She eyed his jaw, squinting slightly. He did have a slight darkness on his lower face, as if he was about to sport some manly stubble. He also had extremely attractive lips, the lower one in particular, with its sweet, oh, so very sweet curve, and the upper with a deep indentation up to a long, straight nose. Like the spot on his neck, she had the worst urge to taste that upper lip dip. She actually licked her own lips thinking about it before she remembered that ogling a drunk’s brother, especially one who should be on the cover of GQ, really wasn’t the thing to do. “Er . . . what was the question?”
He sighed. “Whisker burn. That is all the red marks are.”
“They are?” She turned to Cyndi. “Cyn?”
“He hurt me,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “Even if it was just his rough cheeks, I need to see a doctor.”
Amy, Derek’s girlfriend and the other singer of the group, immediately hugged her, her blue eyes worried. Even Terry, bright, cheerful Terry who always had a joke on his lips, looked somber as he moved closer to the two women. All four sets of eyes watched Harry with an obvious plea in them.
“Whisker burn.” She turned back to face the annoying god with the sexy lips. He raised an eyebrow, and she was thankful that he was clearly beyond such mortal things as saying I told you so.
“I told you she wasn’t hurt,” he said with a slight smirk.
She pointed a finger at him. “You just knocked yourself off your pedestal, buster. All right, I’m willing to accept that your brother didn’t intentionally hurt her. But she’s very upset, and she does have some nasty rashes, so I think it probably would be better for everyone’s peace of mind if she saw a doctor. If you and Mr. Grabby Hands over there would just get out of here, I’ll get Cyn dressed and we’ll take her to the mainland.”
His lickable lips tightened as if he wasn’t used to receiving orders, a thought that gave her immense pleasure. Oh, how fun it would be to take him down a peg or two, to remind him that he might think himself a god amongst lesser folk, but in reality he was nothing more than a man. An extremely rich, urbane, sexy, and probably quite fascinating man, but still a man.
She looked at the dip of his collarbone. Her tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth. “Temptation is a bitch.”
“You can say that again,” he muttered, giving her a dark look before turning on his heel and leaving the room, dragging his brother with him.
CHAPTER 2
There was no reason for him to be there. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the woman with whom Theo had gotten a little overly amorous, and yet there he was, standing in a hospital hallway, waiting to hear exactly what he knew—that she hadn’t been attacked.
So why was he there, when he should have been at home keeping an eye on Elena and the guests who filled his house? The party celebrating his sister’s birthday aside, he had a million other things he’d much rather be doing than standing in the antiseptic surroundings of the small hospital his father had endowed eight years ago, after the death of his beloved second wife.
Nurses hurried past him, most giving him nothing but the deferential acknowledgment due the local benefactor, a few casting warmer gazes that lingered with pleasure. He thought little of the attention they paid him—women had fawned over him since the time he grew hair between his legs.
“I think I’m going to die,” Theo murmured, his head hanging low between his knees as he hunched over in the chair. “That woman broke my nuts.”
“Next time you can’t keep them in your trousers, pick someone a little more experienced,” Iakovos told him, his voice rich with the grim sense of injustice he was cherishing. That woman had poked him in the chest! She had yelled at him!
Theo looked up with a lopsided grin. Even half-drunk and suffering a black eye, he possessed the famed Papaioannou charm that had a passing female nurse gasping. “Couldn’t help myself, Jake. She was so hot. Pretended to be shy, but she was rubbing herself all over me, and she had tits that drove me wild. Everything would have been fine, but then she got demanding, and next thing I knew, that skinny little bit was there screaming that she’d been attacked, and then the two others came in. Even then I could’ve explained that the shy bird was going off about nothing, but then they had to get that . . . that . . .” One hand cupped his testicles.
“Amazon?” Iakovos asked.
“She-devil. Did you see how she looked at me? I thought she was going to skin me alive until you stopped her.”
