“There’s nothing wrong with liking the person you’re in bed with, Emily, and if I haven’t already made it clear, let me say now that I like you very much. I wouldn’t have asked you to come away with me if I didn’t.”
Her smile turned into a thinly disguised yawn. “That’s good,” she said. “I’ll sleep much better knowing that, but I need to brush my teeth first.”
“Of course. I’ll use the head—bathroom in nautical terms, in case you’re wondering—in the forward cabin.”
She slithered off the bed and disappeared, a too-fleeting vision of slender, lamplit femininity that stirred him to fresh arousal. But he had his own rituals to attend to, not the least of which was making sure the anchor was well set for the night. Nothing like having a sailboat run aground to ruin the romantic ambience.
When he rejoined her in the bed some fifteen minutes later, she lay on her side facing away from him and was sound asleep. Just as well, really. She made it too easy for him to forget the rules he’d long ago set for himself. To those he rescued—the orphans, the widows, the elderly—he gave everything of himself because they didn’t trespass into his personal life. Those he associated with the rest of the time he’d learned to keep at a safe distance.
Even though he wasn’t touching her, he lay close enough that the heat of his body coiled around her. She knew that if she turned, if she made the slightest overture, he’d take her in his arms and they’d make love again. And she couldn’t do it. She was too terrified of his power over her. Terrified that as the pleasure he gave her built to an unbearable peak, she might utter the three words guaranteed to put an end to what she had rightly termed a fling.
He might like her very much, but that was light years removed from his wanting to hear her say “I love you.” Not that she did love him. In fact, she knew very well that she did not. Could not. Because anyone with half a brain knew that blissful, incredible sex didn’t equal love.
Men have a one-track mind, she once overheard an embittered nursing colleague say. They want a woman between the sheets, and they achieve it by making you feel as if they don’t want to be anywhere else but with you—until the next day or the next week, when they move on to someone else, and you’re left feeling slightly shopworn and incredibly stupid. The only way to gain the upper hand is either to fool them into thinking you don’t care if you never see them again, or else swear off sex altogether.
Apart from her one dismal experience with the third-year medical resident whose ego had surpassed anything else he had to offer, Emily had subscribed to the latter. She would not risk her self-respect or her reputation for the sake of a tawdry one-night stand. What was best, she’d decided in what she now recognized as pathetic naiveté on her part, was to settle for nothing less than complete commitment before leaping into intimacy with a man. But that prudent argument was before Niko Leonidas swept into her life, and swept out all her preconceived notions of what was best.
Sharing the same bed with him now, and so graphically conscious of him that her skin vibrated with awareness, she forced herself to remain completely still as she waited for his breathing to settle into the deep, even rhythm that signaled sleep.
Seconds passed. Spun into long, painful minutes. Nothing broke the silence but the whisper of the sea and the equally subdued sound of his breathing. He was a very quiet sleeper, unlike his father who snored lustily when he nodded off.
Cautiously she shifted her foot; tucked her hand beneath her pillow. And waited for a sign that he was as wide-awake as she was. He did not stir. Convinced it was now safe to do so, she stopped pretending, opened her eyes and admitted to the moon-splashed night the awful truth.
She was in love with him. She had been for days. She’d committed the ultimate folly and laid on the line everything she had to give, in exchange for what she’d always known could never be more than a passing affair. And now she was paying the price.
The painful enormity of what she’d allowed to happen overwhelmed her. Tears seeped onto her pillow and silent sobs shook her body. All at once she was a child again, left with a heart full of love and no one to give it to. She wanted Niko to look at her as her father used to look at her mother, as if she was the most beautiful, fascinating creature ever to grace the earth. She wanted the magic and passion and permanence they’d known. She wanted it all, and she wanted it with Niko.
In short, she wanted what he couldn’t give her.
“Emily?” His voice swam softly out of the gloom. “Are you asleep?”
“No,” she muttered thickly, “but I thought you were.”
She heard the rustle of the bed linen, felt his hand glide over her silky nightgown and come to rest at her hip. “Anything but,” he said, his voice sinking to a husky growl. “I’m lying here thinking about you…and wanting you again.”
