For a second she stopped in her tracks, a hand going to her breast as an intense pain tightened in her chest. This was the absolute worst place she could be in the world. For a second she felt hysteria rising at the irony of it. She, Angel Kassianides, was about to serve drinks to the crème de la crème of Athens, right under the Parnassuses nose. The thought of what her father would do if he could see her now made her break out in a cold sweat.
She bit her lip and forced herself to go on, breathing a sigh of relief when she had a quick look around the pool area and saw no one. The guests hadn’t started to arrive yet and, though there were some staying at the villa, Angel knew that they’d be getting ready. There was no reason for anyone to be by the pool, but still … an uneasy prickling skated over her skin.
She hadn’t been able to avoid coming here tonight. She and her waiter colleagues had been halfway to their secret destination in a packed minibus before it had been revealed, for ‘security reasons’. Angel knew well that if she’d bailed out of this evening her boss would have sacked her on the spot. He’d sacked people for less in his prestigious catering company. She couldn’t afford for that to happen—not when her income was the only thing helping put her sister through college and keeping food on their table.
She tried to reassure herself: her boss was English, recently moved to Athens with his English/Greek wife. He knew nothing of the significance of who Angel was, nor her scandalous connection to the Parnassus family. She busied herself placing out the tea lights in their antique silver holders in the middle of the white damask-covered tables, and sent up fervent thanks that, tonight of all nights, not one of the other staff were local. Things were so busy at the moment that her boss had had to call in their part-time workers, and they were all either foreign or from outside Athens.
Her only fear now was that someone at the party might recognise her. But, knowing these people as she did, she’d no doubt that in her uniform of black skirt and white shirt they’d not take a second look at her. She worried her lip again. Perhaps she could just stay in the kitchen and get the trays together and avoid—
Angel started suddenly when she heard the splash of water coming from nearby. Someone was in the pool. Carefully she placed the last candle down and made to slip away, back up to the kitchen. As if she’d been subliminally aware of it but had blocked it out, she realised that someone must have been in the pool all along—but not swimming, so she hadn’t noticed them.
The sky was a dusky violet colour, so perhaps that was also why she hadn’t—Angel glanced quickly to her right as a flash of movement caught her eye, and her legs stopped functioning when the sight before her registered on her retina and in her brain.
An olive-skinned Greek god was hauling himself in one powerfully sleek move out of the water, droplets of water cascading off taut muscles. Everything seemed to go into slow motion as the sheer height and breadth of him was revealed. Angel shook her head stupidly, but it felt as if it had been stuffed with cotton wool. Greek gods didn’t exist. This was a man, a flesh-and-blood man. And the minute she registered that she was standing transfixed, staring at him, she panicked.
But her body wouldn’t obey her order to move, or it would, but her limbs all moved in independent directions, and to her utter horror she found herself backing into a poolside chair and almost toppling over it. And she would have, if the man hadn’t moved like lightning and grabbed her, so that instead of falling back she fell forward into his chest, with his hands around her upper arms.
For a long moment Angel tried to tell herself that this wasn’t happening. That she wasn’t breathing in an intoxicating mix of spice and earthiness. That she wasn’t all but plastered against a bare, wet chest which felt as hard as steel, her lips just a breath away from pressing against skin covered in a light dusting of intensely masculine hair.
Angel tried to break away, and pulled back, forcing his hands to drop. Heat scorched upwards over her cheeks as she finally stood upright again and found her eyes level with hard, flat brown nipples. She looked up, swallowing, and her gaze skittered up and past broad shoulders to his face.
‘I’m so sorry. I just … got startled. The light … I didn’t see …’
The man quirked an ebony brow. Angel swallowed again. Lord, but his face was as beautiful as the rest of him. Not beautiful, she amended, that was too girly a word. He was devastating. Thick black hair lay sleek against his head, and high cheekbones offset an impossibly hard jaw. His mouth was forbidding, but held a promise of sensuality that resonated deep in her body.
Suddenly that mouth stopped being forbidding and quirked. She nearly had to put out a hand again to steady herself. A thin scar ran from his upper lip to his nose, making her fight the absurd urge to reach up and trace it. Making her wonder how he’d got it—this complete stranger!
‘Are you okay?’
Angel nodded vaguely. He sounded American; perhaps he was a business colleague, a guest who was staying over. Although somehow, in her muddled brain, that didn’t fit either. He was someone. She struggled to remember where she was, what she was here to do. Who she was.
She nodded. ‘I’m … I’m fine.’
He frowned slightly, seemingly completely at ease with his lack of dress. ‘You’re not Greek?’
Angel alternately shook and nodded her head. ‘I am Greek. But I’m also half-Irish. I spent a lot of time in boarding school there … so my accent is more neutral.’ She clamped her mouth shut. What was she blathering on about?
The man frowned a little deeper, his glance up and down taking in her uniform. ‘And yet you’re waitressing here?’
The incredulity in his tone made Angel’s sanity rush back. Only girls from privileged backgrounds in Greece went abroad for schooling. Immediately she felt vulnerable. She was meant to be fading into the background, not engaging in conversation with the guests of the hosts.
She backed away, looking somewhere in the region of his shoulder. ‘Please excuse me. I have to get back to work.’
She was about to turn when she heard him drawl laconically, ‘You might want to dry off before you start handing out champagne.’
Angel followed his gaze down to where it rested on her chest. On her breasts. She gasped when she saw that she was indeed drenched, her shirt opaque and her plain white bra clearly visible, along with two very pointedly hard nipples. How long had she been plastered against him like some mindless groupie?
With a strangled gasp of mortification Angel scrambled backwards, nearly tripping over a chair again and only just righting it and herself before there could be a repeat rescue performance. All she heard as she fled back up the steps was a mocking, deep-throated chuckle.
A little later, Leonidas Parnassus looked around the thronged salon and tried to stifle his irritation when he couldn’t see the waitress. It had made him uncomfortable, how urgent his need to see her again had been as soon as he’d walked into the main reception room. It had also made him uncomfortable how vividly her image had come back to him in his recent shower, forcing him to turn the temperature to cold.
And now her image surged back again, mocking his attempts to thrust it aside. He recalled how she’d looked, with a dark flush on her cheeks, those intensely light blue eyes wide and ringed with thick black lashes, staring at him like a startled fawn. As if she’d never seen a man before.
She had a tiny beauty spot just on the edge of a full lower lip, and he grimaced when he felt the effect remembering that had on his lower body. He hated having such an arbitrary response. But when he’d seen her arrive by the pool and do her work, with quick, economic movements, her glossy light brown hair pulled into a high topknot, something about her had stirred him. Something about her intense preoccupation, for patently she hadn’t noticed him in the pool. And Leo was not a man who was used to going unnoticed.
When he’d caught her against him in that completely