I’m not available.’
Available? Angel still didn’t get it.
He felt the guilt tighten in his gut but he had no desire to prolong this scene. He’d made a massive mistake, end of story. A post-mortem was not going to change anything.
‘I thought—’
He cut across her. ‘Last night was just sex.’
He was speaking slowly as if he were explaining something to a child or a moron. The coldness in his blue eyes as much as his words confused Angel.
‘But last night...’
‘Like I said, last night was great, but it was a mistake.’ A great big mistake, but a man learned by his mistakes and he didn’t give in to the temptation to repeat them.
She began to feel sick as she watched him fight his way into his shirt, then he was pulling on his trousers. She responded automatically to pick up the object that fell out of the pocket and landed with a metallic twang on the floor just in front of her toes. She bent to pick it up; her fingers closed around a ring.
‘Yours?’
He was meticulously careful not to touch her fingers as he took it from her outstretched hand.
‘You’re married?’
For a moment he thought of telling the truth, saying that he had been, but no longer, that the ring was in his pocket because friends kept telling him it was time to move on. Alex doubted this was what they’d had in mind.
Then he realised how much easier and less painful a lie would be. It wouldn’t ease the guilt that was like a living thing in his gut, but it would make this scene less messy and allow her to say when regaling her friends later that the bastard was married.
‘I’m sorry.’
Her incredible green eyes flared hot as she rose majestically to her feet and delivered a contemptuous ‘You disgusting loser!’ followed up by a backhanded slap that made him blink. He opened his watering eyes in time to see her vanish into the bathroom, the door locked audibly behind her.
Angel ran, hand clamped to her mouth, across the room, just making it to the loo before she was violently sick.
By the time she returned to the bedroom he was gone.
Angel found herself hating him with more venom than she thought she was capable of. She hated him even more than her mother’s creepy boyfriend, the one who had tried to grope her when she was sixteen. The only person she hated more than Alex was herself. How could she be so stupid? He had treated her like a tramp because that was how she had acted.
By the time she left the hotel room later that morning, her tears had dried and her expression was set. She had decided she would never, ever think of him again, not think of him or last night.
It never happened.
He never existed.
It was a solution.
She could move on.
CHAPTER ONE (#uf9ff38c7-3705-5089-92cf-ce5ad2294efa)
‘THEY ARE THE second biggest advertising firm in Europe and—’
‘There is something in it for you?’ Alex, who had been listening to Nico’s pitch while he read the small print on a contract, made the silky suggestion without rancour. He liked his big sister’s son and why should his favourite, actually his only, nephew be any different from everyone else?
The younger man acknowledged the point with a self-conscious shrug. ‘Well, I had heard there might be an internship going...?’
Alex finished reading, wrote his signature on the last page of the document and laid it on top of the done pile before pushing his chair back and stretching his long legs out in front of him. He flexed his shoulders and thought wistfully about the run he had promised himself as a reward for spending the morning at his desk. Not that he begrudged the youngster his time—Nico was a low-maintenance relative, unlike some who looked on him as their own personal bank. He was philosophical about the role but family was important.
‘Consider the decks cleared. You have my attention.’
‘Good of you.’ But not entirely comfortable for him as his uncle Alex’s eyes had always reminded Nico of ice chips. It wasn’t the colour, although that was an unnerving pale blue, as his own mother shared the same strangely coloured eyes with her much younger brother. It was the impression he’d had as a kid that those eyes had always been able to see right into his head. He was no longer a kid but he was always painfully honest around his uncle—just in case.
‘You know that Dad’s offered me a job and I’m grateful,’ came the hasty assurance.
Alex voiced the unspoken addendum. ‘But?’
‘But I’d like to do something that didn’t have anything to do with being his son or your nephew.’
‘I admire your intentions if not your practicality, and you seem to forget I was born with a silver spoon.’
‘And you turned it gold,’ the young man said gloomily.
There was no firm on the brink of the financial abyss for Nico to save. Thanks to Alex the shipping empire founded by his Greek great grandfather had recovered from years of mismanagement and had gone from strength to strength to be hailed as one of the success stories of the global recession.
Of course even if it hadn’t his uncle would still be fabulously rich as Alex had inherited the Arlov vast oil fortune a few years earlier from the Russian great grandfather that Nico had never met. That was when Alex had delegated the day-to-day running of the shipping business to his brother-in-law, Nico’s father.
‘And that is a bad thing?’
‘No, of course not, but no one thinks of you as a little rich boy who’s never done a day’s work in his life.’
A direct quote? Alex wondered, feeling a stab of sympathy for his nephew, who was all of the above but also a rather nice kid.
‘You don’t have anything to prove.’ His eyes fell. ‘Just forget it,’ he mumbled. ‘I knew I was talking out of my... I guess I knew you wouldn’t be up for it. I just wanted to impress the guy from the advertising firm and you should have seen his face when I mentioned your island, Saronia. He lit up like a firework. Pathetic or what.’ He reached out for the tablet he had opened on his uncle’s desk and drew back as Alex withdrew it from his reach.
‘You were trying to impress. Why apologise? Unless your interest is more personal? I am assuming the new face of this cosmetic firm is not ugly—one of your actress friends perhaps? Are you still dating...?’ The name of the pretty girl from the soap escaped him as he idly scrolled down the screen that showed the logo of the cosmetics giant that was apparently launching a new perfume.
It was not a world that Alex knew much about. ‘A big thing, is it, a new perfume?’