“It would have served you right if I’d let her.” His jaw tightened as he looked down at his scapegrace brother. An only child until his father’s second marriage fifteen years after his birth, Iakovos was almost twenty years older than Elena, while thirteen years stood between Theo and him. Sometimes, he felt old enough to be their father. “I told you to lay off the alcohol.”
“I wasn’t drunk,” Theo protested. “I just had a little buzz going.”
“Your little buzzes are going to land you in the hospital with liver failure if you don’t cut back. Or jail if you ever again try a stunt like the one you pulled tonight—don’t bother protesting that you didn’t attack that girl. I know you didn’t. You still shouldn’t have had her in your room.”
Theo gave him another smile that oozed with charm. “Come on, Jake,” he said, using the Anglicized nickname that made Iakovos’ lips thin. “All Papaioannou men have to do is smile, and women fall all over themselves to crawl into our beds. It’s not like you haven’t ever succumbed to a sweet little thing.”
“There’s such a thing as fouling your own nest, and I most certainly haven’t succumbed to the temptation of any woman in Elena’s set. I’d rather not be known as a cradle robber.”
Theo made a rude face. “You’re thirty-nine, Iakovos, not eighty-nine. There’s nothing wrong with Elena’s friends. Some of them are—” He stopped speaking, the smug look on his face swiftly changing to one of horror. “It’s the she-devil! I’m getting out of here before she attacks me again.”
Iakovos turned to watch the woman who was marching down the narrow hallway of the hospital toward him, her long legs eating up the distance, her hair rippling behind her like a banner. She looked exactly like the personification of a summer storm at sea, one that was about to descend upon him. For a moment he wondered if he’d be the same once the storm hit, but dismissed it as a fanciful thought, one not worthy of consideration. Especially, he noted to himself as he allowed his gaze to roam over the approaching woman, as there was such a better use for his attention. The woman—he couldn’t bring himself to think of her by that appalling nickname—what did she say her name was? Rose? No, the French version of that word, Eglantine . . . an unusual name, an old-fashioned name, one that suited her.
She was tall, almost as tall as he was, and plentifully formed, not at all his usual type. She was dressed simply in neutral linen pants and a sleeveless tunic that might have hid her form from other men, but his sharp eyes picked up the alluring curve of her hip when the bottom of the tunic fluttered back momentarily. Her breasts were decently covered, but nothing could disguise their abundance, or the soft sweep of her upper arms, covered lightly in freckles. Her face wouldn’t be considered beautiful by the standards held by the women he usually dated, but he found it pleasing nonetheless. She had a round little stubborn chin, that glorious wide mouth that his gaze returned to again and again, a short nose with freckles, and two eyes that were at this moment looking as if nothing would make her happier than to see him drop dead on the spot.
“Eglantine,” he said, acknowledging her when she stopped in front of him, her hands on her hips.
Her nostrils flared. “Yacky.”
He closed his eyes for a moment. “My name is Iakovos. If you are unable to remember that, you may address me as Mr. Papaioannou.”
She looked incredulous. “You’re not serious.”
“I am. It is my name. It is not that difficult to say. I’m sure that you could master it with little effort should you put your mind to it.”
“Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of your butt, but since neither is likely to happen, we’ll just move on, shall we?”
“What did you say?” he asked, outraged to the tips of his toes. Delightfully irreverent as she was, he had the desperate sense that if he did not take control of the conversation, he would be lost in the storm that seemed to accompany her.
“I said we should move on, and I—”
“You said—” He breathed heavily through his nose for a moment. “You said something about monkeys flying out of my ass. That is the second time you have mentioned that in conversation.”
“Your ass? So?” Her eyebrows rose. “Do you have a problem with your butt?”
“No, I do not have a problem with it!” The sense of control slipping away from him grew stronger. He took a deep breath, and was aware of her unique scent even over the antiseptic odors of the hospital. “But you seem to have one.”
