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Other than for the towel he had slung low around his lean waist, he was naked. Beads of water clung to the dark hairs on his chest. Her heart began to race as her eyes dropped lower, over the taut golden brown muscles encasing his stomach that shone warm and glossy and sinewy tight. The towel covered him from narrow hips and long powerful thighs to his knees, and the strength she could see structuring his calf muscles held her totally, utterly breath-shot as she felt the undiluted wash of what true desire really meant suffuse heat into each fine layer of her skin.
Oh, dear God, I want him badly, she acknowledged as those legs came to a sudden standstill and brought her eyes fluttering up to clash with his. It was like being suffocated, she likened dizzily, because she knew by the way he narrowed his eyes that he was reading her responses to him.
‘I’ve forgotten to pack any m-make-up.’ The words jumped from her in a panic-stricken leap.
He continued to stand there for a few more seconds just studying her, then he started walking again. ‘You will not need make-up for dinner here alone with me,’ he responded evenly.
Natasha pulled her eyes away from him to glance at the scramble of clothes she’d thrown onto the bed. ‘I don’t even have anything here fit to wear for dinner,’ she said, trying desperately to sound as calm as he had when calm was the last thing she was feeling.
He came to a stop beside her. ‘Wear the cream thing,’ he suggested with only the vaguest hint of distaste showing in his voice.
It was enough. Natasha shook her head. ‘I hate it.’
Beginning to frown now, he turned to look down at her. ‘Natasha, what—’
‘W-what are you going to wear?’ she heard herself blurt out, then grabbed in a tense breath because—in all her life she had never asked a man such a gauche, stupid question! And his frown was darkening by the second. She could actually feel him mulling over what to say next! She wanted to call back her silly question. She wished she weren’t even here!
She turned to face him. ‘Listen Leo, I…’
Then it came—his shockingly unexpected answer to her problem: he dropped the towel from around his waist. ‘Let’s wear nothing,’ he said.
The sheer outrageousness of the gesture completely robbed Natasha of speech. Heat flowed through her body, soaking her groin like hot pins and needles before spreading everywhere else. She tried to breathe. She tried to swallow. She tried to stop staring at him but she couldn’t. She tried to back off when he reached across the gap between them, but her legs had turned to liquid and were refusing to move.
He reached for the hand she was using to clutch the bathrobe to her throat and gently prized her fingers free.
‘Leo, no…’ She mouthed the husky protest with her heart clattering wildly against her ribs because she knew what was coming next.
‘Leo—yes,’ he interpreted softly.
Two seconds later the bathrobe fell to the floor at her feet and his hands were taking its place. Freshly showered skin met with freshly showered skin and her naked breasts swelled and peaked. Her shaken gasp was captured by the sensual crush of his mouth and her troubled world tilted right out of kilter as the whole sexual merry-go-round spun off again. She didn’t even want to stop it, she just threw herself into the dizzying pleasure of the kiss with her hands clutching at his solid biceps and her hips swaying closer to the burgeoning evidence of his desire and its formidable promise. Within seconds she was a quivering mass of nerve-endings, moving against him and kissing him back, her heart racing, her breathing reduced to fevered little tugs at oxygen filled with his intoxicating clean scent.
The sound of the bedroom door being thrown open with enough force to send it slamming back into something solid almost blew the top off her head. She flicked her eyes open. Leo was already lifting up his head. Way too dazed to think for herself, Natasha watched him shift the burning darkness of his eyes away from her to look towards the bedroom door, then copied him to look in that direction, too.
A woman stood there. A tall, reed-slender, staggeringly beautiful woman, wearing a dramatically short and slinky red satin dress. Her flashing black eyes were fixed on Leo, her exquisite face turning perfectly white.
‘Gianna,’ he greeted smoothly. ‘Nice of you to drop in, but, as you can see, we are busy….’
As cool as that, he turned Natasha into a block of ice as his wife—his ex-wife—threw herself into a rage of shrill spitting Greek. Leo said absolutely nothing while the tirade poured out. His heart wasn’t thundering. His breathing was steady. He just stood holding Natasha close as if trying to shield her nakedness with his own naked length, and let the other woman screech herself out.
