had raised her and the safety of her daughters’ emotions along with her own sanity.
It was her second worse nightmare. The first had already happened. She’d married Dion Kiriakis.
“Savannah!”
Someone was shouting in her ear. Her hand instinctively tightened on the phone and the room came slowly back into focus.
“Leiandros?” Was that thready voice hers?
How pathetic she must sound to the self-assured man on the other end of the line, but then she doubted anyone had ever forced him to do anything he did not want to.
“Are you all right?”
“No,” she admitted. The last of her emotional reserves seemed to have dissipated with his overt threat.
“Savannah, I’m not going to let anyone hurt Eva and Nyssa.” His voice reverberated against her ear with conviction and assurance.
But would he let them hurt her? “How can you prevent it?”
“You will have to trust me.”
“I don’t trust people named Kiriakis.” Her words came in the flat monotone she couldn’t seem to shake.
“You don’t have a choice.”
Leiandros hung up the phone, satisfied.
The opening gambit had gone to him. It would only be a matter of time before he captured her.
Savannah and her daughters would be flying to Greece the day after Eva’s school let out for the summer. Savannah had agreed only after extracting a promise from him not to instigate any meeting between Eva, Nyssa and their grandparents before she had an opportunity to speak to Helena and Sandros.
How could she now show such concern for her daughters’ emotional well-being when her lies about their parentage had denied them the love of their family since birth?
No doubt, her arguments were an attempt at manipulation. Perhaps she intended to try to use the girls as bargaining chips for a larger allowance. While her current stipend was substantial, it would hardly support the designer clad, jet setting lifestyle she had experienced while living with Dion.
He put through a call to his secretary. “Arrange for my jet to land in Atlanta to transport Savannah Kiriakis and her children to Athens two weeks from today.”
He cut the connection after giving his secretary other necessary details.
Savannah had balked at flying on his jet, but after he told her the plane had a bedroom the girls could use to sleep in comfort, she had agreed. If she’d remained insistent he would have given in to her. The first step in his plan was the most important: getting Savannah and the girls to Greece.
Savannah had to be on the chessboard in order to engage her in the game.
He would not allow an ocean and two continents to prevent him from exacting full payment from her for all that she had cost his family, all that she had cost him.
Savannah had committed the gravest of all sins against his family, that of withholding her children, using lies and manipulation to cheat Dion out of his fatherhood and Helena and Sandros out of their rightful role as doting grandparents.
That would end in two weeks time.
When he had first met Savannah, he had been drawn to her apparent innocence, to the impression of untouched sensuality she had exuded. So drawn he had kissed her without knowing her name or anything else about her.
She had struggled at first, but within seconds had gone up in flames. Her response had been more exciting than any other sexual experience he’d ever had. Then, she’d yanked herself from his arms and told him she was married. His first, primitive instinct had been to tell her she had married the wrong man. And then her husband had arrived. His cousin.
Leiandros’s body still remembered the feel of hers. His mouth still hungered for her taste. His sex still ached for the release denied him that night. No matter how he tried to forget the forbidden desire for his cousin’s wife, she was always there, in his dreams, in his mind.
Even knowing she was a scheming, heartless witch, he wanted her. Now, he would have her. She would replace what he had lost and in the process, he would sate his body’s urge to possess her.
CHAPTER THREE
SAVANNAH carried a sleeping Nyssa toward customs, following Leiandros’s personal flight attendant who led an equally worn-out, but barely awake, Eva by the hand. Exhaustion dragged at Savannah and she looked forward to a shower with almost religious fervor.
She could have taken one on the plane, but had not wanted to wake Eva and Nyssa any sooner than she had to. Wound up by the excitement of flying in an airplane, they had not made proper use of the plane’s bedroom until an hour before landing.
When they reached customs, she was given VIP treatment and rushed through, an example of Leiandros’s power and far reaching influence. It increased the sense of a trap closing around her she’d had since stepping onto his private jet.
As she stepped into the main terminal, she forced her weary eyes to focus on the scene around her. The new airport was all modern glass and streamlined walkways, but still incredibly crowded. She sighed and shifted her grip on Nyssa. Her arms felt like two strands of pasta cooked al dente.
Even as her gaze swept the crowded terminal, she felt the fine hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. Turning her head slightly to the right, she met the dark, inscrutable gaze of Leiandros Kiriakis himself and she stopped. Not voluntarily. Her legs simply quit working.
She hadn’t expected to see him until the next day.
The flight attendant paused beside her, forcing the stream of air passengers to break and flow around them. “Mrs. Kiriakis? Is something wrong?”
Savannah could not make her lips form words. Her entire being was caught up in this first sight of Leiandros Kiriakis in a year. His black hair had been cut to lie close to the sculpted lines of his head. His sensual lips set in a grim line, his eyes betrayed nothing. He made no move to come toward them, but seemed content to wait, towering with unconscious arrogance above the sea of humanity that welled around him.
Taking a tighter hold on her sleeping daughter, she stepped forward only to bump into another passenger. “Excuse me. I’m sorry.”
The woman she’d bumped ignored Savannah and scurried away toward the luggage carousel.
A large man who looked like a Greek Sumo wrestler barreled into her from behind. Stumbling, she feared she would lose her hold on Nyssa when two strong hands gripped her upper arms and steadied her. How had he gotten to her so quickly?
“You’re dead on your feet, Savannah. Let me take the child.” Leiandros moved one hand from her arm to Nyssa’s back.
Without conscious volition, Savannah yanked herself and her daughter out of touching distance from Leiandros. “No. I can carry her, but thank you,” she tacked on belatedly.
His eyes narrowed.
“Mama…”