She looked surprised, and before he could ask her how the young woman was, she walked around behind him, startling him by pulling up the back of the coat he’d slipped on for the ride over to the mainland. “What are you doing?” he demanded, feeling more and more as if he were a bit of flotsam caught in a whirlpool.
“Seeing if I have a problem with your ass. I don’t seem to. Do you mind if I touch?”
Iakovos looked over his shoulder at her, speechless for the first time in his life. Before he could demand that she treat him with the respect due a man in his position, she put out a hand and cupped one cheek. Instantly, his groin was flooded with blood, leaving his sex heavy with need.
He was absolutely, utterly, and completely out of his depth with her.
“Well, it’s kind of hard to see because you’re not wearing skintight pants, but from what I can feel, no, I don’t have a problem with your ass.” Harry dropped his jacket as he spun around to face her, her fingers tingling from the contact with his warm behind.
She badly wanted to use both hands on him, but suspected that would be pushing things too far. As it was, he had another one of those indescribable looks on his face, as if he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to throttle her or kiss her silly.
“I really hope it’s the latter,” she told him.
“What ladder?” he asked, his eyes taking on a bit of a wild look.
“Sorry, inner monologue again. It’s not important. Is the situation with your ass settled? Good. Now, if we could address the issue of Cyndi, the doctor says she’s suffering from the abrasions on her chest and neck, her blood pressure is sky-high, and she’s had to be sedated because she was close to completely losing it. I don’t think she’s in any real danger, but she had worked herself up to such a state, it’s probably better if she spends the night here,” she said, lifting her chin. She dared him—she just dared him—to tell her she was being foolish.
A muscle in Iakovos’ jaw flexed a few times, but all he said was, “I don’t care if she spends a month here so long as she stops throwing herself at Theo.”
“He didn’t have to accept what she offered. Not to mention he was stinking drunk, and way too rough with her, as petite as she is,” Harry told him, dragging her mind away from thoughts of what his butt must look like to more important things. “Amy said she’d stay with Cyndi. The doctor wants Cyndi to remain overnight, but evidently it’s going to take some time to get her into a room. He said they’re run off their feet because half the hospital staff went to another town where there was a train accident, so it could be a few hours. I’m sure you want to get back to your party.”
His brows, straight slashes of ebony against his warm bronzed skin, lowered. “Are you giving me orders, Eglantine?”
“No, Yacky, I’m not. I’m simply suggesting that since it’s going to take some time to get Cyndi settled, you probably want to go home. There’s no sense for you to stay here, too. I assume you came over in another boat?”
He nodded, his eyes searching her face as if he sought some answer there. “You are tired.”
“Oh, I’m well beyond tired,” she agreed, giving him what she hoped was a bright smile as she rubbed her arms against the chill in the air. The hospital was very modern, if small, with an obviously quite efficient air-conditioning system. “I’ve been awake for over twenty-four hours.” His frown asked a question. She answered it with a shrug. “The kids flew out a day before me. I wasn’t called in to pinch-hit until this morning. Er . . . yesterday morning. Sometime. I’ve lost track of what time it is since I left Seattle.”
He stared at her for a moment, not saying anything, just looking at her. She couldn’t help but stare at his lips, and wondered what sort of miracle she’d have to pull off to taste them.
Without a word, he took off his suit jacket and draped it around her shoulders before turning and striding off down the corridor. The jacket was warm from his body heat, and smelled like him. The scent of his cologne—lemony and woodsy at the same time—teased her nose as she watched him walk away. “Oh, I have no problem at all with your butt,” she said softly before melting into a chair, suddenly so exhausted she didn’t have the strength to do more than huddle into the jacket and wish she was back home, in her little apartment that was completely devoid of sexy, arrogant, rich playboys with incredibly fabulous butts.
She woke up to find she was slumped sideways in the chair, drooling on the lapel of Iakovos’ nice jacket.
“Come,” the man himself said, holding out a hand to her.
“Where?” she asked, averting her face so he wouldn’t see her wipe off a tendril of slobber on the wet patch on his coat.