It was awful. Natasha wished she could just sink into a hole in the ground. It was so humiliatingly obvious that Gianna felt she had a right to yell at Leo like this or why would she do it? Likening this situation to the one she’d witnessed between Cindy and Rico made her shiver in shame.
Feeling her shiver, Leo flicked a glance at her, then frowned as with a smooth grace he bent and scooped up the robe she had been wearing and draped it around her shoulders. ‘Shut up now, Gianna,’ he commanded grimly. ‘You sound like a shrieking cat.’
To Natasha’s surprise the shouting stopped. ‘You were supposed to be at Boschetto’s tonight,’ Gianna switched to condemning English. ‘I waited and waited for you to arrive and I felt the fool when you did not turn up!’
‘I made no arrangement to meet up with you,’ Leo said, bending a second time to pick up his towel, which wrapped back around his hips. ‘So if you made a fool of yourself, you did it of your own volition.’
‘You were expected—’
‘Not by you,’ Leo stated. ‘Here, let me help you…’
Trying to push her arms into the robe sleeves, Natasha found Leo taking over the task, but, ‘I’ll do it myself,’ she breathed tautly, and pushed his hands away.
She couldn’t look at him—did not want to look at his ex-wife. Embarrassment was crawling around her insides and she felt so humiliated she was trembling with it.
Speaking earned Natasha Gianna’s attention; she felt the other woman scythe a skin-peeling look over her. ‘So you like them short and fat now?’ she said to Leo.
Fat? Natasha burned up inside with indignation, huddling her size-ten figure into the all-encompassing bathrobe.
‘Much better than a rake-thin whore with a sluttish heart,’ Leo responded, reaching out to stroke one of his hands down Natasha’s burning cheek as if in an apology for his witch of an ex-wife’s insult. ‘Now behave, Gianna, or I will have Rasmus throw you out of here. In fact,’ he then drawled curiously, ‘I will be very interested to hear how you got in here at all?’
Daring a glance at the other woman, Natasha saw that she was standing there with her slender arms folded across her slender ribs. She had to be six feet tall and the way she’d been poured into that red satin dress said everything there was to say about the differences between the two of them.
No wonder she still claimed super-model status, she concluded, flicking her eyes up to Gianna’s fabulous bone-structure to see that her almond-shaped, Latin black eyes were gleaming defiance at Leo, her lush red mouth set in a provoking pout.
Leo released a soft, very cynical laugh as if he understood exactly what the look was conveying.
‘So, who is she?’ Gianna flicked another snide look at Natasha. ‘Yet another attempt you make to find a substitute for me?’
Natasha flinched. Leo drew her back into his arms again and ignored her when she tried to pull back. ‘Never in a thousand years could anyone substitute you, my sweet-tongued angel,’ he mocked dryly. Then he looked down at Natasha and, with the silken tone of a man about to rock her world off its axis, ‘In the form of a heartfelt apology to you, agape mou,’ he murmured soft to Natasha, ‘I must introduce you to Gianna, my ex-wife.’
‘I am your ex-nothing!’ Gianna erupted.
‘Gianna.’ He spoke right across the shrill protest. ‘Nothing in this world has ever given me greater pleasure than to introduce you to Natasha, my very beautiful future wife.’
As a cool, slick way of dropping a bombshell, it was truly impressive. Staring up at his totally implacable face, Natasha almost fell backwards in shock.
The beautiful Gianna turned deathly white. ‘No,’ she whispered.
‘You wish,’ Leo responded.
‘But you love me!’ Gianna cried out in pained anguish.
‘Once upon a time you were worth loving, Gianna. Now…?’ He gave a shrug that said the rest, then apparently committed the ultimate sin in Gianna’s eyes and leant down to capture Natasha’s shock-parted lips with a kiss.
Without any warning it was about to happen, fresh pandemonium broke out with a keening wail that spliced up the atmosphere, then Gianna was coming at Natasha like a woman with murder in mind. Natasha jumped like a terrified rabbit. Leo spat out a curse and stepped right in front of her, taking the brunt of Gianna’s fury upon himself.
