Hot-Blooded Husbands Bundle

by Michelle Reid

  She’d believed there was nothing else he could do to hurt her. She’d actually come here to Athens ready to let go of the past and leave again hopefully feeling whole. But no. If just one name had the ability to crush her that bit more, then it would be that of Diantha Christophoros.

  For that name alone, if she only could reach him she would scratch his eyes out; if she could wrestle him to the ground she would trample all over him in her spike heels.

  But she had to make do with lancing him with words. ‘I don’t want your houses, and I don’t want your money,’ she informed him. ‘I don’t want your name or you, come to that. I don’t even want your wedding ring…’ Wrenching it off her finger, she slid it across the table towards him, then bent and with a snatch caught up her bag. ‘And I certainly don’t want your precious family heirlooms,’ she added, holding her three witnesses silent as she took a sealed envelope out of the bag and launched it to land beside the ring. ‘In there you will find the key to my safety deposit box, plus a letter authorising you to empty it for yourself,’ she informed Leandros. ‘Give them to your next wife,’ she suggested. ‘They might not be wasted on her.’

  Leandros did not look anywhere but at her face while she spat her replies at him. ‘So I repeat,’ he persisted, ‘what is it that you do want?’

  ‘A divorce!’ she lanced back through tear-burned eyes. ‘See how much you are worth to me, Leandros? All I want is a nice quick divorce from you so that I can put you right out of my life!’

  ‘Insult me one more time, and you might not like the consequences,’ he warned very thinly.

  ‘What could you do to me that you haven’t already done?’ she laughed.

  Black eyes turned into twin lasers. ‘Show you up for the tramp you are by bringing your muscle-building lover into this?’

  For a moment Isobel did not know what he was talking about. Then she issued a stifled gasp. ‘You’ve been having me watched!’ she accused.

  ‘Guilty as charged,’ he admitted and sat back indolently, picked up the pen again and began weaving it between long brown fingers. ‘Adultery is an ugly word,’ he drawled icily. ‘I could drag you, your pride and your lover through the courts if you wish to turn this into something nasty.’

  Nasty. It had always been nasty since the day she’d married him. ‘Do it, then,’ she invited. ‘I still won’t accept a single Euro from you.’

  With that she stood up and, to both lawyers’ deepening bewilderment, snatched up her bag and turned to leave.

  ‘Isobel, please—’ It was Takis who tried to appeal to her.

  ‘Mrs Petronades, please think about this—?’ Lester Miles backed him up.

  ‘Get out of here, the pair of you,’ Leandros cut across the two other men. ‘Take one more step towards that door, Isobel, and you know I will drag you back and pin you down if necessary.’

  Her footsteps slowed to a reluctant standstill. She was trembling so badly now she actually felt sick. In the few seconds of silence that followed she actually wondered if the two lawyers were about to caution him.

  But no, they weren’t that brave. He was bigger than them in every way a man could be. Height, size—bloody ego. They both slunk past her with their heads down, like two rats deserting a sinking ship.

  The door closed behind them. They were alone now. She spun on her slender heels, her eyes like glass. ‘You are such a bully,’ she said in disgust.

  ‘Bully.’ He pulled a face. ‘And you, my sweet, are such an angelic soul.’

  The my sweet stiffened her backbone. He had only ever used the endearment to mock or taunt. He was still flicking that wretched pen around in his fingers. His posture relaxed like a big cat taking its ease. But she wasn’t fooled. His mouth was thin, his eyes glinting behind those carefully lowered eyelashes, his jaw rigid, teeth set. He was so angry he was literally pulsing with it beneath all of that idleness.

  ‘Tell me about Clive Sanders.’

  There was the reason for it.

  She laughed, it was that surreal. He dared to demand an explanation from her after three years of nothing? Walking back to the table, she leaned against it, placed the flat of her palms on its top then looked him hard in the face. ‘Sex,’ she lied. ‘I’m good at it, if you recall. Clive thinks so too. He…’

  The table was no obstacle. He was around it before she could say another word. The cat-like analogy had not been conjured up out of nowhere; when he pounced he did it silently. In seconds she was lying flat on her back with him on top of her, and in no seconds at all she was experiencing a different kind of sensation.

