The Greek's Surprise Christmas Bride / Proof Of Their One-Night Passion

‘Diávolos…’ Leo whispered the curse in her ear as they progressed back down the aisle. ‘That’s the worst bit over.’

Letty laughed. Yes, that sentiment was very much Leo. He had as much sensitivity as a brick thrown at a window. Airy, feminine, finer feelings about weddings were foreign to him. Cosmo clutched at her skirts and she bent down and lifted him up, pressing a kiss to his troubled little face. ‘You don’t like the crowds, do you?’ she gathered, holding him close, enjoying the sweet baby smell he still retained.

‘I warned you that this might be too much for them,’ Leo declared.

‘They need the memory of being part of this,’ Letty told him gently and only then registered that she was having her first conversation with Leo since that shameful little episode in the limousine. Her face warmed but she buried the recollection deep again. She had been brazen and silly and she had embarrassed herself, but that was human and it would be pointless to punish herself about something she could not change.

Leo was hoisting Sybella to his shoulder when a tall, slender blonde in a blue dress approached them. ‘What on earth are your nannies doing, Leo?’ she demanded imperiously. ‘The kids should be out of sight and out of mind at such an occasion.’

Reluctant to offend a stranger, Letty swallowed back a sharp retort.

‘We want them with us today,’ Leo stated smoothly in direct contradiction of his words to Letty only seconds earlier. ‘Katrina, meet Letty… Letty, this is my father’s wife, Katrina.’

Grateful then that she hadn’t snapped out a tart response, Letty absorbed the reality that Leo’s stepmother, Katrina, was much younger than she had expected and English into the bargain. She smiled.

But the pretty blonde wasn’t even bothering to look her way. Indeed, all her attention, her curiously avid attention, was for Leo. ‘I just can’t believe the size of the sacrifice you’re making for those kids…actually getting married,’ she said in an incredulous tone. ‘Your father and I were astonished.’

Katrina’s very blue eyes were locked on Leo, her fascination with him so strong it was tangible. Dear heaven, his stepmother was in love with him, Letty registered with shocked distaste. Luckily the photographer wanted a few shots at that point and Katrina was forced to back off while the nannies reclaimed the children. In the crush around the porch steps she watched a white-haired older man with a hint of Leo’s cast of feature join Katrina, undoubtedly his father.

‘I didn’t realise your stepmother was much closer to your age than your father’s,’ Letty admitted simply on the drive to the hotel where the reception was being staged.

Leo compressed his lips. ‘She’s fourteen years older than me. She was twenty when my father married her. I was six. Ana was a baby. After her arrival in our lives I don’t have one good memory of my childhood. She doesn’t like kids, but she wanted one of her own to cement her position in the family. When she failed to conceive, she resented Ana and me even more.’

‘She doesn’t resent you now,’ Letty pointed out, not being a woman to ignore a controversial topic, in spite of the warning signs that Leo’s harsh diction and grim expression put out. ‘In fact I’d say she’s in love with you.’

Leo’s big shoulders tensed and his teeth gritted but he said nothing, deeming it a topic better left untouched.

‘No comment?’ Letty looked at him in disbelief. ‘I suggest that your stepmother is in love with you and you have nothing to say at all?’

‘I wouldn’t call it love,’ Leo countered between clenched teeth, feeling that he had no choice other than to be honest about the situation since Letty was too astute to be fooled and left ignorant. ‘Katrina began flirting with me when I was sixteen and by the time I was twenty-one she was trying to seduce me!’

‘Oh, my goodness!’ Letty exclaimed with shocked distaste, registering that she had had to pressure him to surrender that truth about his father’s wife because naturally such a sordid secret must have put a huge burden on Leo. ‘Did you tell your father?’

‘Of course not… It would have destroyed him!’ Leo framed harshly. ‘He adores her. Whatever faults I have, I am at least loyal and I care about my father even though he has been pretty hopeless as a parent. Katrina, however, disgusts me.’

‘I shouldn’t have pried,’ Letty muttered ruefully, watching the anger she had ignited fade from his taut, lean dark features while noting the pain he was striving to bury about his disturbing past. ‘But I sort of felt I had to know the family background so that I didn’t put my foot in it.’

‘Don’t worry. We won’t see much of either of them. My father and Katrina live in New York,’ Leo informed her. ‘He’s devoted to her. Whatever she wants, she gets. I remember a huge row many years ago about the diamond set you’re wearing. Katrina wanted them but they belonged to my mother and her jewellery was left to her children in her will. Katrina couldn’t get past the law.’

‘Is that why I’m wearing it today?’

‘Only one of the reasons. You’re my wife. You’re a Romanos now and you are entitled to wear my mother’s diamonds.’

‘You’ve never told me anything about your mother either,’ Letty remarked.

