Six Greek Heroes

Andreas was industriously engaged in piling up small pieces of kindling wood with some larger chunks of fuel already stacked in readiness. Again she was impressed by the quiet speed and efficiency with which he got things done. He was resourceful. He didn’t make a fuss. He didn’t agonise over decisions and he didn’t moan and whinge about the necessity either: he just did the job. She had definitely picked a winner to get stranded with in the snow.

She studied him, admiring the trendy cut of his luxuriant black hair, the sleek, smooth and undoubtedly very expensive tailoring of the charcoal-grey suit he wore teamed with a dark shirt and a silk tie. He looked like a high-flying business executive, a real urban sophisticate, the sort of guy she would have been too afraid even to speak to in normal circumstances.

‘One small problem…I don’t smoke,’ he murmured.

‘Oh…I can help there,’ Hope recalled, hurriedly digging into her handbag and producing a cheap plastic lighter. ‘I don’t smoke either but I thought my future employer might and I didn’t want to seem disapproving.’

As he waited for her to complete that rather intriguing explanation Andreas glanced up and registered in surprise that she was very far from being the least attractive woman he had ever met. In the dim interior, her pale blonde hair, now loose and falling almost to her shoulders, glowed like silver against the black upraised collar of his coat. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright. She was smiling at him and when she smiled, her whole face lit up. Lost in the depths of his coat, she looked startlingly appealing.

‘Here…’ Hope extended the lighter.

‘Efharisto…’ Andreas thanked her gravely, mentally querying her unexpected pull for him. She was blonde and rather short and he went for tall, leggy brunettes.

‘Parakalo…you’re welcome,’ Hope responded with a weak grin, striving to move her feet to instil a little feeling back into her toes. ‘So, you’re Greek?’

‘Yes.’ Protecting the minuscule blaze of wood shavings from the wind whistling through the cracks in the wall, Andreas fed the fire. She was virtually naked below his coat. It was that knowledge that was making her appear appealing to him, he told himself in exasperation. He resisted a foolish urge to look at her again. Why would he even want to look at her again?

‘I love Greece…well, I’ve only been there once but it was really beautiful.’ When her companion failed to grab that conversational opener, Hope added, ‘You’re used to lighting fires, aren’t you?’

‘No, as it happens,’ Andreas remarked, dry as dust. ‘But I don’t need to be the equivalent of a rocket scientist to create a blaze.’

Hope reddened. ‘I’m talking too much.’

Andreas told himself that he was glad that she had taken the hint. Yet when he looked up and saw the stoic look of accepting hurt in her face, he felt as though someone had kicked him hard in the stomach. When had he become so rude and insensitive?

‘No. I’m a man of few words and you’re good company,’ he assured her.

She gave him a huge surprised smile and, blushing like a schoolgirl, she threaded her hands inside the sleeves of his over-large coat and shuffled her feet. ‘Honestly?’

‘Honestly,’ Andreas murmured, taken aback by her response to the mildest of compliments and involuntarily touched.

He coaxed the fire into slow life. She was so cold she was shivering without even being aware of it. As the fire crackled he sprang up to his full height of six feet four and approached her. ‘There’s a hip flask in the left pocket of my coat.’

Hope reached in and lifted it out.

‘Take a drink before you freeze.’

‘I’m not used to it…I couldn’t—’

Andreas groaned out loud. Taking the flask from her, he opened it. ‘Be sensible.’

Hope sipped and then grew bolder. When the alcohol raced like a leaping flame down her throat she choked, coughing and spluttering.

Closing the flask for her, Andreas surveyed her and rueful amusement tilted his wide, sensual mouth. ‘You weren’t joking when you said you weren’t used to it.’

Hope sucked in a jerky breath and wrapped her arms round herself. ‘I didn’t know I could feel this cold,’ she confided in a rush.

Andreas uncrossed her arms, closed lean, strong hands over hers and slowly drew her close. ‘Think of me as a hot blanket,’ he urged.

Her lashes fluttered in confusion. ‘I don’t think I could…’

‘Try. It will be a while before the fire puts out enough heat to defrost you.’

Hope lifted wide eyes as turquoise as the Aegean Sea on a summer day. ‘I suppose…’ she mumbled.