  This one involved his touch and his weight and his lean, dark features looming so close that her tongue actually moistened with an urge to taste. It was awful. Memories of never holding back whenever he was this close. Memories of passion and desire and need neither had bothered to hold in check.

  ‘Say that again, from this position,’ he gritted.

  ‘Get off me.’ In desperation she began pushing hard against his shoulders, but the only things that moved were her clenched fists slipping against the smooth cloth of his jacket. She could feel the heat of his body, its power and its promise.

  ‘Say it!’ he rasped.

  Her eyes flashed like green lightning bolts filled with contempt for everything he stood for. His anger, his arrogance, his ability to make her feel like this. ‘I don’t have to do anything for you any more, ever,’ she lashed at him.

  He released a hard laugh that poured scorn onto her face. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, angel, but you still do plenty for me,’ and he gave a thrust of his hips so she would know and understand.

  Shock brought the air from her lungs on a shaken whisper. ‘You’re disgusting,’ she gasped.

  But no more than she was, when the cradle of her own hips moved in response and that oh, so damning animal instinct to mate dragged a groan from her lungs.

  He laughed again, huskily, then reached up to tug the comb from her hair. ‘There,’ he growled as red fire uncoiled across his fingers, ‘now you look more like the little wanton I married. All we need to do now is see how wanton,’ and his fingers moved down to deal with the jacket zip. The leather slid apart to reveal her neat cream blouse with its pearly buttons up to her throat. Whatever the blouse was supposed to say to him, she did not expect the flaming clash of her eyes with his, as if she’d committed some terrible sin.

  ‘Why the sexy leather?’ he demanded. ‘Why the prim hairstyle and a blouse my mother would refuse to wear? What are you trying to prove, Isobel?’ he lanced down at her. ‘That there are different kinds of sexual provocation? Or is this the way you’ve learned to dress for your new lover? Does he like to peel you, layer by exquisite layer, is that it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she hissed into his hard face. ‘The more layers I have on the more I excite him! Whereas you lacked the finesse to notice me at all unless I was already naked in bed and thoroughly convenient for a quick lay!’

  The quick lay struck right at his ego. Both saw the blistering flashback of his last urgent groping before she’d left him for good. Sparks flew, heat, pain then an anguish that coiled a sound inside his throat.

  ‘You bitch.’ The sound arrived in a hoarse whisper.

  He’d gone pale and tears were suddenly threatening her again. On a thick whimper she tried to dislodge him with the pushing thrust of her body, making leather squeak against polish wood and the heels of her shoes come close to scoring deep marks in the wood.

  ‘Let me go!’ she choked out helplessly. He caught the sound with his mouth and his tongue, and a full onslaught followed of someone who needed to assuage what she had just flung up into his face. Within seconds she had lost the will to fight this man who knew exactly how to kiss her senseless and make her cling with the hungry need for more.

  One of his hands was in her hair while the other was sliding between their bodies, making her spine arch sensually as the backs of his knuckles skidded over her breasts. The blouse sprang free, he was that deft with butto
ns, long fingers slid beneath a final covering of flimsy brown lace and claimed her nipple. She groaned in dismay but was already threading her fingers into his hair as she did so, making sure that he didn’t break away.

  It was all so primitively, physically basic! The harried sound of their laboured breathing, the squeak of leather on polished wood. The heat of his lips and the lick of his tongue and the slow, deep, sinuous thrust of his hips against the eager thrust of her own, that even with the thickness of her skirt was pulling her deeper into a morass of desire. If he reached down and touched the naked flesh at her thighs she would be his for the taking; the tingling already happening there was so tight she could barely stop herself from begging for it.