It was horrible, the whole thing. Natasha could only stand there behind him, shocked into shaking while Leo contained his ex-wife’s wrists to stop her long nails from clawing his face.
Then he bit out a terse, ‘Excuse us…’ to Natasha, and he was manhandling the screaming woman out of the bedroom.
The door thudded shut in his wake. Natasha found that her legs couldn’t hold her up a moment longer and she sank in a whooshing loss of energy down onto the edge of the bed.
Beyond the door, Rasmus was just stepping out of the lift. Leo sent him a glancing blow of a look and his security chief paled. ‘I’m sorry, Leo,’ he jerked out. ‘I don’t know—’
‘Get her out of here,’ Leo gritted. ‘Take her home and sober her up.’
Gianna had stopped fighting and screeching now and was sobbing into his chest and clinging instead. Disgust flayed Leo’s insides when it took the controlled strength of both men to transfer her from himself to Rasmus and get her into the lift.
‘I don’t know how she got in here,’ Rasmus said helplessly.
‘But you will do,’ Leo lanced out. ‘Then see to it that whoever it was on your staff she laid in return for the favour is gone from here,’ he instructed, then stabbed the button that shut the lift doors.
Alone in the hallway, he spun round in a full circle, then grabbed the back of his neck. Anger was pumping away inside him, contempt—repugnance. Having taken a telephone call from Gianna when he first arrived here, he’d told her that she had to get the hell off his back!
Her barging in here had been deliberate. Even the angry shrieking had been a put-up job. And the fact that she would not think twice about seducing one of his staff to get what she wanted was just another side to her twisted personality that filled him with disgust!
‘Theos,’ he muttered, long legs driving him through the apartment and pulling him to a halt outside the closed bedroom door, the knowledge that he’d lost the towel again having no effect on him at all.
He wasn’t stupid. He knew that Gianna’s nicely timed interruption had been a set-up, just as he knew the comparison Natasha had drawn from the moment it all kicked off.
Rico with her sister.
A curse ripped from him, followed by another. He paced out the width of the hall trying to clamp down on the anger still erupting inside him because—how the hell did he explain a sex-obsessed feline like Gianna, who only functioned this side of sane while she knew that he was always going to be around to help pick her up when she fell apart?
You didn’t explain it. It was too damn complicated, he recognised as he took in a grim breath of air, then threw open the bedroom door.
Natasha was back in the blue suit, and she was stuffing her things back into her bag.
‘Don’t you pull a hysterical scene on me,’ he rasped, closing the door with a barely controlled thud.
His voice sent a quiver down Natasha’s tense spinal cord. ‘I’m not hysterical,’ she responded quietly.
‘Then what do you call the way you are packing that bag?’
The searing thrust of his anger shocked even Leo as Natasha swung round to stare at him. Miss Cold and Prim was back with a vengeance, Leo saw, and she was stirring him up like…
She saw it happen, and lifted a pair of frosty blue eyes to his. ‘Is that response due to her by any chance?’ And her voice dripped disdain.
Hell, Leo cursed. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered, not sure exactly what it was he was apologising for—the snarling way he had spoken to her or his uncontrolled…
She spun her back to him again. Snapping his lips together, he strode over to the bank of glossy white wardrobes and tugged open one of the doors. A second later he was pulling a pair of jeans up his legs.
‘She’s mad,’ he muttered.
‘Enter the beautiful mad wife—exit the short, fat other woman.’ Natasha pushed a pair of shoes into the bag. ‘Ex-wife,’ he corrected, tugging his zip up. ‘Try telling her that.’
‘I do tell her—constantly. As you saw for yourself, she does not listen—and you are not going anywhere, Natasha, so you can stop packing that bag.’
Straightening up, Natasha meant to spear him with another crushing look, only to find herself lose touch with what they were saying when she saw him standing there with his long legs encased in faded denim and looking like a whole new kind of man. Her heart gave a telling stuttering thud. Her breathing faltered. He was so blatantly, beautifully masculine it took a fight to drag her covetous mind back on track.
‘S-so you thought you might as well make her listen by hitting her with that lie about a future wife?’
