Irresistible Bargain With The Greek
The unsettling note in his voice had gone and now there was only...invitation. Invitation in the sweep of his lashes, the slight but distinct relaxing of his pose as he helped himself to another mouthful of his drink.
She shrugged. ‘What brings anyone to a party?’ she countered.
That sweep of his lashes came again, as if her answer amused him. ‘Do you want me to answer that?’ he challenged.
Unspoken between them was the answer already. The reason so many people went to parties was to see and be seen. And to hook up...
She gave a little shake of her head, dipping it slightly to take a sip from her glass. Then, as if the wine had emboldened her, she glanced back at him. ‘Is that why you’re here?’
This time his lashes did not sweep down. This time his gaze was level on her. ‘Perhaps,’ he murmured.
His gaze lingered, telling her just why he had said that. She felt heat flush through her. Heat she was not used to. Heat that might burn her.
This is going too fast! I should back away, mingle...
But he was speaking again, draining his glass and setting it back on the counter. His eyes washed over her, and as they did so all the caution in her evaporated. She felt her pulse surge, her cheeks flush, her lips part. A heady sense of freedom—of what that freedom might offer her—was vivid within her. What this man had she didn’t know. She only knew that never, ever in her life had she encountered it or experienced the impact he was having on her.
And she could not—would not—resist it.
Whatever is happening, I want it to happen!
‘But one thing I am certain of,’ she heard him say, and there was that glint in his eye that told her just how certain he was, ‘is that tonight calls for champagne!’
He turned to the barman and instantly two flutes were presented to them, sparkling gently. Talia took one, feeling again that heady surge in her veins.
‘Is this a toast to your “sweet, sweet moment”?’ she asked, lifting her glass to him, a smile flashing in her own eyes now, as they met his boldly.
For a second his hand stayed, and then he lifted his own glass to her.
‘To even more,’ he said.
The message was unmistakable, and it told her just what ‘even more’ would be.
And in her eyes was the answer she was giving him...
* * *
Luke lay, one arm behind his head, the other around Talia’s slender waist. Her long hair swathed his chest and her breath was warm on his shoulder as she slept in his embrace. Sweet God, had there ever been a night in his life like this?
It was a pointless question. No woman had ever been like this one!
From the very first I knew it.
From that first moment of seeing her there, at the bar, with her glorious hair tumbling down her bare back, her spectacular figure sheathed in that clinging dark red dress... And her face... Oh, her breathtaking beauty was so dramatic, so stunning, it had stopped him in his tracks.
Desire, instant and immediate, had fired in him—the unmistakable primitive response of a man to a woman who seared his consciousness. Whatever it was about her, it was like a homing signal, drawing him right to her.
Talia.
A woman he had known only a few short hours, but who had turned his life upside down.
He felt his arm tighten possessively around her. He had known right from the first instant that he wanted her—that she, of all the women in the world, was the one who would mark for him the start of his new life.
My old life is done. I have accomplished what I had to do: the task that was set for me the day my father died from sorrow for what had been taken from him and the day my mother died of a broken heart.
His thoughts darkened, slicing back down the long punishing years to the moment when he’d vowed to avenge his parents, who had been stripped—cheated—of everything they’d held so precious.
The stress of it had killed his father, and the man who had done that had laughed in Luke’s face when, at barely twenty years old, he’d stormed into his office, raging at him, only for the cursed man to light a fat cigar with his fat fingers and summon his goons to beat up Luke, his victim’s son, and throw him out on the street.
And now he is destroyed. I’ve taken everything from him just as he took everything from my parents. They can finally rest in peace.
And he, too, could rest now—rest from the infinite pursuit of more and yet more money, so that he could forge the weapon that would finally bring down his enemy.
Now his whole life stretched ahead of him.
He had been wondering what he should do with it, but suddenly his expression changed, softened.