  Suddenly she was free. It happened so quickly that she wasn’t expecting it. Dizzy, disorientated, she lay there gasping and blinking as he arrived lightly on his feet by the table and between two chairs. She’d forgotten the anger with which he’d started this. But now she remembered, felt tears of humiliation fill her eyes and didn’t even bother to fight him when he took hold of her by the waist, lifted her up and swung her to her trembling feet.

  He saw the tears, and a sigh rasped from him. ‘I hate you,’ she whispered shakily. ‘You always were an animal.’

  ‘You should not have brought your lover to Athens!’ he ground out. ‘You insulted me by doing so!’

  She responded by instinct. A hand went up, caught him a hard, stinging slap to the side of his face, then she was grabbing up her bag and turning to walk away. Unsteady legs carried her forward, as her trembling fingers hurriedly tried to zip up her jacket—while her hair flowed down her spine like a red-hot flag that proclaimed what they had been doing.

  He didn’t stop her, which she took as a further insult. When she arrived in the next room the two lawyers stared at her tear-darkened eyes and dishevelled appearance in open dismay.

  ‘Whatever he wants,’ she instructed Lester Miles. ‘Have him draw up the papers and I’ll sign them.’

  With that she just kept on walking.

  Leandros had never been so angry with himself in a long time. He’d just treated her like a whore and for what reason?

  He didn’t have one. Not now that sanity had returned, anyway.

  Three years.

  He couldn’t believe his own crassness! Three years apart and he had reacted to the sight of her with her lover as if he’d caught them red-handed in his own bed! She was young and normal and perfectly healthy. She was beautiful and desirable and she had a sex-drive like anyone else! If she had utilised her right to sleep with another man, then what did that have to do with him now?

  It had a great deal to do with him, he grimly countered that question. On a dark and primitively sexual level she still belonged to him. Not once in the last three years had he thought about her taking other lovers. How stupid did that make him? Supremely, so he discovered, because from the moment she’d stepped into this room he’d tossed half a century out of the window to become the jealously possessive Greek male.

  Then he remembered the expression in her eyes that had brought with it the memory of the last time they had been together. Something thick lurched in his gut and he reeled violently away from what it was trying to make him feel.

  Guilty as charged. An animal lacking the finesse of which he was once so very proud. The boardroom door opened as he was splashing a shot of whisky into a glass.

  It was Takis. ‘She slapped your face,’ the lawyer commented, noticing the finger marks standing out on his cheek. ‘I suspect that you deserved it.’

  Oh, yes, he’d deserved it, Leandros thought grimly and picked up the glass of whisky then stood staring at it. ‘What did she say?’ he asked grimly.

  ‘Give him anything he wants,’ Takis replied. ‘I am to draw up the papers and she will sign them. So take my advice, Leandros, and do it now before she changes her mind. That woman is dangerous. Whatever you did to her here has made her dangerous.’

  ‘She admitted it—to my face—that she’s sleeping with that bastard,’ he said as if it should explain away everything.

  To another Greek male maybe it did in some small part. ‘Did you tell her that you want this divorce because you already have her replacement picked out and waiting in the wings to become your wife?’

  Shock spun him on his heel to stare at Takis. ‘Who told you that?’ he demanded furiously.

  Takis suddenly looked wary. ‘I believe it is common knowledge.’

  Common knowledge, Leandros repeated silently. Common knowledge put about by whom? His hopeful mother? His matchmaking sister? Or Diantha herself?

  Then, no, not Diantha, he told himself firmly. She is not the kind of woman to spread gossip about. ‘Gossip is just that—gossip,’ he muttered, more to himself than to Takis. ‘Isobel will not be here long enough to hear it.’

  Did that matter to him? he then had to ask himself, and sighed when he realised that yes, it mattered to him. What was wrong with him? Another sigh hissed from him. Why was he feeling like this about a woman he hadn’t wanted in years?

  He detected a pause, one of those telling ones that grabbed your attention. He glanced at Takis; saw his expression. ‘What?’ he prompted sharply.

  ‘She knows,’ he told him. ‘Her lawyer mentioned the Christophoros name before he went after Isobel.’

  Leandros felt his mind go blank for a split-second. She cannot know, he tried to convince himself.

