Lynne Graham - The Greek Tycoon's Defiant Bride

His brilliant eyes gleamed in liquid-gold warning below his luxuriant black lashes. ‘Maybe you do,’ Leonidas acknowledged without any inflection at all.

For a long, wordless moment, Leonidas took his fill while he looked at her, his gaze roaming over her with a boldness that came as naturally to him as aggression. His attention lingered on her strained violet-blue eyes, dropped to the luscious fullness of her mouth as it pouted against her peach-soft skin, and finally wandered lower to scan the full glory of her hourglass curves. It was a novelty to know that, this time around, she would most probably slap him if he touched her. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time. He almost smiled at the memory: his very first and still quite unique experience of female rejection.

Madly aware of that unashamedly sexual appraisal and unable to bear it any longer, Maribel flushed to her hairline and breathed curtly, ‘Stop it!’

‘Stop what? ‘Leonidas growled, strong arousal now tugging at him, in spite of the powerful sense of intuition that warned him that there was something wrong. Even as he glanced back at her face, he picked up on her fear and wondered why she was scared. She had never been scared around him before, or so reluctant to meet his gaze. A faint sense of disappointment touched him, even while he wondered what was wrong with her.

‘Looking at me like that!’ For the first time in two long years, Maribel was hugely conscious of her body and she was furious that she could still be so easily affected by him.

Leonidas loosed an earthy masculine laugh. ‘It’s natural for me to look.’

Her slim hands coiled into fists of restraint. ‘I don’t like it.’

‘Tough. Aren’t you going to offer me coffee? Ask me to take off my coat and sit down?’ Leonidas chided.

Maribel felt like a bird being played with by a cat and she snatched in a fractured breath. ‘No.’

‘What has happened to your manners?’ Unasked, Leonidas peeled off his coat in a slow graceful movement that was curiously sexy and attracted her unwilling attention.

Maribel dragged her guilty eyes off him again, gritting her teeth, literally praying for self-discipline. He came between her and her wits. He brought sex into everything. He made her think and feel things that were not her choice. No matter how hard she fought it, there was a shameful hum of physical awareness travelling through her resisting body. He had always had that effect on her, always. Leonidas had provoked a sense of guilt in Maribel almost from the first moment of their meeting.

In a fluid stride, Leonidas closed the distance between them and lifted a hand to push up her chin and enforce the eye contact she was so keen to avoid. ‘Was it the service? Did it upset you?’

He was now so close that Maribel trembled. She was taken aback by the ease with which he had touched her. She did not want to recall the fleeting intimacy that had broken down all normal barriers. She did not want to be reminded of the taste of his mouth or the evocative scent of his skin. ‘No…it was good to remember her,’ she said gruffly.

‘Then what’s the problem?’ Mesmeric dark golden eyes assailed hers, powered by a larger-than-life personality that few could have withstood.

Her throat ached with her tension. ‘There isn’t one,’ she told him unevenly. ‘I just wasn’t expecting you to call.’

‘I’m usually a welcome visitor,’ Leonidas murmured lazily, his relaxed rejoinder quite out of step with the keen penetration of his gaze.

As Maribel strove to keep a calm expression on her oval face her teeth chattered together behind her sealed lips for a split-second before she overcame that urge. ‘Naturally I’m surprised to see you here. It’s been a long time and I’ve moved house,’ she pointed out, struggling to behave normally and say normal things. ‘Did my aunt give you my address?’

‘No. I had you followed.’

Maribel turned pale at that unnervingly casual admission. ‘My goodness, why did you do that?’

‘Curiosity? A dislike of relying on strangers for information?’ Leonidas shrugged with languid cool. An infinitesimal movement out of the corner of his eye turned his attention below the table where a shaggy grey dog was endeavouring to curl its enormous body into the smallest possible space in the farthest corner. ‘Theos…I did not even realise there was an animal here. What is the matter with it?’

Maribel seized on the distraction of Mouse’s odd behaviour with enthusiasm. ‘He’s terrified of strangers and when he hides his head like that he seems to think he’s invisible, so don’t let on otherwise. Friendly overtures frighten him.’

‘Still collecting lame ducks?’ Leonidas quipped and, as he turned his head away, he caught a glimpse through the window of a hen pecking in the flower bed at the front of the house. ‘You keep poultry here?’

His intonation was that of a jet-setter aghast at her deeply rural lifestyle. Maribel was willing to bet that Leonidas had never before been so close to domestic fowl, and in another mood she would have laughed at his expression and rattled on the window to chase the hen away from her plants. Unable to relax, she resolved to treat him as she would have treated any other unexpected visitor. ‘Look, I’ll make some coffee,’ she proffered, thrusting open the kitchen door.

‘I’m not thirsty. Tell me what you’ve been doing over the past couple of years,’ he invited softly.

A chill ran down her taut spinal cord before she turned back to him. He couldn’t know about Elias, she reasoned inwardly. Why should he even suspect? Unless someone had said something at the service? But why the heck should anyone have mentioned her or her child? As far as her relatives were concerned she was a geek who led a deeply boring life. Scolding herself for the unfamiliar paranoia that was ready to pounce and take hold of her, Maribel tilted her chin. ‘I’ve been turning this place into a habitable home. It needed a lot of work. That kept me busy.’

Leonidas watched her hands lace together in a restive motion and untangle again. She folded her arms and shifted position in a revealing display of anxiety that any skilled observer would have recognised. ‘I believe you have a child now,’ he delivered smooth as glass, and all the time as his own tension rose he was telling himself that he had to be wrong, his suspicions ridiculously fanciful.

‘Yes—yes, I have. I didn’t think you’d be too interested in that piece of news,’ Maribel countered in a determined recovery, forcing a wry smile onto her taut lips, while wondering how on earth he had found out that she had become a mother. ‘As I recall it, you used to give friends with kids the go-by.’

Leonidas would have been the first to admit that that was true: he had never had any interest in children and found the doting fondness of parents for their offspring a bore and an irritation. Nobody acquainted with him would have dreamt of wheeling out their progeny for him to admire.

‘Who told you I’d had a child?’ Maribel enquired a shade tightly.

‘The Strattons.’

‘I’m surprised it was mentioned.’ While fighting to keep her voice light, Maribel was wondering frantically what she would say if he asked her what age her child was. Would she lie? Could she lie on such a subject? She was in a situation that she would have done almost anything to avoid. She did not believe that she could lie about such a serious matter and still live with her conscience. ‘Was it the “left-in-the-lurch” version?’ she asked.

A rare smile of amusement slashed the Greek tycoon’s beautifully shaped mouth. ‘Yes.’

‘That’s not how it was,’ Maribel declared, attempting not to stare, because when he smiled the chill factor vanished from his lean, hard-boned features and banished the forbidding dark reserve that put people so much on their guard.