Kyriakis's Innocent Mistress

He was everything a woman dreamed of. Male perfection. Tall, dark and handsome—and yet so much more. Toe-curlingly sexy. Formidable.

If he wanted to flirt with her—or more—then what was wrong with that? She could recall the way some of her colleagues boasted about holiday romances. Apparently it happened all the time.

Fun. Fun was all it was. And what was the harm in a few kisses? She craved his kisses.

Dimitri lowered the thick fringes of his sable lashes over the silver glint in his dark eyes.

His enemy had chosen his messenger well. A man less single-minded would have been putty in her hands, would have done anything—given up the secrets of his very soul—to possess such a woman.

He wasn’t immune—far from it. But putty in a woman’s hand—in anyone’s hand—he wasn’t. If she was offering, he wouldn’t be resisting.

How could he?

Diana Hamilton is a true romantic, and fell in love with her husband at first sight. They still live in the fairytale Tudor house where they raised their three children. Now the idyll is shared with eight rescued cats and a puppy. But, despite an often chaotic lifestyle, ever since she learned to read and write Diana has had her nose in a book—either reading or writing one—and plans to go on doing just that for a very long time to come.

Recent titles by the same author:

VIRGIN: BEDDED AT THE ITALIAN’S COMMAND

THE MEDITERRANEAN BILLIONAIRE’S SECRET BABY

THE KOUVARIS BRIDE

THE ITALIAN’S PRICE

PROLOGUE

DIMITRI KYRIAKIS stared fixedly at his father’s home and told himself he wasn’t overawed. No way. The villa—what he could see of it at the end of the straight tree-bordered drive—was immense: a gleaming white monument to wealth and power. No way could he walk up that driveway without knowledge of the correct sequence of numbers needed to activate the high-tech mechanism that would open the massive wrought-iron gates. And to attempt to climb them would without doubt bring security guards running.

But he’d find a way. He had to. For his mother’s sake, he had to.

She was owed.

He was fourteen years old. A man. Or almost. And he’d come to collect. No power on earth could keep him from what he had to do.

Straightening his bony shoulders, he set off, scouting the high perimeter wall of the estate, the hot Greek sun burning through the cheap white fabric of his best shirt. If his mother knew what he was doing she’d throw a fit. Or several.

He tried to smile at the mental image of the gentle, frail Eleni Kyriakis losing it, but the lump in his throat rose like a spike of hot lava and pushed any attempt out of existence.

Late last night she’d told him. Returning from his after-school stint dogsbodying in the sweltering kitchens of one of Athens’ most prestigious hotels—owned as he now knew by his father—to the mean, claustrophobic rooms they rented in a narrow back street, he’d found his mother bent over a pile of ironing. It was part of the one-woman laundry service she’d instigated several years before, to augment the money she earned from her daily cleaning work.

She had pushed a strand of greying hair from her forehead, and her smile had been as gently welcoming as ever, giving no clue to what was to come.

‘Sit with me, my son. I have something to tell you.’ She sighed softly. ‘Many times you’ve asked who your father is, and many times I’ve answered that I’d tell you all about him when you were older, when maturity has brought the wisdom to see things clearly without the fog of childish emotions. But circumstances have changed.’

Her eyes had glittered with rare tears and he’d known then that something was wrong. Very wrong.

He could still feel echoes of the stomach-looping, throat-clogging sensation that had weakened his bones as she’d told him that she’d been undergoing tests. There was something wrong with her heart. It could fail her at any moment. She’d smiled then, bravely, and it was a smile he’d remember for the rest of his life.

She had taken his hands. ‘But what do they know? I’m tough. I’ll prove them wrong—you’ll see! But just in case they’re right I must tell you about your father. He was so handsome, so magnetic, and I loved him very much.’

It had been then, as she’d given him the identity of the man who had sired him, that he’d seen his beloved mother with fresh eyes. As he’d taken in the lines of exhaustion on her once beautiful face, her sunken cheeks and the tell-tale blue of her lips, he’d known exactly what he had to do.

With the determined tightening of his young jaw that was to become habitual, he began to climb the wall, muscles straining as he sought foot and handholds, his tension released as he swung over the top and dropped silently onto the long grass.

