The Phoenix

‘Well thank you, Mr Alexiadis. But I’m not the sort of girl who needs to be rescued. I suggest you go and terrorize the companions of one of your other … friends.’ She glanced in the direction of Makis’s booth, where Arabella, Miriam and Lisette were all looking daggers in her direction. ‘I’m sure they would all appreciate your chivalry.’

‘Let me buy you a drink, at least,’ said Mak, who was enjoying the thrill of the chase. It was a long time, a very long time, since a woman had shown no interest in him. ‘I’m sorry if we got off on the wrong foot.’

Signing her check, she stood up and looked at him, that same appraising, curious expression in her eye.

‘This being Mykonos, you must already know I’m married.’

‘I might have heard something,’ he confessed, not taking his eyes off hers. They were even bigger close up and the same green as vermouth. All of a sudden his desire to sleep with this woman, but more than that, to conquer her, to make her want him, felt almost overpowering. ‘Do you never cheat on your husband, Persephone?’ he asked, his voice hoarse with lust.

‘Sometimes,’ she answered nonchalantly, not a hint of desire in her own voice. ‘But only when I feel a strong attraction. I’m afraid that’s not the case with you. Goodbye.’

The entire club watched, astonished, as this strangely dressed American girl crossed the dance floor and walked out, leaving Makis Alexiadis sitting there like a jilted schoolboy. You could have cut the tension in the air with a knife. Big Mak was not a man you would choose to humiliate, or offend in any way. Not if you valued your life.

But when Mak walked back over to his group, he was grinning from ear to ear. Ordering another drink, he pulled an ecstatic Miriam onto his lap and distracted himself with her ample bosom.

‘Goodbye!’ She hadn’t even said ‘goodnight’. It was ‘goodbye’ – so cutting, so deliberately final, as in ‘goodbye for ever.’ ‘Get lost.’

The hardness he felt between his legs owed more to Persephone Hamlin’s curt dismissal of him than it did to Miriam’s spectacular breasts.

What a triumph it would be to hear that feisty little bitch moaning out his name in pleasure, begging him to take her, again and again and again. With all the recent stress over the lost shipments and the millions of dollars sunk in the Aegean, he could use a distraction.

Tomorrow he would find out all there was to know about Miss Persephone Hamlin.

Back in her suite at the Grand Hotel, Persephone slipped off her clothes and walked naked into the bathroom, observing herself in the gold rococo mirror.

It felt good to be Ella Praeger again, despite the lingering sexual frustration clinging to her body after her first encounter with Makis Alexiadis. Dear God, the way he’d looked at her! Like a hungry lion locking eyes with a gazelle. It was all Ella could do not to rip off her clothes on the spot and wrap herself around him, so overwhelmingly sexual and masculine was his aura. She could feel her groin throbbing and her throat was dry just thinking about it, and about all the things the animal in her would like the animal in Makis to do to her. Persephone Hamlin might be a model of decorum and restraint, but Ella Praeger wasn’t at all use

d to having to rein in her sexuality. Between resisting Makis and Gabriel, this had the potential to be a grueling and frustrating mission.

Observing her naked reflection appreciatively, Ella ran a hand through the short, boyish hair that she still couldn’t get used to. Back in Athens, after receiving a ten-page ‘background document’ on the mythical Ms Hamlin (Gabriel had concocted an impressively detailed persona, complete with schooling, siblings, complex parental relationships and a skiing accident when she was nine years old that accounted for the kink in her nose), Nikkos had dispatched her to the hairdresser’s for a complete new look.

‘Any color is fine,’ Ella told the stylist in increasingly fluent Greek. ‘And any style, within reason. Just please, don’t go super-short.’

With the very first cut, a foot of her precious blonde hair hit the salon floor.

‘What are you doing?’ Ella screeched. But the man just shrugged.

‘Mr Nikkos already gave me directions. He paid me, very good money,’ he added, rubbing his fingers together with satisfaction.

It’s not enough that the men here choose what women eat? Ella thought furiously. They get to pick their hairstyles too?

‘Why that nasty face?’ Nikkos asked when he came to pick her up. ‘You look very beautiful. Very sexy.’

‘I hate it,’ Ella growled. ‘I look like a boy.’

‘It’s not for you. It’s for Makis. He will like it,’ Nikkos insisted. ‘It’s …’ he searched for the right word. ‘Striking.’

‘Strikingly gross,’ Ella mumbled, like a sullen teenager, although secretly she had to admit that the bright blonde pixie suited her more than she’d thought it would. Afterwards the hairdresser, a woman named Grace, took Ella to some sort of spa where her eyebrows were shaped, her lashes tinted, and hair was removed from every conceivable part of her body. It was agony.

‘I feel like a plucked chicken!’ she berated Nikkos over the phone. ‘And just so you know, I won’t be having inter … I won’t be sleeping with this guy, so what the hell was the point? He’s never going to know what I’ve got going on down there.’

‘It’s Mykonos,’ Nikkos said, grateful Ella wasn’t there to see his blushes. ‘You will be wearing a bikini sometimes. In Greece, men don’t like—’

‘Screw Greece!’ Ella cut him off waspishly. ‘I’m Persephone Hamlin and I didn’t come here to find a Greek boyfriend. I came here to get over my asshole, coke-head husband and his latest prostitute girlfriend.’

‘Called?’ Nikkos quizzed her.

‘Katya,’ Ella answered, not missing a beat. ‘They met at Les Caves nightclub in St Tropez, the day after Nick celebrated six months sober and I kicked him off the yacht the next morning. I’ve got this Nikkos. I’m ready.’