Her eyes were like a fawn’s. Bambi eyes. Toffee-brown and dusted with dark spots that looked like tiny iron filings sprinkled over pools of honey. Her skin was peaches-and-cream and silk, with a scattering of freckles over the bridge of her retroussé nose that reminded him of a dusting of nutmeg. She had a sunny smile, bright and cheery with an endearing little overbite, and well-shaped lips built for kissing...and other things. Those other things had just about blown off the top of his head.
It was true she wasn’t his type. But in another lifetime she might have been. In a parallel life where he didn’t carry guilt like convict’s chains. A life where every day he didn’t relive the stomach-churning moment that had changed everything for his half-sister Ariana and had made him even more of an outcast in his family than he had been before. Even after seventeen years, every time he saw a child’s bike his breath would stop and his guts would turn to gravy. If he heard the sudden squeal of brakes his heart would bang against his sternum like a wrecking ball. The siren of an ambulance sent his pulse sky-rocketing. He still lay awake at night hearing the crunch and crumple of metal and the piercing scream of a critically injured child...
Loukas knew he shouldn’t be seeing Emily again. He shouldn’t have hooked up with her in the first place. But, after having gone straight to the wedding from visiting Ariana in hospital after her latest bout of orthopaedic surgery, those chains of guilt had dug in with a cruel bite. He couldn’t undo the past. It didn’t matter how many times he relived that day. He had ruined his sister’s life and destroyed his mother’s second marriage in the process.
Emily’s smile had been like a bolt of sunshine at the wedding. Her creamy cheeks had blushed when she’d first met his gaze. It had been a long time since he had been with a woman who blushed when he looked at her. He avoided that type usually. But something about Emily had drawn his interest, with her dancing eyes, neat little ballet dancer’s figure and her cute clumsiness. Not to mention her adorable little bunny rabbit twitch where her nose would wrinkle up as if she had an invisible pair of glasses on and was trying to hitch them back up on the bridge of her nose.
He wasn’t going to offer her anything but a temporary fling. He was only interested in the here and now. He was in London for a week working on some software for one of the government’s security agencies. It was too good an opportunity to waste. A week-long fling to enjoy a little more of what they’d experienced that night. He would be upfront and honest about it. He wouldn’t dress it up as anything other than what it was. He would offer her a no-strings, no-promises fling and leave it at that, just as he did with any other woman he took a fancy to.
And he had taken rather a fancy to Emily.
His mind kept going back to that night like a tongue going back to a niggling tooth. Loukas still wasn’t sure why he’d taken her back to his room after Draco and Allegra’s wedding. Emily had been staying on the same floor of Draco’s private villa and he could easily have left her at her door after accompanying her back from the reception. But somehow the impersonal ‘it was nice to meet you’ kiss he’d intended to plant on her cheek had turned into something else. It was as if his lips had had their own agenda. They’d moved from her cheek to her lips like a missile finding a target.
Wham.
One kiss hadn’t been enough. Her soft lips opening under his unleashed a ferocious desire from somewhere deep inside him. A desire that had swept away to some far-off, unreachable place every reason not to sleep with her.
They hadn’t talked much—or at least, he hadn’t. But then, that was his way. Talking had never been his currency in relationships. He was the strong, silent ‘get on with the job’ type. Emily, on the other hand, had talked of her fairy-tale dreams as though he’d been auditioning for the role of handsome prince.
As if that was ever going to happen.
But once it might have...
Loukas pushed out of his chair and turned to look out of the window to the motherboard-like grid of London’s streets below. Crowds of people bustled about like busy ants. He was content with his life as it was...more or less. He had more money than he knew what to do with, a career that was global and a lifestyle that was enviable. It wasn’t like him to leave it a month between lovers, but he hadn’t been with anyone since Emily. He’d been over-the-top busy, certainly, but that didn’t usually stop him from engaging in a bit of sex to relieve the tension with someone who was agreeable to his terms. Terms that didn’t include anything long-or even mid-term. Short-term suited him because he could leave before things got too intense.
However, he didn’t care for the term ‘playboy’ the press labelled him with because it suggested he was shallow and exploitative with women. In reality it was because he wanted to spare his partners unnecessary hurt. He wasn’t like his father who moved from woman to woman with no regard for their feelings, promising them everything and then leaving them with nothing.
Loukas was the opposite. He promised them nothing and left them with generous gifts to soften the end of the affair.
But now the press’s interest in him had gone up a notch. With his best friend now off the market the focus had switched to him. Everywhere he went he had to be mindful of who was watching. The paparazzi were bad enough, but everyone had a camera phone these days, hankering after the money shot, so it was harder and harder to escape the intense interest in his private life.
Was it risky to see Emily again? Probably. But it was only for a week while he was in London. Seven days of sex without strings. The sex had been so damn good that night after the wedding. Good was an understatement. Everything about that night still reverberated in his body like a plucked cello string. He had only to think of her soft little hands with their butterfly touch to feel an aftershock roll through him. Just hearing her voice gave him goose bumps along the flesh of his spine. The soft breathlessness of it, the way she talked too much when she was nervous. The way she chewed at her lower lip and shielded her gaze with those spider-leg-long lashes. The way her cheeks pooled with pink as delicate as the blush of a rose.
He normally steered clear of sweet homespun girls like her. He always kept his head in relationships. Always. But just this once he wasn’t listening to his head. His body was telling him to go for it.
And just this once that was exactly what he planned to do.
CHAPTER TWO
EMILY WAS JUST ABOUT to put her lip-gloss on when the doorbell rang. She grimaced at the state of her bathroom counter. Nearly every item of make-up or skincare treatment she owned was strewn about, some with the lids still open. Her bedroom was even worse. Clothes were on just about every surface, including the floor. It looked as if her room had been ransacked by an addict in frantic search of a fix.
She closed her bedroom door on the way past and opened the front door with a smile that fell a little short of the mark. ‘Hi.’
Loukas’s deep-brown gaze met hers in a look that sent a current of awareness through her body like a lightning strike on metal. ‘Hello.’
How could a one-word greeting create such havoc with her senses? How could one man have such a potent effect on her? He was dressed in dark-blue trousers and a white shirt with a silver-and-black-striped tie and a navy-blue blazer, giving him an air of sophisticated man about town that was lethally attractive. Her pulse skipped and tripped at the mere sight of him. She opened the door wider, inching her feet back against the wall of the narrow hallway to give him more room. ‘Would you like to come in for a bit? I’m not quite ready.’ A hundred years wasn’t enough time to get ready.
H
e stepped through the door without touching her but Emily felt as if he had. Her body tingled when he moved past her in the doorway, as if he had sent out a radar signal to every cell of her flesh. His tall frame shrank her hallway, the carriage-light fitting only just clearing the top of his head. The citrus notes of his aftershave swirled around her nostrils, the clean, sharp scent taking her back to that night in his arms. She had smelt him on her skin for hours afterwards. Felt his hard, male presence in her tender muscles for days. Every time she moved her body it reminded her of the glide and thrust of his body within hers.
The intimacy they’d shared that night was like a presence hovering. The air was charged with it. Electrified by it. Humming with it.
His bottomless brown gaze moved over her body like a caress. ‘You look beautiful.’
Emily wished she didn’t have such a propensity to blush. She could feel it crawling over her cheeks like a spill of red wine on a cream carpet. She tucked a strand of hair back behind her ear. Shifted her feet. Smoothed her hands down the front of her dress. ‘Would you like a drink or...?’
He stepped closer, placing his hands on her waist and bringing his mouth down to within a breath of hers. ‘Let’s get this out of the way first.’