The Greek's Ultimate Conquest

Chloe had known Tatiana by sight and reputation before the other woman had boosted Chloe’s career by mentioning her blog in an interview she’d given covering London fashion week, two years ago now, Chloe realised, though it seemed more like a lifetime. Back then the interview was pretty much responsible for her blog becoming a profitable overnight success.

Chloe had contacted Tatiana to thank her for the plug and they had exchanged the odd email but they had never met in person.

That had happened in a very different context a year ago, after the designer’s god-daughter was moved into the room next to Chloe’s own in the specialist burns unit. Chloe had already been in there for three months; she’d known every crack in the ceiling and had been living vicariously through the love lives of the young nurses designated to her care.

Though the burns Chloe herself had received in a road traffic accident had been severe and painful and the healing process long, her own scars were easy to hide from view under her clothes. But the young woman in the next room had not been able to hide the damage done to her face by the fire caused by a gas explosion. Then, as if life hadn’t already thrown enough rubbish at her, the day after she had arrived at the burns unit her boyfriend had dumped her, at which point Mel had turned her face to the wall and announced she didn’t want to live.

As she’d listened through the partition wall Chloe’s heart had ached for the other girl. Their first conversation later that night shouted through the wall had been a one-sided affair, but it had been the first of many.

‘You got her through it, Chloe,’ Tatiana choked. ‘I’ll never forget that day I arrived and heard her laugh—you did that.’

‘Mel helped me as much as I did her. Did you see the information sheet she put together for me on make-up techniques?’ she asked, placing the photo back on the shelf. In doing so she accidentally nudged the one next to it and straightened it, admiring the frame; it was an antique one, the ebony wood delicately carved and rather beautiful.

Chloe was admiring the craftsmanship, running her fingers across the smooth indentations, when her glance drifted across the photo it held. Her mouth tugged into a smile; with a white-knuckle ride in the background, a younger Eugenie smiled back at her, complete with braces, from under the peak of a baseball cap with the logo of an adventure park emblazoned on it.

The jeans-clad man crouched down beside her in the shot was wearing the same cap, and he was... Chloe’s smile vanished like smoke as brutal stinging reality hit her like a slap across the face. Pale as paper now, she stared at the male in the picture, wearing jeans, a tee shirt, and a teasing, carefree expression on his handsome face, a face that bore no signs of a tortured soul. There were no shadows that she felt the need to banish; he was just a regular guy...well, only if the regular guy in question was more handsome than any man had a right to be with a body that an Olympic swimmer might dream of possessing.

She stood like a statue staring at the photo she held in a hand that quickly developed a visible tremor—the tremor penetrating past the skin level and moving deep inside her.

By sheer force of will she released the breath she was holding in her lungs, but not the avalanche of questions whirring in dizzying succession through her brain. She felt as though a dozen people were inside her shouting so loudly she couldn’t make out the individual questions.

Obviously it couldn’t be him but, equally obviously, it was! The man in the photos was the same man who she had spent a never-to-be-forgotten night of lust with. If all learning experiences were as brutal as that one had been, it would not be worth getting out of bed in the morning—happily they weren’t and she had moved on.

But that didn’t mean she’d forgotten any of it. Forgotten the feelings of emotional hurt and humiliation that had made her physically sick the next morning when she’d realised he’d slipped away during the night. And the worst part was, she had no one to blame but herself. Because she had been the one who had followed her instincts when she’d approached him in that bar, telling herself that what she was doing was somehow meant to be... If they had been handing out awards for naivety and general stupidity that night, she would have walked away with an armful of prizes!

She’d wondered if his name really was Nik. It seemed utterly incredible to her now that she’d ever thought it part of the romantic fantasy element of their night together that she hadn’t even known his full name! Time had stripped away the romantic gloss and revealed it for what it truly was—a cheap and tacky one-night stand, even if the sex had been utterly incredible.

Keeping her voice carefully casual, she half turned to Tatiana, as yet unable to tear her eyes from the snapshot. ‘How old was Eugenie in this one?’