In the long years of amassing his fortune, closing the net on his enemy, he had had only fleeting affairs with women who had only wanted that. Affairs that had been merely a brief respite from the dark, driven purpose of his life. Affairs that had not lasted.
I wasn’t free to do anything else.
But now his long, gruelling task was accomplished, and there was nothing to keep him from finding for himself a woman who could transform his life, who could join him as he journeyed towards the bright, sunlit future that beckoned to him.
And he had found her! Instinct told him she was the one.
He drew her close, grazing her cheek with his mouth, feeling her stir in his arms. He felt a stirring in himself, too, of the desire that had burned between them—the desire that they had slaked with mutual urgency when they had left the party and he’d brought her back here to his hotel suite.
They had dined on food from room service and drunk yet more champagne. They had talked of he knew not what—except he knew that it had not been about themselves. It had been with ease and familiarity, and with a ready laughter that had seemed to spring naturally and spontaneously, as if they had known each for so much longer than a bare few hours.
And he had found her on the very night that he had finally avenged his parents by accomplishing his enemy’s total destruction. He had wanted this night to be special, so that it would mark the start of his new life—the life he’d never been able to claim for himself until now—and now he knew exactly how he wanted this wonderful new life to be.
It would be spent with this woman, and this woman alone...
He felt a shuddering wonder at having found her at such a moment. He grazed her cheek again, softly and sensuously, emotion filling him. She stirred again in her exhausted sleep of passion spent, her arm around his waist tightening instinctively. His mouth moved from her cheek to her parted lips, feathering their tender contours. He felt her waking, and as he trailed a hand over the sweet mound of her breast he felt her nipple crest beneath his palm and his arousal strengthened, quickening his responsive flesh. Desire surged in him and he knew that he wanted to possess her again—to be possessed again.
His kiss deepened and she responded to him, her eyes fluttering open, full of wonder and full of desire. Full of a hunger that he was only too happy to share and sate. His body moved over hers and he murmured her name, caressing her soft, slender body, parting her slackening thighs as her arms wound around his spine. She was whispering his name, drowning in his kisses...
This second time was as glorious as the first—each reaching their climax with a shuddering intensity that swept them away in the ultimate union, an absolute fusing of their bodies. And afterwards, hearts still thudding, breathing ragged, he held her against him, her body trembling in the aftermath of ecstasy.
With a hand that was not entirely steady he smoothed back her hair. He smiled at her, his eyes lambent. But there was a seriousness in his voice behind the smile. ‘You know this can’t just be one night?’
Her eyes searched his. ‘How can it be anything else?’
Her voice was troubled, and he needed to set her mind at rest. ‘Do you not see how special this is? This night is only the start of what we shall have together.’ He swooped a sudden kiss upon her mouth. ‘Come with me. Come with me today—straight away, this morning!’
For an instant that troubled look was in her eye, and then, as if consciously banished, it was gone.
‘Where to?’ she cried out, half in humour, half in an emotion he could not name.
‘Anywhere we want. Name somewhere you want to go. Anywhere at all.’
She laughed now, catching his eagerness. ‘The Caribbean!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’ve never been in all my life!’
‘Done!’ He gave an answering laugh. ‘Now all you have to do is choose the island.’ He rolled onto his back, wrapping one arm around her shoulders, the other across her flank. ‘There are a thousand to choose from—we can explore them all!’
He heard her laugh again, and then he was cradling her cheek with his hand.
‘Come with me.’ His voice was different now. Serious. Intense. ‘Come with me.’
His eyes met hers, held them. She was still gazing up at him, and the troubled look had found a home there once more.
Could she not believe that he was serious? That this was no idle banter?
He drifted his hand languorously across her silken flank and felt her stomach tauten at his sensuous touch. ‘Let me persuade you,’ he said huskily.
Emotion was welling up in him, as powerful as the desire building in him again. Words shaped in his mind.
I will not lose her—not now. I will not.
