Kitabı oxu: «The Scandalous Warehams»

About the Author

PENNY JORDAN is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for the Mills & Boon imprint, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan: ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.

Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire, and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.

Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be published authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

The Scandalous
Warehams
The Wealthy Greek’s Contract Wife
The Italian Duke’s Virgin Mistress
Marriage: To Claim His Twins
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

The Wealthy Greek’s Contract Wife

PROLOGUE

ILIOS MANOS looked out across the land that had belonged to his family for almost five centuries.

It was here on this rocky promontory, stretching out into the Aegean Sea in the north east of Greece, that Alexandros Manos had built for himself a copy of one of Palladio’s most famous creations. Villa Emo.

Manos family folklore said that Alexandros Manos, a wealthy Greek merchant with his own fleet trading between Constantinople and Venice, had done business with the Emo family, and had been seized with envy for the new Emo mansion. He had secretly copied Palladio’s drawings for the villa, taking them home to Greece with him, where he had had his own villa built, naming it Villa Manos and declaring that both it and the land on which it stood were a sacred trust, to be passed down from generation to generation, and must be owned by no man who was not of his blood.

It was here that Alexandros Manos had created what was in effect a personal fiefdom—a small kingdom of which he was absolute ruler.

Ilios knew that this promontory of land, surrounded on three sides by the Aegean sea and with the mountains of northern Greece at its back, had meant everything to his grandfather, and Ilios’s own father had given his life to keep it—just as his grandfather had forfeited his wealth to protect it. To protect it. But he hadn’t protected the sons he had fathered, sacrificing them in order to keep his covenant with both the past and the future.

Ilios had learned a lot from his grandfather. He had learned that when you carried the hereditary responsibility of being descended from Alexandros Manos you had a duty to look beyond your own emotions—even to deny them if you had to—in order to ensure that the sacred living torch that was their family duty to the villa was passed on. The hand that carried that torch might be mortal, but the torch itself was for ever. Ilios had grown up listening to his grandfather’s stories of what it meant to carry the blood of Alexandros Manos in your veins, and what it meant to be prepared to sacrifice anything and anyone to ensure that torch was passed on safely.

His was the duty to carry it now. And his too was the duty to do what his grandfather had not been able to do—and that was to restore their family’s fortunes and its greatness.

As a boy, when Ilios had promised his grandfather that he would find a way to restore that greatness, his cousin Tino had laughed at him. Tino had laughed again when Ilios had told him that the only way he would pay off Tino’s debts was if Tino sold him his half-share of their grandfather’s estate to him.

Ilios looked at the building in front of him, the handsome face imprinted with the human history of so many generations of powerful self-willed men. It was set as though carved in marble by the same hands that had sculpted images of the Greek heroes of mythology. The golden eyes were a legacy of the wife Alexandros had brought back with him from northern lands, and they were fixed unwaveringly on the horizon.

Tino wasn’t laughing any more. But he would be plotting to get his revenge, just as he had since their childhood. Tino had always wanted what little his cousin had, and would not take this humiliation lightly. As far as Tino was concerned, being born the son of a younger son was to labour under a disadvantage—something he blamed Ilios for.

Ilios knew the reputation he had amongst other men for striking a hard deal, and driving a hard bargain, for demanding the impossible from those who worked for him in order to create the impossible for those who paid him to do exactly that.

There was no black magic, no dark art, as some seemed to suppose in the means by which he had made his fortune in the construction business—other than that of determination and hard work, of endurance and driving himself to succeed. The graft that Ilios employed was not oiled by back-handers or grubby deals done in shadowed rooms, but by sheer hard work. By knowing his business inside out and from the bottom up—because that was where he himself had started. Even now, no commission that bore the name of Manos Construction did so until he had examined and passed every smallest detail. The pride and the sense of honour he took from his work, which he had inherited from his grandfather, saw to that.

Ilios knew that the journey he had made from the poverty of his childhood to the wealth that was now his filled other men with resentment and envy. It was said that no man could rise from penury to the wealth that Ilios possessed—counted in billions, not mere millions—by honest means alone, and he knew that few men envied him more, or would take more pleasure in his downfall, than his own cousin.

The rising sun struck across his profile, momentarily bathing it in bright gold reminiscent of the mask of the most famous of all of Greek Macedonians—Alexander the Great. He had been born in this part of Greece, and according to family lore had walked this very peninsula with his own forebears.

Several yards away from him one of his foremen waited, like the drivers of the heavy construction equipment behind him.

‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked.

Ilios gave the building in front of him a grim look.

‘Destroy it. Pull it down and level the site.’

The foreman looked shocked.

‘But your cousin—?’

‘My cousin has no say in what happens here. Raze it to the ground.’

The foreman gave the signal to the drivers, and as the jaws of the heavy machinery bit into the building, reaching out to the morning sun, Ilios turned on his heel and walked away.

CHAPTER ONE

‘SO, what are you going to do, then?’ Charley asked anxiously.

Lizzie looked at her younger sisters, the familiar need to protect them, no matter what the cost to herself, stiffening her resolve.

‘There is only one thing I can do,’ she answered. ‘I shall have to go.’

‘What? Fly out to Thessalonica?’

‘It’s the only way.’

‘But we haven’t got any money.’

That was Ruby, the baby of the family at twenty-two, sitting at the kitchen table while her five-year-old twin sons, who had been allowed a rare extra half an hour of television, sat uncharacteristically quietly in the other room, so that the sisters could discuss the problems threatening them.

No, they hadn’t got any money—and that was her fault, Lizzie acknowledged guiltily.

Six years earlier, when their parents had died together, drowned by a freak wave whilst they were on holiday, Lizzie had promised herself that she would do everything she could to keep the family together. She had left university, and had been working for a prestigious London-based interior design partnership, in pursuit of her dream of getting a job as a set designer. Charley had just started university, and Ruby had been waiting to sit her GCSE exams.

Theirs had been a close and loving family, and the shock of losing their parents had been overwhelming—especially for Ruby, who, in her despair, had sought the love and reassurance she so desperately needed in the arms of the man who had abandoned her and left her pregnant with the adored twin boys.

There had been other shocks for them to face, though. Their handsome, wonderful father and their pretty, loving mother, who had created for them the almost fairytale world of happiness in which the family had lived, had done just that—lived in a fairytale which had little or no foundation in reality.

The beautiful Georgian rectory in the small Cheshire village in which they had grown up had been heavily mortgaged, their parents had not had any life insurance, and they had had large debts. In the end there had been no alternative but for their lovely family home to be sold, so those debts could be paid off.

With the property market booming, and her need to do everything she could to support and protect her sisters, Lizzie had used her small savings to set up in business on her own in an up-and-coming area south of Manchester—Charley would be able to continue with her studies at Manchester University, Ruby could have a fresh start, and she could establish a business which would support them all.

At first things had gone well. Lizzie had won contracts to model the interiors of several new building developments, and from that had come commissions from homebuyers to design the interiors of the properties they had bought. Off the back of that success Lizzie had taken the opportunity to buy a much larger house from one of the developers for whom she’d worked—with, of course, a much larger mortgage. It had seem to make sense at the time—after all, with the twins and the three of them they’d definitely needed the space, just as they had needed a large four-wheel drive vehicle. She used it to visit the sites on which she worked, and Ruby used it to take the boys to school. In addition to that her clients, a small local firm, had been pressuring her to buy, so that they could wind up the development and move on to a new site.

But then had come the credit crunch, and overnight almost everything had changed. The bottom had dropped out of the property market, meaning that they were unable to trade down and reduce the mortgage because of the value of the house had decreased so much, and with that of course Lizzie’s commissions had dried up. The money she had been putting away in a special savings account had not increased anything like as much as she had expected, and financially things had suddenly become very dark indeed.

Right now Charley was still working as a project manager for a local firm, and Ruby had said that she would get a job. But neither Lizzie nor Charley wanted her to do that. They both wanted the twins to have a mother at home, just as they themselves had had. And, as Lizzie had said six months ago, when they’d first started to feel the effects of the credit crunch, she would get a job working for someone else, and she still had money owing to her from various clients. They would manage.

But it turned out she had been overly optimistic. She hadn’t been able to get a job, because what industry there was in the area geared towards personal spending was shedding workers, and with the cost of basics going up they were now struggling to manage. They were only just about keeping their heads above water. Many of her clients had cancelled their contracts, and some of them still owed her large sums of money she suspected she would never receive.

In fact things were so dire that Lizzie had already made a private decision to go to the local supermarket and see if she could get work there. But then the letter had arrived, and now they—or rather she was in an even more desperate situation.