  ‘The guy knew quite a lot as a matter of fact,’ Takis went on and there was surprise and reluctant respect in the tough lawyer’s voice. ‘He knew that Diantha spent time alone with you on your yacht in Spain, for instance. He also mentioned conservative attitudes in Greece to extramarital affairs, then suggested we review the kind of scandal it would cause if two big names such as Petronades and Christophoros were linked in this way in a court battle. He’s a clever young man,’ Takis concluded. ‘He needs watching. I might even use him myself one day.’

  Leandros was barely listening. His mind had gone off somewhere else. It was seeing Isobel’s face when she’d walked in here, seeing the anger, the hate, the desire to tear him to shreds where he stood.

  ‘Dear God,’ he breathed. Where had his head been? Why had he not read the signs? When she hurt she came out fighting. Make her feel vulnerable and expendable and she unsheathed her claws. Let her know she wasn’t good enough and she spat fire and brimstone over you then ran for cover as quickly as she could. Let her think she was being replaced with one of Athens’ noblest, and you could not hurt her more deeply if you tried.

  ‘The lack of a pre-nuptial is beginning to worry me.’ Takis was still talking to a lost audience. ‘She could take you to the cleaners if she decided she wanted to roll your name in the mud.’

  Turning, Leandros looked at the table where the imprint of her body had dulled the polished wood surface. His stomach turned over—not with distaste for what he had done there but for other far more basic reasons. He could still feel the imprint of her down his front, could still taste her in his mouth.

  Not far away, resting where it had landed when she tossed them at him, lay her wedding ring and the envelope containing access to the so-called family heirlooms.

  What family heirlooms? he thought frowningly. It was not something his family possessed.

  Until today she had still worn her wedding ring, even after three years of no contact with him, he mused on while absently twisting his own wedding ring between finger and thumb. Did a woman do that when she took herself a lover? Did she flout convention so openly?

  Ah, the lover, he backtracked slightly. The muscle-building blond with the lover’s light touch. His senses began to sizzle, his anger returned. Getting rid of the whisky glass, he walked up to the table and picked up the envelope and the ring.

  ‘We need to start moving on this, Leandros,’ Takis was prompting him.

  ‘Later,’ he said absently.

  ‘Later is not good enough,’ the lawyer protested. ‘I am telling you as y
our lawyer that if you want a quick, clean divorce then you have to move now.’

  But I don’t want a divorce, was the reply that lit up like a halogen light bulb in his head. I want my wife back. My wife!

  CHAPTER THREE

  OUT in the street Isobel hailed a passing taxi, gave the driver the name of her hotel then sank back in her seat with a shaking sigh. Maybe she should have waited for Lester Miles to join her but at this precise moment she didn’t want anyone witnessing the state she was in.

  ‘You OK, thespinis?’ the taxi driver questioned.

  Glancing up, she saw the driver studying her through his rear-view mirror, his brown eyes clouded by concern.

  Did she look that bad?

  Yes, she looked that bad, she accepted. Inside she was a mass of shakes and tremors. Beneath her zipped-up jacket her blouse was still gaping open and there wasn’t an inch of flesh that wasn’t still wearing the hot imprint of a man’s knowing touch. Her hair was hanging around her pale face and her mouth was hot, swollen and quivering from the kind of assault that should have set her screaming for help but instead she just—

  ‘Yes—thank you,’ she replied and lowered her eyes so he wouldn’t see just how big a lie that was.

  She felt like a whore. Her eyes filmed over. How could he do that to her? What had she ever done to him to make him believe he had the right to treat her that way?

  You riled him into doing it is what happened, a deriding little voice in her head threw in. You went in there wanting to rip his unfaithful heart out and ended up with him ripping out yours!

  She stared at the fingers of one hand as they rubbed anxiously at the empty place on another finger where her wedding ring had used to be, and tried to decide if she hurt more because of the way he had just treated her, or because she was still flailing around in the rotten discovery that she was still in love with the over-sexed brute!