‘Do you wear coloured contact lenses?’ Andreas enquired, black brows pleating because even as he spoke he questioned the inanity of his enquiry.

‘You must be joking… I can’t even afford makeup!’ Hope’s state of nerves was betrayed by the tiny jerk she gave as he eased her into physical connection with his tall, well-built body. All of a sudden her heart felt as if it were jumping inside her chest and she could hardly catch her breath.

‘You have perfect skin…you don’t need it,’ Andreas said thickly, his big, powerful body growing rigid. Even the separation of their clothing could not dull his high-voltage awareness of the tantalising softness of her lush, feminine curves. In spite of his every effort to freeze his own all-too-male reactions, his libido was rocketing into overdrive.

That close he turned her bones to jelly and Hope couldn’t think straight. She looked up and connected with his mesmerising dark golden eyes. A dulled heaviness gripped her lower limbs while a tight, hard knot of agonising tension formed in her pelvis. He lowered his handsome dark head and she guessed what was going to happen before it happened but still couldn’t believe that he would actually do it.

But Andreas confounded her expectations and captured her mouth with hungry urgency. That single kiss devastated her and as it began, it continued, his tongue delving between her readily parted lips to demand greater intimacy. She was defenceless against that wild, sweet tide of sensation, for her body flared into sudden desperate life. The tense knot low in her stomach spiralled into a drugging flare of heat that suffused her entire body with explosive effect. Only the need to breathe conquered that wicked heat and she had to pull her swollen lips free to drag in a great gulp of oxygen.

Andreas gazed down at her with heavily lidded dark eyes and then, abruptly, he yanked his head up and colour delineated his hard cheekbones. ‘Theos mou…I had no intention of…’ His handsome mouth clenched. ‘I should never have touched you. I’m sorry.’

‘Are you married?’ Hope demanded, voicing her worst fear instantaneously and only contriving to drag her hands from him as she finished speaking.

‘No.’

‘Engaged?’ Hope was no longer cold. Her entire body felt as though it were hot as a furnace with embarrassment.

His ebony brows pleated. ‘No.’

‘Then there’s no need to apologise,’ Hope declared half under her breath, scrupulously avoiding his scrutiny while she struggled to get a grip on herself. The way he had made her feel had been a revelation to her and she felt incredibly vulnerable and confused. Her fingers clenched into the cuffs of the coat sleeves to prevent her hands from reaching back to him. She turned away in an awkward semi-circle, so many thoughts and emotions and physical feelings bombarding her that she felt momentarily overwhelmed.

Her first real kiss and he had apologised. It would be terribly uncool to confess that he had thrilled the socks off her and that if he wanted to do it again he was more than welcome. Her face flamed with guilt and bewilderment. For goodness’ sake, where had that shameless thought come from? With hands that trembled she made herself concentrate long enough to pick up and drape her wet clothing over the pile of logs.

‘I’ve upset you,’ Andreas breathed.

Hope whirled round, turquoise eyes bright as precious stones in her flushed heart-shaped face. ‘No… I’m not upset.’

She felt a hundred things but not upset: shocked, bemused and exhilarated by the sheer strength of her response to him. For too many years she had lived in a world empty of any form of excitement. Andreas was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her and so great was her fascination that it hurt to deny herself the pleasure of looking at him.

‘I planned to leave you here alone,’ Andreas drawled flatly, still struggling to get a handle on his own inexplicable behaviour and somewhat stunned by his loss of control.

Startled, Hope whirled round. ‘Why? Where were you planning to go?’

‘I intended to try and find a house but it’s too dark now.’

‘And I have your coat. Much better to wait until daylight.’ Hope snatched in a stark breath of the icy air while she gazed out at the fast-swirling snow being blown about by the wind. It was no longer possible to see even the hedges bounding the road.

She drew nearer to the fire and then knelt down beside it to take advantage of the heat the flames were beginning to generate.

‘Tell me about your interview,’ Andreas invited, having noted that she would no longer meet his gaze and determined to eradicate her unease. ‘What was the job?’

‘The position of live-in companion to an elderly woman but the interview never happened,’ Hope confided ruefully. ‘When I got to the house I found out that a relative had moved in with the lady instead and there was no longer a job available.’