It was his last conscious thought as passion was rekindled between them, consuming all in its heat.
I will not lose her...
* * *
Luke stirred. Something was wrong. Very wrong. He reached out his arm, feeling only cold sheets. His eyes flared open, going immediately to the en suite bathroom door. It was standing open, no one inside. His eyes swept the room.
No Talia.
And no handbag, no shoes, no jacket, no dress. No discarded underwear slipped from her eager body as he’d taken her to his bed, to sate himself on her and change his life for ever...
No trace of her existence.
Except the note propped on the desk.
Face stark, he got up and walked towards it. Something was tightening around his guts, like a boa constrictor throwing its coils around him to crush the life from him.
Luke—I have to go. I didn’t want to wake you.
That was it. Nothing else. For a long moment he just stared at it as the breath was crushed from his lungs. Then, wordlessly, he screwed it up and dropped it into the bin.
He walked into the en suite bathroom refusing to feel a single emotion.
CHAPTER TWO
TALIA SAT IN the back of the taxi, staring at her phone. It was signalling a low battery, and she was glad of it in a cowardly way. Her brain was not working properly. It seemed to be split in two, and neither side would connect with the other. She was still with Luke, folded against his body, dreaming of Caribbean islands.
Islands to escape to...islands to set me free...
Free from what her eyes were forcing into her head as she reread her mother’s repeated pleading texts.
Darling, phone me! You must phone me. You absolutely must!
She could not face making the call. Yet fear was biting at her out of nowhere. Her mother had never sounded so desperate...
But before she phoned her she must get to her flat, set her phone to charge and then shower—wash Luke from her. And she must change into her day clothes—what she thought of as her prison clothes.
A shaft of anguish pierced her. She silenced it. She had to. There was no choice but to bury it way down deep. Her prison door had opened—but for a fleeting moment only. Now it was slammed shut again and that fear was biting at her.
Something was up. What could have made her mother so desperate?
The taxi driver pulled up at her apartment block and she paid him, clambering out on shaky limbs, bare feet crammed into high heels. She slipped the phone into her bag and hurried to the exterior doors of the block.
The doorman stepped towards her, holding up a hand. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Grantham, but I’ve orders to prevent anyone entering,’
She stopped short. Stared blankly. ‘Orders?’ she echoed, her voice blank.
‘Yes, miss,’ he said. ‘From the new owners.’
She tried to make sense of what he’d said. ‘Someone’s bought the block from Grantham’s?’ she said stupidly.
He shook his head, looking at her with a touch of sympathy. ‘No, miss. Someone’s bought Grantham’s—what’s left of it.’
* * *
Talia’s mother flung herself at her.
‘Oh, darling, thank God—thank God you’re here! Oh, what is happening? How did this happen?’
She was hysterical, and Talia was on the verge of hysteria herself.
How she had got herself from central London to her parents’ house she hardly knew. Her brain had simply ceased to function. Now, the only thing she could do, besides tightening her arms instinctively around her clingy, crying mother, was say, ‘Where’s Dad?’
Her mother threw back her head. Her hair was unstyled, her make-up absent—she looked years older than she did in the carefully presented image Talia was used to seeing.
‘I can’t contact him!’ Hysteria was present in her voice still. ‘I phone and phone and nothing happens! I can’t even get through to his office—it rings out! Something’s happened to him. I know it has. I know it!’
Gently, Talia set her mother aside. ‘I have to find out what’s going on,’ she said.
There was a stricken note in her own voice, and she was not sure how she was still managing to function, but she knew that above all she needed to discover what had happened to her father’s company. To her father...
Five minutes on the Internet later and she knew. It was blazoned all over the financial press.
Grantham Land goes under:
LX Holdings picks over the carcass!
She read the article in shock. Disbelief. Yet her disbelief was seared with the hideous knowledge that everything was true, whatever her desperate hope that it was not. Her father’s company had gone under, collapsing under a mountain of hitherto concealed debts, and all remaining assets acquired by a new owner.
