The Demetrios Virgin

‘Teenage!’

‘She married at twenty-two,’ Andreas told her with a shrug. ‘That was almost twenty years ago.’

Saskia’s eyes widened as she did her sums. Athena was obviously older than Andreas. A lonely and no doubt vulnerable woman who was being pressurised into a second marriage she perhaps did not want, Saskia decided sympathetically.

‘However, you need not concern yourself too much with Athena, since it is doubtful that you will meet her. She lives a very peripatetic existence. She has homes in Athens, New York and Paris and spends much of her time travelling between them, as well as running the shipping line she inherited.’

A shipping line and a hotel chain. No wonder Andreas’s grandfather was so anxious for them to marry. It amazed Saskia that Andreas was not equally keen on the match, especially knowing the hard bargain he had driven over the takeover.

As though he had guessed what she was thinking, he leaned towards her and told her grittily, ‘Unlike you, I am not prepared to sell myself.’

‘I was not selling myself,’ Saskia denied hotly, and then frowned as the waiter approached their table carrying two plates of delicious-looking food.

‘I didn’t order a meal,’ she began as he set one of them down in front of her and the other in front of Andreas.

‘No. I ordered it for you,’ Andreas told her. ‘I don’t like to see my women looking like skinny semi-starved rabbits. A Greek man may be permitted to beat his wife, but he would never stoop to starving her.’

‘Beat...’ Saskia began rising to the bait and then stopped as she saw the glint in his eyes and realised that he was teasing her.

‘I suspect you are the kind of woman, Saskia, who would drive a saint, never mind a mere mortal man, to be driven to subdue you, to master you and then to wish that he had had the strength to master himself instead.’

Saskia shivered as the raw sensuality of what he was saying hit her like a jolt of powerful electricity. What was it about him that made her so acutely aware of him, so nervously on edge?

More to distract herself than anything else she started to eat, unaware of the ruefully amused look Andreas gave her as she did so. If he didn’t know better he would have said that she was as inexperienced as a virgin. The merest allusion to anything sexual was enough to have her trembling with reaction, unable to meet his gaze. It was just as well that he knew it was all an act, otherwise... Otherwise what? Otherwise he might be savagely tempted to put his words into actions, to see if she trembled as deliciously when he touched her as she did when he spoke to her.

To counter what he was feeling he began to speak to her in a crisp, businesslike voice.

‘There are certain things you will need to know about my family background if you are going to convince my grandfather that we are in love.’

He proceeded to give her a breakdown of his immediate family, adding a few cautionary comments about his grandfather’s health.

‘Which does not mean that he is not one hundred and fifty per cent on the ball. If anything, the fact that he is now prevented from working so much means that he is even more ferociously determined to interfere in my life than he was before. He tells my mother that he is afraid he will die before I give him any great-grandchildren. If that is not blackmail I don’t know what is,’ Andreas growled.

‘It’s obviously a family vice,’ Saskia told him mock sweetly, earning herself a look that she refused to allow to make her quake in her shoes.

‘Ultimately, of course, our engagement will have to be broken,’ Andreas told her unnecessarily. ‘No doubt our sojourn on the island will reveal certain aspects of our characters that we shall find mutually unappealing, and on our return to England we shall bring our engagement to an end. But at least I shall have bought myself some time...and hopefully Athena will have decided to accept one of the many suitors my grandfather says are only too willing to become her second husband.’

‘And if she doesn’t?’ Saskia felt impelled to ask.

‘If she doesn’t, we shall just have to delay ending our engagement until either she does or I find an alternative way of convincing my grandfather that one of my sisters can provide him with his great-grandchildren.’