Tatiana came across and looked at the photo of her daughter and she gave a nostalgic sigh. ‘Oh, that was taken on her tenth birthday, although just five minutes afterwards she was throwing up. Nik let her eat a bag of doughnuts then took her on some white-knuckle ride.’

Chloe’s own knuckles were bone white where her hand was pressed to her chest. Her poor heart was vibrating against her ribcage, her insides were quivering as she told herself sternly to get a grip, not to mention a sense of proportion. It was only a photo after all, and he was old history.

Note to self, she castigated herself, the next time you decide to make love, don’t do it with a complete stranger! No, Chloe, let’s be grown up and honest here—it wasn’t making love, it was having sex.

It hadn’t been until she’d accepted that particular fact and realised that what they had shared that night had had absolutely nothing to do with a spiritual connection but everything to do with blind lust that she had been able to move on.

Move on—really? So why was she shaking?

She put the photo down carefully and smoothed her hands down over the fabric of her jumpsuit. She would not let that man do this to her again; she was not that silly naive girl any longer.

It had been a painful learning experience, but once her pride had stopped stinging and she had stopped feeling basically stupid she’d understood that while empty sex with anonymous strangers could obviously be physically satisfying, it probably wasn’t for her. She wasn’t exactly holding out for the love of her life, but she did think maybe a bit of mutual respect might be nice.

‘So that’s your brother Nik,’ she said flatly. Sometimes it seemed as if fate had a very warped sense of humour.

Her eyes skimmed the mantel. The same man, she recognised now, was in several of the photos. It wasn’t just the time difference that made him look younger, it was the absence of the cynicism and dangerous darkness she had sensed in him that night they’d had sex. What had happened to the man in these photos to turn him into the one she’d met only a few years later?

She dug her teeth into her plump lower lip as she squared her shoulders. Nik Latsis, her Nik—it was so weird to finally be able to put a full name to the man who had introduced her to sex and the fact it really was the only thing that some men were interested in. Well, his name was actually pretty irrelevant and she couldn’t care less what had happened to turn him into such a cold bastard.

Not that she wasn’t totally prepared to take her fair share of the blame. After all, ‘naive closet romantic meets utter bastard’—it was never going to end well, was it? But she was not that person any more.

‘I forgot, you haven’t met Nik...have you?’ Tatiana asked.

The truth or a lie?

Chloe settled for somewhere in the middle. ‘He does look a little familiar...’

It’s the clothes that threw me.

She brought her lashes down in a concealing sooty curtain and fanned her hot cheeks with a hand, causing the bangles she wore around her wrist to jingle. ‘I think summer might finally have arrived,’ she commented, ignoring the house’s perfect air-conditioning system.

‘You might have seen him on the television, perhaps?’

‘Television?’ A puzzled frown drew Chloe’s brows together above her small straight nose. ‘I don’t think so...’ Then it clicked; Tatiana wasn’t talking about the present day but her brother’s previous life. ‘Oh, when you said he was a journalist I thought you meant he was in print...’

His sister nodded. ‘He started out in print journalism but Nik was a war correspondent, and he was on the telly quite a lot actually. He won awards.’ Tatiana’s pride in her brother’s achievements was as obvious as her distress as she enlarged. ‘He spent the last two years of his journalistic career embedded with the military, in the worst war zones you can imagine. Nik has always been the sort of person who doesn’t do half measures.’

He had certainly been no half-measure lover or, for that matter, halfway callous!

‘On his last assignment his cameraman, his best friend, was shot.’

Chloe blanched in shock. ‘Did he...?’

Tatiana nodded. ‘He died in Nik’s arms, but the worst part—at least for the families—was that for three days we knew that there had been a fatality. There were about ten journalists, all from different media outlets pinned down, but we didn’t know their identities or who had died.’

Chloe gave an empathetic murmur of sympathy and touched her friend’s hand as the older woman closed her eyes and shuddered. ‘We all loved Charlie, he had just got engaged...but at the same time we were all so incredibly relieved that it wasn’t Nik. It made everyone feel so guilty.’