Like her mother—sobbing jerkily on the sofa while Talia hunched over her laptop—Talia tried to phone through to her father’s office. The call rang out, unanswered. Unlike her mother, she then tried to find a number for the company that seemed to have bought what was left of Grantham Land, but LX Holdings did not seem to exist—certainly not in the UK.
She started to search for overseas companies, but realised how little she knew of corporate matters. The press didn’t seem to know much either—the adjective employed in their articles to describe the acquiring company was ‘secretive’.
As for where her father was... Talia knew with bleak certainty that filled her entirely that he had gone to earth. He would not easily be found. As to whether he would bother to get in touch with his wife and daughter...
Her mouth tightened to a whip-thin line. She turned her head towards her mother, huddled in a sodden mass of exhausted hysteria. Would her father care?
She knew the answer.
No, he would not. He had abandoned them to whatever would be the fallout from this debacle.
Fallout that, within a week, she would know to be catastrophic.
* * *
Luke sat in his office. Beyond the window he could see Lake Lucerne. He had deliberately chosen this place for his base because of its very quietness.
Throughout his entire career he had striven to draw as little attention to himself as possible. The financial press called his company ‘secretive’ and he liked it that way. Needed it that way. He’d needed to amass the fortune he’d required for his purpose as unobtrusively as possible.
His corporate structure was deliberately opaque, with shell companies, subsidiaries in several jurisdictions, and complex financial vehicles all designed with one purpose in mind: to amass money through careful, assiduous speculation and investment without anyone noticing, and then, once his fortune was sufficiently large, to hunt his enemy to destruction.
And now his enemy was defeated. Destroyed utterly. Wiped off the face of the earth—literally, it seemed. For, like the sewer rat he was, he’d gone to ground.
Luke had a pretty shrewd idea of where he’d gone, and it was not a place where he would feel safe. Those from whom his quarry had borrowed money in his final desperate attempts to stave off the ruin rushing upon him were not likely to be forgiving of the fact that he could not repay them at all.
He tore his mind away—that was not his concern. His concern was what to do with the rest of his life.
He felt his guts twist. His face hardened with a bleakness in his expression that he could not banish.
Weeks had passed since the night that had transformed his existence—when he had so rashly thought, for those brief hours, that he had started his new life, free at last from the punishing task he had set himself. He still could not accept what she had done—could not accept how totally, devastatingly wrong he had been about her.
I thought she felt as strongly as I did! I thought what was between us was as special to her—as mind-blowing, as amazing and as lasting—as it was to me. I thought we had started something that would change our lives.
That twist in his guts came again, like a rope knotting around his midriff. Well, he had thought wrong, hadn’t he? That incredible night had meant nothing to her—nothing at all.
She walked away with barely a word—just that brutal note. How could I have got it so wrong? Got her so wrong?
In the punishing years since he’d set out to wreak vengeance upon the man who had driven his father to an early grave he’d had no time for relationships—only those fleeting affairs. Was that why he’d got this woman Talia—the name echoed tormentingly in his head...Talia—so wrong?
What do I know of women? Of how they can promise and deceive?
With a razored breath he reached jerkily for the file lying in front of him. He flicked it open, seeking distraction from his tormenting thoughts.
The photos inside mocked him, but he made himself stare at them—made himself read the accompanying detailed notes and scan down the complex figures set out in the financial analysis provided.
With an effort of mind he forced himself to focus. The rest of his life awaited him. He had better fill it somehow.
His acquisitions team were busy stripping what flesh remained on the carcass of his prey, disposing of any remaining assets for maximum profit—which they would do, he knew, with expert efficiency. He had left them to it. His goal had been to destroy his enemy, not make money out of his destruction. He had plenty more of the money that he’d amassed—enough to give him a life of luxury for as long as he lived. Now all he sought were ventures to invest in that would be for his own enjoyment. And this project, displayed in the photos in front of him, would do as well as anything else.
