Petra, left with no other choice but to comply, smiled meekly and slid into the driver’s seat.
‘Have you eaten?’ she asked a moment later as the car’s powerful engine turned over. ‘I’ve made you a booking at Poseidon.’
Andreas couldn’t fault her logic. It was what he normally did if he arrived with a woman in the late afternoon or evening. Sometimes they’d be in time to catch the sunset, sometimes they’d miss it, but a platter of fresh seafood and a Greek salad filled with olives, feta and fresh tomatoes bursting with Greek sunshine ensured that they would be fuelled for the night ahead.
But not tonight. Not when his so-called mistress was as jumpy as a kitten. Maybe she might relax at the house.
‘No, take us straight to the house. We had a late lunch. We will eat later.’
There was silence from the driver and yet Andreas could almost hear her mind ticking over, wondering just what was so important that they would rush back to the house and pouncing on the answer in the very next thought. He wondered how far Petra could be pushed. Would she leave if she could see her position was hopeless? He hadn’t wanted to lose her expertise but maybe that would be for the best. No one was indispensable. And he couldn’t have her thinking she had claims on him.
Likewise he couldn’t have the woman alongside him thinking that she could just sit there, as far away from him as she could get and gaping out of her window like some tourist
on a coach tour. Damn it, she was supposed to be interested in him!
He leaned across and wrapped an arm around her, cursing when her startled response earned raised eyebrows from their driver in the rear-vision mirror.
‘It’s not far to Fira,’ he told Cleo as the car powered up the road from the airport.
It was as he said. Within a few minutes the car had climbed its way past small picturesque villages and scattered whitewashed hotels to a road along the very edge of the island where it became more built up. On one side the land sloped down gently to where they’d just come, the lights of the airstrip bright in the dark night. On the other side, the land fell away steeply, to a dark flat sea. A scattering of lights shone across the waters while in front there seemed a sweeping curve of lights into the distance that curved in tiers down a hillside before being swallowed up by the darkness.
‘It is hard to appreciate in the dark,’ Andreas told her, the stroke of his thumb on her upper arm doing all kinds of crazy things to her breathing, ‘but Santorini is actually a collection of small islands, the remnants of an ancient eruption. Fira, the capital, is built on the lip of the crater. The lights you see further on belong to the town of Oia. Like Fira, it is a very beautiful town, full of narrow cobbled streets and beautifully restored buildings, centuries of years old. Some say the sunset in Oia is the best in the world. I will take you there if you like.’
She suspected he was merely acting his part, she knew she should be, but still the very picture of sharing a sunset with this man worked its way into her soul so much that she almost wanted it to be real. Her voice, when she found it, was breathless and short, and it was no trouble for her to inject into it the necessary enthusiasm. ‘I would like that, very much.’
There was a strangled sound from the front seat, followed
by a cough and a murmured apology. ‘Andreas is right, Cleo,’ Petra said, steering the car through a succession of narrower and narrower streets, past ornate iron gateways and walls of polished white set off with colourful bougainvilleas that caught Cleo’s eye. ‘It is only a small island, but there is much to see on Santorini. Will you be staying long?’
Cleo shot a look at Andreas, who was scowling again, and she wondered if it was because she’d made such a hash of things that he was already regretting their deal and the time he’d said they’d have together. ‘Maybe a few weeks,’ she offered nervously, ‘maybe less…’
In the rear-view mirror she saw their driver’s eyebrows shoot up as she pulled up before a private garage alongside a red-brick building that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Venice and waited for the automatic door to roll up. ‘That long? How lovely for you. It will be like a wonderful holiday.’
‘Of course,’ Andreas added with a growl as Petra steered the car into the garage and pulled to a stop. ‘There’s every chance she may stay longer.’
‘Why did you say that?’ Petra had bid them goodnight and left them in the lobby, retiring to her own suite, and meanwhile Cleo had been playing and replaying the words over in her head, so much so that she’d barely taken in the details of the house, other than just a handful of impressions. Grand proportions, furnishings that were both elegant and exquisite, it was more a palace than any humble home she’d ever seen.
