Michelle Reid - Hot Nights with a Greek

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…?’

‘Maybe her claim on you has some justification,’ Natasha said with a shrug.

‘Like…?’ he prompted, and there was no hint whatsoever left of the provoking mockery with which he had started this conversation. He was deadly curious to hear where she was going with this.

‘The way you run your life is your own business.’ Chickening out at the last second from stating outright the real question that was beating a hole in her head, she gave up on the chair and tossed the cushion back onto it.

But—did he still sleep with his ex-wife when he felt like it? Did Gianna have a genuine right to her grievances when she’d barged in on them as she had? If so, then it made him no better than Rico in the way that he treated women!

Tacky, as she’d already said. She returned to her search with his brooding silence twitching at her nerve-ends as she moved about the room.

‘I do not have a relationship with my ex-wife,’ he spoke finally. ‘I do not sleep with her and I have no wish to sleep with her, though Gianna prefers to tell herself I will change my mind if she pushes long and hard enough… In case you did not notice,’ he continued as Natasha turned to look him, ‘Gianna is not quite—stable.’