A frown darkened his lean features and made the bump on his nose stand out. ‘It was not a lie, Natasha,’ he declared like a warning.
‘Oh, yes, it was,’ she countered that. ‘I wouldn’t marry you if my life depended on it.’
‘You mean, you are here merely to use me for sex?’
The sardonic quip was out before Leo could stop it.
‘Substitute!’ she tossed right back at him like the hot sting from a whip. ‘And not even that again,’ she added, yanking her eyes away from him altogether and zipping up the hastily packed bag with enough violence to threaten the teeth on the zip.
Easing his shoulders back against the wardrobe door, Leo folded his arms across his hair-roughened chest. ‘So I was a tacky one-night substitute, then,’ he prodded.
‘Very tacky.’ Pressing her lips together, she nodded in confirmation, then parted her lips to add bitterly, ‘God save me from the super-rich class. Everything they do is so tacky it constantly makes me want to be sick.’
‘Was that aimed at me, Gianna or Rico?’
‘All three,’ she said, frowning as she sent her eyes hunting the room for her purse. She couldn’t see it anywhere and she couldn’t recall when she had last had it in her hand.
‘Lost something valuable?’ his hatefully smooth voice questioned. ‘Like your virginity, perhaps?’
It was as good as a hard slap in the face. Natasha tugged in a hot breath. ‘I’ve just remembered why I dislike you so much.’
His wide shoulders gave a deeply bronzed shrug against the white wardrobe. He looked like some brooding dark male model posing for one of the big fashion magazines, Natasha thought, feebly aware that her eyes refused to stay away from him for more than ten seconds before they dragged themselves back again because he was so bone-tinglingly good to look at. Sexuality oozed out of every exposed manly pore and those jeans should be X-rated. How had she ever thought that he was nothing to look at next to Rico? If Rico dared to stride in here right now and stand next to this man, Natasha knew she wouldn’t even see him. Leo won hands down in each single aspect of his dominant masculine make-up—even the bump in his nose yelled sexually exciting unreconstructed male at her!
Oh, what’s happening to me? On that helplessly bewildered inward groan, she yanked her eyes away from him—yet again—and made them search the room for her purse! In less than a day it felt as if everything she’d ever held firm about herself had been corkscrewed out of her then mixed around violently before being shoved back inside her to form this entirely new perspective on everything!
And the way he was standing there looking at her with his eyes thoughtfully narrowed just wasn’t right, either—as if he was considering striding over here and showing her the tough way in which this new order of things worked.
A sensation Natasha just did not want to feel spread itself right down her front. Tense upper lip quivering—she just had to get out of here.
‘Have you seen my purse?’
‘What do you need it for?’
Straightening her tense shoulders, she said, ‘I’m ready to leave now.’
‘By what form of transport?’
‘Taxi!’ she spat out.
‘You have the Euros to pay for a taxi?’ her cool tormentor quizzed. ‘And a mobile phone handy to call one up? Do you speak any Greek, agape mou? Do you even know this address so you can tell the taxi driver where to come to collect you?’
He was deliberately beating her up with blunt logic. ‘Y-you have my mobile phone,’ she reminded him, hating that revealing quiver in her voice.
He responded to that with yet another of those irritatingly expressive shrugs against the glossy white wardrobe door. ‘I must have mislaid it, as you have your purse.’
Deciding the only way to deal with the infuriatingly impossible brute was to ignore him, Natasha started hunting the bedroom.
While Leo watched her do it, his narrowed gaze ran over the way she looked all neat and tidy in every which way she could be—except for the wet hair which lay in a heavy silk pelt down her back. A man could not find a bigger contrast between Natasha’s cool dignity and Gianna’s reckless abandon, Leo observed grimly. Where Gianna clung to him like a weeping vine, this aggravating woman was preparing to walk out on him!
‘Tell me, Natasha,’ he asked grimly, ‘why are you so eager to leave when only ten minutes ago you were ready to fall back into bed with me?’
‘Your wife got in here somehow,’ she muttered, checking beneath one of the cushions on the chair to see if her purse had slid behind it.
‘Ex-wife—and…?’
