Theo looked through the sheets one by one, automatically passing each one to Helena once he’d finished perusing. They were Takis’s designs for all the statues and ornate benches that would eventually adorn Theo’s garden.
Each and every design was stunning. She had no doubt that, once completed, any piece could sit proudly in the Vatican or in the Uffizi Gallery.
‘What did you think of Takis?’ Theo asked her once they were driving back to the villa.
‘A true artist,’ she replied, shaking her head reverently. ‘Your garden is going to be a work of art.’
‘That’s the idea.’ He cast a quick glance at her before turning his attention back to the open road before them.
Theo had loved watching her reaction to the studio. In many ways, she was an artist like Takis, her imagination creating something out of nothing. The sketches she made freehand, he’d always believed, were works of art in themselves and he felt a sudden twinge of guilt to remember the fate of that first sketch in the palace grounds.
Flushed with happiness at his compliments of her work, she’d given the sketch to him and refused to accept anything in return, which he’d immediately pounced on by insisting he buy her dinner as a thank-you. He’d bought her dinner every night for three months thereafter and he’d treasured the sketch, had it professionally framed and hung on his bedroom wall.
He’d smashed the frame’s glass and burned the sketch a fortnight after she jilted him.
His jaw clenched. It didn’t relax until they were back at the villa.
He pressed the knob to close the car’s roof while Helena undid her seatbelt and then smoothed her hair.
He turned to face her. His throat caught. Her golden skin was flushed from the drive, her eyes alight, a soft expression on her face he hadn’t seen for a long time. She still wasn’t wearing her glasses...
Neither of them spoke. For the longest time, all they did was gaze into each other’s eyes, their individual breaths falling into rhythm together, becoming shallow as the chemistry that had always bound them so tightly coiled around them.
He brought his face to hers and captured a lock of her hair in his fingers.
She shivered lightly and raised her chin. Her lips parted. He brushed his mouth against them then pulled back an inch.
‘Do I tell the captain to take us back to Sidiro now or in the morning?’ he whispered.
Her eyes flickered with confusion then darkened. She bit her bottom lip, all the while staring deep into his eyes...
And then she wound an arm around his neck and pulled him down into a hot, passionate kiss that answered for her.
* * *
Helena stared out of her office window, sipping absently at her coffee. She’d had a chat with Stanley for advice on certain aspects of the plans that had been concerning her. Her mind now at ease, she should be busy working on the plans she hadn’t touched in three days, and yet...
She felt Theo’s absence acutely. An early morning call from his PA about some business crisis had seen him fly from Agon to Athens with a promise to meet her back at Sidiro later.
She’d spent the sail back to Sidiro with her laptop open but her finger pressed in the exact spot on her lips where his mouth had lingered when he’d kissed her goodbye.
She squeezed her eyes shut. There would be no more kisses. They’d had two nights together. That had to be enough. She’d made it perfectly clear that their return to Sidiro meant a return to their professional relationship.
Scolding herself firmly, she drained her coffee and returned to her stool at the large table, where she was working on the physical blueprint. If she continued at the pace she’d set, she should have the first plans ready to present to him in a fortnight. They would then go through it in detail together and anything Theo wasn’t happy with would—
Distinct footsteps snatched her attention away from her work.
The pen in her hand slipped from her fingers. She snatched it back up and wiped her suddenly clammy hands on her skirt.
‘You’ve put your uniform back on, I see.’ Theo’s voice, as distinct as his footsteps and his scent, soaked into her skin.
Changing into a skirt and blouse had been the first thing she’d done when she’d arrived back on the peninsula. Dressing professionally was like mental armour.
She took a moment to compose herself before twisting her stool round to face him.
Theo was still dressed in the same shirt and tailored trousers he’d left the villa in that morning but had ditched the jacket and tie. Dressed or undressed, her body didn’t care. It sang for him regardless. Her heart sang for him too...
She pressed her bottom more firmly into the stool to prevent her legs running over to him.
‘Everything sorted?’ she asked, relieved her voice sounded relatively normal and not all throaty and breathless.
He shrugged. ‘As much as it can be.’
‘Oh?’
‘Minor problems with a new government directive. We thought we were prepared but one of the legal team discovered not all our systems are equipped to cope with it.’
She had no idea what he was talking about.
Theo must have noticed her expression, for he burst into laughter. Strolling to the coffee pot and grabbing a clean cup, he said, ‘Don’t worry, matia mou, it is every bit as boring as it sounds. Did you miss me?’
How she loved the way matia mou rolled off his tongue. That had been his pet name for her before. She’d had no idea how much she hated him calling her agapi mou until he’d switched back to the old endearment. It sounded right. It sounded exactly as things should be...
‘Helena?’
She blinked, aware she’d fallen into yet another trance. ‘Sorry?’
His eyes sparkled and, cup of coffee in hand, he propped himself against the wall. ‘I asked if you missed me.’
