steps before a vise-like grip had clamped over her upper arm and turned her. “Why are you here tonight? What do you want from me?”
The nerve of the man! “You approached me. You...you ordered me to stay and keep you company. You... I only spoke the truth.”
“So I’m supposed to believe the Plain Princess of Drakon—” he bit out her moniker with such sarcasm that Eleni flinched “—walks around masquerade balls, accosting men for kisses? That this is your nightly routine?”
“I did not accost you at all. And yes... I wanted a kiss. I wanted to feel less lonely for one night. I wanted...” Her voice caught, but she didn’t back down. “Which scenario threatens your masculine ego—that a woman could want to kiss a man, or that in your arrogance you think I came here looking to somehow trap you into kissing me?”
“You lied to me, Princesa. I asked you straight and you said you didn’t know me. Maybe you even got a little power trip from the fact that you knew who I was and I didn’t know who you were. Maybe it’s a little game you play every night with powerful men.”
“You’re crossing the line!”
“I’m sick of deceit and lies. If it is a kiss you want, here it is!”
If Eleni had had any sense, she would have slapped his arrogant jaw, hard. But no, when he touched his lips to hers again, she melted. She had no will or control over her body.
When he licked the seam of her lips, she gasped open for him, like a sunflower.
When he plunged his tongue into the cavern of her mouth, she shamelessly pressed against him.
His hands moved to her bottom and he pressed her against him, until she felt the evidence of his arousal. Until the hard planes of his body were stamped onto her soft curves. Until she was moaning, spreading her legs to feel more of him.
The kiss was over before it had begun, and yet it seemed to spin her senses. And the man who had delivered it looked at her as if she had agreed to sell her soul for pennies. “If you’re that desperate for a man, maybe ask one of your powerful brothers to set you up with one, Princesa,” he said mockingly. “The next man you play your little game with might not be as forgiving as me for your duplicity.”
Eleni stared at him, shaking from head to toe, burning with the unspent desire that he had aroused in her. Desire, she now realized, he had aroused with the sole intention of punishing her.
“I would not kiss you again if you were the last man on earth, Mr. Marquez,” she shouted but he’d already gone.
Try as she might to fight the temptation, she couldn’t help but run her fingers over her stinging mouth. Couldn’t stop tasting him on her lips.
Three months later
“I HATE THIS PLACE, I hate that I had to give up all my friends and move here and I hate you.”
The loud, blistering announcement exploded inside the conference room like a small detonation, jerking twelve heads toward the twelve-year-old girl standing just inside the room. Face scrunched, eyes brimming with fat tears, his daughter, Angelina, stood glaring at Gabriel Marquez.
A pounding began behind his left eye.
He had made his father’s small construction company into a billionaire real estate firm, he owned major chunks of multinational companies, he had palatial residences in nine different cities in the world, but this was one problem, it seemed, for which he had no solution.
Angelina had come to live with him three months ago after her mother had passed away suddenly—a model he had met in New York, years ago.
His own daughter was a stranger, because until the accident that had killed her, Monique hadn’t had the decency to tell Gabriel that he had a daughter.
Now Angelina looked at him as if he were a monster, as if he had taken away the one person who had loved her.
He hadn’t been able to have one normal conversation with her in all the weeks she had been in Drakon with him.
“Angelina, calm down and wait for my meeting to finish,” he gritted out. His jaw hurt with how tightly he had leashed the urge to vent his frustration that he was floundering just as much as she was.
That they were strangers to each other was not his fault.
His board members stared between him and Angie like spectators at a tennis match, ready to feed fuel to the wildly spreading rumors that Gabriel Marquez was an abysmal father.
Anything he did and said was news to the press. But the fact that he’d successfully hidden the existence of a daughter, who’d been born out of wedlock, for twelve years, sent them into a feeding frenzy. That his daughter hated him with every breath and, even worse, didn’t know him at all would be the cherry on a very nasty cake.
“If I waited for you to finish one of your unending meetings, I would wait forever. All I want is to—”
Gabriel shot up from his seat, frustration boiling over in his blood. “You behave like a spoiled brat, with no concern for others’ time. Has your mother taught you no manners?”
Her flinch fell on him like a poisoned dart, sinking deep. Goddamn it, nothing he said ever worked with Angelina. The tears that she had somehow contained in those big eyes fell onto her round cheeks, drawing paths down to her neck. “I wish you had died instead of Mom. I wish you weren’t my father. I wish—”
“Angelina! That’s enough,” a feminine voice shot out.
Shock traveled through Gabriel as his daughter, who’d barely exchanged one civil word with him in three months, instantly looked contrite. Her round shoulders straightened and something shifted in the planes of her juvenile face, already struggling to show signs of adulthood.
He startled when Eleni Drakos pushed her chair back and walked toward his daughter, her expression one of sternness and yet somehow kindness at the same time.
Gabriel frowned as her pumps click-clacked against the marble floor. In three months, he hadn’t been able to quite put his finger on the woman the media disparagingly called the Plain Princess.
An opinion he didn’t agree with anymore.
Unlike her tall, dark brothers, the Princes of Drakon, Eleni Drakos, on first impression, was a mousy woman. Ten years ago, she’d barely ever met his gaze, hiding behind King Theos’s fierce temper.
Since he’d arrived in Drakon a few months ago, however, he’d watched the brisk efficiency with which she ordered the palace staff around—and even his staff.
Every time he turned around, there she was, a petite dynamo. Only now, as he saw her reach Angelina, did he realize how much his staff and he had depended on her to smooth out numerous problems between his company and the palace in those first few weeks.
How much the Crown Prince Andreas and the Daredevil Nikandros relied on her.
His frown deepened as her slim hand went around Angelina.