He inched the hem of her gown up past her knees. Past her waist. His hand ventured, warm and possessive, between her thighs. “Emily?” he said again.
Any woman with an ounce of self-preservation to her name would have slapped his hand away, but not Emily Anne Tyler. No, she melted at his touch. Rolled onto her back, let her legs fall slackly apart and advertised the fact that she was more than willing to accommodate him. Well, why not, some distant part of her brain rationalized. At this point, she had nothing left to lose and might as well hoard as many precious memories as possible of this brief enchanted interlude.
He kissed the side of her neck. Murmured in her ear all the words men were supposed to murmur to a woman they planned to seduce. Words calculated to break down her resistance, to make her compliant to his every wish. Eventually he lowered himself on top of her and, pulling her legs up around his waist, eased himself smoothly inside her. As if, she thought, struggling to retain a grip on reality, God had designed them specifically for each other.
He loved her slowly this time, transporting her in leisurely increments of sensual delight until she could hold back no longer, then supporting himself on his forearms to watch her as she climaxed. When he came, she watched him, too. Saw the grim line of his mouth as he fought a battle he hadn’t a hope of winning. Saw how, at the last moment, he closed his eyes and groaned as his body shuddered in helpless surrender. The unguarded honesty of it all made her cry again.
“What is it?” he asked, clearly appalled. “Did I hurt you? Tell me, mana mou.”
“No,” she said, because confessing the truth—that with every touch, every word, every glance, he made her love him all the more—wasn’t an option. “Making love again was so beautiful, that’s all.”
A weak excuse, but thankfully he accepted it. Cradling her so that her head rested on his shoulder and his arm kept her close, he said, “It was magnificent. It will be the next time, too.”
She was able to fall asleep on that promise, comforted by the steady beat of his heart beneath her hand and lulled by the gentle rise and fall of the sea beneath the boat.
They didn’t wake up until almost nine o’clock. After a simple breakfast of yogurt and fruit, they took their coffee up on deck. Although summer’s intense heat was long past, it was still a shorts-and-tank-top kind of day.
“By noon,” he told Emily, pulling her into the curve of his arm, “you’ll be lying on the foredeck, stripped down to your bikini.”
“Mmm.” She lifted her face to the sun. “Lolling in a bikini on a sailboat in October. Not too tough to take, I have to admit.”
“Happy you decided to come away with me?”
“Who wouldn’t be? It’s lovely here.”
Right answer, but it didn’t quite ring true. Something was bothering her. “Are you sure?”
“Of course,” she said, and promptly changed the subject. “Will the water be too cold for swimming, do you think?”
“We can find out later, if you like, but it’s a bit too early yet. Emily, is there something—?”
“Early! Heavens, Niko, it’s after ten already. Do you always sleep in so late?”
“Only when I’m away on the boat. It’s my one, sure outlet of escape from the everyday routine.” He didn’t add that the constant danger inherent in his work, the risks involved, took a toll. He left that part of his life behind the second he cast off from the yacht club and took to the sea.
“Burn-out, you mean? I know what that’s like. It’s one reason I agreed to come to Greece and nurse Pavlos back to health. I needed a change of scene.”
“And the other reason?”
She chewed her lip thoughtfully. “I’d grown very fond of him during the time he was hospitalized. In a way, we’d become more like father and daughter than nurse and patient, and I didn’t feel I could abandon him.”
“More like grandfather and granddaughter, surely?”
“When you don’t have any other family, you don’t quibble about little things like that.”
A month ago, he’d have taken that remark and found any number of hidden messages in it. Now, he took it at face value.
“Even after all these years, you still miss your parents, don’t you?”
“Yes. Very much.”
“And I made it worse with my comments last night,” he muttered, cursing himself. “I tarnished your perfect memories of them.”
“Not really, because nobody’s perfect, not even my parents, for all that I tried so hard to idealize them. The truth is, I’ve sometimes thought it was as well they died young and together. They wouldn’t have dealt well with old age or being alone. And I would never have filled the emptiness left behind if only one of them had been killed in the accident.”