‘You were only gone for a few hours.’
He looked at his watch. ‘Eight hours.’
‘I never noticed,’ she lied, averting her gaze from his. She twisted her stool back around and straightened the blueprint. ‘I’m glad you got the directive thing sorted. I know what a pain it can be keeping up with new legislation. I’m lucky I don’t have to enforce anything, just implement it where necessary.’
‘Still avoiding my question?’
He read her so easily. Like no one else. But then, he’d been witness to a side of her no one else had seen. She’d let that side slip out a little on Agon, but now they were back she had to return it to where it belonged. To allow anything else would be madness.
‘Things are always quiet without you,’ she finally answered. After she’d spent forty-eight hours glued to his hip...and groin...the silence had felt more acute than ever. Where there was Theo, there was life. Whatever she was feeling, she would never regret agreeing to a second night with him.
‘Excellent avoidance. I’m not ashamed to say I missed you.’
She bowed her head and kept her eyes on the blueprints. The lines she’d drawn thickened and blurred...
‘All I could think about was getting back to you and sweeping you off to bed,’ he continued with a sensuous purr. ‘But I can’t sweep you off to bed, can I? Because it’s against your rules.’
She closed her eyes and tried to hold back the wave of heat crashing through her, but it would have been easier for Theo to lasso the moon.
‘Do you know what I think about rules?’ he whispered into the stark silence that followed.
She could guess.
‘That they are made to be broken. Or bent...’
She couldn’t stop herself from twisting back around to look at him.
His eyes pulsed and he moved away from the wall and stalked towards her. ‘What is to stop us from sharing a bed here too? As professionalism is so important to you, I can promise to keep my hands to myself during
office hours.’
She dug her fingers into the table, eyes squeezed shut, suddenly holding on for dear life while his caressing words penetrated her senses.
‘But when the night comes...’ His words dangled in the air between them and then the air itself shifted.
Helena opened her eyes and found him within arm’s reach. He leaned down to look directly at her. ‘Or we could sail back to Agon every evening. Elli and Natassa would, I’m sure, be grateful of the extra privacy... As would I.’ Then he straightened, a wicked gleam playing in his eyes. ‘I’m going to get changed.’
And then he sauntered out of her office before she could unglue her vocal cords enough to speak.
* * *
Theo showered briskly and changed into a pair of shorts. And nothing else.
Time to go and torture Helena a little more. He didn’t think he could ever tire of making her blush.
There was a fizz in his veins when he walked the short route back to her office, where he found her at her desk once more, working on her computer.
She didn’t acknowledge his arrival. But she noticed. He saw it in the way she shifted in her seat and had a large gulp of her coffee.
Smiling to himself, he sat on the sofa closest to her and pressed his phone to check his emails. A fresh batch had recently landed from his American employees, who were just waking up to the new business day. Theo enforced a strict policy within all his companies that, unless specifically trading with different time zones, all work communications were muted from eight p.m. until seven a.m. He’d wanted to enforce it from six p.m. but had been advised it would be unenforceable. There were people out there so desperate to get ahead they would forgo a social life to climb another rung on the corporate ladder. He didn’t understand the mentality. His father, a hugely successful entrepreneur, had always made sure to be home to share the evening meal with his family. Weekends were sacrosanct. His father had worked hard and played hard, a policy Theo had wholeheartedly adopted. He paid his staff well and was generous with paid leave and other perks because he was a firm believer that staff with happy, fulfilled personal lives were more productive at work.
It made his stomach knot to know his best work had come in the months after Helena had jilted him, when he’d had to occupy every minute of every hour to stop himself from losing his mind. The inheritance he’d quadrupled in the years after his parents’ death had increased by a further five-fold in the three years after she’d left him.
Helena, he would bet, took her work home with her. Her upbringing had been similar to his in that they were only children, both had stay-at-home mothers and both shared their evening meals with their parents, but there the similarities ended. Family meals in the Nikolaidis household had been noisy affairs with plenty of disagreements and shouting, especially if his paternal grandfather joined them. Now in his eighties, he could still win awards for shouting. But those meals had been fun and the thing he had missed the most when his parents died.
Any fun in his life had been forced, he now realised. He’d thrown himself into the party lifestyle in part because he couldn’t bear being in the huge house without them. The silence of their absence had been acute. Not until he’d met Helena had he experienced true joy again. She’d seamlessly filled the gaping hole his parents had left in him. Before he’d met her, he hadn’t had a night in since his father’s great heart had given out. The doctors said an undetected abnormality had been the cause of it but Theo knew better. Nursing his mother through her battle with cancer and then the pain of losing her had caused it. His father had died of a broken heart. Theo, eighteen years old and suddenly the possessor of a great fortune, had found relief from his grief in drink, women, exercise and work—and not necessarily in that order. For years he’d tried to escape the pain, never closing his eyes for sleep unless certain he was exhausted enough or inebriated enough to slip into oblivion.