Two of her more recent clients, for whom she had done a good deal of work, had further commissioned her to do the interior design for a small block of apartments they had bought in northern Greece. On a beautiful promontory, the apartments were to have been the first stage in a luxurious and exclusive holiday development which, when finished, would include villas, three five-star hotels, a marina, restaurants and everything that went with it.

The client had given her carte blanche to furnish them in an ‘upmarket Notting Hill style’.

Notting Hill might be a long way from their corner of industrialised Manchester, on the Cheshire border, but Lizzie had known exactly what her clients had meant: white walls, swish bathrooms and kitchens, shiny marble floors, glass furniture, exotic plants and flowers, squishy sofas …

Lizzie had flown out to see the apartments with her clients, a middle-aged couple whom she had never really been able to take to. She had been disappointed by the architectural design of the apartments. She had been expecting something creative and innovative that still fitted perfectly into the timeless landscape, but what she had seen had been jarringly out of place. A six-storey-high rectangular box of so-called ‘duplex apartments’, reached by a narrow track that forked into two, with one branch sealed off by bales of dangerous-looking barbed wire. Hardly the luxury holiday homes location she had been expecting.

But when she had voiced her doubts to her clients, suggesting that the apartments might be difficult to sell, they had assured her that she was worrying unnecessarily.

‘Look, the fact is that we bargained the builder down to such a good price that we couldn’t lose out even if we let the whole lot out for a tenner a week,’ Basil Rainhill had joked cheerfully. At least Lizzie had assumed it as a joke. It was hard to tell with Basil at times.

He came from money, as his wife was fond of telling her. ‘Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and of course Basil has such an eye for a good investment. It’s a gift, you know. It runs in his family.’

Only now the gift had run out. And just before the Rainhills themselves had done the same thing disappearing, leaving a mountain of debt behind them, Basil Rainhill had told Lizzie that, since he couldn’t now afford to pay her bill, he was instead making over to her a twenty per cent interest in the Greek apartment block.

Lizzie would much rather have had the money she was owed, but her solicitor had advised her to accept, and so she had become a partner in the ownership of the apartments along with the Rainhills and Tino Manos, the Greek who owned the land.

Design-wise, she had done her best with the limited possibilities presented by the apartment block, sticking to her rule of sourcing furnishings as close to where she was working as possible, and she had been pleased with the final result. She’d even been cautiously keeping her fingers crossed that, though she suspected they wouldn’t sell, when the whole complex was finished she might look forward to the apartments being let to holidaymakers and bringing her in some much-needed income.

But now she had received this worrying, threatening letter, from a man she had never heard of before, insisting that she fly out to Thessalonica to meet him. It stated that there were ‘certain legal and financial matters with regard to your partnership with Basil Rainhill and my cousin Tino Manos which need to be resolved in person’, and included the frighteningly ominous words, ‘Failure to respond to this letter will result in an instruction to my solicitors to deal with matters on my behalf’. The letter had been signed Ilios Manos.

His summons couldn’t have come at worse time, but the whole tone of Ilios Manos’s letter was too threatening for Lizzie to feel she could refuse to obey it. As apprehensive and unwilling to meet him as she was, the needs of her family must come first. She had a responsibility to them, a duty of love from which she would never abdicate, no matter what the cost to herself. She had sworn that—promised it on the day of her parents’ funeral.

‘If this Greek wants to see you that badly he might at least have offered to pay your airfare,’ Ruby grumbled.

Lizzie felt so guilty.

‘It’s all my own fault. I should have realised that the property market was over-inflated, and creating a bubble that would burst.’

‘Lizzie, you mustn’t blame yourself.’ Charley tried to comfort her. ‘And as for realising what was happening—how could you when governments didn’t even know?’

Lizzie forced a small smile.

‘Surely if you tell the bank why you need to go to Greece they’ll give you a loan?’ Ruby suggested hopefully.

Charley shook her head. ‘The banks aren’t giving any businesses loans at the moment. Not even successful ones.’

Lizzie bit her lip. Charley wasn’t reproaching her for the failure of her business, she knew, but she still felt terrible. Her sisters relied on her. She was the eldest, the sensible one, the one the other two looked to. She prided herself on being able to take care of them—but it was a false pride, built on unstable foundations, as so much else in this current terrible financial climate.

‘So what is poor Lizzie going to do? She’s got this Greek threatening to take things further if she doesn’t go and see him, but how can she if we haven’t got any money?’ Ruby asked their middle sister.

‘We have,’ Lizzie suddenly remembered, with grateful relief. ‘We’ve got my bucket money, and I can stay in one of the apartments.’

Lizzie’s ‘bucket money’ was the spare small change she had always put in the decorative tin bucket in her office, in the days when she had possessed ‘spare’ change.

Two minutes later they were all looking at the small tin bucket, which was now on the kitchen table.

‘Do you think there’ll be enough?’ Ruby asked dubiously

There was only one way to find out.

‘Eighty-nine pounds,’ Lizzie announced half an hour later, when the change had been counted.

‘Eighty-nine pounds and four pence,’ Charley corrected her.

‘Will it be enough?’ Ruby asked.

‘I shall make it enough,’ Lizzie told them determinedly.

It would certainly buy an off-season low-cost airline ticket, and she still had the keys for the apartments—apartments in which she held a twenty per cent interest. She was surely perfectly entitled to stay in one whilst she tried to sort out the mess the Rainhills had left behind.

How the mighty were fallen—or rather the not so mighty in her case, Lizzie reflected tiredly. All she had wanted to do was provide for her sisters and her nephews, to protect them and keep them safe financially, so that never ever again would they have to endure the truly awful spectre of repossession and destitution which had faced them after their parents’ death.

CHAPTER TWO

NO! It was impossible, surely! The apartment block couldn’t simply have disappeared.

But it had.

Lizzie blinked and looked again, desperately hoping she was seeing things—or rather not seeing them—but it was no use. It still wasn’t there.

The apartment block had gone.

Where she had expected to see the familiar rectangular building there was only roughly flattened earth, scarred by the tracks of heavy building plant.

It had been a long and uncomfortable ride, in a taxi driven at full pelt by a Greek driver who’d seemed bent on proving his machismo behind the wheel, after an equally lacking in comfort flight on the low-cost airline.

They had finally turned off the main highway to travel along the dusty, narrow and rutted unfinished road that ran down to the tip of the peninsula and the apartments. Whilst the taxi had bounded and rocked from side to side, Lizzie had braced herself against the uncomfortable movement, noticing as they passed it that where the road forked, and where last year there had been rolls of spiked barbed wire blocking the entrance to it, there were now imposing-looking padlocked wrought-iron gates.

The taxi driver had dropped her off when the ruts in the road had become so bad that he had refused to go any further. She had insisted on him giving her a price before they had left the airport, knowing how little money she had to spare, and before she handed it over to him she took from him a card with a telephone number on it, so that she could call for a taxi to take her into the city to meet Ilios Manos after she had settled herself into an apartment and made contact with him.

Lizzie stared at the scarred ground where the apartment block should have been, and then lifted her head, turning to look out over the headland, where the rough sparse grass met the still winter-grey of the Aegean. The brisk wind blowing in from the sea tasted of salt—or was the salt from her own wretched tears of shock and disbelief?

What on earth was going on? Basil had boasted to her that twenty per cent entitled her to two apartments, each worth two hundred thousand euros. Lizzie would have put the value closer to one hundred thousand, but it still meant that whatever value they’d potentially held had vanished—along with the building. It was money she simply could not afford to lose.

What on earth was she going to do? She had just under fifty euros in her purse, nowhere to stay, no immediate means of transport to take her back to the city, no apartments—nothing. Except, of course, for the threat implied in the letter she had received. She still had that to deal with—and the man who had made that threat.

To say that Ilios Manos was not in a good mood was to put it mildly, and, like Zeus, king of the gods himself, Ilios could make the atmosphere around him rumble with the threat of dire consequences to come when his anger was aroused. As it was now.

The present cause of his anger was his cousin Tino. Thwarted in his attempt to get money out of Ilios via his illegal use of their grandfather’s land, he had now turned his attention to threatening to challenge Ilios’s right of inheritance. He was claiming that it was implicit in the tone of their grandfather’s will that Ilios should be married, since the estate must be passed down through the family, male to male. Of course Ilios knew this—just as he knew that ultimately he must provide an heir.