‘I have few memories of her. She died having Ana. In those days, we lived on her family’s island… My mother was an heiress from a far wealthier family than my father,’ Leo stated wryly. ‘Ios, the island, now belongs to me, along with everything else that was my mother’s. Her inheritance was protected by an unbreakable family trust. Katrina was not best pleased to marry my father and learn that he wasn’t as rich a man as she had naively assumed.’

‘Serves her right if that’s all she cared about,’ Letty said roundly.

‘I’ve always believed that she was his mistress before she was his wife. My mother may have died before her time, but I suspect that if she had lived my father would have divorced her for Katrina because he was and still is besotted with her.’

‘There must be a huge age gap between them.’

‘Twenty-odd years.’

Letty raised a brow but knew that it worked for some couples even though it clearly hadn’t worked for Leo’s father and stepmother. ‘I wonder if your mother knew your father had a mistress.’

Leo took the easy way out of that unanswerable question by shrugging a broad shoulder, but his expression was grim, belying that show of casual acceptance. ‘It’s how the marriages in my family have always worked. Marriage is for children, inheritance, property protection. It’s got very little to do with sex.’

Letty blinked. ‘Maybe for very rich people,’ she qualified uneasily and then she finally wondered in dawning dismay if possibly he was into some sort of kink that the average wife was unlikely to deliver. That prospect hadn’t occurred to her before but, the more she thought about it, the more she thought that to be a possible explanation for his instinctive mental separation of sex and marriage.

After all, there had to be some very good reason why he thought that way. Ancestors with mistresses being an accepted way of life for the men? The stepmother from hell? The stepmother who had been his father’s mistress? An unrepentantly unfaithful father, who must have hurt his mother? Wasn’t that a more probable truth? That Leo suffered from that clichéd view of women as either angels or whores? A belief system that had been born in the early death of his mother and the arrival of a shamelessly unscrupulous stepmother?

‘I know you don’t understand my attitude,’ Leo commented, startling her with that perception. ‘We’ll discuss it over dinner tonight.’

Letty was disconcerted by that suggestion, not having expected Leo to be so open on such topics. Ironically, in spite of her curiosity, she was in no hurry to hear his views, preferring to stuff the whole thorny question of his marital infidelity under a large mental rock and leave it buried there. What she didn’t know couldn’t unsettle her, after all. Ignorance would be preferable.

They arrived at the hotel. Letty drank champagne, greeted a never-ending line of guests, exchanged pleasantries and smiled. Her aunt, Elexis, her grandfather’s daughter, cornered Letty when she emerged from the cloakroom after a quick touch-up of her make-up. Elexis was as thin as a playing card and a very attractive woman with a chic blonde bob.

‘You look very like photos I’ve seen of your father, Julian,’ the blonde commented on the subject of her late half-brother. ‘Did you ever even get to meet him?’

Letty chose to ignore the rather offensive tone of that question.

‘Several times when I was a child. My mother had an on-off relationship with him in the early years, before she realised that he would never settle down and stay clean,’ Letty admitted quietly. ‘But he was her first love and it was hard for her to step away from him.’

‘You sound like a romantic. Leo won’t like that,’ Isidore’s daughter proclaimed.

Letty simply smiled. ‘I believe that you’re getting married in the spring,’ she said, keen to change the subject because she felt a little awkward about the fact that Leo had, years earlier, considered marrying Elexis.

‘Yes, I can’t wait. Anatole adores me,’ Elexis told her smugly. ‘You see, I wanted more from Leo than he was willing to give me. I wanted fidelity and I know for a fact that he’s not willing to pledge that.’

‘How do you know?’ Letty asked in as mild a tone as she could manage.

‘His current mistress is a guest at your wedding…and you didn’t know?’ Elexis queried in unkind surprise. ‘Mariana Santos—that’s her over there with the lady in the lime-green hat. Mariana, Spain’s most acclaimed supermodel.’

‘Fancy that…’ Letty said noncommittally, determined not to react although she had felt the blood draining out of her face as her aunt spoke. Even before the brittle blonde had dropped her bombshell about Leo’s mistress, Letty had suspected from her tart defensive tone that Elexis had wanted Leo much more than he had ever wanted her and that her ego had been stung by his walking away from her. The blonde’s final words made that reality clear.

As Elexis drifted off, seemingly happy to have stuck the knife in Leo’s bride, Letty’s attention strayed towards Mariana Santos, a gorgeous brunette with a curvier figure than was usual for a model, her hourglass shape artfully revealed by a turquoise dress with a plunging neckline. Her tummy curdled and she glanced away, annoyed that Leo could be that insensitive. If Elexis knew the identity of his current lover, others had to know as well and it was disrespectful, at the very least, to include such a woman on the guest list. It was not that she felt jealous or possessive of Leo, Letty assured herself as she lifted her chin, a combative glint in her green eyes, it was simply a question of what was right and appropriate.

