He halted at a couple of metres distance.
‘You’re Ariadne Giorgias?’
His voice was deep and beautiful, but it was his eyes that held her. They were mesmerising, a dark glinting chocolate fringed by thick black lashes. They swept over her in a cool assessment, made cooler by the stern set of his mouth, but she could guess what they sought. Her breasts, her legs, her child-bearing hips. Would she be a sufficient trophy?
She felt the proud colour rise to her cheeks. Anger and humiliation made her voice scrape in her throat. ‘Yes. I’m Ariadne Giorgias. And you are…?’
Sebastian heard the stiff tone and his expectations received instant confirmation. So, Miss Ariadne Giorgias, child of the Giorgias shipbuilding dynasty and his potential wife, was as spoiled as she was rich. Despite his fury at the trap he found himself in, he felt a curious edge of anticipation as he examined her face for the first time. Whatever transpired, this might be the woman he married.
Her face was nothing like the one he’d once thought the ultimate in feminine beauty, but he could concede it had a symmetry. He could imagine how his sisters would have described it. Heart-shaped, with those cheekbones.
She had creamy skin with an almost satin translucence, and quite astonishing deep blue eyes, glittering now with some sort of emotion. Her full mouth was especially sensuous, somewhere between sweet and sulky. An alluring blend of sultriness and innocence, if he could believe that. A siren’s mouth.
She could have been worse. If a man was blackmailed into marriage, whatever the failings that had brought the woman to this point, she should at least look presentable.
He swept the rest of her with a judgemental gaze.
Her hair was a pale ash, paler than it had been in the photo the magnate had posted, though her dusky eyebrows and lashes gave away its true colour. He supposed she was beautiful, if a man happened to admire that particular style of beauty.
She was slightly smaller than he’d expected, though in her designer jeans and jacket her body appeared slim and, he had to admit, graceful, with pretty breasts, a waist so slender a man could span it with his hands, and sweetly flaring hips.
As far as he knew anything about women’s apparel she was dressed well, nothing flamboyant. Limited jewellery, though what she had was no doubt the finest money could buy.
He realised his pulse was pumping a little faster than the average. All right, so she was attractive with those eyes. She could afford to be. She seemed pale, perhaps she was nervous, but he cut any softer emotions that might have evoked.
She should be nervous. She’d be even more nervous when she understood the sort of man she’d had the gall to attempt to add to her acquisitions.
As the full picture sank in he found his eyes needing to return to her face.
His lungs tightened. Yes, certainly, it could have been worse.
‘Sebastian Nikosto,’ he said finally, making a belated move to extend his hand.
Ariadne kept hers at her side. Never to touch him, she resolved fiercely. Not if she could help it.
His brows twitched, and she knew he’d taken note of her small rebuff. But he stayed as smooth as glass. ‘Your uncle arranged that I should meet you and show you around Sydney.’
‘Oh,’ she said softly. ‘So it was you who was to meet me at the airport?’
His eyes glinted, then were almost immediately screened by his thick black lashes. ‘I apologise for not managing to be there. Tuesdays are always demanding for my office and I’m afraid I got caught up. Still…’ He smiled, though it didn’t reach his eyes. ‘I guessed you would be quite experienced in these matters.’ Somehow his voice was the more cutting for being so gentle. He spread his hands. ‘And here you are. Safe and sound, after all.’
What ‘matters’? With a pang she wondered what he’d heard about her. Would news of the wedding debacle have reached this distant shore? ‘Experienced’ was no innocuous word. Or did he assume she must be easy? Traded like a piece of livestock on a regular basis?
‘No harm done,’ he added.
Offhand, to say the least.
She thought of the morning she’d spent waiting for someone—any friendly face—at the airport, her agony of fear and indecision after the long trip and being tricked onto the plane. Praying that somehow, against all the odds, she’d misunderstood, and there would be a representative of the Nikosto family waiting with open arms to invite her into their warm family home. Worrying if she should take herself to the hotel, or run like the wind to some safe haven. Only what safe haven, when she was a stranger here?
The only vague knowledge she had of Australia, apart from her memories of her parents’ home, remote flashes of that first little primary school, was the beach house her parents had taken her to for a visit with some distant relative of her mother’s. She had no idea where it even was.
As an apology this didn’t even rate. Had he been so reluctant to interrupt designing his satellites, or whatever he did? These days, did men expect their mail-order brides to deliver themselves to the door?
‘I’m sorry you are dragged away from your work now,’ she said, equally gentle. ‘Perhaps you would prefer to postpone this meeting.’
One thick black brow elevated. ‘Not at all, Miss Giorgias. I am charmed to meet you now.’
The words were smooth, but uttered in a silky tone that conveyed a wall of ice inside that elegant dark navy suit and pale blue shirt, colours that perfectly enhanced the bronzed tones in his skin and his blue-black hair.
Then, paradoxically, as if her coldness had somehow stirred the male in him, his dark eyes made an involuntary flicker to her mouth, hooked there an instant too long.
She angled a little away, her blood pulsing, indignation struggling with her body’s involuntary response to the disturbance in the atmosphere surrounding his big masculine body. Testosterone, no doubt. It was only natural he’d be thinking about her in terms of sex.
She pulled the edges of her jacket a little closer. ‘I’m not sure what my uncle told you, Mr Nikosto, but I came out here for a holiday. Nothing more than that.’
He considered her with an unreadable expression, then blasted any pretensions of innocence she might try to place on the situation.
‘I’d have thought Pericles Giorgias would have been in a position to buy his niece a bridegroom from any of the grand houses in Europe, Ms Giorgias.’ His eyes swept over her again in a smouldering acknowledgement of her desirability. ‘I’m surprised to have been so—honoured. And flattered, of course.’
The words blistered her sensibilities. She saw his eyes flare with a dark, dangerous emotion that wasn’t anything like feeling flattered, or honoured, and shock jolted through her. The man was angry. Was she such a disappointment? She didn’t want him to want her, but the insult sank deep, just the same.
But she mustn’t let him see her as some toothless lioness. He’d better learn she could defend herself.
‘I’m surprised you could be bought, a man like you,’ she mocked, though her voice trembled.
His eyes flashed. ‘You’d better be sure you know what you’ve bargained for, Ms Giorgias. Tell me, once you have me shackled to your side, what do you hope to do with me then?’
She met his smouldering dark gaze, and tried to repress visions of lying naked beside him on some wide bed. Of being held in his arms, pressed against his lean, hard body, his dark eyes…But, she wouldn’t…And he couldn’t want to…She’d never…
She quickly thrust the images away. What could her uncle have promised on her behalf? With a helpless sense of shame, she scrambled to find some gloss to minimise the outrage Thio Peri had committed against her autonomy.