Ilios had been tempted to dismiss Tino’s threat, but to his fury his lawyers had warned him that it might be better to avoid a potentially long drawn-out and costly legal battle and simply give Tino the money he wanted.

Give in to Tino’s blackmail? Never. Ilios’s mouth hardened with bitterness and pride.

Inside his head he could hear his lawyer’s voice, saying apologetically, ‘Well, in that case, then maybe you should think about finding yourself a wife.’

‘Why, when Tino doesn’t have anything resembling a proper case?’ Ilios had demanded savagely.

‘Because your cousin has nothing to lose and you have a very great deal. Your time and your money could end up being tied up for years in a complex legal battle.’

A battle which once engaged upon he would not be able to withdraw from unless and until he had won, Ilios acknowledged.

His lawyer had suggested he take some time to review the matter, perhaps hoping Ilios knew that he would give in and give Tino the one million euros he wanted—a small enough sum of money to a man who was, after all, a billionaire. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that Tino thought that he could get the better of him by simply putting his hand out for money he hadn’t earned. There was no way that Ilios was going to allow that.

He had been attempting to vent some of the fury he was feeling by felling branches from an old and diseased olive tree when he had seen a taxi come down the road to the headland, stopping to let its passenger get out before turning round and going back the way it had come.

Now, still wearing the old hard hat bearing the Manos Construction logo he had put on for protection, his arms bare in a white tee shirt, his jeans tucked into work boots, he walked out from the tree line and watched as Lizzie looked out to sea, his arms folded across his chest.

Lizzie turned back towards the flattened ground where the apartments had been, shock holding her immobile as she saw the man standing on it, watching her.

‘You’re trespassing. This is private land.’

He spoke English! But the words he had spoken were hostile and angry, challenging Lizzie to insist with equal hostility, ‘Private land which in part belongs to me.’

It wasn’t strictly true, of course, but as a partner in the apartment block she must surely own a percentage of the land on which it had been built? Lizzie didn’t know the finer points of Greek property law, but there was something about the attitude toward her of the man confronting her and challenging her that made her feel she had to assert herself and her rights. However, it was plain that she had done the wrong thing. The man unfolded his arms, revealing the outline of a hard-muscled torso beneath the dirt-smeared tee shirt tucked into low-slung jeans that rode his hips, and strode towards her.

‘Manos land can never belong to anyone other than a Manos.’

He was savagely angry. The hardness of the gaze from golden eagle eyes fringed with thick dark lashes speared her like a piece of helpless prey.

Lizzie stepped back from him in panic, and lost her footing as she stumbled on a rough tussock of grass.

As she started to fall the man reached for her, hard fingers biting into her jacket-clad arms as she was hauled upright and kept there by his hold on her. The golden gaze raked her with a predatory male boldness that infuriated her. He was looking at her as though … as though he was indeed a mythical Greek god, with the right and the power to take and use vulnerable female mortal flesh for his own pleasure as and when he wished. Sex with a man like this would be dangerous for the woman who was drawn to risk herself in his hostile embrace. Would he take without giving, or would he subjugate a woman foolish enough to think she could make him want her by overpowering her with his sensuality and leaving her a prisoner to it whilst he remained unmoved? That mouth, with its full bottom lip, suggested that he possessed a cruel sensuality that matched his manner towards her.

Lizzie shivered, shocked by the inappropriateness and the unfamiliar sensuality of her own thoughts. She tried to concentrate on something practical.

Somehow as he’d moved he’d also found time to push back the protective hard hat he was wearing, so that now she could see the thick darkness of his hair. She was five foot six. He was much taller—well over six foot—and of course far more powerful that her. Lizzie could see that the effort of holding her had hardly raised the biceps in his powerful arms, but that didn’t stop her from trying break free of him.

He stopped her with contemptuous ease, pulling her closer to him. He smelled of earth, and hard work, and of being a man. From somewhere deep down, in the place where she kept her most special memories, she had a sudden mental image of being held in her father’s arms in the garden at her parents’ lovely house in Cheshire, laughing in delight as she looked down from that height to where her mother was kneeling beside her two younger sisters. Those had been such wonderful years—years when she had felt safe and secure and loved.

But this man was not her father. With this man there would be no safety, no security, and certainly no love.

Love? She was so close to the dirt-streaked tee shirt that she could see the dark shadow of his body hair through it. She could almost feel the force of his hostility towards her. And she felt equally hostile to him. That was why her heart was banging into her chest wall and why her senses were recoiling from the intense awareness of him that his proximity was forcing on her.

What kind of awareness? Awareness of him as a man? Awareness of his maleness? Awareness of his sexuality? Awareness that within her something long denied, something starved of the right to express itself, was pushing against the barriers she had erected against it. Because of this man?

No, of course not. That was impossible. Her heart was thudding even more frantically, pumping adrenalin-fuelled denial through her veins. Why was she reacting to him like this? She had no interest in his sexuality. She must not have any interest in his sexuality. She must not want to stay here in his arms.

The panic caused by her own feelings had Lizzie demanding fiercely, ‘Let go of me.’

Ilios wasn’t used to women demanding to be set free when he was holding them—quite the opposite. Normally women—especially women like he knew this one to be: selfish, shallow, self-seeking women who cared nothing for others—were all too keen to inveigle themselves into situations of intimacy with him. Which was, of course, why he felt so reluctant to release her.

When she pulled back against him the movement of her body released the scent she was wearing, delicate and light. Deep down inside him something visceral and unfamiliar jerked into hot molten life. Desire? For a woman like this? Impossible. He released her abruptly, stepping back from her.

‘Who are you?’ Lizzie asked unsteadily, struggling for balance both physically and emotionally.

‘Ilios Manos,’ Ilios told her curtly.

This man was Ilios Manos? The man who had sent her that letter? Lizzie’s heart thumped into her ribs, its sledgehammer blow fired by shock.

‘Ilios Manos, the owner of this land on which you have no right to be, Miss Wareham,’ Ilios told her grimly.

‘How do you know who I am?’ The question had been spoken before Lizzie could stop herself.

‘Your name is on your suitcase strap,’ Ilios pointed out curtly, gesturing towards the brightly coloured strap wrapped around the handle of the small trolley case she had abandoned in the shock of discovering that the apartment block had gone.

‘What’s happened to the apartments?’

‘I gave orders for them to be knocked down.’

‘What? Why? You had no right.’ Her shocked disbelief deepened her anger, and also in some illogical way her awareness of him—as though she had developed some unwanted new sense designed exclusively to register everything about him and make her intensely receptive to that information. From the way the narrowing of his eyes fanned out fine lines around his eyes to the shape of his mouth as he spoke and her extreme awareness of the powerful maleness of his body.

‘I had every right. They were on my land. Illegally on my land.’

Lizzie struggled to clamp down on her awareness of him.

‘The land belongs to my partner, Tino Manos, not you.’

‘My cousin has ceded his right to the land to me.’

‘But you can’t just knock down a block of apartments like that. Apart from anything else, two of them belonged to me.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘they did.’

There was something about the way he was looking at her that made Lizzie feel extremely uneasy—as though she had unwittingly stepped into some kind of trap.

‘Tell me, Miss Wareham, what kind of greed makes a person ignore the normal rules of law to grab at something even when they know it must be fraudulent?’ His voice was deeply cynical, his whole manner towards her menacing and iced with bitter contempt.

‘I … I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Lizzie protested truthfully.

‘Of course you do. You were in partnership with my cousin. You have said so yourself. You must have known about the building regulations that were broken, about the suppliers and workmen left unpaid in order to build the apartments at a minimum cost to your partnership, and for the maximum ultimate profit.’

‘No, I didn’t,’ Lizzie insisted. But she could see that he didn’t believe her.

‘Have you any idea of the damage your greed has caused? The hardship it has inflicted on those you cheated? Or do you simply not care? Well, I intend to make sure that you do care, Miss Wareham. I will make sure that you pay back everything you owe.’

Ilios was angrier than he could ever remember being. His cousin had systematically tried to cheat him and manipulate him at every turn, and now Tino was even daring to challenge his legitimacy to what was rightfully his. Ilios could feel his fury boiling up inside him. His cousin might not be here to pay for what he had done, but his partner in crime, this Englishwoman who actually dared to lie to him, was here, and she would bear the brunt of his fury and his retribution, Ilios decided savagely.

‘Everything I owe?’ Lizzie objected, her heart sinking. ‘What do you mean? I don’t owe anybody anything.’