She captivated him with her honesty, which was pretty ironic considering his first impression of her had been that she wasn’t to be trusted. “They might not have been perfect, Emily, but they came close to it when they made you. I’m sure they loved you very much.”
“Oh, they loved me,” she said, moving away from him and gazing mistily at the blue horizon, “but they never really needed me. If you must know, that’s why I decided to become a nurse. I wanted to be needed. You don’t, though, do you?”
Her question threw him. “Why else do you think I put my life on the line to help other people?”
“Because they’re strangers who invade your professional life for just a little while. But your personal life…well, that’s different. It’s off-limits. A person only has to look at your relationship with your father, to see that.”
She saw too much, and he wouldn’t sink so low as to deny it. “Having him join the party isn’t my idea of a good time, Emily.”
She made a face. “My fault. I’m the one who mentioned him.”
“Then I suggest we make a concerted effort to get rid of him. What do you say we take the dinghy ashore and go for a walk on the island?”
“I’d love to,” she said with alacrity. “Let me get my camera.”
Her relief was palpable. Because she didn’t want his father hanging around, either, Niko wondered, or because she wanted to put distance between the two of them?
He shouldn’t have cared, one way or the other. Annoyingly he did.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A GREAT suggestion, Emily concluded, watching as Niko tilted the outboard engine clear of the water and the bottom of the dinghy scraped onto the narrow strip of gravelly beach edging the island. Luxuriously comfortable though it might be, the yacht’s big drawback was that it offered no means of escape when the conversation got out of hand. And it had, dangerously so, straying close to disastrous when she foolishly brought up the business of wanting to be needed. Another few minutes and her feelings for Niko, which she was so desperately trying to suppress, would have spilled out.
Hiding behind her camera gave her the chance to regroup. She took pictures of flowers enjoying a riotous last bloom before winter: wild geraniums and gaudy poppies; daisies and ice plant in shades of mauve and white. She snapped the yacht riding peacefully at anchor in the sheltered bay. And when he least expected it, she captured images of Niko; of his dazzling smile, his chiseled profile, his lashes lowered to half-mast as he squinted against the brightness of the sparkling sea.
The atmosphere on the island was different, she realized. Freer, less soberly intense. Here, she could breathe and not have to worry about keeping up her guard. If necessary, she could put distance between her and Niko. Contrarily, because she could, she felt no need to do so.
Sensing her change of mood, he matched it with a lighthearted teasing of his own. “If you didn’t have a camera slung around your wrist, you’d be up to your neck in trouble,” he growled with mock ferocity, grabbing her before she could escape after she’d caught him unaware at the water’s edge and splashed him.
That kind of trouble she could handle. “I wish I could say I’m sorry, and mean it,” she returned cheekily, and splashed him again.
Suddenly his laughter faded and twining her hands in his, he regarded her searchingly. “I wish I could take you away for a month, instead of a weekend,” he said. “Being around you is good for me, Emily. You remind me that there’s more to living than burying myself in work. I’m a happy man when I’m with you.”
Her spirit soared at that. Could he possibly be falling for her, too?
Well, why not? Wasn’t she forever telling her patients and their families that they should never give up hope? And hadn’t she seen for herself, time and time again, that miracles did happen? Why couldn’t one come her way for a change?
“Keep looking at me like that,” he went on, his voice lowering to a thrilling purr, “and I won’t be held liable for what I might do, which would be a mistake on two counts. This beach isn’t designed for comfortable seduction, and even if it were, I didn’t bring a contraceptive with me.”
Flirting shamelessly, she glanced up at him in her best imitation of a siren bent on luring him to destruction. “Then why don’t we go back to the yacht?”
His eyes darkened, turned a deep forest-green. “Race you to the dinghy, angel.”
Love in the afternoon was different, she discovered. Sunlight pouring through the window above the bed and casting dancing reflections of the sea on the cabin ceiling brought an openness to intimacy that, at first, dismayed her because it left her with no place to hide.
