The Greek Tycoon's Defiant Bride

‘You are magnificent, mali mou.’

Maribel still felt incredibly unsure of herself. But then he touched her with strong male hands and helpless physical response enfolded her, stopping her thoughts in their tracks. He moulded the firm creamy mounds and chafed the pouting pink buds that crowned them. His every caress sent tiny little tremors through her while a velvet knot of heat and anticipation uncoiled in her belly. He toyed with her tender nipples and lowered his mouth there to tease the lush, straining tips. Delicious tension gripped her until she was breathing in shallow little gasps, her entire body boneless with simmering, tingling pleasure.

‘This is not how I imagined today would turn out,’ she confessed unsteadily, a kind of wonder finally daring to blossom inside her and become joy.

Gorgeous golden eyes hot as flames on her oval face, Leonidas tipped her back on the bed. ‘Set your imagination free. Today and every day can be what you want it to be now, mali mou.’

‘Wish-fulfilment,’ Maribel muttered, a slim hand curving to a long, powerful male thigh.

‘My wish at this precise moment is to be very dominant, and for you to lie there and allow me to pleasure you,’ Leonidas husked in a roughened undertone.

He eased up her skirt in a slow, erotic manoeuvre and nudged her nerveless legs apart. She could feel herself melting like butter beneath a blow torch. Long before he could reach the sweet, damp warmth between her thighs, her excitement was at screaming pitch. Her languorous purplish-blue gaze clung to his bold dark features. ‘This once,’ she traded unevenly, ‘I shall just lie here and think of living with you.’

Leonidas saw disaster hovering on the horizon and almost cursed out loud in his seething frustration. Avoiding the discussion of detail was one thing; lying an impossibility. He rolled over and pinned her in place beneath a muscular thigh. ‘We won’t be living together,’ he murmured. ‘This will be your home with Elias and I’ll stay only when I’m visiting.’

Visiting? Maribel felt herself freeze in self-protection from the giant rolling wave of pain threatening her composure. Her sense of rejection was acute, but as nothing next to the awful sense of humiliation she experienced. She felt as though she had been slapped in the face with her own stupidity, for he had no desire whatsoever to live with her. He simply wanted to house his son in a luxury dwelling where he could conveniently visit him and occasionally enjoy a little recreational sex with his son’s mother. By no stretch of the imagination was he offering her a normal relationship or indeed any form of commitment towards a shared future. Shutting her eyes tight, she tried to pull free of him.

‘No…no, you’re not bolting on me again!’ Leonidas growled, catching both her frantic hands in his and pinning them above her head in one of his to hold her in place. ‘Calm down.’

‘I’m calm,’ Maribel declared.

‘I’m sorry if I misled you.’

‘Let go of me,’ she framed tightly between compressed lips.

‘Sometimes I could stay the whole weekend with you. Maybe we could even share the occasional vacation,’ Leonidas proffered, holding her wildly squirming body captive with the considerable weight of his own. ‘It would be good. It would be a very efficient arrangement.’

The last drop of hope inside her died when he voiced that passion-killing word, ‘efficient’. ‘If you don’t let me up, I’ll scream.’

Leonidas would much have preferred a scream to the frozen tension of her face and the flatness of her voice. He coiled back from her with extreme reluctance.

Wrapping a screening arm over her bared breasts, tears burning like acid behind her lowered lashes, Maribel slid off the bed, snatched up her discarded clothing and headed straight for the adjoining bathroom. ‘I’d appreciate it if you would wait for me downstairs.’

‘Theos mou…why are you being so bloody unreasonable about this?’ Leonidas demanded, vaulting off the bed in one powerful movement. ‘Anyone would think I’d insulted you!’

Maribel almost lost her head with him at that point. Had there been anything suitable within reach she would have snatched it up and thrown it at him with vicious intent. Mercifully there wasn’t, and she shut the door behind her and simply stared blankly into space. When was she going to learn to keep her distance? Only an idiot would have credited that Leonidas Pallis was offering her a serious live-in relationship. Her eyes burned as she fought back the tears with all her strength. She had almost ended up in bed with him again. Concentrate on the positive, her intelligence told her, not on your mistakes. She could not afford to let go of her emotions. She had to face him again, still had to deal with how two such disparate people—one of whom was a domineering, selfish, spoiled billionaire—could possibly share the upbringing of one little boy.