‘Say what?’ Andreas sounded almost bored as he instructed the hired help to take care of the luggage and led the way to his suite of rooms, and yet there was too much coiled tension in his every step, his every movement, for her to believe that. Even his words were brimming with tension. The sound of her heels clicking on the terrazzo floor only served to ratchet it up.
‘Why did you say I might stay longer?’
‘Because you made it sound like you weren’t planning on staying at all.’
‘I wasn’t sure you’d want me to.’
‘And I thought we had a deal.’
Maybe so, but she knew he wasn’t happy with her, knew she’d failed to impress him with her acting skills. But what did he expect when she’d never been a mistress, didn’t know how a mistress was supposed to act? It wasn’t as if she’d blown it in front of his business partners. It had only been his driver—his right-hand woman.
An exceptionally beautiful right-hand woman.
Could the act all be for her benefit?
‘Petra is very beautiful.’
He shrugged, but gave every impression of knowing who he was talking about. ‘Is she? She’s good at what she does.’
‘And she lives here with you, in this—’ she looked around her, at the exquisite wall hangings and period furniture ‘—this
house
?’
‘The offices of Xenides Properties are here. I’m often away and Petra works long hours. It’s an arrangement that works well for both of us.’
There was no hint of any attachment in his words or the tone of his voice. In fact he could have been talking about any employee. Maybe her hunch had been wrong. Maybe he was just aware of Petra’s obvious resentment for his lifestyle and his constant change of companions? Or maybe he was just angry with her own hopeless acting skills. She could hardly blame him if he was.
‘Here we are.’ A pair of carved timber doors stood at the end of a passageway. He pushed them both open and her eyes opened wide. ‘The sitting room,’ he said, still moving.
She stayed where she was and let herself gape. By now she
should have been used to the luxury—luxury suites in London hotels, a personal private jet with wrap-around leather and champagne on tap—but still the sheer opulence of his everyday lifestyle made her jaw drop. For this was no rented accommodation or flying office, this was his home. And this one room was large enough to house her entire family back home.
‘How much money do you have?’
And he turned and looked at her, a cold expression charging his eyes. ‘Does it matter?’
‘Well, no. It’s just…’
‘Do not fear, I have more than enough to pay for you.’
His words shouldn’t have stung but somehow they did. The notion he was paying to have her here, to stroke her hand with his thumb and kiss her when he needed to look as if he had someone to kiss.
It wasn’t as if he were paying her for sex. She was merely acting. Pretending. And yet there was no pretence about the impact his touch and his kisses had on her. It made no sense. She’d been the one to insist on no sex, so why was it that his touch made her think of nothing else? Why did his kisses make her hunger for that which she had refused to entertain? Did he really not feel it too, this ribbon of desire that seemed to tug her ever closer to his side?
No! Andreas was right. This was a commercial arrangement, not some fairy-tale Cinderella story. In a month’s time, or however long it took, she’d leave Santorini and go back to her home in Kangaroo Crossing, albeit a million dollars richer than when she’d arrived. For a girl with her background and her chances in life, surely that was fairy tale enough. And yes, clearly there was no question he couldn’t afford it.
‘Come on, then,’ he said gruffly as he tugged off his tie, pointing towards a door on the far side of the room at the same time. ‘Let’s get this over with.’
‘W
HA
…? What do you mean?’
Andreas sighed. What the hell had he been thinking to contract this woman to act as his mistress? As an actress Cleo was as stiff and unyielding as a block of cement. As a mistress, she’d been a total failure. And she would continue to be, until she got over this problem she had with being with him. He tossed the car keys Petra had given him onto a dresser where they slid straight off and fell with a clatter to the tiled floor. Behind him she did the startled thing again, jumping as if he’d just thrown the keys at her. And the quicker she got over it, the better. ‘What do you think I mean?’ He tugged off his already loosened tie and shrugged off his jacket.
