‘You have the Euros to pay for a taxi?’ her cool tormentor quizzed. ‘And a mobile phone handy to call one up? Do you speak any Greek, agape mou? Do you even know this address so you can tell the taxi driver where to come to collect you?’
He was deliberately beating her up with blunt logic. ‘Y-you have my mobile phone,’ she reminded him, hating that revealing quiver in her voice.
He responded to that with yet another of those irritatingly expressive shrugs against the glossy white wardrobe door. ‘I must have mislaid it, as you have your purse.’
Deciding the only way to deal with the infuriatingly impossible brute was to ignore him, Natasha started hunting the bedroom.
While Leo watched her do it, his narrowed gaze ran over the way she looked all neat and tidy in every which way she could be—except for the wet hair which lay in a heavy silk pelt down her back. A man could not find a bigger contrast between Natasha’s cool dignity and Gianna’s reckless abandon, Leo observed grimly. Where Gianna clung to him like a weeping vine, this aggravating woman was preparing to walk out on him!
‘Tell me, Natasha,’ he asked grimly, ‘why are you so eager to leave when only ten minutes ago you were ready to fall back into bed with me?’
‘Your wife got in here somehow,’ she muttered, checking beneath one of the cushions on the chair to see if her purse had slid behind it.
‘Ex-wife—and…?’
‘Maybe her claim on you has some justification,’ Natasha said with a shrug.
‘Like…?’ he prompted, and there was no hint whatsoever left of the provoking mockery with which he had started this conversation. He was deadly curious to hear where she was going with this.
‘The way you run your life is your own business.’ Chickening out at the last second from stating outright the real question that was beating a hole in her head, she gave up on the chair and tossed the cushion back onto it.
But—did he still sleep with his ex-wife when he felt like it? Did Gianna have a genuine right to her grievances when she’d barged in on them as she had? If so, then it made him no better than Rico in the way that he treated women!
Tacky, as she’d already said. She returned to her search with his brooding silence twitching at her nerve-ends as she moved about the room.
‘I do not have a relationship with my ex-wife,’ he spoke finally. ‘I do not sleep with her and I have no wish to sleep with her, though Gianna prefers to tell herself I will change my mind if she pushes long and hard enough… In case you did not notice,’ he continued as Natasha turned to look him, ‘Gianna is not quite—stable.’
It was the polite way to call it, but Natasha could see by the flick of a muscle at the corner of his mouth that he was holding back from voicing his real thoughts about Gianna’s mental health. And what did she do? She stood here eating up every single word like some lovelorn teenager in need of his reassurance.
‘In some ways I still feel responsible for her because she was my wife and I did care for her once—until she pressed the self-destruct button on our marriage for reasons not up for discussion here.’ And the tough way he said that warned her not to try to push him on it. ‘I apologise that she barged in here and embarrassed you,’ he expressed curtly. ‘I apologise that she found a way to enter this property at all!’ A fresh burst of anger straightened him away from the wardrobe. ‘But that’s it—that is as far as I am prepared to go to make you feel better about the situation, Natasha. So stop behaving like a tragic bride on her wedding night and take the damn jacket off before I take it off!’
‘W-what—?’ Not quite making the cross-over from his grim explanation about Gianna to the sudden attack on herself, Natasha blinked at him.
Which seemed to infuriate him all the more. ‘While you stand here playing the poor, abused victim, you seem to have conveniently forgotten about the money you stole from me!’
The money.
Natasha tensed up, then froze as if he’d reached out and hit her. Leo smothered a filthy curse because her hesitation told him that she had forgotten all about the money. Though the curse was aimed at himself for reminding her about it when he would have preferred it to remain forgotten about! Now she was looking so pale and appalled he grimly wondered if she was going to pass out on him.
A tensely gritted sigh had him striding over to her. Lips pinned together, he reached out and began unbuttoning her jacket with tight movements that bore no resemblance whatsoever to the other times he had taken it upon himself to do this.
She didn’t even put up a fight, but just stood there like a waxen dummy and let him strip the garment from her body, which only helped to infuriate him all the more! With the muscles across his shoulders bunching, he tossed the jacket aside, then turned to walk back across the room to the wardrobes. Hunting out a white T-shirt, he dragged it on over his head.
When he turned back to Natasha, he found her still standing where he’d left her, giving a good impression of a perfectly pale ghost.
Theos, he thought, wondering why seeing her looking so beaten was making his senses nag the hell out of him to just go over there and apologise yet again—for being such a brute.
‘Dinner,’ he said, taking another option, keeping up the tough tone of voice because—well, she was a cheating thief even if he wanted to forget that she was!
At last she moved—or her pale lips did. ‘I’m not hungry—’
‘You are eating,’ he stated. ‘You have had nothing since you threw up in my London basement.’
And reminding her of that was Leo Christakis well and truly back as the blunt-speaking insensitive brute, Natasha noted.
Even in the T-shirt and chinos.
And his feet bare…
She felt like crying again, though why the sight of his long, bronzed bare feet moving him so gracefully across the room to the door made her want to do that Natasha did not have a clue, but suddenly she just wanted to sit in a huddle in a very dark corner somewhere and…
He pulled the bedroom door open, then stood there pointedly waiting for her to join him. Head lowered, she went because there was no point in continuing to argue with him when all he had to do was to mention the money to devastate her every line of defence.
Hard, tough, unforgivably ruthless, she reminded herself, wondering how she had allowed herself to forget those things about him while she had been giving him free use of her body—as a part of their deal.
She didn’t look at him as she walked past him and out into the hallway. She kept her head lowered when he stepped in front of her to lead the way through the apartment and into a room lit by flickering candle-light and another glass wall. Bernice was there, arranging the last pieces of cutlery on a white linen tablecloth intimately set for two. Candles flickered. Beyond the table stood the night view of Athens, making the most romantic backdrop any woman could wish for.
Any romantically hopeful woman, that was.
Friction stung the atmosphere and the housekeeper smiled and said something in Greek to Leo. He replied in the same language as he held out a chair for Natasha to use. After that there was no privacy to speak of anything personal because a maid arrived to serve them. Natasha had a feeling Leo had arranged it that way so he didn’t get into yet another dogfight with her, but the tension between them made it almost impossible to swallow anything, though she did try to eat. When she couldn’t manage to swallow another beautifully presented morsel, she stared at the view beyond the glass window, or down at the leftover food on her plate, or at the crisp white wine he had poured into the glass she was fingering without drinking—anywhere so long as it wasn’t at him.
Then he shattered it. Without any hint at all that one swift glance from his eyes had sent the maid disappearing