bleak, pained look that came into his eyes occasionally was beginning to make more sense now, she realised as she watched it appear again. ‘Just over a year ago,’ he replied.
So, he had lost a wife he loved six years before, and a brother only recently. ‘I’m sorry,’ Claire murmured.
‘So am I.’ He smiled that brief grim smile. ‘I miss him.’
‘I know.’ She nodded in understanding. ‘You catch yourself looking round to speak to them only to feel that dreadful clutch of emptiness when you find they’re not there and you remember …’
His dark lashes gave a flicker. Claire’s breath caught on a softly inhaled little gasp when she saw the usual knock-back on its way. So she was totally unprepared for it when instead he bent his head and kissed her fully on her mouth.
If this was another punishing kiss for encroaching where he didn’t want her to, then it didn’t quite work out like that. Caught so off guard with her lips parted and her body relaxed, she was powerless to stop what happened next as she fell headlong into that kiss.
I don’t need to be looking into those eyes to feel like this, she realised as her whole mouth softened and drew him deeper, touching tongues—tongues that caused a sharp, hot electric charge to go racing through her blood. It was devastating, the most passionate encounter she had ever experienced. And if he wasn’t feeling it with her, then he was certainly feeling something that made a muffled groan break in his throat and his chest heave against her resting head before he completely caved in and threw himself passionately into that kiss.
If he hadn’t been holding Melanie, Claire had a horrible feeling he would have fallen on her like a ravenous wolf. As it was his stance shifted slightly and the hand resting at her waist became a clamp to wedge her back hard up against the full length of his side with a need to increase and compound upon what was suddenly running rife between them.
It was crazy—totally crazy, she kept on telling herself over and over. This wasn’t supposed to happen. This was a business arrangement. No intimacy.
No intimacy. But if this wasn’t being intimate then she didn’t know what was. And she could smell the clean spicy smell of him—was being enveloped by it—stormed by it! Even her bruised ribs weren’t bothering to put up any protest at being clamped so tightly against him—they were too busy being under attack from the other side where her heart was pounding wildly in response to the whole mad, hot onslaught.
Then he groaned again, and in the next moment she was abruptly set free. In a dizzy haze of complete and utter disorientation, she reeled away. Legs like lead, eyes in a fog, she stumbled from beneath the terrace overhang and out into the sunshine.
‘Where are you going?’ His voice sounded hoarse and husky. But it brought her to a stop.
‘I—don’t know,’ she answered honestly, too confused to care how stupid she must sound.
Or stupefied, she then thought numbly, and wished the grass beneath her feet would open up and swallow her whole so she didn’t have to make herself turn around and face him.
Not that she needed to look to know exactly what she would see—a dark devil who had the kiss of hell in his repertoire, she thought fancifully.
A dark devil no less, who was cradling a sweet little baby on his arm, she added, and let out a strangled laugh that seemed to echo plaintively in the somnolent warmth of the afternoon quietness.
Yet he didn’t sound like a devil when he said, ‘Come back, Claire,’ very gently. ‘You’re quite safe here; please believe me …’
Safe, she repeated to herself. Tears sprang. Wretchedly she blinked them away. Then, on a small, tight, thickened suck of air, she attempted to pull herself together before turning round again.
She didn’t look at him—refused to do so as she made her shaking limbs carry her back into the shade. Coming to her side, he paused for a moment, and her senses began to sting in an agony of need for him to say not another word!
He must have sensed it and held his silence, which was something else she was realising about him—he picked up her feelings very easily.
Which made her what? Claire wondered dizzily as they both began walking in silence along the terrace towards the door. Pathetically transparent? ‘I …’ Desperately she searched her foggy brain for something casual to say so she could pretend the kiss just hadn’t happened. And found it when the sound of a car engine powering into life reminded her of Desmona. ‘Does Desmona live here in this house?’
‘She has her own apartment in Athens,’ he replied. ‘But she comes to visit my grandmother quite regularly. Claire, listen to me,’ he then urged huskily.
‘Oh, good,’ she cut in, agitatedly aware he was going to say something about that wretched kiss, and equally sure she did not want to hear it. ‘Then I won’t have to watch my back for flying knives,’ she joked, and managed to gain some reassurance from the fact that she could joke while she was feeling like this.
They turned together into a vast hallway with a white ceramic floor, cream walls and a white-painted staircase that swept gracefully upwards to a galleried landing above. It was all very grand. Very—
At which point her brain ground to a stop when she found herself confronted by a long line of shyly smiling and expectant faces.
Oh, what now? she groaned inwardly, eyeing the long row of what could only be the staff needed to run this big house, looking at the uniform neat pale pink dresses and white aprons the females were wearing, while it was white shirts and dark trousers for the men.
Then, on a sudden flashback to a few minutes ago, her face suffused with mortified colour. ‘Do you think they saw us outside?’ she breathed for his ears alone, while having a sudden horrendous vision of them all crowding at the windows to watch Andreas kissing her.
‘If they did,’ he drawled, ‘then we will have no need to labour the game-plan.’
It hit her then just what had been going on outside. That kiss had been part of this deception! No impulse, she realised. But merely part of his precious game-plan to make their liaison appear genuine.
She felt oddly cheated. No, worse than that. She felt used.
‘Shall we get this over with?’ he suggested, while she was still struggling with the appalling proof of just how ruthless this man could be!
With a light touch to the rigid line of her spine he prompted her into motion. For the next five minutes, face after face went by in a blur of smiles and curiously craning necks as his staff tried to get a peep at the sleeping baby lying in the crook of their employer’s arm.
In fact the only face that registered was that of a young girl on the end of the row who reminded her of Althea. She stepped forward and shyly offered to take Melanie from Andreas. While Claire stood by, intensely conscious of everyone’s eyes on her, Andreas exchanged a few words in Greek with the young girl before he handed over Melanie.
‘I don’t believe you put me through that,’ she hissed when eventually he began leading the way up the staircase to the landing above, giving the staff the chance to crowd around the young girl holding Melanie.
‘It was not set up for your benefit but for theirs,’ he came