Pointless!
She stood there in the doorway to the bedroom, knowing only that he was furious. Meanwhile Andreas had kicked off his shoes and peeled off his socks, tossing them into a corner. The shirt was next, exposing once again that muscled chest to her gaze. She wanted to look away, but she couldn’t. She was transfixed.
‘Couldn’t you have even pretended to be my lover? Why do you have to jump like a startled rabbit every time I touch you?’
‘Because you do startle me. I can’t help it!’
He swore under his breath. ‘We should have slept together last night. Instead we wasted a perfect opportunity to get comfortable with one another.’
His trousers hit the ground and he kicked them carelessly aside. She wanted to resent him for his arrogance, for his knowing that the hired help would pick them up, for his wealth that allowed him to be that way, and most of all for assuming that she would abandon the one condition she’d set on this arrangement. But he made it so hard, too hard, when, instead of mustering a defence, she was busy admiring his lean powerful legs and the way his muscles played under his olive skin with the action.
Her mouth was dry, her blood thick and thumping slow. ‘I don’t understand. I told you I wasn’t prepared to sleep with you.’
He looked up at her then. ‘No, you didn’t. You said no sex. I told you there would be times where we would have to share a bed and you made no protest.’ He looked up at her, her feet still stuck to the floor in the doorway. ‘Go on, then, get undressed.’
Her mouth went dry.
Get undressed
. She could be in a doctor’s surgery, awaiting an examination, but then the order would be a request and it would be gently and considerately done, with a curtain provided for her modesty and discretion. Here, she was somehow expected to take off her clothes and climb into bed with Andreas glowering at her, dissatisfied and unrepentant. ‘Andreas, I…’
But he was already leaving the room, striding barefoot through a door to a room she could see brimming with marble and gilt. Seconds later he returned, stopping dead when he saw her still there, rooted to the spot. ‘You’re planning on going to bed fully clothed? At least I won’t have to put up with that flannelette armour.’ The black silk pouch that was his final barrier
hit the floor next, leaving him gloriously naked before her. He was beautiful clothed, carrying himself with an authority and presence that turned heads, but naked he was magnificent, broad shoulders that tapered down to a tightly packed waist and lean hips. He was so beautiful, just the sight of him caused her blood to sizzle. She closed her eyes and swallowed hard against a throat filled with cotton wool as he flipped down the covers and slid into the bed.
‘Last night,’ she began. ‘Last night I had my own bed. Why can’t I now?’
‘Last night we were in London. I told you we might have to sleep together, to keep up appearances. Given there is only one bedroom in this suite and the fact my offices are here, it wouldn’t look good if word got out that my latest mistress was sleeping on the sofa, because I certainly don’t intend to. Don’t worry, I’m sure I can resist you.’
She didn’t doubt it. But sharing the same bed as him, lying alongside his naked body when she already knew how his touch turned her flesh alight, she only wished she could be so sure she could resist him.
He pushed himself up on one hand. ‘I’m losing patience, Cleo. Are you going to take your clothes off,’ he growled, with more than a hint of menace in his voice, ‘or am I going to have to come over there and do it for you?’
She shook her head, fear congealing like a ball in her gut. God no, the last thing she wanted was Andreas undressing her. She’d claimed she was experienced. She could do this. But she wasn’t about to do it in front of him. She bolted for the bathroom, taking several minutes to calm herself, cooling her burning cheeks with water from the tap. Her luggage had not yet been delivered or if it had, Andreas wasn’t telling, so she stripped herself down to the camisole, bra and knickers and wrapped herself in a voluminous robe she found hanging
on the back of the door. It would have to do. This wasn’t about sex, or so he’d claimed. So what she wore to bed shouldn’t matter.
She emerged from the bathroom a good ten minutes or more after she’d entered to find the lights dimmed and Andreas facing away, his eyes closed as if asleep.
