Sergios walked across to Bee.
‘Thirty-two minutes and counting,’ she warned him in case he was thinking of cutting his agreed hour short.
An appreciative grin slashed his handsome mouth. ‘I haven’t got a stopwatch on the time.’
‘What happened to your father?’ she asked in a rush before she could lose her nerve.
As he looked out to sea his eyes narrowed. ‘He died at the age of twenty-two trying to qualify as a racing driver.’
‘You never knew him?’
‘No, but even if Petros had lived he wouldn’t have taken anything to do with me.’ Sergios volunteered that opinion with telling derision. ‘My mother, Ariana, was a teenage receptionist he knocked up on one of the rare days that he showed up to work for Nectarios.’
‘Did your mother ever tell him about you?’ Bee prompted.
‘He refused her calls and got her sacked when she tried to see him. She didn’t know she had any rights and she had no family to back her up. Petros had no interest in being a father.’
‘It must have been very tough for so young a girl to get by as a single parent.’
‘She developed diabetes while she was pregnant. Her health was never good after my birth. I stole to keep us,’ he admitted succinctly. ‘By the age of fourteen I was a veteran car thief.’
‘From that to…this…’ Her spread hands encompassed the big opulent house beyond the forest and the island owned by his grandfather. ‘Must have been a huge step for you.’
‘Nectarios was very patient. It must’ve been even harder for him. I was poorly educated, bitter about my mother’s death and as feral as an animal when he first employed me. But he never gave up on me.’
‘You were probably a more worthwhile investment of his time than the father you never met,’ Bee offered.
Sergios surveyed her steadily, his stunning gaze reflecting the sunlight as he slowly shook his arrogant head in apparent wonderment at that view. ‘Only you would think the best of me after what I’ve just told you about my juvenile crime record, yineka mou.’
Bee coloured, noticed that Milo was approaching the sea with a bucket and sped off to watch over the little boy. But it was Sergios who stepped from behind her and scooped up Milo as he teetered uncertainly ankle deep in the surging water, swinging the child up in the air so that he laughed uproariously before depositing him and, thanks to Bee’s efforts, a filled bucket of water back beside the sandcastle.
Eleni her silent companion, Bee spread the rug and Sergios threw himself down beside her. As she knelt he closed a hand into her chestnut hair and lifted her head, searching her oval face with brooding eyes. She gazed back at him with a bemused frown. ‘What do you want from me?’ she questioned in frustration.
‘
Right now?’ Sergios released a roughened laugh that danced along her taut spine like trailing fingertips. ‘Anything you’ll give me. Haven’t you worked that out yet?’
He crushed her mouth under his, tasting her with an earthy eroticism that fired up every skin cell in her quivering body. Hunger rampaged through her like a fire burning out of control and the strength of that hunger scared her so much that she thrust him back from her, her attention shooting past him to check that the children were still all right. Paris had been watching them kiss and he turned away, embarrassed by the display but no more so than Bee was. Sergio rested back on an elbow, one raised thigh doing little to conceal the bold outline of his arousal below the denim. Suddenly as hot as though she were roasting in the fires of hell, Bee dragged her gaze from him and watched the children instead.
‘You’re trying to use me because I’m the only woman available to you right now,’ she condemned half under her breath.
Sergios ran a fingertip down her arm and she turned her head reluctantly to collide with his glittering dark eyes. ‘Do I really strike you as that desperate?’
Her full mouth compressed. ‘I didn’t say desperate.’
‘I can leave the island any time I like to scratch an itch.’
‘Not if you want to convince your grandfather that you’re a happily married man.’
‘I could easily manufacture a business crisis that demanded my presence,’ Sergios countered lazily. ‘You have a remarkably low opinion of your own attraction.’
‘Merely a realistic one. Men have never beaten a path to my door,’ Bee admitted without concern. ‘Jon was special for a while but once he realised that my mother and I were a package he backed off.’
‘And married a wealthy judge’s daughter. He’s ambitious, not a guy with a bleeding heart,’ Sergios commented, letting her know how much he knew and making her body tense with resentment over the professional snooping that had delivered such facts. ‘Doesn’t it strike you as odd that he should now be approaching you as the representative of a children’s charity?’
Bee ignored the hint that Jon was an opportunist because she did not intend to adopt Sergios’s cynicism as her yardstick when it came to judging people’s motives. ‘No. As your wife I could be of real use to the charity.’
‘And as my ex-wife you could be of even more use to Jon,’ Sergios completed with sardonic bite. ‘Be careful. You could be his passport to another world.’