Her determination to continue lying to him hardened Ilios’s resolve to inflict retribution on her. She was everything he most disliked and despised in her sex. Dishonest, and attempting to cloak her dishonesty with an air of pseudo-innocence that manifested itself in the way she was dressed—simply, in jeans worn with a tee shirt and a plain jacket—and in her face with its admittedly beautiful bone structure, free of make-up.

Just as that damn elusive scent she was wearing had made him want to draw her closer, to pursue it and capture it, so the pink lipstick that deliberately drew his attention to the fullness of her mouth made him want to capture her lips to see if they were as soft as they looked. Where another less skilled woman might have tried to use artifice to mask her deceit, Elizabeth Wareham used art—the art of appearing modest, honest, vulnerable. Well, it wouldn’t work on him. Anyone who did business with his cousin had to be as dishonest and scheming as manipulative as Tino was himself. Like attracted like, after all. She could try using her sexuality to disarm him as much as she liked. He wasn’t going to be taken in.

When Ilios Manos didn’t respond, Lizzie stiffened her spine and her resolve and repeated, as firmly as she could, ‘I don’t owe anyone in Greece any money, and I don’t understand why you think I do.’

‘I don’t think you do, Miss Wareham. I know you do—because the person you owe money to is me.’

Lizzie gulped in air and tried not to panic. ‘But that’s not possible.’

Ilios was in no mood to let her continue lying to him. ‘You owe me money, Miss Wareham, because of your involvement with the apartments built by my cousin on my land. Plus there is also the matter of the outstanding payments for goods and services provided by local suppliers to you.’

‘That isn’t my fault. The Rainhills were supposed to pay them,’ Lizzie defended herself.

‘The contract supplied to me by my cousin states unequivocally that you are to pay them.’

‘No—that can’t be possible,’ Lizzie repeated

‘I assure you that it is.’

‘I have my copy of the contract here with me, and it states quite plainly that the owners of the apartments are to pay the suppliers direct,’ Lizzie insisted.

‘Contracts can be altered.’

‘And in this case they obviously have been—but not by me.’ Lizzie’s face was burning with disbelief and despair.

‘And you can prove this?’ Ilios Manos was demanding, the expression on his face making it plain that he did not believe her.

‘I have a contract that states that my clients are responsible for paying the suppliers.’

‘That is not what I asked you. The contract I have states unequivocally that you are responsible for paying them. And then there is the not so small matter of your share of the cost of taking down the apartments and returning the land to its original state.’

‘Taking down the apartments?’ Lizzie echoed. ‘But that was nothing to do with me. You were the one who ordered their destruction—you told me that yourself …’

Lizzie badly wanted to sit down. She was tired and shocked and frightened, but she knew she couldn’t show those weaknesses in front of this stone-faced man who looked like a Greek god but spoke to her as cruelly as Hades himself, intent on her destruction. She was sure he would never show any sign of human weaknesses himself, or make any allowances for those who possessed them. But there was nowhere to sit, nowhere to hide, to escape from the man now watching her with such determined intention on breaking her on the wheel of his anger.

‘I had no choice. Even if I had wanted to keep them it would have been impossible, given their lack of sound construction. The truth is that they were a death trap. A death trap on my land, masquerading as a building constructed by my company.’

As he spoke Ilios remembered how he had felt on learning how his cousin had tried to use the good name of the business Ilios had built up quite literally with his own bare hands for his nefarious purposes, and his anger intensified.

His company. Lizzie automatically looked at his hard hat and its logo. She remembered Basil Rainhill smirking when he’d told her that Manos construction was ‘fronting’ the building of the apartments, and that they had a first-class reputation. Then she had assumed his smirk was because of the good deal he has boasted about to her, but now …

‘I don’t know anything about how the apartments were built. In fact, I don’t understand what this is about. I was contracted to design the interiors of the apartments, that’s all.’

‘Oh, come, Miss Wareham—do you really expect me to believe that when I have a contract that stages unequivocally that payment for your work was to be a twenty per cent interest in the apartment block?’

‘That was only because the Rainhills couldn’t pay me. They offered me that in lieu of my fee.’

‘I am not remotely interested in how you came by your share in the illegal construction my cousin built on my land, only that you pay your share of the cost of making good the damage as well as what you owe your suppliers.’

‘You’re making this up,’ Lizzie protested.

‘ You are daring to call me a liar?’ Ilios grabbed hold of her, gripping her arms as he had done before. How had she dared to accuse him of lying? His desire to punish her, to force her to take back her accusation, to kiss her until the only sound to come from her lips was a soft moan of surrender, pounded through him, crashing through the barriers of civilized behaviour and forcing him to fight for his self-control.

She had said the wrong thing, Lizzie knew. Ilios Manos was not the man to accuse of lying. His pride lay across his features like a brand, informing every expression that crossed his face—and, Lizzie suspected, every thought that entered his head.

He was still holding her, and his touch burned her flesh like a small electrical shock. Her chest lifted with her protesting intake of air. Immediately his gaze dropped to her body with predatory swiftness—as though somehow he knew that when he had touched her, her flesh had responded to his touch in a way that had flung her headlong into a place she didn’t know, brought her face to face with a Lizzie she didn’t know. Her heart was thumping jerkily, her senses intensely aware of him, and her gaze was drawn to him as though he was a magnet, clinging to his torso, his throat, his mouth.

She swung dizzily and helplessly between disbelief and a craving to move closer to him. Beneath her clothes her breasts swelled and ached, in response to a mastery she was powerless to resist. How could this be happening to her? How could her body be reacting to Ilios Manos as though … as though it wanted him? It must be some weird form of shock, Lizzie decided shakily as he released her, almost thrusting her away from him.

‘I’m not calling you a liar,’ Lizzie denied, feeling obliged to backtrack, if only to remind herself of the reality of her situation. ‘I’m just saying that I think you’ve got some of your facts wrong. And besides—why aren’t you demanding recompense from your cousin, instead of threatening and bullying me?’ she demanded, quickly going on the attack.

Attack was, after all, the best form of defence, so they said, and she certainly needed to defend herself against what she had felt when he had held her. How could that have happened? She simply wasn’t like that. She couldn’t be. She had her family to think of. Being sexually aroused by a man she had only just met, a man who despised and disliked her, just wasn’t the kind of thing she had ever imagined being. Not ever, and certainly not now.

Determinedly she martialled her scattered thoughts and pointed out, ‘After all, I only owned twenty per cent of the apartment block. Your cousin, from what the Rainhills told me, owned the land, most of the apartments and was responsible for the building work. I never even met him, never mind discussed his business plan with him. I was given the apartments and made a partner in lieu of payment for the work I’d done. That’s all.’

Ilios knew that that was true, but right now it didn’t suit his mood to allow her any escape route—especially now that his cousin had increased his fury by continuing to plot against him. Ilios wanted repayment, he wanted retribution, he wanted vengeance—and he would have them. Ilios hated cheats, and he hated even more being forced to let them get away with cheating.

‘My cousin has no assets and is heavily in debt. The Rainhills, as I am sure you have discovered yourself, have disappeared. And, whilst you might only own twenty per cent of the apartment block’s value, the partnership agreement you signed contains what is called a joint and several guarantee—which means that each partner is both jointly and severally liable for the debts of the whole partnership. That means that I can claim from you recompense for the entire amount owing.’

‘No, that can’t be true,’ Lizzie protested, horrified.

Ilios looked at her. There was real panic in her voice now. He could see that she was trembling.

An act, he told himself grimly. That was all it was. Just an act.

‘I assure you that it is,’ he told her, ignoring her obvious distress.

‘But I can’t possibly find that kind of money.’ She couldn’t find any kind of money.

‘No? Well, I have to tell you that I intend to be fully recompensed—not just for the money I am owed, but also for the potential damage that could have been done to my business. A business for which I have worked far harder than someone like you, who lives off the naïveté of others, can ever imagine. You own your own business?’

‘Yes,’ Lizzie acknowledged. ‘But it is almost bankrupt.’

Why had she told him that when she hadn’t even told her sisters just how bad things were? That every spare penny she had had been placed into their shared joint account to ensure that the mortgage was paid, the household bills met, and food put on the table at home.

She looked really distraught now, Ilios could see, but he refused to feel any sympathy. Showing sympathy was a sign of weakness, and Ilios never allowed himself to be weak.

‘You have a property? A home, I assume?’ he pressed

‘Yes, but it is mortgaged, and anyway I share it with my sisters, one of whom has two small children and is dependent on me.’

Lizzie didn’t know why she was admitting all of this to him, other than because she was in such a state of shock and panic. She wasn’t going to let herself think about the last few months of long nights, when she had lain awake worrying about how she would manage to protect her family and continue to provide for them financially. They knew that things were bad, she hadn’t been able to hide that from them, but they did not know yet just how bad.