‘So these people didn’t bother to cancel your interview and left you stranded?’ Andreas queried with disapproval.

‘I asked why I hadn’t been contacted but the woman who spoke to me said it was nothing to do with her because she hadn’t placed the ad in the first place.’ Hope just shrugged and smiled wryly. ‘That’s life.’

‘You are far too forgiving,’ Andreas told her. ‘Why did you want work of that nature?’

‘I’m not qualified for anything else…at least, not at present.’ Hope wanted a stable roof over her head and a period of steady employment before she checked out what she considered to be the much more remote and ambitious possibility of winning a place on a design course. ‘I also need somewhere to live and it would’ve suited me very well. Where were you travelling?’

‘I was heading back to London.’

‘Why did you kiss me?’

It was hard to know which of them was most surprised by that very abrupt question: Hope, who had not known that she was about to embarrass herself by asking for clarification on that score, or Andreas, who had never been faced with such a bald demand to know his motivation before.

Dark golden eyes surveyed her steadily. ‘Why do you think?’

Face hot again, Hope studied her tightly linked hands. ‘I haven’t a clue…I was just curious.’

‘You’re very sexy.’

Her lashes swept up on her astonished gaze. ‘Are you serious?’

‘I should know…I’m a connoisseur,’ Andreas asserted without hesitation.

Her lush, full mouth curved into a grin, for she liked his frankness. So, he liked women and no doubt in large numbers. And why should he not? He was gorgeous and women had to fall for him in droves. Naturally he took advantage and who could blame him? If deep down a little twinge of pain stabbed at her that that should be so, she ignored it.

After all, she was much more interested in what Andreas had said prior to that final statement. It seemed like a miracle to her but he had called her sexy. Hope was used to thinking of herself as plain, overweight and ordinary. She had spent years hating her own body and longing to be thinner. To that end she had dieted and exercised and her weight had fluctuated up and down while the slender figure she craved continued to elude her. Even the mother she loved had sighed over her daughter’s lack of looks and lamented her keen appetite.

Yet Andreas, who was heartbreakingly handsome, considered her attractive. And not only that…he thought she was sexy. Even better he had proven his own conviction by succumbing to charms she had not known she had. She reckoned that she was probably going to love him until the day she died for allowing her to feel just once like a young and pretty woman. She had waited what felt like half a lifetime to hear such words and had truly believed that she would die without ever hearing them. He was the fulfilment of a dream and she studied him with massive and grateful concentration.

‘So what do you do for a living?’ Hope asked chattily.

‘I deal with investments.’

‘I suppose you’re stuck at a desk all the time studying figures and it’s a bit boring. Still, somebody has to do it.’ Her turquoise eyes were warm with sympathy.

Andreas got a high out of his immensely successful career but he had met far too many women who faked an interest in finance in an effort to impress him. Hope, he recognised, was not tempted in that direction. His rare smile illuminated his lean bronzed features, which in repose could seem grave and cold.

‘Would you like some chocolate?’ she asked, rooting round in her capacious bag and emerging with a giant bar and only then seeing that smile and riveted by it. He had buckets of charisma and she was entrapped.

‘Yes…before you melt it,’ Andreas laughed, hunkering down to reach for the bar, which she was holding perilously close to the fire. He broke off a piece and let his brilliant gaze sweep from her clear bright eyes and the fascination she couldn’t hide to the ripe curve of her lips. He remembered the intoxicating taste of her and the laughter left him to be replaced by a disturbingly strong desire to haul her back into his arms. He put the square of chocolate he had intended for himself into her mouth instead.

‘Oh…’ Hope gasped in surprise and closed her eyes in slow, blissful appreciation as the cold chocolate began melting against her tongue.

Andreas was transfixed by the expression she wore. He could not take his attention from her. He wondered if she would react like that to him in bed. He tried to kill the thought. He tried to suppress the powerful tide of hunger she ignited in him, but his usually disciplined libido was behaving like a runaway train.

Her lashes lifted. ‘I would do just about anything for chocolate…’

Her voice faded away and her mouth ran dry on the glittering blaze she met in his intent golden eyes. On a level of understanding she had not even known she possessed she recognised his hunger and she leant forward without even thinking about what she was doing and sought his hard, sensual mouth again for herself. With a hungry growl, Andreas came down on his knees and kissed her until the blood drummed at an insane rate through her veins and her head swam.

