Nikos gave a low chuckle. His gaze flicked to hers.
Mistake.
Mistake, mistake, mistake.
Nikos smiling—laughing. How many times had she seen him smiling at her, laughing with her? Her breath caught.
Oh, God, don’t let me remember—don’t let me remember!
She stifled the memories, fought them back. Fought just as hard against the tug of unstoppable attraction that pulled like a rope, lassoing her. Four years had only made him even more devastating, more magnetically compelling!
‘So what do the females look like?’ His question pulled her round.
‘Very dull. Brown. Boring. Plain.’
He cocked an eyebrow again. ‘How curious that nature is so different from humans. With us, it is the female who lures with her beauty—the male is the dull one, the plain one.’
Her eyes went to him. Not you! Never, never you!
She shifted in her seat, taking yet another strawberry. Focussing on that, not on him.
‘So, tell me, what do you think of the place?’ His query came invitingly, at odds with his former riling provocation.
‘What?’ She looked across at him again.
He took another strawberry too. ‘You’ve been here four days—what do you make of the place? I take it you’ve wandered around? Not just confined yourself to this small garden? So, what do you think? Who knows? Once I’ve restored it and it’s a hotel you might stay here one day.’
He spoke lightly, nonchalantly. But even as he did so he could suddenly see in his mind’s eye Sophie as a guest at the hotel. A thought stabbed at his mind—what if there were no blighted past between them? What if he were to meet her at the hotel in the future for the first time? Attraction, unfettered by poisonous memories, flared in him.
How can she be so beautiful, even making no effort, like now, so full of natural grace that I cannot take my eyes from her?
His eyes rested on her, and Sophie felt her emotions plunge wildly, her breath catch. No, he mustn’t have that effect on me any more—he mustn’t!
But then he was getting to his feet, polishing off the last strawberry as he did so. He held a hand out to her. ‘Come and tell me what you like about the place and what you don’t,’ he said.
He was holding out a hand to her. Almost, almost she put hers into it, as if taking his hand were nothing at all. Once holding Nikos’s hand had been bliss itself. Now it would be nothing less than torture.
She got haltingly to her feet. Nikos was gesturing towards the garden door that led through into the main grounds. Numbly, she let herself be ushered out. Self-consciousness burned through her. They gained the terrace reaching along the front façade, and her gait was still stiff and awkward, then rounded the corner to the carriage sweep that led up to the grand front entrance. Skewed across the weed-infested gravel was a sight that brought her to a sudden halt.
She recognised it instantly—it was the same highpowered, low-slung car that he had been driving the very first day she’d ever set eyes on him. The exact same—she knew, because she’d become so besotted with him she’d learned the make, model and number plate. Memory overwhelmed her—the first time she’d seen him, driving along the street to her father’s house. The first time she’d been in the car herself.
And the last.
The time when he’d been driving her home late that last night, when her heart had been pounding with what she had been intending to do, her hands clammy with nerves.
And the sound of its engine had been the last noise she’d heard as he’d roared off into the night, leaving her weeping, demented, destroyed—clinging to the wall after he’d peeled her from him like a dirty rag…
‘You’ve got the same car.’
The words broke from her before she could stop them. Nikos twisted his head, pausing in his stride. She’d gone pale again, pale beneath the flush of the honey-tan that was already gilding her fair skin.
She’d been pale as milk when he’d first met her. Long hours indoors, in music studios, had made her as fair as porcelain. His hand on hers had been striking in its contrast, with its olive Mediterranean skin.
Not just his hand on her hand.
Her breasts as white as snow, her limbs like ivory, as she pressed against him, as he crushed her to him, all sense swept away from him, all sanity gone—only the heady paradise of the senses…
‘It’s become a collector’s item.