He soon put paid to that nonsense. He examined her all over, from the soles of her feet to the top of her head. He found the tiny scar on her bottom where she’d fallen on broken glass at the beach when she was little, and he kissed it as if it were new and still hurting.
He paid attention to every inch of her, sometimes with his hands, sometimes with his mouth and tongue, pausing every now and then to murmur, “Do you like it when I do this?”
Like? She’d never before felt such slow, rolling awareness of herself as a woman. He made her quiver with anticipation. He brought her body to electrifying life and made it yearn and ache and throb. He made her scream softly and beg for more.
Until him, she’d never climaxed. With him, she came so quickly and with such fury that she couldn’t catch her breath.
His touch sent her flying so high, she could almost touch the heavens, and he knew it because he watched her the entire time. Knew to the second when she hovered on the brink, and tipped her over the edge into a glorious, sparkling free-fall she wished might never end.
Then, when she was dazed with exhausted pleasure and sure she didn’t have the strength to lift a finger, let alone peak again, he buried himself in her hot, sleek folds and taught her otherwise. Caught in his urgent, driving rhythm, she swooped and soared with him again to a magnificent crashing finale.
At two in the afternoon or thereabouts, they put together a snack of fruit and cheese and ate it in the shade of the canvas bimini in the cockpit. They drank a little wine, and they talked, mostly about Niko as it turned out, which inevitably meant Pavlos crept back into the conversation, too.
“Was he cruel to you?” Emily asked, when Niko spoke briefly of his unhappy childhood.
“Not in the way you’re thinking,” he said. “Far from it. I never lacked for a thing. Clothes, toys, tutors, whatever I needed, he provided. When it came to my later education, there was no limit to how far he’d go to make sure I had the best. He sent me to the most prestigious boarding school in Europe—more than one in fact, since I managed to get myself kicked out of several.”
“Then why the estrangement?”
“He didn’t understand that there was more to being a father than spending money.”
“Or else he didn’t understand that you were crying out for his love.”
“It was never about love with him. It was about power. And from his point of view, money and power are one and the same. Which is another bone of contention between us because to me, money’s merely the means to an end. If I end up without any, I’ll find a way to make more, but I’ll never let it rule my life the way it rules his.”
“Why do you think he sets such store by it?”
“Probably because he grew up without any. He was the by-product of an affair between a housemaid and the son of her millionaire employer who abandoned her when he learned she was pregnant. If you asked him what his most driving ambition had been when he was a boy, I guarantee he’d say it was to end up one of the wealthiest men in Greece, able to pick and choose his friends, his associates and, eventually, his wife.”
“He appears to have succeeded.”
Niko inclined his head in agreement. “Yes, but it took him years. He didn’t marry my mother until he was thirty-one which, back then, was considered pretty old. She was just twenty, and the only daughter of one of his biggest business rivals.”
“Is that why he married her—to score points over her father?”
“No,” he said. “He really loved her. I have to give him credit for that much.”
“What a shame he could never see you as her most lasting legacy to him.”
“I was too much the rebel, refusing to toe the Leonidas line, determined to go my own way and to hell with anyone who tried to stop me.”
He’d never been so open with her before. Was it the lazy afternoon heat or their lovemaking that made it easier for him to share his life story with her now? Whatever the reason, Emily was hungry to know everything about him and prepared to listen for as long as he was willing to talk. “Did he want you to go to university?”
“In the worst way, and was pretty convinced he could make it happen since I wouldn’t have any money of my own until I turned twenty-one. He saw a business degree as the next logical step to my joining his empire. But I got out from under his control when I joined the air force, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. After I left the service, I spent a year in England with a former UN pilot who taught me everything he knew about mercy missions, and introduced me to the finer points of the English language. After that, I came back to Greece, took over my inheritance and set up my own operation.”
“And the rest, as they say, is history?”
He stood up and stretched. “Ne—and pretty dull at that, if you ask me, not to mention a criminal waste of a beautiful afternoon. What do you say to a swim?”
