The Scandalous Warehams. PENNY JORDAN
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and the anxiety she had endured added to her tiredness now. Combined with the comforting hum of the expensive car, they had her drifting off to sleep and then waking herself up again as she fought the longing to close her eyes. She might feel appalled by the story he had told her, and filled with compassion for the lonely child he must have been, but that did not mean she felt comfortable about falling asleep in his presence. Far from it. There was something too intimate, too vulnerable about sleeping in his wakeful presence to allow her to do that.
And yet inevitably in the end she was unable to prevent her eyes from closing and her head dropping against the leather headrest, with her face turned towards the man who now had command of her life.
Ilios studied her. The bone structure beneath the pale skin was elegantly formed, her beauty quietly classical and enduring. Her loyalty to her family matched one of the most important tenets of traditional Greek society. She was, he recognised as he looked at her, the kind of woman a man would marry rather than simply want to bed for momentary sexual satisfaction.
Ilios exhaled on the sudden realisation of where his own thought processes were taking him.
The car hit a pothole in the road, waking Lizzie up.
What had she told herself about not betraying any more vulnerability than she had to? she cautioned herself as she sat up, and then frowned as she glanced at her watch and realised what time it was.
‘Please excuse me, but I must send a text,’ she told Ilios, reaching for her phone.
‘To your lover?’ Ilios challenged her.
‘No! I don’t have a lover!’ Lizzie denied immediately.
The dark eyebrows rose. ‘Such a vehement, almost shocked denial—and yet surely it is perfectly natural that a woman of your age should have a man in her life and her bed. You are what? Twenty-four? Twenty-five? After all, you can hardly still be a virgin.’
‘Of course not. And I’m twenty-seven,’ Lizzie told him.
Of course not. But her last sexual relationship—her only sexual relationship, in fact—had been when she had been at university. And it had existed more because it was the done thing than because she and the boy in question had envisaged spending the rest of their lives together. Things had been different then. She had been young, and life had been fun. Fun had died out of her life with the loss of her parents.
‘And I wasn’t shocked. It’s simply that I have more important things to think about than men.’
‘Such as?’
‘My family—my sisters and my nephews. It is actually the boys I need to text. I promised them I would because I won’t be there to read their bedtime story—it would have been my turn tonight.’ Emotion choked Lizzie’s voice. ‘My family are far more important to me than any man ever could be. I have to put them first. They depend on me, and I can’t let them down. They matter far more to me than some … some fleeting sexual pleasure.’
Automatically Ilios wanted to reject, to push away and in fact deny his awareness of the emotion in Lizzie’s voice when she spoke of her family. There was no place for that kind of sentiment in his present life or in his plans for his future life. Nor would there ever be.
‘If your only experience of sexual pleasure has been fleeting then it is hardly surprising it doesn’t bother you to give it up,’ he told Lizzie coolly instead. ‘A good lover makes it his business to make his partner’s pleasure as enduring as she wishes it to be.’
‘That’s easy to say,’ Lizzie responded, desperate to try to hold her own and appear as nonchalant as Ilios himself. The reality was that his casual observation was having an intense and unwanted effect on her. It was making her ask questions of herself that she knew she could not answer. Questions such as what would it be like to be Ilios Manos’s lover?
‘And I assure you easy to do, when one knows how,’ Ilios came back slipping the comment up under Lizzie’s guard and drawing a soft gasp of choked reaction from her.
Of course Ilios Manos would be an experienced lover. Of course he would know exactly how to please his partner—even if that partner was an untutored as she was herself.
She was floundering now, going down under the flood of awareness surging through her, a flood of dangerous sensations, longings, and—heavens, yes—images as well, of two sensually entwined naked bodies, one belonging to her and the other to Ilios. Stop it, Lizzie warned herself, beginning to panic. She could not afford this kind of self-indulgence. It was far too dangerous.
Determinedly Lizzie concentrated on texting the twins, adding a few words for her sister, telling her that she was still involved in discussions about the letter and would be in touch again as soon as she had something concrete to report to them.
‘I take it that your sisters are aware of the purpose of your journey to Greece?’ Ilios asked Lizzie.
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘They saw your letter.’ The thought of how her sisters would feel if they knew what Ilios had said to her—what he had demanded of her—brought a lump to Lizzie’s throat. They would be dreadfully shocked—and worried too, for their own security.
That thought had her turning impetuously towards Ilios to beg him emotionally, ‘Surely we can come to some kind of sensible arrangement that would enable me to repay you?’
‘What do you mean by “sensible”?’ Ilios asked.
Lizzie shook her head. ‘Perhaps I could work for you as an interior designer?’
‘The constructions in which I am involved are very large-scale commercial projects—schools, offices, corporate buildings, that kind of thing. However …’ Ilios paused, turning to give her an assessing look in the shadowy darkness of his car. ‘There is an alternative means by which you could clear the debt between us.’
Lizzie moistened her suddenly dry lips with the tip of her tongue, before asking in a voice that was slightly hoarse with tension, ‘And that is?’
The Bentley picked up speed as Ilios overtook the car in front of them. The delay in answering her ratcheted up Lizzie’s tension.
It seemed an aeon before he turned towards her, his profile outlined by the moonlight beaming into the car. It was an undeniably handsome and very sensually male profile, Lizzie admitted, but there was a harshness in the downward turn of his mouth, that made her shiver inwardly. She wasn’t sure which she feared the most: the effect of his harshness on her too easily bruised emotions, or the effect of his sensuality on her equally easily aroused senses.
‘Marriage,’ Ilios told her.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘MARRIAGE?’ Lizzie repeated unsteadily, feeling that she must somehow have misunderstood him.
‘According to my solicitors I am in need of a wife,’ Ilios informed her curtly. ‘And since you claim you cannot repay me in cash, and since I have no appetite for the kind of woman who so easily shares her body with any man who has had the price to pay for it, I have decided that this is best way for me to recoup what I have lost and take payment from you.’
Lizzie felt as though glue had been poured into her brain, locking it together and jamming her ability to think.
The only words she could summon were the words, Ilios Manos, marriage, and danger—all written large in bright red ink.
‘No,’ she told Ilios shakily, before she could do the utterly reckless, dangerous and unthinkable and say yes. Whatever the reason Ilios might want her as a wife, it was absolutely not because he wanted her, and she had better hang on to that fact, Lizzie told herself, not start spinning crazily foolish fantasies and daydreams about Mr Right, Cinderella and happy ever after, filled with nights of sensual delight and days of blissful joy.
A categorical no was not the answer Ilios wanted, and nor was it the answer he had expected. He knew of a dozen women at least who would have been delirious