Beyond the belt of trees, the seeding grasses, he could see the sweep of an immaculately manicured and watered lawn—could smell, from somewhere, the evocative scent of summer-flowering jasmine, and could hear distant voices. A male, clipped and harsh, a petulant female whine.

Emerging into the full, relentless beat of the sun, Dimitri saw them. The man wearing a cream linen suit was his father. His photograph was splashed across the financial pages often enough to be instantly recognisable. The woman—young, supple—was dressed in something that floated around her body with every shift of the breeze, with every movement. She was carrying a parasol, her blonde head turned slightly away from his father. He could see the icy glint of diamonds hanging from her ears. The amount the gems must cost would have meant his mother wouldn’t have had to work herself half to death for at least a couple of years.

So this had to be the second wife his mother had spoken of.

Resolve spurred him towards them, his long, gangling legs automatically taking him out into the open, where he could be seen. This wretched man, already married for the first time, with a young son, had seduced a servant in his employ and instantly dismissed her when she’d told him she was pregnant.

With him!

For that he would be made to pay!

He’d been seen; his intrusion had registered. Every nerve in Dimitri’s skinny body stretched and his mouth went dry. But his chin came up as the man who was his father walked towards him, leaving the woman who was his wife standing.

‘Who are you and what do you want?’ The voice carried the harshness of the despot he was, secure in his kingdom, the wealthy owner of cruise liners and swanky hotels. One hand, Dimitri noted, went to an inner jacket pocket. Did he carry a gun? he conjectured wildly. Did he mean to shoot the shabby peasant and claim self-defence? Or was he about to use some device to summon his security officers, have him tossed back over the wall with as much ceremony as the disposal of a bundle of unspeakable rubbish?

Refusing to let his tautened nerves get the better of him, he spoke, deploring the wretched highpitched squeak his breaking voice sometimes embarrassed him with. ‘I’m DimitriKyriakis, son of Eleni. Your son.’

Silence, thickening in the heat of the sun. His father’s hand slid back to his side. Empty.

A broad, stocky figure, black-suited, approached along a path that snaked from the villa. The woman began to move towards them. His father motioned them both back with an impatient arm movement. ‘An easy claim to make! And even easier to dismiss. What do you want with me?’

The handsome features were marred by what was doubtless a perpetual sneer. Dimitri reddened. He took insults from no one, but he had no pride where his mother’s wellbeing was concerned. She had worked her guts out to provide for them both, gone without food sometimes so that her son shouldn’t go hungry. Never complained.

He squared his bony shoulders. He was almost as tall as the older man. He willed his voice to remain steady. ‘You are Andreas Papadiamantis. Everyone knows how rich and powerful you are—all those fancy hotels and cruise liners. You have everything; my mother has nothing. Fifteen years ago Eleni Kyriakis worked here for you, as a domestic servant. You told her your marriage was finished. You seduced her. She was beautiful then and she was in love with you.’ His heart leaped when he saw the unmistakable flicker of recognition in his father’s eyes. He remembered her—remembered what had happened! It made what he had to say, ask, so much easier. ‘But she became pregnant, and when she told you you dismissed her. I guess you broke her heart.’

She hadn’t said as much, but Dimitri had sensed deep sadness when she spoke of what had happened all those years ago.

He met his father’s narrowed, contemptuous eyes and stated vehemently, ‘She doesn’t know I’m here, speaking to you. She would never ask for anything for herself. Ever. But I will. She is ill. Her heart is exhausted. She needs rest, decent food. I do what I can. At weekends and after school I work in the kitchens at one of your hotels here in Athens. It is some help, but it’s not enough.’ He took a deep breath. ‘All I ask is that you make her a small monthly allowance. Just enough to mean she doesn’t have to work to pay the rent and buy food.And only until I am able to provide for her myself. She needs to rest, to live without anxiety,’ he stressed, his voice cracking.

Rumoured to be one of the wealthiest men in Greece, Andreas Papadiamantis wouldn’t miss the outlay of a modest monthly allowance. He would probably spend more on an evening dining out with his beautiful second wife.