‘Your sister does not have a husband to support her and her children? You do not have parents?’

‘The answer to both those questions is no. Not that it is any of your business, or relevant to our discussion. There is no way I can find the money to repay you. The only thing I own that is my own is my body …’

‘And you wish to offer that to me in payment?’

Lizzie was horrified.

‘No! Never!’

Her immediate recoil, coupled with her vehemence, inflamed Ilios even further. Was she daring to suggest that she was too good for him? Morally superior to him? Well, he would soon make her change her tune, Ilios promised himself savagely.

‘You deny it now, but the offer was implicit in your declaration that your body is the only thing you have.’

He was determined to humiliate her. Lizzie could see that. Because he had somehow sensed her sexual reaction to him?

‘No. That is, yes—but I didn’t mean it the way you are trying to suggest. I only meant that I do not own anything via which I could raise the money to pay you.’

‘Except your body.’

‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ Lizzie repeated, mortified. ‘I just meant that …’ She lifted her hand to her head, which was now pounding with a mixture of anxiety and despair. ‘I can’t pay you.’

Ilios had had enough. His temper was at breaking point. He would have what he was owed—one way or another.

‘Very well, then,’ he began, causing Lizzie to go weak with relief at the thought that he was finally going to accept that there was no point in him continuing to press her for money.

‘If your body is all you have with which to repay me, then that is what I will have to take—because I promise you this: I will have repayment.’

CHAPTER THREE

LIZZIE’S head jerked back on the slender stem of her neck as she looked up at Ilios in shocked disbelief.

‘You—you can’t mean that!’ she protested. But even as she protested, something fierce and elemental was flaring up inside her—a desire, an excitement, a wild surge of female longing that shook her body with its force and shamed her pride with what it said about her. She couldn’t want him—and most especially she could not want him under circumstances that should have been making her recoil with revulsion.

‘I do mean it,’ Ilios assured her.

‘I can’t believe that anyone could be so … cruel and inhuman, so lacking in compassion or understanding.’

The sudden explosion of sound from Lizzie’s mobile phone, announcing the arrival of a text message, momentarily distracted them both.

Watching the way Lizzie reached frantically for her mobile to read it, Ilios gave her a look of cold contempt.

‘You are obviously eager to read your lover’s message, but—’

‘It’s from my sisters,’ Lizzie interrupted him abstractedly, without lifting her gaze from the small screen. ‘Wanting to know if everything is all right.’

‘And you, of course, are going to reply and tell them all about the my so called cruelty and inhumanity.’

‘No,’ Lizzie told him. ‘If I did they’d worry about me, and that’s the last thing I want. I’m the eldest. It’s my job to look after them and protect them. Not the other way around.’

Ilios digested her response in silence. An eldest sister determined to protect her younger siblings wasn’t the way he wanted to think about this woman.

‘The light’s fading,’ he told her, gesturing towards the horizon where the winter sun, half obscured by clouds, was starting to dip below the horizon. ‘Soon it will be dark. I have to return to Thessaloniki. We can continue our discussion there.’

Over her dead body, Lizzie thought rebelliously, suddenly seeing an opportunity to put some much needed distance between them. She hated the thought of running away instead of staying to fight and prove her innocence, but with a man like this one, hell-bent on extracting payment from her—in kind if he could not have cash—the normal rules of engagement didn’t seem the best course of action.

‘Very well,’ she agreed, reaching for her mobile again.

‘What are you doing?’ Ilios demanded.

‘Telephoning for a taxi,’ Lizzie answered.

Ilios shook his head. ‘There’s no point. You won’t get one to come all the way out here—and anyway it isn’t necessary. You can travel back with me.’

‘No! I mean, no, thank you. I prefer to make my own arrangements,’ Lizzie insisted, whilst her heartbeat raced in panicky dread in case he guessed that the reason she was so reluctant to travel with him was not that she was afraid of the intimacy between them it would entail, but that she was afraid a part of her might actually welcome that intimacy.

‘You can drop the prim stance,’ Ilios told her. ‘I can assure you that I have no intention of using my car as a makeshift brothel—and besides, the amount you owe me would require far more in repayment than a single fumble in the back of a car.’

As he finished speaking Ilios reached for Lizzie’s trolley case, his swift possession of it leaving her with no option other than to nod her head in unwilling acceptance of his offer.

‘This way,’ Ilios commanded.

He had walked over the headland from Villa Manos, and it would be easier to walk back there rather than him leaving Lizzie here whilst he went for the car. And besides, he didn’t trust her not to try to cheat him a second time by attempting to leave without paying her debt.

The path was narrow and single track, climbing over the headland, and Ilios was making it plain that he expected her to go first, Lizzie could see. In normal circumstances she would have enjoyed such a walk, in the crisp early evening air, and even as it was when she reached the top of the incline she couldn’t help being tempted to take a few steps off the path towards the edge of the headland, drawn there by the magnificence of the scenery.

Ilios watched as the wind buffeted Lizzie, whipping her hair into a tangled blonde skein, and then he realised what she was doing.

Lizzie had only gone a few feet when she heard Ilios commanding, from behind her, ‘Don’t move. Stay where you are.’

It was too much to be denied such a small pleasure on top of everything else, so Lizzie ignored him, determined to defy him and have her moment of small rebellion and triumph even though she had been forced to give in to him on the bigger issues.

When Lizzie ignored him and continued to head for the edge of the promontory, Ilios let go of her case and raced after her.

Too late, Lizzie learned the reason for Ilios’s command. The ground was shifting beneath her feet, moving. The edge of the headland was falling away—and she was going to fall with it. She was falling, in fact—but not, Lizzie recognised with relief, into the sea with the rock and earth. Instead she fell onto hard, firm ground, clear of the headland, wrapped in Ilios Manos’s arms as he grabbed her in a flying tackle, dragging her backwards with a speed and force that sent them both falling to the ground. He had saved her life.

‘Are you crazy? What the hell were you trying to do?’

‘Not throw myself off the cliff, if that’s what you thought,’ Lizzie answered. ‘Apart from anything else, I haven’t got any life insurance. So there wouldn’t be any point in trying to kill myself.’

‘So you weren’t planning some dramatic gesture, claiming you’d rather have death before dishonour?’ he taunted her. ‘That’s just as well, because you’d have been wasting your time since you have already dishonoured yourself with your debt to me.’

‘I wasn’t trying to do anything other than look at the view.’ Lizzie defended herself. ‘I didn’t know it was dangerous. There aren’t any warning signs.’

‘There don’t need to be any. It’s private property, exclusively mine, for my own use and pleasure.’

Lizzie was still in his arms, with the weight of his body pinning her to the ground. She should try to move, she knew, but those words he had used—private property … exclusively mine … for my own use and pleasure—had set off a trail of lateral thinking inside her head. Applied to herself, in the context of his insistence on her repayment of the debt she owed him, they were now conjuring up the kind of sensual scenarios that turned her body weak with a reckless longing and filled her with excitement and apprehension.

She wasn’t used to feeling like this about any man. She didn’t want to feel this way about any man—especially not Ilios Manos, who would, she felt sure, take her desire for him and use it against her to punish her. Wanting a man she barely knew wasn’t something she had ever imagined would happen to her—her whole way of life, her entire way of thinking, was diametrically opposed to such a possibility. Not for her own protection, but for the protection of her family. To have such feelings now alarmed and terrified her. Lizzie desperately wanted to ignore what she felt, to deny it completely if she could. But it wouldn’t let her. It was too strong for her, too determined to make its need felt.

Her heart was thudding under his hand, Ilios recognized, like the beat of the wings of a trapped bird, frantic for its freedom. But, like this land and everything on it, she was his by rights so ancient they were imprinted on every cell of his body. She was his. He was still holding on to her, and against the palm of his hand he could feel the soft, warm swell of her breast, more rounded and fuller than her slenderness had suggested.

Automatically, of its own accord, as though divorced from his thoughts and answerable only to its own need, his palm curved closer to her flesh, the pad of his thumb-tip moving experimentally over a nipple soft at first, but rising immediately to his touch. He cupped her breast fully, stroking her nipple, and his other hand tightened its hold to draw her closer. His body moved so that he could thrust one thigh between the jean-clad flesh of hers.