“There’s a handkerchief in the inside pocket,” he said with martyred resignation.
“Sorry,” she said, dabbing at her lips before offering him the jacket.
He looked at it as if she’d just wiped out a cesspool with it. “Keep it. I have others.”
“I didn’t mean to fall asleep and slobber all over it. I’ll have it cleaned and sent back to you.” She stood slowly, feeling as if she were a hundred years old.
“You’ll need it in a few minutes. The wind is cold on the water at night.”
“I told you I wasn’t going to leave until Cyndi got settled in a room.” He tried to herd her toward the elevator. She dug in her heels.
He made an annoyed click of his tongue. “You are exhausted and you need to rest.”
“Yeah, well, you may be Mr. Fabulous, but you’re so not the boss of me.”
“Mr. Papaioannou, not Fabulous,” he corrected her.
“I am never going to be able to pronounce that!”
“You will. It’s not that difficult. Say it slowly. Papai-oan—”
“Argh!” she yelled, as her emotions of the past two hours—combined with a pretty severe case of sleep deprivation—more or less robbed her of what few inhibitions she had. She knew that, and yet there was nothing, absolutely nothing, on this good earth that was going to stop her from doing what she had wanted to do the second she saw the annoying, aggravating, incredibly sexy man in front of her.
She grabbed his head with both hands, pulled his face down to hers, and sucked his lower lip into her mouth.
He stood frozen for a second, then pulled back, his eyes glittering like polished onyx. “I do not like aggressive women!”
She stared at him, stunned by her own brashness but absolutely flabbergasted by the brief taste of his mouth. Before she could even begin to stammer some sort of an apology, he was on her, the cool, hard planes of the wall behind her holding her up while hot, hard man covered her front. His mouth was like fire, a sweet, sensual fire that threatened to burn her up, leaving nothing but a Harry-shaped smear of ash on the wall. He didn’t ask permission for his tongue to visit hers—it was just suddenly there, sweeping around as if it owned the place while he groaned into her mouth.
She put both hands on his chest, gathered every ounce of strength, and shoved him backward.
His expression was as black as his eyes, but that didn’t stop her. “And
I don’t like men who don’t bother to ask permission before they stick their tongues down my throat!”
Those beautiful, glittering eyes narrowed. “How many men have stuck their tongues down your throat?”
“None! But that’s beside the point!”
She panted, literally panted, from the fire of his kiss, and the heat of his body, which seemed to sink into her very pores, leaving her burning with the desire for more. More of his mouth, more of his body, just more.
He gritted his teeth. “I have never been forced to ask permission to kiss a woman. It does not happen! And I will not—”
Harry threw herself on him. She just leaped on him, wrapping both arms around his head and her legs around his waist. He caught her, pulling her higher so that her mouth was directly in front of his, his fingers digging into her behind. “Shut up and kiss me.”
His eyes opened wide with indignation. “Did you just tell me to shut up?”
“Yes. Yes, I did. Do you want to make something of it?”
The promise of retribution shone brightly in his eyes, but before he could answer, Cyndi’s doctor emerged from the elevator. He stopped, looking at them, blinking a couple of times as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
“Hi, Dr. Panagakos,” Harry said, trying to think of a viable excuse for her clinging to one of the world’s most eligible bachelors, her legs wrapped around his waist, his hands on her butt.
Iakovos shot her a glare. “Oh, you have no difficulty pronouncing ‘Panagakos’?”
“He put consonants in his name,” she said with a pointed look.
He growled deep in his chest, his eyes almost scorching her flesh.
The doctor edged around them, murmuring something about seeing to a patient.
“Well?” she asked Iakovos.
The muscle in his jaw twitched. “Well, what?”
“Are you going to kiss me or not? I mean, we are in this really compromising position, and despite the fact that you don’t appear to have back problems, I imagine holding me up like this for any length of time is bound to wear you out.”
It's All Greek to Me Page 3