Refusing to let himself squirm under the relentless stare of his father’s hard black eyes, Dimitri blurted, ‘I want nothing for myself, and I will never ask anything else of you but this. A small allowance would mean little to you, but it would make the difference between life and an early death for my mother. Consult with her doctors if you don’t believe me!’

The man who was his father smiled then. A humourless twisting of his hard, handsome mouth. And his voice was harsh. ‘I don’t give in to blackmail—as smarter people than you have learned to their cost. Breathe one word of this to anyone else and I will squash you and your mother as if you were beetles beneath my feet. Even if your story is true, Eleni Kyriakis knew what she was doing when she opened her legs for me. And learn this and learn it well: dog eats dog in this world, and the weak go to the wall.’

An abrupt arm movement had the security guard advancing. He had hands like hams, Dimitri noted with the small part of his mind that wasn’t seething with impotent rage.

‘Spiro, see this person off my property.’ Not even looking at him, Andreas Papadiamantis turned and strolled back to the waiting woman, and Dimitri found himself ignominiously frogmarched to the main gates and tossed out onto the white dust of the road.

Hearing the gates clang shut, Dimitri hoisted himself back to his feet, his jaw set.

His mother had been insulted. He had been insulted. He hated the man who was his father. He would have his revenge. He brushed himself down and, his dark head held high, began the long trudge back to the city.

He would make his father pay for his callous insults. He would find a way.

His vow was strengthened when he discovered that there was to be no more work for him in the kitchens of his father’s hotel. The loss of his meagre pay was a spiteful act on his father’s part.

And the vow was set in impermeable stone when ten months later his mother died of a heart attack.

CHAPTER ONE

DIMITRI KYRIAKIS placed the unmarked buffcoloured envelope squarely in front of him on the gleaming expanse of the otherwise empty desktop and tried not to show his distaste as he dismissed the private investigator.

With the tips of his long fingers resting on the surface of the envelope he stared out of the huge floor-to-ceiling plate glass window, seeing nothing.

He had lived for thirty-six years, a driven man, with the last twenty-two of those years spent coldly and clinically exacting vengeance on the man who was his father for the way he’d flung unforgivable insults and flatly refused to help his gentle, loving mother when she’d needed financial help as much as she’d needed oxygen and he, her son, fourteen years old, had been impotent to provide it.

Years spent working, learning, planning, taking at first tentative steps and then giant strides towards his objective: the downfall of the arrogantly powerful Andreas Papadiamantis.

Already the Kyriakis fleet of eye-wateringly luxurious cruise liners had relegated his father’s dwindling fleet to scratching for the cut-price, downmarket, kiss-me-quick tourist business, and it was rumoured to be going out of business altogether.

And now his money men were working on the takeover of the last two of his father’s hotels. One in Paris, the other in London. The rest had been overshadowed by the Kyriakis chain, driven out of the top end of the market and eventually sold off at a loss.

But things had changed. His father had disappeared off the radar six months ago—none of the usual mentions in the press, no sightings at his head office in Athens—and the thought of the old lion crawling into his den to lick his wounds had been oddly unsettling to Dimitri. He needed his enemy to be in the ring, fighting.

Four months into his father’s apparent disappearance, his frustration and curiosity at fever-pitch, he had had the fabulous, sprawling white villa he’d only visited that once in his life watched. He had needed a clue to what was going on. To him, the spying exercise had been utterly distasteful. Ruthless in pursuit of his objectives he might be, but he was always up-front, his intentions open for anyone to see. It was the way he operated.

His dark-as-jet eyes focused at last on the panoramic view from the window: the expanse of deep blue ocean framed in the foreground by tall pines, the glimpse of the soft white sand of a rocky bay. Relaxing. Hypnotic. Or it should be. Always had been. Until today.

He came to his island retreat on average twice a year, to unwind, empty his mind. Not a fax machine, a computer, a landline in sight. But now his mind was churning with totally uncharacteristic and unwelcome indecision.