The world—her world, the world she had thought she knew—had gone crazy, Lizzie acknowledged. The heat burning through her body was surely global warming gone into overdrive. Her breasts—both of them, not just the one he was caressing—were aching to be enjoyed, whilst the knowing male thigh thrusting between her own made her want to lean against it, move against it, open herself to it and to all the delicious sensual possibilities its presence signposted.

This man was …

This man was her enemy!

What was he doing? Ilios had never had any taste for casual, meaningless sex, and yet here he was touching this woman who was lying beneath him as though he was starved for the sensation of her female flesh beneath his hands—as though the desire he could feel pounding through him was so strong, so all-important and demanding, so beyond his own control, that he had no choice other than to submit to it.

As Lizzie pushed him away Ilios released her, infuriated both with himself for his unacceptable and inexplicable need and with her for being the cause of it.

‘You had no right to do that,’ Lizzie told him fiercely, desperately anxious to establish that she was not the one who had started what had happened.

‘That wasn’t what your body was saying.’

Of course he was bound to have known what she was feeling, a man like him, with that aura he had of sexual power and knowledge. Lizzie’s face burned hot with self-conscious awareness of how he had made her feel. She wasn’t going to allow him to get the better of her, though. She couldn’t afford to.

‘You can think what you like,’ she told him defensively. ‘But I know the truth.’

Of course she did. And the truth was …

She didn’t want to think about what the truth was, or what it had felt like to be held in his arms, to be touched by him, to have her senses set alight and her defences laying down their arms in willing surrender. She didn’t want to think of anything other than putting as much distance as she could between herself and Ilios Manos as fast as she could.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘WHERE are we going?’ Lizzie asked uncertainly, once she was back on her feet and Ilios was a safe distance away from her.

‘Not to some secluded grotto so I can imprison you like some Greek nymph awaiting the gods’ pleasure, where you will be obliged to answer to my every sensual need, if that is what you are imagining. We are merely returning to Villa Manos, which is where I left my car.’

‘Villa Manos? That is where you live?’ Lizzie queried—after all, it was far safer talking about a villa than it was thinking about the dangerous effect his previous comments had been having on her.

‘No. I have an apartment in Thessaloniki, at the top of the Manos Construction office block. The villa is very old, and the building has fallen into disrepair. It was Tino’s hope that he could insist that it be bulldozed, because it might present a danger to the holidaymakers visiting the complex he planned to build here—but then I am sure that you already know all about that, since you are partners.’

They had almost reached the top of the incline now, and even though she was slightly out of breath Lizzie turned to face him, her normally calm grey eyes sparkling quicksilver-bright with temper as she objected. ‘I have already told you. I have never even met your cousin, never mind been the recipient of his confidences with regard to his business plans.’

‘Business plans which included manipulating me into selling him my half of our grandfather’s land once he had forced me to remove our ancestral home from it.’

Ilios had started to climb the last few feet of the path, so Lizzie did the same, coming to an abrupt halt as she saw what lay below them, bathed in the last dying rays of the day’s light.

At the far end of a long straight drive, lined with tall Cyprus trees and surrounded by Italianate gardens, slightly elevated from the surrounding terrain, set like a pearl against the dark green of the Cyprus and the blue of the Aegean Sea beyond it, perfectly framed by its surroundings was—

‘Villa Emo,’ Lizzie announced breathlessly in a slightly dazed voice as she stared at the building. She turned to Ilios to say in disbelief, ‘It looks exactly like Villa Emo—the house Palladio designed for the Emo family outside Venice.’

To either side of the main house long, low, arcaded wings—which on the original Villa Emo had been farm buildings—extended in perfect symmetry, capped at both ends with classically styled dovecotes, whilst the main building itself was a perfect copy of the Italian original.

‘It’s so beautiful,’ Lizzie whispered, awestruck by the wonderful symmetry of the building and wondering how on earth Palladio’s beautiful villa for the Emo family had somehow transported itself here, to this remote Greek Macedonian promontory.

‘A deadly beauty, some might say, since it was someone else’s desire to possess it conflicting with my grandfather’s determination to keep it that cost my father and Tino’s father their lives.’ His voice was openly harsh with bitterness.

Without waiting to see if Lizzie was following him he started off down the steep path towards the house. Automatically Lizzie followed him, unable to stop herself from asking, once she had caught up with him, ‘What happened—to your father?’ She had lost her own parents, after all, and she knew the dreadful pain of that kind of loss.

‘What happened?’ Ilios stopped so abruptly that Lizzie almost cannoned into him, only stopping herself from doing so by placing her hand on his forearm to steady herself. She snatched it back again for her own safety and peace of mind as she felt the now familiar surge of sensual longing that physical contact with him brought her. How was it possible for this one man to do what no other man had ever done, without actually doing anything to arouse the desire she felt for him? Lizzie didn’t know, and she didn’t really want to know either. She simply wanted it not to happen.

Ilios was speaking again, and she forced herself to concentrate on what he was saying and not what she was feeling.

‘The ruling Junta at the time believed that since my grandfather would not agree to sell the villa to one of their number he should be forced to make a choice between the villa and the lives of his sons. They misjudged my grandfather, I’m afraid. He chose the villa.’

‘Over his own flesh and blood?’ Lizzie couldn’t conceal her horrified disbelief. ‘How could he do something like that?’

They had reached the gardens now, and were taking a path that skirted past them, but instead of being disappointed at not being able to see them in more detail Lizzie was too appalled by what Ilios was telling her to think about them.

‘He had no other choice,’ Ilios told her as they emerged from the shadow of a tree-lined walkway into the gravelled courtyard where he had left his car.

‘So what happened—to … to your father?’ Lizzie had to ask the question.

‘He was shot. They both were. But not at the same time. Tino’s father, the younger of the two, was set free initially. It seemed he had convinced the Junta that if they set him free he would persuade his father to change his mind. When he couldn’t, the only difference it made to their ultimate fate was that my father was blindfolded and shot by the firing squad he was facing whilst my uncle was shot in the back trying to escape them.’

Lizzie couldn’t stop herself from shuddering.

‘How awful—your poor mother.’

‘I doubt she cared very much one way or the other. She and my father had only been married a matter of months—a dynastic marriage of sorts—and by the time she had given birth to me the Junta had been overthrown.’

Lizzie was appalled.

‘So you never knew your father?’

‘No.’

‘And your mother?’

‘She remarried—a cousin with whom she was already in love. I was handed over to my grandfather.’

‘She gave you away?’

The pity that had been growing inside her with every terse answer Ilios had given her had grown into an aching ball of shocked compassion. She and her sisters had known such love from their parents, had had such happy childhoods, and Lizzie couldn’t help but feel the contrast between her own childhood and the one Ilios must have had.

‘As she saw it she had done her duty in marrying my father and producing a son, and so she deserved to follow her own heart, which did not lie with me.’

‘Where is she now? Do you see her?’

‘She and her second husband were killed in a freak storm when they were out sailing.’

Lizzie could understand why a person would want to keep such a beautiful home in the family—but surely not at the price of one’s own children? How could a man have sacrificed his own sons the way Ilios’s grandfather had?

‘Villa Manos isn’t just an inheritance, it is a sacred trust,’ Ilios told her coldly, obviously guessing what she was thinking. ‘It was said by our ancestor when he had it built that as long as it remained in the hands of the Manos family our family would survive and thrive, but that if it should be lost to the family our line would shrivel and turn to dust. It is the responsibility of the Manos who holds the key to Villa Manos to ensure that there is someone for him to pass it on to. Since he is the elder or the two of us my cousin grew up believing—as I did myself—that our grandfather would pass on the key to him.’

‘So why didn’t he?’ Lizzie couldn’t resist asking.

‘I went out into the world and made something of myself, whilst Tino preferred to live off what little our grandfather still had. In the end our grandfather decided that our history and out future would be safer in my hands. The land he divided between us, but the house he left to me.’

It was a tale of true Greek tragedy in many ways, Lizzie reflected as Ilios headed for an expensive-looking car, which Lizzie could now see was a Bentley. He unlocked the passenger door and then opened it for her.

She had no option other than to go with him. Lizzie knew that, but she still hesitated.

In the end it was her compassion for the child he must once have been as much as her awareness of his power over her that had her sliding into the richly luxurious leather seat. Ilios stowed her trolley case in the boot before getting into the driver’s seat and starting the car.

What a terrible, tainted inheritance he had received, Lizzie thought sadly as they bumped down the rutted lane.