‘Survivor’s guilt,’ Chloe said, thinking of her sister who, after the accident from which she had escaped unscathed while Chloe had not, had been helped by a therapist. Well, Nik Latsis could afford the best help money could buy.

‘You’ve probably seen him, although professionally he used Mum’s maiden name, because he didn’t want to be accused of using the family name. Does Kyriakis ring a bell...? Nik Kyriakis?’

Chloe shook her head. ‘I’ve never watched much TV. There was a rule when we were growing up, half an hour’s television a day, and then when I could decide for myself I suppose it had become a habit I never really broke. Even now I listen to the radio rather than switch on the box. It must have been hard for your brother going back to work after what had happened...?’

She had gone back to the spot where the accident had happened—had it been therapeutic? Only in the sense that she had proved to herself that she could do it?

That had been how she had privately charted her recovery: the things she was able to do, the things she could move past—looking at her scars, showing them to her family, getting into a car, driving a car...going back to the winding mountain road where the accident had happened.

‘He didn’t go back. A day after he returned, our dad had his stroke and couldn’t run the company any more; the plan had always been for Nik to step up when the time came.’ She stopped, an expression of consternation crossing her face. ‘Nik doesn’t ever talk about what happened to Charlie, so don’t mention it tonight, will you?’ she finished anxiously.

If he wanted to bottle things up in a stupid manly way, that was fine by her; she definitely wouldn’t be getting him to unburden himself to her. In fact, the idea of seeing him, let alone passing the time of day with him, made the panic gathered like a tight icy ball in her stomach expand uncomfortably.

Ironically there had been a time when she would have paid good money to confront her runaway lover, but that time was long gone; she had no intention of having any sort of conversation with Nik Latsis.

He was history, a mistake, but not one she was going to beat herself up over any more, and one she really didn’t want to come face to face with, but, if she absolutely had to, she was going to do it with pride and dignity.

Well, that was the plan anyway.

‘I won’t,’ she promised as the voice in her head reminded her once again that her plans often had a habit of going wrong...

CHAPTER TWO

‘YOU’RE LATE.’ TATIANA kissed her brother’s lean cheek, grimacing a little as the sprinkling of designer stubble grazed her smooth cheek before one eyebrow rose. She struggled to hide her surprise as she shifted her gaze from her impeccably turned-out brother to the woman who stood with one hand possessively on his dark-suited arm.

‘You know Lucy Cavendish?’ Placing a hand across her shoulders, he drew the model, her famous dazzling smile firmly in place, close into his side. The redhead tilted her head. Unusually for a woman, in her heels she topped his shoulder.

‘I did Tatiana’s last catwalk show in Paris. What a lovely home you have.’ Lucy’s expertly made-up green eyes moved admiringly around the entrance hall with its chandeliers and dramatic staircase.

Tatiana inclined her dark head and delivered an air kiss. ‘Thank you. You’re looking well, Lucy...’ Tatiana looked up at her brother. ‘You growing a beard, Nik?’

‘With your views on facial hair, Ana, would I dare?’

‘Oh, I just lurve the moody, broody look.’ Lucy’s eyes sparkled with teasing amusement as she stroked his cheek, letting her red fingernails slide familiarly over the stubble.

Nik removed the hand firmly from his cheek where it had lingered and whispered so only she could hear him, ‘Don’t overdo it, angel.’

As they moved across the hall the sound of voices and laughter drifted out through the open double doors of the drawing room.

‘Anyone I know here?’ Lucy asked.

‘Just a small gathering of friends.’

Letting Lucy go ahead of them, Nik fell into step beside his sister. ‘Hope you didn’t mind me bringing Lucy.’

‘Why should I mind?’

‘I thought you might have had me paired off with some good breeding stock...?’

‘I don’t—’ Tatiana stopped and gave a shake of her head, admitting ruefully, ‘I suppose I do, but I just want you to be happy and...like you used to be...before...’

Impelled by an inconvenient spasm of guilt, Nik stepped in to hug his sister as suddenly the charade with Lucy seemed less of a good idea. ‘I am happy.’

‘I like Lucy. Are you two together?’