Had he done enough? Was the vendetta played out? Was it time to forget his father, let the planned takeover go? Time to allow the man who’d sired him to avoid the final humiliation? Time for Dimitri to move on, to turn his life in an entirely different direction? To turn his back on sporadic, ultradiscreet affairs, to marry, produce sons and daughters of his own—laughing, golden-limbed small people to give a gentler purpose to his life.

The black bars of his brows drew together as he finally remembered what lay beneath his fingertips. Broad shoulders tightening beneath the crisp white cotton of his custom-made shirt, he withdrew the photographs.

His father. On a terrace surrounding an immense outdoor swimming pool. Wearing his trademark cream linen suit, shades and—incongruously—a battered straw hat. The telephoto lens made him look strangely diminished. Not so the female he was touching.

He was touching the naked shoulder of arguably the most luscious blonde bimbo ever to wear a bikini. Caught in the act of turning to smile at the older man, her long silvery hair falling back from her gorgeous face, her voluptuous breasts seeming about to burst from the confines of the two scraps of dark blue fabric, she was sexual enticement on legs.

And what legs! Long, beautifully proportioned, smooth, tanned.

Abruptly he pushed the photographic images back in the envelope. He didn’t need to see the others. He’d already seen enough to knowthat the old lionwas on the hunt for a new wife to stir his ageing libido.

His father favoured blondes.

His mouth tightened to a hard, straight line as his mind swirled with the memory of that other time, that other blonde. His father’s second wife. With diamonds glittering at her ears, and her floaty designer dress a whole universe away from the cheap, second-hand stuff his mother had had to wear. And his father throwing him off his property, refusing to help, refusing the modest sum that would have assuredly gone a long way to making the life of the mother of his bastard son so much easier, in all probability extending it by several precious years.

So, no, while such coldly bitter memories still existed, it wasn’t over.

Andreas Papadiamantis was still unforgiven.

‘A girl could get used to this, sis!’

Bonnie Wade smiled warily at her sister. Lisa was sprawled out on a lounger, her honed, bikiniclad body still glistening from the pool, her cropped strawberry blonde hair slicked to her head.

‘My two blonde babies,’ her dad called them. ‘One strawberry, one champagne!’

‘Here—’Bonnie reached for the tube of sunblock from the marble-topped table at the side of the lounger and tossed it over. ‘You don’t want a dose of sunburn.’

At twenty-seven, two years Bonnie’s senior, Lisa had always been her best friend. Physically and temperamentally, they couldn’t be more different. Lisa was tough as old boot leather, and slim to the point of thinness, whereas Bonnie was soft as marshmallow and—to her private dismay—billowy. But they complemented each other, understood each other.

Their mum, the harrassed wife of a busy GP, had been heard to confide in her closest friend, the mother of three boisterous boys who seemed perpetually to be intent on causing grievous bodily harm to each other. ‘I don’t have that problem, thank heavens! Ever since little Bonnie learned to walk my two have been joined at the hip. Never a cross word!’

So, delighted as she had been to receive the seven a.m. call from the airport this morning, she still didn’t understand why Lisa was here.

‘I’ll talk to you about it later,’ the older girl had stated on the drive back to the villa. ‘And before you get your knickers in a twist, the Olds are fine. It’s nothing to worry about.’

Now, three hours later, she was none the wiser. As a fitness instructor to the rich and famous, Lisa usually took time off over the Christmas season, taking a three-week break and flying to where was hottest. But it seemed this year she had decided to take a week off during the summer, with a lastminute diversion to drop in on her sister on her way to Crete.

‘You’re sure the old guy doesn’t mind me being here?’ Lisa finished slapping sunblock on her legs.

‘Quite sure,’ Bonnie confirmed. ‘When I told him I needed time off to collect you at the airport he insisted Nico drive me, and wouldn’t hear of you finding a hotel.’ She tweaked the starched skirts of her white uniform dress. ‘So—give. Why the unexpected visit? What is there to talk about?’

Lisa hoisted herself up on one elbow. ‘OK. Look, why don’t you sit down—relax? I think I know how you’re going to take this, but I’m not sure, so, I thought I’d stop in as I was passing and talk to you face to face.’