Please God he was!
She padded silently to the bed, stood there a second watching him breathe and decided this was it. She’d practically told him she was a woman of the world, claiming she’d had sex loads of times, so just sleeping with a man in the same bed should hardly throw her. She unlaced the tie at her waist and let the robe slip from her shoulders. Andreas didn’t stir and she gained confidence. He wouldn’t even know she was here. She turned off the light and slipped between the covers, hovering so close to the edge there could be no way he would feel her presence, and he gave no sign that he did, his breathing slow and regular, a pattern that calmed her own frantically beating heart.
On tenterhooks she lay there listening to his breathing, feeling foolish and naïve, even as the curtains of sleep descended one by one, closing around her and pulling her into their embrace, until she was surrounded by them, warm and comforting and reassuring.
And if those curtains felt as if they’d grown arms and legs and were fashioned of silken flesh rather than velvet, and breathed as if the mild night air moved through them, the brush of them on her shoulder like the warm brush of a lover’s lips, she could feel no less comforted.
Cleo woke alone in the wide bed to the spill of sunshine through tall narrow windows and a feeling of disbelief suffusing her veins. She was here. She was really here, lying in bed
in a centuries-old mansion on a Greek island and last night—last night she’d slept with a real Greek billionaire, a Greek billionaire who’d honoured her condition that sex was no part of this deal!
A shiver ran down her spine. Four weeks, the contract had stipulated. Four weeks she could be here, sharing Andreas’ bed. After last night the prospect was suddenly more thrilling than threatening. Scattered remnants came to her then, of a warm hand and a silken touch, of the press of thigh and a puff of breath at her neck, and the press of lips…
She must have been dreaming again.
She pulled on the robe she’d left lying on the end of the bed just as the chimes of a clock on a mantelpiece rang out, drawing her eye. Ten in the morning! Even allowing for the two-hour time difference with London, she hadn’t slept in so late for months. No wonder Andreas wasn’t here. He’d probably gone to work hours ago. And no wonder she was so hungry, it was hours since they’d eaten on the plane. She was halfway to the bathroom when it caught her eye, a patch of blue through the whisper-thin gauzy curtains billowing in the soft breeze, so blue that she was compelled to draw the curtain and investigate.
What she saw took her breath away. There was a terrace outside the window, whitewashed and dazzling in the morning sun, and then the earth must have fallen away beneath them, for a long way below shimmered a sea of the brightest blue she’d ever seen, a sea that stretched before another island that rose, tall and long and dusted with white buildings. And to the left sat another islet, low and wide and dark.
So this was Santorini? No wonder Kurt had raved about it to her. Even if he had never visited, even if he’d never intended bringing her here, maybe for once he hadn’t been lying. It was breathtakingly beautiful.
And now she had four weeks to enjoy it, to share it with Andreas…
‘You’re up, then.’
She turned with a start to see him standing in the doorway. He looked as fresh as the morning, his hair damp at the ends where it curled over his collar, a white shirt and fitted trousers making the most of his lean shape.
And suddenly she wasn’t sure what to be the more embarrassed about, finding herself staring hungrily at the delicious V of olive skin where his shirt was unbuttoned, or the knowledge that without intimacy they’d slept together and would do again, tonight. Damn it if her nipples hadn’t already tightened under the robe in anticipation, her pulse sending blood to all the places that shouldn’t even know he existed, but seemed to anyway. It was only sleep with him they had to look forward to, but that seemed to make no difference; she tingled all over.
‘I thought you’d gone to work.’
‘There were some things I had to attend to.’ He stopped in front of her and curled a hand under her hair, skimming her neck with his fingertips and drawing her closer, his eyes on her mouth. She sensed he was going to kiss her and she made no move to shift away, her eyelids fluttering closed on a sigh. Why should she when his touch felt so good, and when he’d agreed to her terms? Sex might be out but a kiss was definitely within the bounds of conditions she’d set. She could deal with that. Surely this was the best of all worlds?