Nik’s glance slid away. She looked so hopeful that, although this had been the idea, he felt reluctant to raise her hopes, knowing full well they were false ones. ‘Early days,’ he prevaricated slickly.

‘I just hope Lucy won’t be bored silly,’ Tatiana fretted, glancing towards the model who was walking through the double doors. ‘It so happens that there is a woman here who might interest you—’

‘Just when I thought I might have misjudged you,’ he began sardonically.

‘Not in that way!’ Tatiana cut back. ‘She’s a good friend of mine.’

‘And you wouldn’t wish me on a friend?’

She slung him an irritated look. ‘I just want you to set a good example when you meet her, and give a really generous donation to the charity—set a good example for the others.’

‘Another of your worthy causes, Ana?’

‘This is important to me, Nik.’

‘Fine, I’ll be generous.’

* * *

Chloe glanced at the clock...maybe he was a no show? Annoyed with herself for caring one way or the other, she turned her back on the doorway and focused her attention fully on the man beside her, a middle-aged Greek man who ran a property development company and seemed genuinely interested in the charity.

‘I admire your enthusiasm but, and I don’t want to be negative, aren’t you being a little overambitious? Have you costed it up properly? The premises alone would—’

‘Yes suitable premises, especially here in London, will be difficult.’

‘Which is where I come in?’

Her smile glimmered. ‘Your specialist knowledge and advice would be much appreciated.’

‘And my money?’ he added shrewdly.

Chloe’s dimples appeared. ‘I know that Tatiana has already spoken to you about...sorry, I really can’t do this.’

The recipient of her half-empty glass of champagne looked startled and then amused as Chloe popped the finger food she had been holding into her mouth, swallowed, then smiled. ‘That’s better!’ she said as she held out her hand for her glass.

Tipping his head, her companion replaced the crystal wine cup in it.

‘Mostly I can multitask,’ she told him cheerfully. ‘I can do food or drink but not both at the same time. You wouldn’t believe how many outfits I’ve emptied glasses of wine down, which makes it sound as though I always wander round with a glass of pinot in my hand, which I don’t.’ She delivered another smile. ‘I can assure you that your donation will be in sober and sensible hands.’

The older man gave an appreciative chuckle at her tactics. ‘Nice try, but I don’t recall saying yes.’

Chloe conceded his point with a nod. ‘But you didn’t say no either and I’m an optimist.’

This time the man’s chuckle was loud enough to divert some of the attention currently being given to the model who was making her entrance. ‘So let me get this right, you’d like me to let you have the lease on several buildings for a fraction of what they are worth, and what do I get?’

‘A warm glow knowing you’ve done the right thing? Or, failing that, the sort of publicity that money can’t buy? The sort of publicity that comes from having your company represent the caring face of capitalism,’ Chloe said, thinking wryly that she was getting quite good at this.

The man gave her an approving look tinged for the first time with respect. ‘I think we should schedule a meeting, Lady—’

‘Call me Chloe,’ she cut in quickly.

He tipped his head in acknowledgment of her request. ‘Right, Chloe, how about...?’

As the man’s eyes moved over her head and his voice trailed away Chloe turned to see what had snatched his attention. The answer was immediately obvious in the shape of a glamorous redhead in a glittering gown more suited to a red carpet event than a dinner party.

Immediately tolerant of her companion’s distraction, she turned to study the new arrival with some curiosity. In her experience people you had only previously seen beautifully lit on the screen or airbrushed in magazines rarely lived up to expectations, but Lucy Cavendish did and then some.

She looked beyond her hostess and the model to see if Lucy had come with someone. The woman’s past boyfriends had included not one but two Hollywood A-listers, a Russian oligarch and the heir to a banking fortune, so Chloe was expecting a handsome face or serious money, someone who might be interested in donating to a good cause, perhaps?

She got neither...or rather actually what she got was both!

What she also got when she saw that Lucy’s date was Nik was a jolt similar to the occasion her hairdryer had given her an electric shock, times a hundred. A home-made and dangerously uncontrolled defibrillation that felt as if a hammer had landed on her chest and made her limbs feel weak.

But this was fine; she could totally deal with it...

Not dealing with it, Chloe!