Bonnie shifted on the flat soles of her white canvas shoes, as near to feeling exasperation with her sister as she’d ever been. ‘I’m on duty,’ she pointed out. A glance at her watch confirmed it. ‘Andreas is due for his exercise session in ten minutes.’

‘Fair enough. Here goes…But first, how much longer are you in this job?’

‘I’m supposed to sign off at the end of the week. Why?’

As a nurse, working through a highly respected agency, she specialised in remedial care. Sometimes, as now, she worked abroad, but mostly in the UK. She might be staying on longer to help this patient. Andreas Papadiamantis was a troubled man, and she’d promised to help him. But there was no time to go into that now—although the unexpected opportunity to confide in her sister later, during her off-duty hour after lunch, would be more than welcome.

‘Why?’ Lisa gave a wry, tight-lipped smile. ‘Because Troy went to see the Olds, that’s why. He says he wants you back.’

Bonnie felt her face crawl with colour. Anger, disbelief—she didn’t know which. Abruptly she sat on a vacant lounger. On the eve of their wedding he’d sent his best man to tell her that he couldn’t go through with it. Sorry. Would she arrange for the return of the wedding gifts? And she could keep the engagement ring.

She’d felt sorry for Brett, the bearer of the news. He’d been painfully embarrassed. Only with hindsight had she realised that she should have been feeling sorry for herself, broken-hearted. But she hadn’t been broken-hearted, and Troy’s supposedly magnanimous message that she could keep his ring was an insult she was still smarting over six months later.

The next morning, on what should have been her wedding day, she’d taken the ring and the unworn bridal gown to the nearest charity shop. Her parents, bless them, though alternately fussing over her and ranting at Troy’s perfidy, had made all the necessary cancellations and returned the gifts, and she had just gone ahead and got on with her life as if nothing had happened.

Which, also with the clarity of hindsight, she recognised meant that Troy had done her a favour. She couldn’t have been in love with him at all. He’d hurt her pride, her sense of self-worth, but, being of a cheerful, optimistic disposition she’d soon got over that.

‘Apparently,’ Lisa was saying, ‘he gave them a real sob story. He didn’t know what came over him. Burn-out, he guessed. He’d been working so hard. He’d never forgive himself for hurting you so badly, for messing up his own life, come to that. He loves you more than he thought possible, and just wants the chance to put things right. But he didn’t know where you were working, how to contact you—blah-blah-blah. And you know Mum. A soppy romantic if there ever was one. She went and got all dewy-eyed and sentimental and told him where you were, working with a cancer patient. And—this is more than a guess—I know he’ll be turning up any time now. As soon as he can fix time off from that supposedly mega-impressive job of his in the City. I wanted to warn you. I don’t think you’re the type to go all gooey when a guy gets down on his knees and begs forgiveness with crocodile tears in his eyes, but some women just might—’

‘Not this one!’ Bonnie got to her feet, a smile twitching at the corners of her expressive mouth. The nerve of the man! Though if Lisawas right, and Troy Frobisher didwant them to get back together, and she had been head over heels in love with him, then she might be deluded enough to believe whatever he said and spend the rest of her life regretting her gullibility.

She turned to her sister. ‘Thanks for the warning. We’ll talk more later—after lunch. Don’t worry, I won’t be taken in by him—or any man, come to that. And I’ve got something to tell you that’ll knock spots off the prospect of any sick-making visit from an exfiancé!’

Andreas Papadiamantis could be a charming companion when he wanted to be, and if ensuring that his surprise house-guest felt welcome and relaxed while she enjoyed the lavish hospitality of his home was his objective then he’d succeeded magnificently.

Over lunch at the polished stone-topped table in a cool, airy dining room, his gaunt, still-handsome features softened as he glanced between the sisters, smoothly switching subjects.

‘Touching on your amusing description of your need for strictness with your clients, I must tell you that my nurse—your sister—is also a formidable woman,’ he told Lisa. ‘When I was first diagnosed and taken in for treatment I insisted on a total news blackout. I am not the powerful business force I once was, but I still have assets—the remainder of a once dominant chain of luxury hotels. If the shareholders got wind of my possible demise the value could drop like a stone.