style="font-size:15px;"> She looked away from the voluptuous model again, reminding herself that Leo’s sex life was none of her business. Even so, the awareness that he had invited his lover to their wedding stung like salt on an open wound. Get over yourself, she told herself sternly. The wedding ring on her finger had never been intended as a promise that Leo belonged to her in any way. Their marriage was a fake steadily turning into a farce, she ruminated. So far, she had met Leo’s infatuated stepmother, the jealous and spiteful Elexis and now she had Mariana Santos covertly sending the bridegroom a look of burning longing.
Leo had a toxic effect on women, she decided. A little taste of Leo and it seemed women tended to become strongly attached to him and then pine for him. Her nose wrinkled and she thanked her lucky stars that she was not so easily impressed. If that was true, why was she stressing about his obvious compelling attraction in the eyes of other women? It shouldn’t bother her, should it? She should be able to ignore those other women and not care. Letty swallowed hard, unable to fathom her own reactions and annoyed that the indifference she needed to project towards Leo with regard to his extra-marital interests was nowhere to be found. If she was annoyed, why was she annoyed?
That thorny question occupied her brain throughout the reception that followed. It swept her through the wedding speeches and her mother’s brief tribute, which brought tears to her daughter’s eyes. She strayed into a polite conversation with Leo’s father, Panos, and her own grandfather, who it seemed was in a rather glum mood because Leo had recently uncovered some financial irregularities within his company, which Isidore felt he should’ve discovered for himself.
‘Leo’s got fantastic financial ability,’ Panos Romanos contended with a clear pride in his son’s abilities that warmed Letty towards the older man.
‘Oh, I’m not denying that,’ Isidore responded. ‘Our businesses couldn’t be in stronger hands than his.’
Leo spanned a lean hand across Letty’s stiff spine. ‘It’s time for us to open the dancing,’ he murmured softly in her ear. ‘One more hour and then we’re out of here.’
Letty twisted her head, eyes wide with surprise. ‘Only an hour… Where are we going?’
‘Ios…the island,’ Leo told her as he urged her on to the dance floor, wondering why she was pulling back from him to ensure a large space separated them.
‘But we can’t both leave the children!’ Letty exclaimed.
‘They’re coming too,’ Leo soothed, long brown fingers smoothing down her arms in a curiously caressing motion that sent the oddest little shiver shooting down her taut spinal cord. ‘The kids, the nannies, the whole shebang… Happy now?’
‘But I didn’t do any packing for them and they probably need new clothes and—’ she began in bemusement.
‘That’s why I employ staff. It’s all taken care of for us,’ Leo soothed, lowering his dark head, tawny eyes ablaze with gold below the lights, enhanced by the black lace frame of his lashes. ‘And once we arrive I will finally have you all to myself, yineka mou.’
Letty stared up at him in confusion, questioning why he would make such a statement and ducking her head to peer around him to see if there was someone nearby for whom he might be putting on an act. Why else would he say such a thing? Coincidentally, Mariana Santos was only a couple of feet away, dancing in the arms of another man, and Letty received a frozen look from the brunette, who had clearly been watching the bridal couple closely. Of course she was, Letty reflected ruefully. Leo was much more Mariana’s property than he would ever be his wife’s but in public he would pretend otherwise. She marvelled that Mariana had attended the wedding to watch her lover becoming the husband of another woman.
Indeed, so busy was Letty’s brain that when Leo kissed her she didn’t even see it coming. One minute she was wondering what it was like to be a mistress…and the next? Leo was crushing her parted lips under his with an urgency that shocked her rigid, all that explosive passion of his smouldering and burning through her cool front and smashing it to broken pieces. She swayed, knees turning weak, the sudden pulse of answering heat low in her pelvis a treacherous self-betrayal.
It was just one little kiss and she swiftly tugged free of him and grabbed the back of a convenient chair to steady herself. For a split second she had been shattered by an urgent desire to flatten Leo to the nearest horizontal surface and have her way with him so thoroughly that he would never look at another woman again. And that dangerous thought stayed with her as she recovered from his sensual onslaught. Physically she was fine but mentally she was in another place, she recognised unhappily. He had only kissed her as part of the wedding show. Possibly he had kissed her too because Mariana was nearby, and he intended to make some sort of statement.
But as Letty went upstairs to the room where she was to change, she was much more bothered by her own response to Leo. There was the lust she evidently couldn’t suppress and that thought she had succumbed to in the same moment…an utterly pathetic and inappropriate desire to have Leo all to herself. In other words, while she was thinking with disdain of all the other women still caught in the trap of craving Leo’s blazingly sexual energy, she was no better and had absolutely no reason to feel even slightly superior…
IN THE BIG villa sited on the hill above the bay, Leo grabbed Letty’s hand when she would have followed the children and the nannies upstairs. ‘No, they’ve had enough of your attention for one day. Those kids were a nightmare to travel with,’ he said with a decided wince.
‘Because,’ Letty replied with emphasis, ‘they were overtired and overexcited and the journey totally disrupted their routine.’
‘Sometimes schedules have to be disrupted,’ Leo countered lazily, tugging her inexorably back to the entrance door and the darkness outside, which had prevented her from seeing much of the island as they flew in on a helicopter. ‘This was a special day and you wanted to share it with them. The downside of that decision was their exhaustion.’
Letty nodded, silently conceding that but more curious about where he was trying to take her. ‘Where on earth are we going?’
Leo recalled the flight out to Greece and the cross crying, continual demands and screaming from the children and gritted his teeth. Parenting was tougher than he had ever imagined but he was adapting because he hadn’t once contemplated leaving his nieces and nephews behind in London. Instead he had come up with a compromise for their honeymoon that would give Letty and him some much-needed space. Not for the first time that day his head spun with a definite sense of wonderment at the commitment he was about to make—one he had never anticipated. It was a huge step for him and he was still marvelling at the awareness that such an idea had even occurred to him.
‘There’s a guest cottage on the beach. We’re staying there.’
‘But we have to be here with the children,’ Letty began afresh.
Leo froze and turned back to her. ‘I am delighted that you have already become so fond of the children,’ he admitted truthfully. ‘But it would be good if you could concentrate…occasionally…on my needs.’
Her lashes fluttered in sheer bewilderment. ‘But why would I want to do that?’ she whispered as he urged her into the beach buggy awaiting them outside the villa.
‘We’ll