Helena had stopped the merry-go-round. In her he’d found someone to share his life and raise a family with. His parents’ marriage had been strong and he’d been certain he and Helena had the same strength to replicate it. Before he’d met her, he hadn’t even known he was searching for her.
Once he’d accepted she had left him for good, his grief had speared him. The hole had ripped back open, far bigger and deeper than before. He’d hidden himself from the pain the only way he knew how: by throwing himself back into his old lifestyle with a vengeance. And vengeance had been on his mind too. All the love he’d lavished on Helena had twisted into something ugly. He’d used it as fuel while biding his time for the perfect moment to strike.
He’d never stopped to think of the pain Helena must have gone through too. It had been too easy to see her as the villainess who’d humiliated him when he should have seen the warning signs. They’d been there. If only he had paused a moment to read them.
He remembered her agitation in the days leading up to her parents’ arrival before the wedding. He’d assumed she was worried he would dislike them and so had made an extra effort to get on with them and ingratiate himself with her father. His ego, he now knew, had seen him look at everything from a Theo-centric prism.
She’d relayed snippets of her childhood to which he should have paid closer attention. If he had, he’d have understood what she’d tried to tell him.
Meals in the Armstrong household, from how Helena had matter-of-factly described them, had been conducted in silence unless her father wanted to start a discussion about a particular news item on which he had strong views or a book he wished to critique.
Only now did it occur to him that for Helena to contribute to those lofty discussions, she would have had to contribute in Greek, a difficult language to master for non-native speakers.
Little wonder Helena had kept the light that lived inside of her deeply hidden. To let it out would have met heavy disapproval. He remembered her telling him, also matter-of-factly, that her father had hoped to breed a scholar like himself. Archibald Armstrong had approved of architecture as a career choice for his daughter only because it had the social cache he craved. There had been a number of Archibald’s equally highbrow friends in the congregation when Theo had stood before them and merrily announced the wedding was off. Her father would have felt humiliated by his daughter’s wilful actions, but to throw her out and cut her off for it...?
How could anyone treat their own flesh and blood so abysmally?
How hard must it have been for Helena to cope? To survive?
His ruminations dissolved when he became aware of being watched.
Lifting his head from his phone—he hadn’t read a single one of the emails—he found Helena’s dark eyes fixed boldly on him.
The tiniest smile played on her lips but it was a smile that stirred his blood.
She slowly placed her hands to her breasts and cupped them.
Theo blinked, suddenly certain his imagination had gone haywire.
She undid the top button of her shirt. And then the next. And the next until, one by one, all her buttons were undone and she parted the shirt...
Her breasts strained against the plain white bra like succulent marshmallows.
All the moisture in his mouth vanished.
She got to her feet and slowly brought the sleeves down her arms and let the shirt drop to the floor.
He gulped for air.
Eyes still holding his, she put her hands behind her back. A beat later, her skirt fell to the floor. She stepped out of it with a sensuous grace that had him gulping for more air.
Then her hands went behind her back again...
The beautiful breasts sprang free, high, full, cherry-tipped... Perfect. Just like the rest of her.
She took another step towards him. Her fingers plucked the sides of her white knickers.
Was he dreaming? He could pinch himself to be sure but that might mean waking up. He did not want to wake up. If this w
as a dream, then he would let his fantasies live on...
The knickers slid down her creamy thighs.
A groan escaped his throat.
So much for him torturing her...
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
HELENA STEPPED OUT of her knickers and took another step towards Theo. Her heartbeats were so heavy she was sure he must be able to hear them. Or see them.
He’d left her office and the whole room had spun around her like a wheel on fire. Her thoughts had been a jumble.
When he’d walked back in, her heart had pounded like a fist against her chest and knocked all the confusion out of her.
How could she think two days of being Theo’s lover would be enough?
What was to stop them carrying on with their affair?
She wasn’t the same woman she’d been three years ago. Theo had helped rip off the straitjacket of her upbringing and, unwitting though it had been, given her the courage to pursue her career without her parents’ support—without anyone’s support. He had so much nerve, such energy, such confidence... Was it any surprise she’d taken some of that energy into her own blood? He’d made her brave with her father and given her confidence in her work. What was stopping her from using that bravery and confidence for pleasure without putting a time limit to it?
What was wrong with taking things one day at a time and just enjoying and exploring the closeness of the one man who made her feel so alive? He made her feel like the most desirable woman in the world. He made her smile, made her laugh, made her want to wrap her arms around him and crush her skin against his and inhale nothing but his scent.
The feelings he evoked in her were so powerful that she didn’t want to lose them. Not yet. Not ever...
She took another step towards him, relishing the expression in his hooded eyes. His breaths were heavy through his nose. His bare chest rose up and down rapidly.
His Greek Wedding Night Debt (Passion In Paradise Book 10) Page 13