Ignoring the mocking voice in her head, she took a deep breath, straightened her slender square shoulders, cleared her throat and readjusted the chunky necklace of raw amethyst slices that hid the pulse pounding at the base of her throat.

Breathe...she told herself, so she did, and for good measure she focused on the positive.

The worst was over and, as worsts went, seeing the man you’d made the mistake of sleeping with without knowing his full name was, on the scale of things, pretty low-key. A couple of minutes and her nervous system would catch up with the message and by tomorrow she’d be laughing—all right, maybe smiling about it.

But that was tomorrow; being realistic today, as in the next sixty seconds, she was aiming for a less ambitious goal. Her legs stopping shaking would be a good start.

She stifled a stab of impatience; her nervous system was getting this situation way out of proportion. After all, what was the worst that could happen?

And what was the worst anyway: him remembering her or him not?

Her mobile lips quirked into a smile as she considered the alternatives. An awkward reunion or a hit to her ego?

Did it really matter?

The fact that she could even ask herself the question was a sign of how much she’d changed in a little over a year. There had been a time when, despite the outward confidence she projected, what people thought about her had mattered, and she wanted the right people to like her...she wanted to fit in.

The journey to where she was today had not been easy, but everything had changed. Well, maybe not everything, she conceded, watching the new arrival above the rim of the glass she raised to her lips. Still, even at a distance, he had the ability to make the muscles deep in her pelvis quiver...so it was lucky she could consider this phenomenon in an objective way, wasn’t it?

She might not be able to achieve total physical indifference to the male magnetism he oozed, but she was more than a bundle of hormones...despite the fact that he was, she thought, studying him through the protective sweep of her lashes, just as incredible-looking as she remembered.

They said you always remembered your first and it turned out they were right. The self-mocking glint in her wide-spaced sky-blue eyes faded and a tiny pucker appeared between her darkly defined feathery brows as she realised how intact her memory of him was, not just the way he looked, or moved, but the texture of his skin...the smell of his... She took a shaky breath and straightened her shoulders, slamming the door on that particular memory. It was just a lapse of judgement, ancient history, Chloe, she told herself. Do not revisit.

‘What a stunning woman!’

Chloe started slightly at her companion’s comment and tore her eyes from the tall figure whose dominant presence had made her forget about the woman he’d brought with him, although they made a pretty magnificent couple. ‘Yes, she is.’ Stunning was probably an understatement.

‘But I’d say she’s high maintenance, and I can’t see her climbing Kilimanjaro.

The comment startled a laugh from Chloe. ‘It sounds to me like you measure all women by some pretty high standards.’

He smiled and nodded. ‘My wife is an extraordinary woman.’

Chloe stood and listened as the man launched into what was clearly his favourite subject. An emotional lump settled in her throat as he talked about his wife. What would it feel like to be the centre of a man’s universe? she wondered wistfully.

* * *

Nik walked past his sister and moved to where Lucy stood.

‘Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,’ he muttered.

‘I was the one who told you that,’ the model reminded him. ‘But you’ve been my beard on more than one occasion, darling, so I kind of owe you. Do you realise how much money is in this room tonight?’

His eyes moved over the heads of the fellow guests assembled; most were members of the Greek expat community, and all of them would have considered not having a private yacht as being poverty-stricken. ‘That figures. Ana is raising money for one of her causes again.’

‘So you’re not in danger of meeting Ms Right here. Does that mean you’re dumping me already, darling?’

‘Funny... God, I need a drink.’

He placed a guiding hand under Lucy’s elbow, and she immediately exclaimed mockingly, ‘Ooh, darling, I do so love it when you’re masterful. Ah!’

She staggered a little as Nik suddenly released her arm without warning.

It was an automatic response to a soft peal of laughter that made Nik turn his head. Although it hadn’t been loud, there was something attractively infectious about the sound that tugged his lips into a smile.

As his eyes surfed across the heads of the other guests to the source of the sound, his smile snuffed out as recognition crashed through his nervous system like a tsunami, and for several seconds his mind went a total blank, the effect of sheer shock colliding with serendipity.