‘Good. You didn’t jump,’ he said, abruptly letting her go before their lips had even connected.
She blinked, swaying momentarily until she regained her bearings. ‘I what?’
‘We seem to be curing you of your habit of jumping every time I touch you. This is a good start. Perhaps now you will be more convincing.’
‘Oh, of course.’ She studied her toes, while she pushed her hair back behind her ears, feeling a total fool for thinking he wanted to kiss her, a total fool for being so eager. ‘That is good.’
He was already turning to go when he turned back. ‘Breakfast is being served on the terrace if you’re hungry.’
She nodded, looking to his eyes for a hint, hoping to find a trace of the warmth and comfort she’d felt last night in her sleep, but there was nothing there and she knew what she’d felt had been a dream.
‘I’ll be along as soon as I’m dressed.’
There was nothing to feel disappointed about, she told herself as she took a shower in the luxurious marble bathroom, the spray from the shower more like a downpour, raining down sense on an otherwise wayward brain. What was her problem? She had a job to do for four weeks and then she would return home, a millionaire. Tenderness didn’t come into it.
She stepped out onto the sun-washed terrace and any remaining sense of disappointment evaporated in the wonder of the place he’d brought her to. What she’d glimpsed through the bedroom window had been magical. But outside on the terrace the view was simply breathtaking.
She could see from one end of this island to the other, the sweeping curve of dark cliffs topped with whitewashed villages that clung to the very edge of the cliff like icing spilling over the sides of a cake.
Andreas sat at the table already but, despite her growling stomach, she was too excited right now to sit and eat. How could she even think about eating when there was so much to devour with her eyes?
A breeze toyed with the ends of her hair as she stood at the balustrade, the air pure and clean as she gazed out across the sapphire-blue waters. The light was wonderful, more like
the bright sunlight of home rather than the grey misty blanket that so often shrouded London, defining everything with sharp detail, so that even islands far beyond this ring of cliffs could be clearly seen.
Either side of her, the town of Fira spread across the clifftop, a jumble of closely packed buildings, some adorned with splashes of colourful bougainvillea and punctuated by stairways and narrow paths that somehow combined harmoniously to create a picture of charm, while far below two sleek cruise ships sat anchored. For a second memories of Kurt once more invaded her thoughts, but only for a moment. She was no day visitor here; she was living here for a month.
‘What do you think?’
Andreas appeared at her side, his arm looping casually around her shoulders.
Appearances
, she told herself, willing away the jag in her heart rate,
he’s merely keeping up appearances for the maid busy filling up coffee cups.
But it didn’t matter so much any more, not when she was being treated to a place of such amazing beauty that the man-made seemed not to detract from but to complement the natural.
‘It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. I don’t know how you can bear to leave it.’
He smiled as if pleased with her reaction. ‘It is always good to come home. Come.’ He drew her further around the terrace, pointing out the various islands. ‘This is the main island, known as Thera. The island across the water is called Therassia, and the tiny one between is known as Aspronisi.’
‘What about that one?’ She pointed to the low dark isle she’d noticed earlier.
‘That is Nea Kameni, the volcano.’
Her head swung around. ‘Volcano!’
He laughed, a rich deep sound that in normal circumstances would allay her fears. But these were hardly normal circumstances.
He expected her to live on the edge of a volcano? ‘Like I was telling you last night, this ring of islands and these cliffs are the remains of the caldera after an eruption thousands of years ago. The empty chamber filled with sea water causing a massive explosion into which the volcano collapsed. This ring of islands is all that’s left.’
Despite the warming rays of the sun, Cleo shivered. The island cliffs formed a crater that was enormous. That something so beautiful could be created from something so devastating beggared belief. ‘But it’s safe now, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, yes, the volcano hasn’t erupted for some decades.’
Cleo wrapped her arms around her midriff. ‘You mean it’s still active?’