think of it—everything about Jess felt different. ‘I thought the anonymity aspect appealed to you,’ he drawled. ‘You certainly seemed turned on when you had your back to me earlier. For a minute I thought you might be pretending I was someone else.’
‘Don’t try to change the subject.’
‘I’ll do anything I please. Just because I’ve made love to you doesn’t give you the right to censor my speech, or to demand answers.’
She bit her lip. ‘Is it such an awful story, then?’
‘Yes.’ He said the word without planning and it was like an overfilled balloon being popped by the prick of a needle. Like a bruise beneath your fingernail which only a white-hot lance would relieve. ‘Yes,’ he repeated. ‘Awful gets pretty close to it.’
‘Won’t you tell me?’
His instinct was to distract her—either by making love to her again, or by heading off to take a shower. Because she wanted to talk about the old Loukas, and he had spent a long time forging a new Loukas, a man as hard as the diamonds which were at the core of his fortune and a success beyond his wildest dreams.
He had uncovered secrets he would have preferred to have left alone, and had hidden them away deep inside himself. But secrets left their mark, he was discovering—a dirty mark which left a stain if you didn’t expose it to the sunshine and the air. He looked into Jess’s cool features, but for once her face was showing the emotions she usually kept contained. He could see the concern shadowing her eyes. He could hear an anxious softness in her voice, and something made him start talking. ‘How much do you know?’
She shrugged. ‘Not a lot. That you were an only child and your mother brought you up in Athens, and that you never knew who your father was.’
Loukas twisted his mouth into a grim smile. How easily a whole life could be condensed into a single sentence—black and white, without a single shade of grey in between. ‘Did I tell you that we were poor?’
‘Not in so many words, but I...’ Her words tailed off.
‘You what, Jess?’ he said silkily. ‘You guessed?’
She nodded.
‘How?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Oh, but it does. I’m interested.’
Reluctantly, she shrugged. ‘You just always seemed so...oh, I don’t know...restless, I guess. Like a shark moving through the water. Like you were always looking for something.’
It startled him how accurate her words were and Loukas nodded. Because she was right. He had been looking for something—he just hadn’t known what it was. And then, when he’d found it...
‘We were dirt poor, my mother and I,’ he said, wanting to ram home the fundamental differences between them. To shock her. To convince her—and him—that all they shared was a rare electricity in between the sheets. ‘Sometimes I used to hang around at the backs of restaurants to see what food they were throwing away at the end of a day’s trade, and I’d take it home...’ Take it home and hang around outside until his mother had finished with whoever she was currently entertaining. He remembered the different men who had stumbled out, some of them trying to cuff him on the mouth, while others had pressed a few coins into his hand. But Loukas had never kept those coins. He’d put them in the poor box at the nearby church...unwilling to accept money which was tainted, no matter how hungry he’d been. ‘Although I took what jobs I could, just as soon as I was old enough—running errands, sweeping restaurants, polishing cars— anything, really.’
‘And your mother?’ she questioned hesitantly. ‘Did she work?’
‘She didn’t have time to work,’ he said bitterly. ‘She was too busy devoting herself to whoever her current love interest was. She always had to have a man around and a child like me was only ever going to get in the way. So for the most part, I was left to my own devices.’
‘Oh, Loukas,’ she breathed.
‘I lived from hand to mouth,’ he continued grimly. ‘I worked at the ferry port in Piraeus as soon as I was old enough, until I’d saved up enough money to take myself off to a new life. I didn’t go back to Greece for a long, long time. I did my own tour of Europe, only it was nothing like the ones you see advertised in the glossy brochures. I lived in the shadows of Paris. I learnt to box in the Ukraine, and for a while I won amateur fights all over the continent, until Dimitri Makarov asked me to be his bodyguard.’
‘And that was when you met me,’ she said slowly.
Loukas nodded slowly. Yes. That was when he’d met his fairy-tale princess, with her white skin and her blue eyes and the cutest little bottom he’d ever seen. Her coolness had fascinated him; she’d been restrained and cautious—nothing like his mother or all the women he’d subsequently been intimate with. She hadn’t been predatory or coquettish. In fact she’d fought against an attraction which had been almost palpable. And hadn’t the fact that his princess had presented him with her virginity been like a master stroke in capturing his heart as well as his body, culminating in that proud proposal of marriage which had been thrown back in his face? He gave a bitter laugh. What a fool he had been.
‘Yes,’ he said, with a note of finality. ‘That was when I met you.’
‘And did you ever...?’ She drew in a deep breath and he saw the rise of her tiny breasts. ‘Did you ever see your mother again?’
Loukas flinched, because it didn’t matter what hurt and what pain she had caused him—she was still his mother.
‘Only once,’ he said flatly. ‘I’d been sending her money for years, but I couldn’t face returning. And then, when she was dying I went back to find her living in a...hovel.’ His voice tailed off, before taking on a bitter note. ‘In thrall to her latest boyfriend—a vulture who was systematically bleeding her dry of her dignity, as well as all the money I’d sent her. I remember how weak she was when she took my hand and told me that she loved this particular loser. And even though she’d been a notoriously bad picker of men all her life—this one was in a class of his own. He had neglected to give her any pain relief—he’d been too busy spending her money at the casino.’
‘Was that when you got the scar?’ she said slowly.
Loukas nodded, realising how alien this must all sound to someone like her. ‘Neh,’ he drawled, the flicker of anger not far from the surface. He remembered being young and fit and prepared to fight fairly, but his mother’s lover had not. He hadn’t seen the glint of steel as the knife had come flashing down out of nowhere, and at first he hadn’t even registered the strange, digging sensation in his flesh, which had heralded the eruption of blood. Loukas’s voice shook with rage. ‘The only good thing that came out of it was that he was arrested and jailed and no longer able to steal money from my mother. But by then it was too late anyway.’
‘What do you mean?’ she whispered.
‘She died later that week, just as I was being discharged from hospital,’ he said, his face twisted with pain. ‘I found all her paperwork and I understood at last why she had never wanted to talk about my father.’ He met the question in her eyes. ‘Like I said, she was a bad picker of men and that my father was abusive to her came as no real surprise. But the most interesting