She looked away from the voluptuous model again, reminding herself that Leo’s sex life was none of her business. Even so, the awareness that he had invited his lover to their wedding stung like salt on an open wound. Get over yourself, she told herself sternly. The wedding ring on her finger had never been intended as a promise that Leo belonged to her in any way. Their marriage was a fake steadily turning into a farce, she ruminated. So far, she had met Leo’s infatuated stepmother, the jealous and spiteful Elexis and now she had Mariana Santos covertly sending the bridegroom a look of burning longing.

Leo had a toxic effect on women, she decided. A little taste of Leo and it seemed women tended to become strongly attached to him and then pine for him. Her nose wrinkled and she thanked her lucky stars that she was not so easily impressed. If that was true, why was she stressing about his obvious compelling attraction in the eyes of other women? It shouldn’t bother her, should it? She should be able to ignore those other women and not care. Letty swallowed hard, unable to fathom her own reactions and annoyed that the indifference she needed to project towards Leo with regard to his extra-marital interests was nowhere to be found. If she was annoyed, why was she annoyed?

That thorny question occupied her brain throughout the reception that followed. It swept her through the wedding speeches and her mother’s brief tribute, which brought tears to her daughter’s eyes. She strayed into a polite conversation with Leo’s father, Panos, and her own grandfather, who it seemed was in a rather glum mood because Leo had recently uncovered some financial irregularities within his company, which Isidore felt he should’ve discovered for himself.

‘Leo’s got fantastic financial ability,’ Panos Romanos contended with a clear pride in his son’s abilities that warmed Letty towards the older man.

‘Oh, I’m not denying that,’ Isidore responded. ‘Our businesses couldn’t be in stronger hands than his.’

Leo spanned a lean hand across Letty’s stiff spine. ‘It’s time for us to open the dancing,’ he murmured softly in her ear. ‘One more hour and then we’re out of here.’

Letty twisted her head, eyes wide with surprise. ‘Only an hour… Where are we going?’

‘Ios…the island,’ Leo told her as he urged her on to the dance floor, wondering why she was pulling back from him to ensure a large space separated them.

‘But we can’t both leave the children!’ Letty exclaimed.

‘They’re coming too,’ Leo soothed, long brown fingers smoothing down her arms in a curiously caressing motion that sent the oddest little shiver shooting down her taut spinal cord. ‘The kids, the nannies, the whole shebang… Happy now?’

‘But I didn’t do any packing for them and they probably need new clothes and—’ she began in bemusement.

‘That’s why I employ staff. It’s all taken care of for us,’ Leo soothed, lowering his dark head, tawny eyes ablaze with gold below the lights, enhanced by the black lace frame of his lashes. ‘And once we arrive I will finally have you all to myself, yineka mou.’

Letty stared up at him in confusion, questioning why he would make such a statement and ducking her head to peer around him to see if there was someone nearby for whom he might be putting on an act. Why else would he say such a thing? Coincidentally, Mariana Santos was only a couple of feet away, dancing in the arms of another man, and Letty received a frozen look from the brunette, who had clearly been watching the bridal couple closely. Of course she was, Letty reflected ruefully. Leo was much more Mariana’s property than he would ever be his wife’s but in public he would pretend otherwise. She marvelled that Mariana had attended the wedding to watch her lover becoming the husband of another woman.

Indeed, so busy was Letty’s brain that when Leo kissed her she didn’t even see it coming. One minute she was wondering what it was like to be a mistress…and the next? Leo was crushing her parted lips under his with an urgency that shocked her rigid, all that explosive passion of his smouldering and burning through her cool front and smashing it to broken pieces. She swayed, knees turning weak, the sudden pulse of answering heat low in her pelvis a treacherous self-betrayal.

It was just one little kiss and she swiftly tugged free of him and grabbed the back of a convenient chair to steady herself. For a split second she had been shattered by an urgent desire to flatten Leo to the nearest horizontal surface and have her way with him so thoroughly that he would never look at another woman again. And that dangerous thought stayed with her as she recovered from his sensual onslaught. Physically she was fine but mentally she was in another place, she recognised unhappily. He had only kissed her as part of the wedding show. Possibly he had kissed her too because Mariana was nearby, and he intended to make some sort of statement.

But as Letty went upstairs to the room where she was to change, she was much more bothered by her own response to Leo. There was the lust she evidently couldn’t suppress and that thought she had succumbed to in the same moment…an utterly pathetic and inappropriate desire to have Leo all to herself. In other words, while she was thinking with disdain of all the other women still caught in the trap of craving Leo’s blazingly sexual energy, she was no better and had absolutely no reason to feel even slightly superior…

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