He’d waited long enough, that cold, set expression said. Now he wanted explanations.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘WE HAVE some talking to do.’
Theo had no idea how he kept control over his voice. The coldly burning rage inside him would keep fighting to get away from his determination to rein it in, and the resulting conflict made his tone brutal and cold as a sword of ice.
He wanted to know just what the hell was going on. How the woman he had last seen in a London hotel room—the woman who had wanted only a one-night stand, no names, no information—had turned up on Helikos, at his father’s house, in his father’s pool.
Though he would be able to think much more clearly if she would just cover up.
‘Don’t you have a wrap or something? Something to put on.’
‘I—I’m not cold.’
‘It’s not your temperature I was thinking of!’
He knew he was glaring ferociously. The look in her eyes and the way that she took an instinctive step backwards, away from him, told him that. But he had been knocked off balance by the discovery of her in the pool and being close to her, like this, only made matters so much worse.
He had thought that his memories of her soft-skinned, naked body were arousing enough—in fact, he had tried to convince himself that he had exaggerated her appeal. No woman, no real, living, breathing woman, could have been as physically appealing as his recollections told him she had been. But those recollections had been nothing but the truth.
Less than the truth, in fact. Because the memories had none of the warm, physical presence of this woman. And though the white swimming costume might be modest when compared with the skimpy bikinis worn by so many on the Greek beaches, its subtle sexuality was doing devastating things to his heart rate and his ability to think. The stretchy material clung to the swell of her breasts and hips, the thin straps revealing the peachy skin and soft curves of her shoulders, while the cutaway shape made her legs seem endlessly elegant. Just to think of those long legs curled around his waist, squeezing tight as she gave herself up to the throes of her orgasm, threatened to blow his mind into tiny, spinning splinters that were impossible to form into any coherent thoughts.
‘We might both be able to talk more rationally if you were more—respectably dressed.’
That softly curved mouth took on a mutinous set that wasn’t quite matched by the fiare of something in her eyes. Not anger, but something wild and defiant, clashing with his dark glare until he almost felt he could see sparks in the air between them.
‘And you think that your clothing is so much more decorous?’ she flashed back, lacing the words with an unexpected sting.
‘Is that a way of saying that you don’t trust yourself to keep your hands off me?’ Theo said scornfully. ‘Because you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t believe you. You had no trouble tearing yourself away from my bed that night…’
‘That night was a mistake and one I’ve regretted ever since.’
‘Not as much as I have, lady. I don’t happen to go in for one-night stands and if I’d known you were going to disappear like that, I’d have had more than second thoughts about the whole situation. And then when I find you swimming in my father’s pool—’
‘I never tried to deceive you in any way. I told you exactly what…’
Her voice died abruptly as she realised just what he had said. All colour fied from her cheeks, leaving her looking white as a ghost.
‘Your father’s—!’
She actually glanced back at the pool and then back to his face, her grey eyes wide with shock and disbelief.
‘Did you say…?’
This couldn’t be real! It couldn’t be happening, Skye thought in desperation. Please let it not be happening. Please let it be a dream—a nightmare from which she could wake.
He couldn’t have said my father’s pool. Because that would make him Cyril’s son. The son of the man she had to marry. The son of the man who held the fate of her whole family in his hands and who could destroy their hope of a future if he chose.
She actually caught a tiny part of her arm in her fingers and pinched hard, praying it might bring her out of the horror. But, of course, nothing happened. She was still standing there, bathed in the Greek sunlight, with the only sound that of a faint ripple of the water in the pool where a breeze hit it.
And Anton was standing beside her, big and dark and dangerous-looking.
‘But you said your name was Anton.’
She flung the accusation into his cold, set face, but his expression didn’t change and he continued to regard her with a stony lack of expression.
Anton…Antonakos. Suddenly the truth fell into place with a shock that made her head spin.
‘You lied to me!’
His shrug was a swift, careless dismissal of the charge.
‘I was economical with the truth. I find it’s often the best policy until I get to know someone’s real motives.’
The cold, slashing look he flung at her left her in no doubt that she had been included in the group of people whose motives he considered suspect. The ice in it seemed to take away all the heat of the sun so that her skin crawled with goose-bumps and it was all she could do to suppress an instinctive shiver. Reaching for the towel she had left on the wooden lounger earlier, she pulled it round her, knotting it securely over her breasts, under her armpits.
Covered, she felt a little more confident until he spoke again.
‘And, as I recall, you were the one who insisted we kept to one name only.’
He was right, of course, and the knowledge of it didn’t make her feel any better. Dear God, what sort of malign fate had brought her together with this man on that night? How had she had the appalling bad luck to walk into the one bar where Cyril’s son had been sitting on his own?
And what had he been doing in London? All she knew about Cyril and his son was that they had not been on the best of terms for some time. So did this man know…?
The terrible reality of the whole truth she had been keeping from him made her stomach heave nauseously.
‘Mine was at least my real one,’ she said, taking the risk of stepping a little further into the danger zone. ‘I’m Skye Marston.’
There was no flicker of anything in the opaque-eyed stare that he turned on her. So was it possible that his father hadn’t told him?
‘Theodore Antonakos,’ he returned, totally deadpan. ‘Usually known as Theo.’
The look that scoured over her made her feel as if it had scraped away a much-needed layer of skin, so that in spite of the bulky protection of the towel wrapped around her she felt exposed and naked to his cold scrutiny.
‘So now what?’ the man she now had to call Theo drawled with lazy mockery. ‘Do we shake hands formally and really do everything totally back to front?’
‘I think we’ll take the handshake as read,’ Skye returned stiffly. The idea of even touching him frankly terrified her. She just could not forget the burn of his skin on hers, the caressing touch of those long, powerful hands that could turn as gentle as the patting paws of a kitten when he chose or be as demanding as blazing fire. ‘We’ve already done that bit.’
‘And more,’ he returned dryly, and the wicked gleam deep in those brilliant black eyes told her that he remembered every moment of it.
As did she.
That