Greek Tycoon, Inexperienced Mistress

‘Do you?’ Lindy bridled at that untimely comment. ‘Am I supposed to write that down in a little black book and never wear trousers again?’

‘Where does Ben fit in?’ Atreus enquired, neatly sidestepping her tart response.

Lindy gave him a puzzled frown and then laughed. ‘I thought he was the love of my life when I was a student of eighteen, but unfortunately, he didn’t see me in the same light. I got over him, we became friends, and we’ve been friends ever since.’

Atreus lowered lush black lashes over his shimmering dark golden gaze. He had not taken to Ben, and the admission that she had once been in love with the other man simply underlined his reservations. But Atreus was proud of the fact that he had never experienced the urge to be possessive with his lovers. He met her strained violet-blue gaze and suddenly smiled, because he could read her like a book. She was pleased that he had invited her to lunch, but still nervous of being seen out in his company.

‘We’ll eat in the hotel suite,’ Atreus murmured, closing a hand over hers to urge her across the depth of seat separating them.

‘Atreus…’ she gasped, in the aftermath of a long, drugging kiss that left her feeling intoxicated. ‘Throughout the history of the world there couldn’t be two people less suited than us.’

‘You have such old-fashioned ideas, but I like them,’ Atreus growled, his mouth following a line down her neck to her throat that made her shiver violently, every nerve-ending screaming on high alert. ‘Just as you like this—don’t you?’

‘Well…er…’

‘Tell the truth,’ he prompted lethally.

‘It just feels indecent, and that’s not who I am or what I’m like!’ Lindy protested with the shattered incomprehension of a woman suddenly finding herself flat on the backseat of a limo in broad daylight.

‘But the bottom line is that you like it, glikia mou,’ Atreus replied with irrefutable logic. ‘As for you not being like this, what would you know about who you really are when you waited so long to take a lover? Educating you promises to be a very exciting exercise.’

A lean hand sketched a provocative line along the tautness of her inner thigh below her trousers and she honestly thought she might spontaneously combust from the level of heat and longing centred at the heart of her. Her lashes slid down. What had come over her? Where had all her common sense and caution gone? Into twenty-six years of clean living, low self-esteem and loneliness, a little voice answered. Not a bad life, but undeniably a life without any breathtaking highs.

‘Do we have to eat first?’ Atreus said huskily in an erotic growl.

Lindy tried and failed to swallow. Excitement was clawing at her, and no matter how hard she fought it she could already see how much influence he had over her and how much she was changing. If that was the effect he could have in twenty-four hours…But it wouldn’t, couldn’t, last long between them. It was a kind of madness, an attraction of opposites: sudden, startling and sexy, but surely destined to burn out fast. And when it was over she would be miserable….

Lindy looked up into his lean, dark beautiful face and decided that she could live with the prospect of that misery if it meant that she had him all to herself for a little while.

Four months later, Lindy and Atreus were still together almost every weekend.

By now Lindy was madly in love, and so happy she wakened with a smile on her face. But her mood was punctured suddenly one day by the sight of a photo in a gossip column. Atreus with another woman. It had been taken at a charity ball and the beautiful brunette was curved round Atreus like a second skin. Lindy felt quite sick looking at the photo, but she told herself that she would make no mention of the matter. She did not want to act possessively. The very idea of it hurt her pride, and she knew he would have a low tolerance threshold for such behaviour.

But after a couple of nights of disturbed sleep she realised she could not keep silent. They were lovers, and she needed the assurance that she was the only one in his life. When she dined with Atreus at Chantry House that weekend, Lindy planned to use subtlety to introduce the delicate subject of what he did when he was away from her during the week.

The graceful Georgian mansion had been restored to its former splendour in record time by builders and decorators working round the clock in shifts. Standing on the sidelines, Lindy had found that efficient restoration project highly educational. Atreus had not lowered his standards of excellence by so much as an inch, and the feat had been completed in a timeframe which most people had deemed impossible.

When no useful opening to the controversial topic occurred during their meal Lindy became increasingly restless and distracted.