Demos Atrides felt the heavy hand on his shoulder, and for a moment it felt like the clap of doom. Then he recovered.
‘Theo!’ he exclaimed, with a forced expression of delight. ‘It’s good to see you. My PA told me you’d phoned from the jet to ask where I’d be tonight.’ He glanced beyond his cousin. ‘Where is Milo?’
‘Resting,’ returned his cousin tersely. ‘The flight was a strain. You shouldn’t have made it necessary, Demos.’
The words were a reproof, and Demos coloured slightly.
‘There was no need for him to come,’ he replied defensively.
‘Wasn’t there?’
Deliberately Theo shifted his focus to the woman hanging on to Demos’s arm like a gilded limpet. As his eyes lit full on her face for the first time he felt, like an electric shock, a response that was like a kick in the gut.
For a moment his brain churned. She wasn’t in the least what he’d been expecting from what he’d seen of her so far. He’d assumed that the brazenly sexy body would be accompanied by nothing more than a vacuous expression and an avaricious nature.
Instead, a pair of intelligent amber-coloured eyes flashed up at him, deep-set and lustrous, catching him with an unexpected beauty despite being caked in eyeshadow and their lashes clotted with too much mascara. Something showed in their depths, but before his scrambled brain could identify it it was gone. Theo dismissed it, and went on studying the rest of her face. It was layered in make-up, far too much of it, but the excess could not camouflage the height of her cheekbones and the fine, straight line of her nose. Nor could the sticky scarlet lipstick disguise the tender curve of her mouth.
Theo suddenly felt an odd desire to take a tissue and sweep away the acres of gunk smeared all over her extraordinary natural beauty…
For a moment, the merest instant, something stirred in him that had nothing to do with his immediate and all too easily identifiable reaction to the lush physical charms of the woman in front of him. Something that disturbed him—moved him…
He snapped his mind away. It didn’t matter an iota what he thought of Demos’s mistress. It only mattered that he got his cousin away from her and back to Athens and his engagement to Sofia Allessandros.
It was what everyone expected—especially Milo. He was desperate to see the next Atrides generation secure. He had never, Theo knew, recovered from the tragedy that had almost overwhelmed the family eight years ago, when both his sons and their wives had been killed when the Atrides jet had crashed. Theo himself had hardly had time to grieve. At the age of twenty-four he had found himself single-handedly in charge of the entire Atrides business empire as Milo suffered a near-fatal stroke at the loss of his sons. Business rivals, seeing the Atrides clan so stricken, had swooped.
Theo had fought them off, swiftly becoming battle hardened, and now, at thirty-two, the Atrides empire was stronger and wealthier than ever. No one dared challenge its ruthless boss these days.
All it needed now was a new heir for the next generation—Milo was right.
But it would not be Theo who provided one.
Marriage was not for Theo. Never would be.
If anyone was going to give Milo the great-grandsons he craved, it would have to be Demos—and Sofia Allessandros. As for the foxy piece clinging to Demos’s arm—well, she’d just have to look for another rich lover!
His eyes swept over her again. With looks like that it shouldn’t take her long to find one…
Leandra stared at the man looking her over with those dark, heavy-lidded eyes. Just stared. Oh, good grief, but he was devastating! Absolutely devastating! She’d heard enough about Big Bad Cousin Theo from Demos, heaven knew. He wasn’t just a tough, ruthless businessman.
Women flocked around Theo Atrides, and he helped himself to the ones he wanted, sampled them, then discarded them for fresh sweetmeats. Leandra could see why—and it was not, definitely not, just because he was stinking rich. Theo Atrides could have pulled women by the bucketload without a drachma to his name!
Leandra felt herself helpless under the impact of his sheer physical presence, from the commanding height of his six-foot-plus frame to the subtle but heady scent of his aftershave mingled with raw, potent maleness. The photos she’d seen of him—family shots in Demos’s apartment, glossy spreads in celebrity magazines—whilst capturing his eye-catching good looks, had not prepared her for the real Theo Atrides. Let alone for his effect on her.
She’d blithely assumed, because she was totally unattracted by Demos’s looks, that she’d be as immune to his cousin’s.
Oh, boy, what a mistake! Theo Atrides’s features were much stronger, his eyes keen and hooded, darker than his twenty-six-year-old cousin’s and far, far more knowing. His nose was a strong slash, his cheekbones powerful and high, and his jaw might have been hewn with a chisel. His mouth had none of Demos’s fullness, but was wide and mobile and, Leandra registered with a hollow feeling, a million times sexier…
In fact, in just about every atom of his being, Theo Atrides was a million times sexier than his cousin.
And a million times more dangerous. In an act of unconscious self-preservation Leandra veiled her assessing eyes, adopting instead the vacuous expression of a bimbo that fitted the charade she was acting out. Doing so had its compensations. It allowed her to look him over just the way she wanted to—needed to.
Not that he’d look twice at her. All his women, however briefly they lasted, were either celebrities in their own right—a couple of supermodels, an opera singer and an Oscar-winning movie star sprang effortlessly to mind—or else they were blue-blooded scions of Europe’s cosmopolitan aristocracy and America’s Wall Street plutocrats.
Except that he was looking at her. Theo Atrides was looking her over very, very thoroughly, with all the expertise of a practised connoisseur of the very best in female beauty.
It was a nerve-tingling experience.
As she felt, almost physically, those dark, knowing eyes wash over her, Leandra could feel her legs jellify. Her breath had frozen solid in her throat, making it impossible to breathe. Her heart, it seemed, slewed to a stop in her chest and her eyes were stretched so wide she must be goggling. Then, just as she started to go into complete meltdown under his blatantly sexual appraisal, she realised she could see contempt openly sitting in his eyes. It was obvious what he thought of a woman dressed as revealingly as she was.
Two impulses warred within her. One was to grab the nearest tablecloth and cover herself up. The other was to slap his face so hard it would spin the stars for him!
Of course she did neither—she could not afford to.
Instead, she behaved in the way that her role in this elaborate charade required her to behave. Badly.
‘Demos,’ she husked, pressing into his side more closely, unconsciously seeking his protection from such an arrant sexual predator, ‘who is this gorgeous, gorgeous man?’
Leandra’s voice was slightly breathy. It was not entirely put on. Her body was out of control, reacting to this man’s presence in ways she had only ever read about, never experienced. It was a mix of terrifying and exhilarating.
Demos opened his mouth to answer, but was forestalled.
‘Theo Atrides,’ murmured his cousin. His voice had dropped a register and taken on a deep, dark husk of its own, heavy with his drawling Greek accent. The raw sexiness of it made Leandra’s toes curl, accompanied as it was by a kilowatt’s worth of sexual charge blazing through eyes which were suddenly, devastatingly, heavy-lidded and half closed.
He turned to Demos.
‘And this is…?’ He paused