continued to stand there for a few more seconds just studying her, then he started walking again. ‘You will not need make-up for dinner here alone with me,’ he responded evenly.
Natasha pulled her eyes away from him to glance at the scramble of clothes she’d thrown onto the bed. ‘I don’t even have anything here fit to wear for dinner,’ she said, trying desperately to sound as calm as he had when calm was the last thing she was feeling.
He came to a stop beside her. ‘Wear the cream thing,’ he suggested with only the vaguest hint of distaste showing in his voice.
It was enough. Natasha shook her head. ‘I hate it.’
Beginning to frown now, he turned to look down at her. ‘Natasha, what—’
‘W-what are you going to wear?’ she heard herself blurt out, then grabbed in a tense breath because—in all her life she had never asked a man such a gauche, stupid question! And his frown was darkening by the second. She could actually feel him mulling over what to say next! She wanted to call back her silly question. She wished she weren’t even here!
She turned to face him. ‘Listen Leo, I…’
Then it came—his shockingly unexpected answer to her problem: he dropped the towel from around his waist. ‘Let’s wear nothing,’ he said.
The sheer outrageousness of the gesture completely robbed Natasha of speech. Heat flowed through her body, soaking her groin like hot pins and needles before spreading everywhere else. She tried to breathe. She tried to swallow. She tried to stop staring at him but she couldn’t. She tried to back off when he reached across the gap between them, but her legs had turned to liquid and were refusing to move.
He reached for the hand she was using to clutch the bathrobe to her throat and gently prized her fingers free.
‘Leo, no…’ She mouthed the husky protest with her heart clattering wildly against her ribs because she knew what was coming next.
‘Leo—yes,’ he interpreted softly.
Two seconds later the bathrobe fell to the floor at her feet and his hands were taking its place. Freshly showered skin met with freshly showered skin and her naked breasts swelled and peaked. Her shaken gasp was captured by the sensual crush of his mouth and her troubled world tilted right out of kilter as the whole sexual merry-go-round spun off again. She didn’t even want to stop it, she just threw herself into the dizzying pleasure of the kiss with her hands clutching at his solid biceps and her hips swaying closer to the burgeoning evidence of his desire and its formidable promise. Within seconds she was a quivering mass of nerve-endings, moving against him and kissing him back, her heart racing, her breathing reduced to fevered little tugs at oxygen filled with his intoxicating clean scent.
The sound of the bedroom door being thrown open with enough force to send it slamming back into something solid almost blew the top off her head. She flicked her eyes open. Leo was already lifting up his head. Way too dazed to think for herself, Natasha watched him shift the burning darkness of his eyes away from her to look towards the bedroom door, then copied him to look in that direction, too.
A woman stood there. A tall, reed-slender, staggeringly beautiful woman, wearing a dramatically short and slinky red satin dress. Her flashing black eyes were fixed on Leo, her exquisite face turning perfectly white.
‘Gianna,’ he greeted smoothly. ‘Nice of you to drop in, but, as you can see, we are busy….’
As cool as that, he turned Natasha into a block of ice as his wife—his ex-wife—threw herself into a rage of shrill spitting Greek. Leo said absolutely nothing while the tirade poured out. His heart wasn’t thundering. His breathing was steady. He just stood holding Natasha close as if trying to shield her nakedness with his own naked length, and let the other woman screech herself out.
It was awful. Natasha wished she could just sink into a hole in the ground. It was so humiliatingly obvious that Gianna felt she had a right to yell at Leo like this or why would she do it? Likening this situation to the one she’d witnessed between Cindy and Rico made her shiver in shame.
Feeling her shiver, Leo flicked a glance at her, then frowned as with a smooth grace he bent and scooped up the robe she had been wearing and draped it around her shoulders. ‘Shut up now, Gianna,’ he commanded grimly. ‘You sound like a shrieking cat.’
To Natasha’s surprise the shouting stopped. ‘You were supposed to be at Boschetto’s tonight,’ Gianna switched to condemning English. ‘I waited and waited for you to arrive and I felt the fool when you did not turn up!’
‘I made no arrangement to meet up with you,’ Leo said, bending a second time to pick up his towel, which wrapped back around his hips. ‘So if you made a fool of yourself, you did it of your own volition.’
‘You were expected—’
‘Not by you,’ Leo stated. ‘Here, let me help you…’
Trying to push her arms into the robe sleeves, Natasha found Leo taking over the task, but, ‘I’ll do it myself,’ she breathed tautly, and pushed his hands away.
She couldn’t look at him—did not want to look at his ex-wife. Embarrassment was crawling around her insides and she felt so humiliated she was trembling with it.
Speaking earned Natasha Gianna’s attention; she felt the other woman scythe a skin-peeling look over her. ‘So you like them short and fat now?’ she said to Leo.
Fat? Natasha burned up inside with indignation, huddling her size-ten figure into the all-encompassing bathrobe.
‘Much better than a rake-thin whore with a sluttish heart,’ Leo responded, reaching out to stroke one of his hands down Natasha’s burning cheek as if in an apology for his witch of an ex-wife’s insult. ‘Now behave, Gianna, or I will have Rasmus throw you out of here. In fact,’ he then drawled curiously, ‘I will be very interested to hear how you got in here at all?’
Daring a glance at the other woman, Natasha saw that she was standing there with her slender arms folded across her slender ribs. She had to be six feet tall and the way she’d been poured into that red satin dress said everything there was to say about the differences between the two of them.
No wonder she still claimed super-model status, she concluded, flicking her eyes up to Gianna’s fabulous bone-structure to see that her almond-shaped, Latin black eyes were gleaming defiance at Leo, her lush red mouth set in a provoking pout.
Leo released a soft, very cynical laugh as if he understood exactly what the look was conveying.
‘So, who is she?’ Gianna flicked another snide look at Natasha. ‘Yet another attempt you make to find a substitute for me?’
Natasha flinched. Leo drew her back into his arms again and ignored her when she tried to pull back. ‘Never in a thousand years could anyone substitute you, my sweet-tongued angel,’ he mocked dryly. Then he looked down at Natasha and, with the silken tone of a man about to rock her world off its axis, ‘In the form of a heartfelt apology to you, agape mou,’ he murmured soft to Natasha, ‘I must introduce you to Gianna, my ex-wife.’
‘I am your ex-nothing!’ Gianna erupted.
‘Gianna.’ He spoke right across the shrill protest. ‘Nothing in this world has ever given