‘I’ll buy you chocolate every day,’ Andreas promised huskily.

‘You know…I wasn’t meaning anything provocative,’ Hope warned him anxiously.

‘I know.’ Long fingers framed her cheekbones while his eyes devoured her. ‘I find that straightforward streak of yours very refreshing.’

‘Other people call me blunt—’

‘Whatever, I don’t meet with much of it,’ Andreas admitted thickly, his hands not quite steady on her. ‘I also want you so much it hurts to deny myself. That’s a first for me.’

Hope felt utterly unlike herself. It was as though at that first kiss she had become an alien inside her own once familiar skin. She felt wild and greedy and joyous and as tempting as Cleopatra. All the years of stoically repressed regret at the manner in which life was passing her by, all the wistful longings and fanciful dreams that crowded out the fertile imagination she hid behind a front of no-nonsense practicality finally got to break free. Andreas was the embodiment of her every fantasy.

‘A first for me too,’ she confided breathlessly.

He unbuttoned the coat and then froze, a rare glint of confusion in the wondering appraisal he gave her. He had no grasp of quite how the situation had developed but he couldn’t make himself let go of her. ‘We have to be out of our minds—’

Hope closed her fingers into the lapels of his suit jacket. ‘Shush…don’t spoil it,’ she whispered pleadingly.

Andreas spread her back against his coat and let his mouth glide down the length of her throat. ‘Tell me when to stop…’

With no intention of calling a halt at any point, Hope shivered with delicious tension and lay there. She booted the misgivings struggling to be heard out of her mind and slammed shut the door on them for good measure. For twenty-eight years she had been good and just once, and for the space of one stolen, secret night, she was going to be bad and what was more she was going to enjoy it.

He unsnapped the lace bra and groaned out loud at the creamy swell of her pouting breasts in the firelight. ‘You have a body to die for.’

Hot with a mix of self-consciousness and helpless longing, she opened her eyes to see if he was teasing: his appreciation spoke for him. With reverent hands he toyed with the tender pink peaks already straining into thrusting points. Deep down inside she felt as if she were burning and her hips shifted in a pointless effort to contain the feeling. Within very little time the whole world centred on him and what he was doing to her.

He employed his knowing mouth on the stiff crests that crowned her breasts and the inner thrum of her body’s response became so powerful she could not stay still. Her entire skin surface felt unbearably sensitive but more than anything she was aware of the damp ache at the swollen heart of her.

‘Andreas…’ She sounded his name in a throaty, pleading purr and at last he touched her where she most needed to be touched.

Sensation electrified her and took her to a place she had never been before, where all that mattered was the sensual glory of his touch and the wildness that was being born within her. She writhed, wrapped herself round him, lost in the hot, male scent of his skin and hair and the enervating roughness of his hard, muscular body against her.

‘I can’t wait…’ Andreas confessed rawly, passion breaking through his formidable control at a level of excitement he had never known before.

The sheer overload of physical pleasure had driven her to a tortured peak and she was helpless in the hold of the powerful craving that controlled her. He pulled her under him and she was with him every step of the way. With an earthy groan he sank into the slick, hot heat of her and met with unexpected resistance.

‘You’re a virgin?’ he breathed in stark shock.

‘Don’t stop…’ she gasped, reaching up to lock imprisoning arms round him.

He yielded and swept her through the sharp little pain into a fast, frantic rhythm as primal as the overpowering sensations that had taken her over. Intolerable excitement pushed her into ecstasy and a cocoon of pleasure. In the aftermath, she felt amazingly silly and happy and buoyant.

Andreas gazed at Hope with wondering golden eyes and then he gathered her very carefully back into the warmth of his coat and tugged her into his arms. He kissed her brow. ‘You’re very sweet…but you should have told me I’d be the first.’

‘It was my business,’ Hope muttered, burying her face into his shoulder, fighting off the shock of what she had just done.

‘But now’s it mine,’ Andreas asserted, determined fingers tipping her chin up so that he could look at her again in the flickering light cast by the burning logs. ‘I think that in the very near future you will decide to move to London and I will be your lover.’