‘Massive,’ his nephew assured him. ‘They’re planning to make a series of ads to promote it using the same couple, six ads in all, really glossy and high production values, like a kind of serial each with a story and a cliffhanger like a romantic minisoap. They’ve got a big-name director and this guy from Hollywood to star in it—though he must be at least thirty-five.’
Alex fought a smile. ‘That old!’ Good to know he had three years to go before he was classed as elderly by his nephew.
‘They want to film the first three in an exotic setting—sand, sun and palm trees on an island paradise thing.’
‘And a connection with the golden age of Hollywood would not hurt,’ Alex inserted. He could see why Saronia would appeal to them as a location.
In its day the island had been the setting for his grandfather’s famous parties. Spyros Theakis—a man with a well-documented taste for starlets—reaping the financial rewards of his successful Greek shipping empire, had hosted lavish parties attended by all the stars of the day on his private island. The photos of those legendary events still surfaced from time to time, as did the tales of wild parties, torrid affairs and general excess. Most left out the fact that the mansion had been burnt down during an electrical storm. By some miracle none of the guests had been seriously hurt but the place had never been rebuilt. His grandfather’s fortunes, like those of the island, had gone into decline and the place had become uninhabited.
Alex had visited out of curiosity when the resort hotel he had commissioned was being built on the mainland just a few minutes away by boat. Emma, who had come with him, had been fascinated by the romance of the place. They had always planned to build a house there but the plans had been put on hold when she’d become ill and had been shelved permanently after the diagnosis.
He had gone back to Saronia for the first time a few months after her death, camping on the beach for a few days that had stretched into several weeks. Later that year he had commissioned a house, not the family house that he had planned with Emma but a small place, minimalist, no frills—though not the monk’s cell his sister had called it. It was his own retreat; he went there once or twice a year to recharge his batteries.... God knew there were few places where he could guarantee there were no photographers lurking around the corner, no phones, no news—he was off the grid when he was there.
As much as he admired his nephew’s enterprise he would sooner have invited cameras into his own bathroom than allow a film crew to invade this precious private sanctuary.
‘Louise,’ the younger man said suddenly as he took a seat on the edge of the big desk. ‘She had a really tough upbringing and she thinks I’m...spoilt.’
‘This is your soap star?’
Nico nodded.
‘And you want to impress her.’ Alex, who had been idly scrolling through the tablet, stopped. ‘Who is that?’ The lack of inflection in his voice might have made those who knew him better wonder...but Nico’s attention was on his own troubled love life, not the sudden tension in his uncle’s body language.
His nephew bent over, scanning the inverted image that filled the screen. It was a studio shot of an extremely beautiful young woman pouting provocatively at the camera with lips that were glossy and scarlet. Everything about her was provocative, from the swathe of dark wavy hair that fell artistically across one half of her face to the smile in her heavily lidded eyes, a smile that seemed to invite you to share a secret that gleamed in the shimmering emerald depths as she leaned forward displaying a large amount of cleavage in a gold sheath dress that clung like a second skin.
‘Angel. She’s a model.’
Angel... Angelina? ‘A model.’
It did not surprise him. What did surprise him was the instant effect of a face he had last seen six years ago.... An incident that had not been his finest hour, but one he had consigned to the past. The instant surge of sexual hunger that tightened in his belly had a very present feel to it.
His nephew nodded and looked amazed by his uncle’s ignorance. ‘You must have seen her in that underwear campaign last year. She was everywhere.’
‘I must have missed that one,’ he mused, seeing the beautiful sleek brunette not in underwear...not in anything. He went to stand but, not wanting to draw attention to the testosterone that had suddenly pooled in his groin, he sat back down again like some hormonal teenager, resenting his lack of control—or at least the cause of it.
‘Gorgeous, isn’t she?’ the young man continued, oblivious to any undercurrents in the air. ‘All that hair and those green eyes. They are going to build the campaign around her. It’s a calculated risk, they said, not to choose a big celebrity to be the new face for a perfume, but they want to build the campaign around someone who—’
Alex tuned out the explanation of the thinking behind employing a relative unknown—she was not unknown to him. Seeing that face, those eyes, remembering the sleek, sinuous body, the undulating curves, the golden toned skin, brought that night back so clearly that he could smell the scent of her shampoo.
Lust slammed through him again like an iron fist. With it came the guilt...always the guilt. Emma dead how many weeks...? And he had jumped into bed with the first available woman. She had led but he had followed.
His lips curled in self-disgust. He had moved on since then, when he’d felt ready. Not one-night stands, that was not his thing, but he had enjoyed a series of satisfying relationships with women who enjoyed sex but not drama, and none had been tainted with guilt. If that required he maintain a certain emotional distance it was a price worth paying.
‘Yes.’
He had no desire to revisit that place of agonising guilt but to recapture that...? It was not so much a thing he was trying to recapture but an absence that he was trying to fill. He gave his head a tiny shake, aware that he was guilty of the sin of overanalysing. She had been the best sex of his life, so why not make a push to sample it and her again?
Nico, who had taken his ringing mobile phone from his pocket intending to turn it off, dropped it. It lay where it had fallen as, jaw slack with shock, he scanned the face of the man who sat behind the big desk, a pointless exercise because he never could read his uncle.
‘Whaddaya... Yes...?’ he said, unable to believe he was this lucky.
Behind the desk Alex brought his formidable mental control into play and pushed the increasingly erotic images from his head.