The March day had darkened into early evening by the time they reached the main road that would take them back to Thessalonica. It had been a long day for Lizzie, who had been up at five in the morning to catch her flight, and the anxiety she had endured added to her tiredness now. Combined with the comforting hum of the expensive car, they had her drifting off to sleep and then waking herself up again as she fought the longing to close her eyes. She might feel appalled by the story he had told her, and filled with compassion for the lonely child he must have been, but that did not mean she felt comfortable about falling asleep in his presence. Far from it. There was something too intimate, too vulnerable about sleeping in his wakeful presence to allow her to do that.

And yet inevitably in the end she was unable to prevent her eyes from closing and her head dropping against the leather headrest, with her face turned towards the man who now had command of her life.

Ilios studied her. The bone structure beneath the pale skin was elegantly formed, her beauty quietly classical and enduring. Her loyalty to her family matched one of the most important tenets of traditional Greek society. She was, he recognised as he looked at her, the kind of woman a man would marry rather than simply want to bed for momentary sexual satisfaction.

Ilios exhaled on the sudden realisation of where his own thought processes were taking him.

The car hit a pothole in the road, waking Lizzie up.

What had she told herself about not betraying any more vulnerability than she had to? she cautioned herself as she sat up, and then frowned as she glanced at her watch and realised what time it was.

‘Please excuse me, but I must send a text,’ she told Ilios, reaching for her phone.

‘To your lover?’ Ilios challenged her.

‘No! I don’t have a lover!’ Lizzie denied immediately.

The dark eyebrows rose. ‘Such a vehement, almost shocked denial—and yet surely it is perfectly natural that a woman of your age should have a man in her life and her bed. You are what? Twenty-four? Twenty-five? After all, you can hardly still be a virgin.’

‘Of course not. And I’m twenty-seven,’ Lizzie told him.

Of course not. But her last sexual relationship—her only sexual relationship, in fact—had been when she had been at university. And it had existed more because it was the done thing than because she and the boy in question had envisaged spending the rest of their lives together. Things had been different then. She had been young, and life had been fun. Fun had died out of her life with the loss of her parents.

‘And I wasn’t shocked. It’s simply that I have more important things to think about than men.’

‘Such as?’

‘My family—my sisters and my nephews. It is actually the boys I need to text. I promised them I would because I won’t be there to read their bedtime story—it would have been my turn tonight.’ Emotion choked Lizzie’s voice. ‘My family are far more important to me than any man ever could be. I have to put them first. They depend on me, and I can’t let them down. They matter far more to me than some … some fleeting sexual pleasure.’

Automatically Ilios wanted to reject, to push away and in fact deny his awareness of the emotion in Lizzie’s voice when she spoke of her family. There was no place for that kind of sentiment in his present life or in his plans for his future life. Nor would there ever be.

‘If your only experience of sexual pleasure has been fleeting then it is hardly surprising it doesn’t bother you to give it up,’ he told Lizzie coolly instead. ‘A good lover makes it his business to make his partner’s pleasure as enduring as she wishes it to be.’

‘That’s easy to say,’ Lizzie responded, desperate to try to hold her own and appear as nonchalant as Ilios himself. The reality was that his casual observation was having an intense and unwanted effect on her. It was making her ask questions of herself that she knew she could not answer. Questions such as what would it be like to be Ilios Manos’s lover?

‘And I assure you easy to do, when one knows how,’ Ilios came back slipping the comment up under Lizzie’s guard and drawing a soft gasp of choked reaction from her.

Of course Ilios Manos would be an experienced lover. Of course he would know exactly how to please his partner—even if that partner was an untutored as she was herself.

She was floundering now, going down under the flood of awareness surging through her, a flood of dangerous sensations, longings, and—heavens, yes—images as well, of two sensually entwined naked bodies, one belonging to her and the other to Ilios. Stop it, Lizzie warned herself, beginning to panic. She could not afford this kind of self-indulgence. It was far too dangerous.

Determinedly Lizzie concentrated on texting the twins, adding a few words for her sister, telling her that she was still involved in discussions about the letter and would be in touch again as soon as she had something concrete to report to them.

‘I take it that your sisters are aware of the purpose of your journey to Greece?’ Ilios asked Lizzie.

‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘They saw your letter.’ The thought of how her sisters would feel if they knew what Ilios had said to her—what he had demanded of her—brought a lump to Lizzie’s throat. They would be dreadfully shocked—and worried too, for their own security.

That thought had her turning impetuously towards Ilios to beg him emotionally, ‘Surely we can come to some kind of sensible arrangement that would enable me to repay you?’

‘What do you mean by “sensible”?’ Ilios asked.

Lizzie shook her head. ‘Perhaps I could work for you as an interior designer?’

‘The constructions in which I am involved are very large-scale commercial projects—schools, offices, corporate buildings, that kind of thing. However …’ Ilios paused, turning to give her an assessing look in the shadowy darkness of his car. ‘There is an alternative means by which you could clear the debt between us.’

Lizzie moistened her suddenly dry lips with the tip of her tongue, before asking in a voice that was slightly hoarse with tension, ‘And that is?’

The Bentley picked up speed as Ilios overtook the car in front of them. The delay in answering her ratcheted up Lizzie’s tension.

It seemed an aeon before he turned towards her, his profile outlined by the moonlight beaming into the car. It was an undeniably handsome and very sensually male profile, Lizzie admitted, but there was a harshness in the downward turn of his mouth, that made her shiver inwardly. She wasn’t sure which she feared the most: the effect of his harshness on her too easily bruised emotions, or the effect of his sensuality on her equally easily aroused senses.

‘Marriage,’ Ilios told her.

CHAPTER FIVE

‘MARRIAGE?’ Lizzie repeated unsteadily, feeling that she must somehow have misunderstood him.

‘According to my solicitors I am in need of a wife,’ Ilios informed her curtly. ‘And since you claim you cannot repay me in cash, and since I have no appetite for the kind of woman who so easily shares her body with any man who has had the price to pay for it, I have decided that this is best way for me to recoup what I have lost and take payment from you.’

Lizzie felt as though glue had been poured into her brain, locking it together and jamming her ability to think.

The only words she could summon were the words, Ilios Manos, marriage, and danger—all written large in bright red ink.

‘No,’ she told Ilios shakily, before she could do the utterly reckless, dangerous and unthinkable and say yes. Whatever the reason Ilios might want her as a wife, it was absolutely not because he wanted her, and she had better hang on to that fact, Lizzie told herself, not start spinning crazily foolish fantasies and daydreams about Mr Right, Cinderella and happy ever after, filled with nights of sensual delight and days of blissful joy.

A categorical no was not the answer Ilios wanted, and nor was it the answer he had expected. He knew of a dozen women at least who would have been delirious with joy at the thought of becoming his wife, quite apart from the fact that Lizzie Wareham was in no position to dare to refuse him anything. She was certainly not going to be allowed to do so. Didn’t she realise the position she was in? A position in which he held all the aces and she held none. If not, then perhaps it was time he made that position completely clear to her.

‘No?’ he challenged her coldly. ‘So it is just as I thought. All that you have said to me about your desire to protect your sisters—your family—is nothing more than lies and total fiction.’ He paused. A man of action and powerful determination, Ilios did not waste time analysing his decisions once he had made them, or asking himself what might have motivated them—even when they involved the kind of turnaround that had taken place inside his head since that very morning. He had decided Lizzie would be his wife.

He also hated not winning; once he had decided upon a course of action he stuck to it, no matter what obstacles lay in his way. Obstacles could be crushed and then removed. It was simply a matter of finding the right method to do so, with speed and efficiency, and Ilios thought he knew exactly the right method to shift the obstacle to his plans that was Lizzie’s ‘no’.

‘I was about to say—before you were so quick to refuse me—that I am also prepared to pay you a bonus of one hundred thousand pounds, on the understanding that for your part you conduct yourself in public at all times during our enforced relationship as you would were that relationship real. In other words I expect you, in your role as my fiancée and then my wife, to behave.’

A bonus? What he meant was a bribe, Lizzie acknowledged, feeling sickened as much by her awareness of how little she could now afford to refuse as by her personal feelings swirling through her at the thought of being married to him.

‘To behave as though I’m in love with you?’ Lizzie supplied lightly, determined not to let him see how humiliated she felt. The thought of having to act as though she loved him filled her with an immediate and self-defensive need to refuse.

It was bad enough that he was humiliating her by offering her money, without her own painful awareness of her fear that the physical longing he aroused in her so easily might overwhelm her.

A truly brave person did not turn and flee from their own fear and danger, Lizzie reminded herself. A truly brave person stood their ground and fought to overcome it, to make themselves even stronger. And besides, how could she turn down the money he was prepared to offer her when she knew what it would mean at home. It would clear the mortgage, for one thing, and leave nearly ten thousand pounds’ much needed ‘rainy day money’.