He was finished baring his soul and, for now at least, she realized she’d gain nothing by pressing for more. “Okay, if you’re sure the water’s warm enough.”
“Only one way to find out, Emily,” he said, dragging her to her feet. “You coming in of your own free will, or do I throw you in?”
“At least let me change into my bikini.”
“What for?” He dropped his shorts and briefs, pulled off his T-shirt and climbed onto the swim grid in all his beautiful naked glory. “Nothing like going au naturel, as they say in polite society, especially as neither of us has anything to show that the other hasn’t already seen.”
“Once a rebel, always a rebel,” she muttered self-consciously as she peeled off her clothes.
He favored her with a lascivious grin. “I hardly expected a nurse to be so modest, my dear. Even your bottom’s blushing.”
There was only one response to that remark and she wasted no time delivering it. Bracing both hands against his chest, she shoved him into the water. He landed with a mighty splash and she followed suit before he had the chance to climb back on board and exact his revenge.
After the first chilling shock, the sea was deliciously refreshing. Heaven had never seemed so close, Emily decided, floating on her back with her hair streaming out behind her and the big blue bowl of the sky arcing overhead.
Niko, whom she’d last seen swimming in a powerful crawl toward the mouth of the bay, suddenly bobbed to the surface next to her. “You look like a mermaid,” he said. “A particularly delectable mermaid.”
And he looked like a sea god, she thought, her heart turning over at the sight of his broad, tanned shoulders, his brilliant smile and the thick lashes spiking in clumps around his remarkable green eyes. Small wonder she’d fallen in love with him. What woman in her right mind could resist him?
They climbed back on board and lay down on the foredeck to dry in the sun’s benign warmth. He’d swum farther than he intended, a strenuous workout that left him pleasantly tired and happy just to lie next to her, his limbs touching hers, his fingers brushing lightly against her arm. Not moving, not speaking, just looking into her dark blue eyes and letting utter contentment sweep over him.
Was he falling in love?
He couldn’t be. It was completely out of the question. A misguided romantic fantasy brought on by brain fatigue or some other disorder of the mind, because he absolutely refused to entertain the possibility that it might have something to do with his heart. Yet if it was so impossible, why did he suddenly hate the man who’d taken her virginity? She belonged to no one but him, and should have waited until he found her.
“What dark thoughts are chasing through your mind?” she murmured drowsily, peering at him from half-closed eyes.
The unpalatable truth rose in his throat, bitter as bile. Scowling, he said, “I have a confession to make. More than one, in fact.”
“Oh?” A shadow flitted over her face. “Such as?”
“For a start, I’m jealous of my predecessor.”
Clearly at a loss, she said, “What are you talking about?”
“I’m jealous of whoever it was that you slept with before you met me.”
“I see.” She pushed herself up on one elbow, propped her head on her hand and regarded him thoughtfully. “Should I be flattered?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never found myself in this kind of situation before.”
And that, he thought, was the whole problem in a nutshell.
Before he met her, sex had been all about mutual pleasure with no strings attached. He never lied to his willing partners, never made promises he couldn’t keep, was never intentionally cruel. But sometimes he hurt them anyway because they wanted more than he could give.
Until now. Until Emily, when his initial plan had somehow gone terribly wrong and he found himself in danger of wanting to give much more than he could ever afford.
“That doesn’t sit well with you, does it?” she said.
“No. I prefer to stick to the rules.”
“What rules?”
“Those I’ve set for myself.”
“And you’re breaking them with me?”
“Yes,” he said grimly, uncertain whether it was self-preservation or self-destruction that drove him to bare his soul so brutally. “When I first started seeing you, all I ever intended was to act as a decoy.”
“A decoy?”
He heard the wariness in her voice edging closer to outright dismay, and wished he’d kept his mouth shut. But palming her off with half-truths left him feeling dirty and unworthy of her. And even if it didn’t, he’d said too much to stop now. “Yes,” he said. “To keep you away from my father. There being no fool like an old fool, I decided to step in and save him from himself—and you—by diverting your attention from an ailing old man to one who could better please you.”