‘Why would I do that?’ Hope dared to ask although sparkles of joy were running through her like precious gold dust.

His hard, sensual mouth slashed into a sudden smile of breathtaking assurance. ‘Because I will ask you to and you won’t be able to resist.’

Her heart was bouncing like a rubber ball inside her chest and she smiled up at him with all the natural warmth that was the very core of her character.

CHAPTER ONE

ALMOST two years later, Hope sat in a fashionable London café waiting for her friend Vanessa’s arrival.

Her thoughts were miles away and centred entirely on Andreas. She was dreamily wondering how she could best celebrate the second anniversary of that first eventful meeting. By seeking out a snow-bound barn? That would not be a good idea, she conceded with a grin. Andreas disliked inconvenience, cold and, indeed, had a very low tolerance threshold for any form of discomfort.

‘Sorry I’m late.’ A slim redhead with sharp but attractive features and bright brown eyes sank down into the seat opposite and settled a heavy camera case down. ‘If that hair of yours grows any longer,’ she remarked, surveying the pale blonde hair Hope wore secured at her nape but which reached halfway to her waist, ‘people are going to start wondering if you’ve got Rapunzel fantasies.’

Hope blinked. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You know…the lady in the fairy tale who got locked up in the tower and let her long hair down to be used as a ladder to rescue her,’ Vanessa clarified. ‘Only unfortunately for her, it wasn’t the handsome prince who climbed up, it was the witch. Be warned.’

Hope laughed and they ordered coffee. She was accustomed to her more sophisticated friend’s cynical outlook on life. The daughter of a famous artist, Vanessa had survived a Bohemian and unstable childhood to become a gifted photographer. But the redhead still bore the scars inflicted by parents who had enjoyed tempestuous love lives.

‘So, how is your handsome prince?’ Vanessa enquired a tinge dryly.

Hope was impervious to that tone and her eyes sparkled. ‘Andreas is great. Very busy, of course, but he phones me a lot when he’s out of the country—’

‘A mobile phone being Andreas’s equivalent of a ball and chain,’ her friend mocked. ‘I seem to recall that if you switch it off he wants an explanation in triplicate.’

‘He just likes to know where I am. He worries about me,’ Hope countered equably. ‘Do you realise that in ten days’ time, Andreas and I will have been together for two whole years?’

‘Wow. The guy who doesn’t commit is going for gold. You could be making gossip column headlines. Of course,’ Vanessa murmured wryly, ‘the world would first have to know you existed and you remain a very well-kept secret.’

‘Andreas hates media attention and he knows I wouldn’t like it either. I’m a very contented secret,’ Hope admitted, telling herself with the ease of long habit that what little time she had with Andreas would be very much diluted if she had to share him with a social whirl and lots of people as well. ‘Right now, I’m trying to think of some special way to celebrate our anniversary.’

‘Andreas didn’t make the effort to mark the occasion last year, did he?’

‘I doubt if it even occurred to him that we had been together an entire year. I shouldn’t have sat around waiting for him to say or do something, I should just have reminded him,’ Hope said ruefully

‘Did he ever mention it afterwards?’

Hope shook her head.

‘Then, let me offer you a piece of advice,’ the younger woman remarked. ‘If you want to hang onto Andreas Nicolaidis, resist the urge to celebrate your second anniversary in his presence.’

‘But why?’

‘The reminder that you’ve been around for two years might set the cold wind of change blowing.’

‘What are you trying to say to me?’ Hope prompted anxiously.

Vanessa compressed her lips and sighed. ‘I just feel you’re wasting your time with Andreas. He didn’t even bother to show up the night you collected the top award for your design course.’

‘His flight was delayed.’

‘Was it?’ The younger woman looked unimpressed. ‘He has no interest in anything in your life unless it directly affects him.’

‘Andreas isn’t artistic…or into fashion. I don’t expect him to take an interest in the handbags I design—’

‘He hasn’t introduced you to a single member of his family or to any of his friends. If he takes you out it’s to some place where he won’t be bothered by the paparazzi and where he won’t be seen with you. He’s kept his life separate from yours and he keeps you in a little restricted box. Why don’t you face facts? You’re his mistress in everything but name—’