Michelle Reid - Hot Nights with a Greek - The Greek's Forced Bride / Powerful Greek, Unworldly Wife / The Diakos Baby Scandal

‘Fortunately for you, right now I am starving for real food,’ he mocked her smitten expression. ‘Find yourself something comfortable to put on while I shower, then we will go and eat.’

With that he strode into the bathroom. Arrogant—arrogant— arrogant! Natasha thought as she wiped the taste of his mouth from her lips.

Thoroughly out of sorts with herself for being so susceptible to him, she hunted down her holdall and used up some of her irritation by hauling it up onto the bed and yanking open the zip. For the next few seconds she just stood looking down into the bag with absolutely no clue whatsoever as to what the heck she had packed inside it. She only had this very vague memory of grabbing clothes at random, then dropping them into the bag. Tense fingers clutching the gaping robe to her throat again, she let the other hand rummage inside the bag and pulled out an old pair of jeans and a pale green T-shirt.

Great, she thought as she discarded those two unappealing garments onto the bed. A pair of ordinary briefs—not a thong, thank goodness—appeared next, and she tossed those onto the bed, too. She found another suit styled like the pale blue suit she’d been wearing all day, only this one was in a dull cream colour that made her frown because she could not imagine herself buying it, never mind wearing such an awful shade against her fair skin. Yet she must have bought it or it wouldn’t be here.

Or perhaps this new Natasha—the one clutching a robe to her throat after losing her virginity to an arrogant Greek—had developed different tastes. She certainly felt different, kind of aching and alive in intimate places and so aware of her own body it started to tingle even as she thought about it.

No make-up, she discovered. She’d forgotten to pack her make-up bag or even a brush or comb. A couple of boring skirts appeared from the bag, followed by a couple of really boring tops. Frowning now with an itchy sense of dissatisfaction that irritated her all the more simply because she was feeling it, she finally unearthed a floaty black skirt made of the kind of fabric that didn’t crease when she pulled it free of the bag. A black silk crocheted top appeared next, which was going to have to go with the skirt whether she liked it or not since she did not seem to have anything else like it in the bag.

Only one spare pair of shoes—and no spare bra! she discovered. Sighing heavily, she turned towards the chair where her other clothes were neatly folded, and was about to walk over there to recover her white bra—when Leo strode out of the bathroom.

It was as if she’d been thrown into an instant freeze the way she stood there between the bed and the chair, pinned to the polished wood floor while her busy mind full of what to wear came to a sudden halt.

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.