His mouth twisted and thoughts knifed in his head. The photos showed palm trees, an azure sea, the verdant greenery of the Caribbean.
I would have taken her there...
The thought left a hollowness in its wake, an emptiness that would not leave him.
* * *
Talia stared out of the window of the low-cost carrier’s plane that was winging her to Spain. Dread filled her. Her mother was at the Marbella villa, where Talia had taken her in those first nightmare days after her father’s disappearance and financial ruin.
It had been painstakingly explained to her by the blank-faced lawyer who had summoned her to her father’s former City HQ, where she’d been able to see through the glass door all the deserted offices being dismantled and stripped of their furnishings by burly men. Her father’s ruin encompassed not only the corporate assets, but Gerald Grantham’s personal assets too.
‘Your father put everything he owned into the company—initially for tax advantages and latterly to shore up the accounts. Consequently...’ the man had looked impassively at Talia, who had stared back at him white-faced ‘...it all now passes to the acquiring owner.’ He’d paused, then said unblinkingly, ‘Including, of course, the riverside mansion in the Thames Valley and all its contents.’
Talia had paled even more, as the man had gone on.
‘Vacant possession is required by the end of the week.’
So she’d taken her mother to Spain, thanking heaven that the villa seemed to have been spared. It appeared to be owned by a different corporation—an offshore shell company her father had set up.
In Spain, she’d tried to sort out the pathetic remnants of what they had left—which was almost nothing. All their bank accounts had been frozen, and all the credit cards. Had it not been for Talia’s secret personal account—the one she’d opened in defiance of her father’s diktats—she would not even have been able to buy air tickets or food. Or to pay Maria, the only member of staff in Spain she’d been able to keep on. She needed Maria as her mother’s only support when she went back to London to see if there was news about anything else she could salvage.
But it had turned out to be the reverse. Now, with dread mounting in her, she knew she would have to give her mother the worst news of all. The Marbella villa was being taken from them...
They had been given a fortnight to get out, and in that time Talia was going to have to find them somewhere else to live and keep her mother from collapsing totally. It would finish her, she knew, to lose the villa as well as everything else—as well as her husband. Which was a loss she simply could not and would not believe.
‘He’ll come back to us, darling!’ Her mother’s pitiful words rang in Talia’s ears. ‘He’s just sorting things out, making it all right, and then everything will be back to normal again!’
Talia knew better. Her father was not coming back. He’d saved his own skin, leaving his wife and daughter to face utter ruin.
Her mother repeated her pathetic hopes again that evening, when Talia arrived at the palatial villa, its opulence mocking her. Talia said nothing, only hugged her mother, who seemed thinner than she had ever been, her face haggard. She looked ill and Maria, taking Talia aside, expressed concern for Maxine Grantham’s health.
Talia could only shake her head, feeling dread inside her at the news she must tell her mother.
She let her mother chatter on in her staccato, nervy fashion, telling her how the pool needed to be cleaned, and how Maria had to have help because she couldn’t cope with such a huge house on her own, and that she must get to Rafael, in Marbella town, who was the only person she trusted with her hair, because she couldn’t possibly let her husband see her with such a rats’ nest when he came back—as surely he would, very soon now.
Surely Talia must have heard from her father by now, she said. For she herself had not, and she was worried sick about him, because something dreadful must have happened for him not to be in touch...
Talia put up with it as best she could, saying soothing, meaningless things to her mother. As they sat down to eat the meal Maria had prepared Talia encouraged her mother to take more than the few meagre mouthfuls that was all she seemed to want. She had to force herself to eat, too, because above all she had to keep her strength up.
I’ve got to keep it together—I can’t fall apart! I can’t!
It was an invocation she had to repeat when, after dinner, she sat her mother down in the opulent drawing room and told her she must speak to her.