It meant that she would be quite literally selling herself to him—a man she already knew affected her as no man ever had. But she had to accept his offer for the sake of her family. How could she live with herself if she didn’t, knowing the huge difference it would make to their lives?

‘To behave as though our relationship is genuine and desired by both of us,’ Ilios told her. ‘Very, well, then.’ he continued, when Lizzie remained silent. ‘If you prefer to have your family stripped of the roof over their heads—’

What kind of fool was she to dare to try and refuse him? What was she expecting? That he would turn into some kind of white knight in shining armour? Some kind of saviour who would generously let her off any kind of payment? It was time she grew up and learned as he had had to learn that saviours didn’t exist. The only way to escape from the burdens life presented you with was to dig your own way out from under them—with your bare hands, if necessary, as he had. No doubt she expected him to feel sorry for her, with her tale of how her family had suffered and how she believed it was her duty to protect them. Why should he? Who had ever protected him when he had needed protection? No one. Hardship made a person stronger, unless they were so weak in the first place that they went to the wall. She must know that herself, since she had strength.

Ilios frowned. When and how had he decided, without knowing more about her, that Lizzie Wareham had strength? Strength was something he admired and respected, after all. Especially when that strength was hard-won.

‘No, of course I don’t,’ Lizzie told Ilios fiercely, immediately tormented by the horrific images his callous words had conjured up. ‘I just don’t understand why you should want to marry me.’

It was the wrong thing to have said.

‘I don’t,’ Ilios assured her, and the look he gave her sliced her pride to the bone. ‘It is my lawyers who believe that the best way for me to protect what is rightfully mine from my cousin’s greedy machinations is for me to marry. Tino needs money. He thinks he can blackmail me into giving him that money by threatening to challenge my right of inheritance under our grandfather’s will. He knows that I will never give up what is in effect a sacred charge on me, a duty to both the history of our name and its future, so he thinks I will give in to him. But I shall not. He claims that the fact that I am known to have sworn never to marry and do not have a wife means I have broken an unwritten article of faith—namely that Villa Manos must be passed down through the male line of our family. Villa Manos and its lands are a sacred trust. They have been in our family for over five hundred years. They are the essence of what we are. Manos blood, my father’s blood, was sacrificed for them. There is nothing I will not do to hold my duty and to meet it. Nothing!’

His fury, and the pride that went with it, filled the air around her so that she could almost feel and taste them, Lizzie recognized.

‘Tino believes that he has backed me into a corner,’ he continued angrily. ‘That I will be prepared to buy him off in order to keep Villa Manos. My solicitors advise me that the best and only guaranteed way to block Tino’s plans is for me to marry. After all, with blackmail one payment is never the end, it is merely the beginning. If I were to give in to him now—which I have no intention of doing—Tino would think that he has me in his power.’

Privately Lizzie found it impossible to imagine that anyone, male or female, would be foolish enough to think they could control a man like Ilios Manos.

‘Why don’t you simply find someone you genuinely want to marry?’ she suggested. ‘After all, a man with your—’

‘With my what?’ Ilios stopped her. ‘With my wealth? That is exactly why I am not married and why I never intend to marry. Only a fool voluntarily puts himself in a position where a woman can enjoy a rich man’s money both in marriage and then out of it, after they both discover that they no longer want one another. The curse of wealth is that it has the same attraction for sharks as fresh blood. My marriage to you will be different. You will already have been paid to wear my name and my ring. My cousin does not have the temperament for a long fight. Once he sees that I am married he will lose interest and the marriage can be annulled.’

Lizzie shivered as she heard the implacable merciless coldness in Ilios’s voice. It reminded her all too well of what the reality of her situation was.

Once, before their parents’ death, she might have been an impulsive eager young woman who believed that one day the sensuality of her nature would find joyous fulfilment with a man who was her soul mate. But that had been a long time ago. Since then she had believed that sensuality and its satisfaction were things she had put to one side without regret. Now, though—albeit against her will—she suspected that Ilios Manos had reignited her female desire. That made her vulnerable to him in a way that could not be countenanced.

For her own sake she should protect herself by returning to England and never thinking about him or seeing him again. For her own sake. But what about her family? For them, for their sake to protect them, she needed to stay here and accept the terms that Ilios was forcing on her. How could she possibly put herself first?

As though he had access to her private thoughts, Ilios told her unkindly, ‘You have two choices. Either you agree to marry me, and in doing so give your sisters the financial protection you claim is all-important to you, or you refuse and face the consequences. Because I will pursue you for repayment of your debt to me, with all the power at my command. And I warn you—do not make the mistake of thinking I do not mean what I say or that I will not carry out my retribution.’

Two choices? He was wrong about that, Lizzie admitted bleakly to herself. She had no choice at all.

Even so, she managed to keep her head held high as she told him, ‘Very well, then. I shall marry you—although there seems to be something you have overlooked in your calculations,’ she couldn’t resist adding.

‘Which is?’ he demanded.

‘You said that Villa Manos and its lands must be passed from father to son,’ Lizzie pointed out to him.

‘And so it shall be,’ Ilios agreed. ‘We are living in the twenty-first century now,’ he told her matter-of-factly. ‘A child can be created without its parents having to meet, never mind get married.’

‘But what about love?’ Lizzie couldn’t stop herself from asking. ‘You may fall in love, and then—’

‘That will never happen. I don’t believe in what you call “love”, and I don’t want to. I would never trust any woman to have my children and not at some stage use them as pawns for her own benefit.’

The harshness in his voice warned Lizzie that this was a dangerous subject, one which raised strong emotions in him, even though she suspected that Ilios himself would refuse to accept that. But not to believe in love—of any kind … Lizzie shivered at the thought of such a cold and barren existence. Love could hurt the human heart—badly—but surely it was also woven into the weft and warp of human life in a way that made it as essential as air and water.

‘When the time comes,’ Ilios continued, ‘I shall ensure that I become the father of one or possibly two sons. They will carry my DNA along with that of a woman who will provide the eggs before being carried by a surrogate. Neither women will know who I am, because it will not be any of their business. My sons will grow up with me, knowing that I am their father.’

‘But they will never know their mother.’ Lizzie’s shock couldn’t be hidden. ‘Aren’t you concerned about how that might affect them?’

‘No. Because they will grow up knowing that they were planned and wanted—by me—and why. They will know too that I have protected them from exploitation by any woman using them for her own financial advantage. They will be far too busy learning what it means to be a Manos to worry about the absence from their lives of a woman they can call “Mother”. Unlike many other children they will never be in the position of believing that their mother loves them above all else only to find that she does not …’

Was this the reason he refused to believe in love?

‘Is that what happened to you?’ she asked softly, driven again to feel pity for the child he must have been, despite the way he had behaved towards her. The words were spoken before she could check them.

The softness of Lizzie’s voice touched a previously unrecognised area of raw pain within him that immediately had Ilios fighting to deny its existence—furious with himself for having such a vulnerability, and even more furious with Lizzie for so accurately finding it.

‘Don’t waste your time or your pity trying to psychoanalyse me. All I want from you is payment of your debt to me. Nothing less and nothing more,’ he told her coldly.

It was all too much for her to take in, Lizzie admitted numbly. Physical and emotional exhaustion claimed her as the miles flew by, and her eyes ached to be closed just as her mind ached for the panacea of sleep, so that it could escape for a little while from the daunting prospect ahead of her. If it was cowardly to allow herself to find that escape in sleep, then she would just have to be a coward, Lizzie told herself, and she allowed her eyes to close.

He had got what he wanted, so why wasn’t he feeling a greater sense of triumph? Ilios wondered. Why wasn’t he filled with a sense of righteous satisfaction in having forced Lizzie to make reparation? He had the right and the justification for feeling both of those things, after all.

Some sense he hadn’t known he possessed alerted him to the fact that Lizzie had fallen asleep again. He glanced at her. At least she would make a convincing wife—which, of course, was exactly why he had hit on this method of making her pay what she owed him. It was a perfectly logical and sensible decision for him to have made, and one which would leave him with the balance sheet of his pride healthily in credit. That was why he had been able to offer her the additional inducement of a cash payment. There was no other reason. No question of him actually having felt some sort of ridiculous compassion for the plight of her family. He simply wasn’t that kind of man and never would be. If Lizzie Wareham was the victim of circumstance rather than her own greed, as she insisted to him she was, then what was that to him? Nothing.