Redeemed By Her Innocence (HQR Presents)

by Bella Frances

  ‘Of course. That’s a given. So on that basis we have a deal?’ He laughed, and extended his hand.

  ‘Deal,’ she said, and as she slid her hand into his, and looked up with those cool blue eyes, he knew there was a fire that burned there, and he was even more sure that there was nothing he wanted more on this earth than to light it.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE BRIGHT AFTERNOON sparkled and finally faded as the lilac clouds of dusk slipped through purples and mauves and came to settle over the low hills. Night wrapped warm arms around the vast lands of the villa, snuffing out everything except the sconces on the walls, the lamps dotted on paths and the fiery glow of the man himself.

  Jacquelyn, freshly showered, hair long and loose, slipped into her silk jersey maxi dress and stepped out on the terrace to watch.

  Her hands curled round the cool metal barrier and she breathed, deeply. What a day. From the moment the plane had touched down on the soil she’d been swept up in love for this place. The light, the scents and sounds, every fabulous aspect of this fabulous villa. And then spending the last part of the afternoon walking through shady olive groves, visiting the fabled Well of Agamemnon and sitting on Nikos’s private beach.

  She could hardly believe she was the same person who had been so dismissive of Nikos Karellis only one day earlier. Now her heart raced and her stomach fluttered at the thought of his face breaking into a smile, as he took her hand to guide her down the worn sandstone steps onto the baking sand.

  She’d been right not to strip off and swim though, tempted as she was. But that would have been a step too far. Instead she’d kept her sundress on and her dignity intact, and watched happily from the tiny terrace as he’d emerged from the pool house in a pair of swim shorts and jogged past her into the sea.

  He was magnificent. All that she’d denied herself in that flash as he’d opened the door to his suite, she’d then feasted on from the safety of her deck chair. She’d gorged herself on the rippling muscles of his back, his firm calves and thighs as he’d pounded past her to the waves. The sight of his fabled tattoos winding from his neck over his back and his chest, tracing their silky path over strong, hard, perfect muscles.

  He’d pounded the waves, swimming out some fifty metres and back, making her feel stupidly, ridiculously nervous when he’d almost seemed to disappear in the foaming white horses.

  And then finally he’d emerged and walked towards her, dragging a towel this way and that, mesmerising her, like a magnificent godlike hypnotist. She’d been powerless to stop herself. And that was OK. Because all she’d been doing was looking. And as long as she remembered that, she was in no danger.

  But even now as she stood watching him on the terrace below, she knew that every single thing about Nikos Karellis eclipsed every single thing about every other man she’d ever met. Back and forward he paced, like a general pacing in front of his army. In the calm, silent night his voice carried to where she stood, switching from the Greek she barely recognised, to Italian and then back to his deep, drawling Australian English—he was orator, statesman and king all in one.

  She knew she should be thinking about her presentation, but she simply couldn’t make her mind focus. Yet. As long as she had an early night, she’d be up at dawn and get back into the zone.

  ‘Hey up there! Juliet! Coming to join me?’ said Nikos. He had walked to the end of the terrace and was almost underneath her.

  ‘Yes, Romeo, just coming,’ she laughed. She lifted her fingers to her lips to blow him a kiss, and then stopped—what was she thinking? She drew her hand back as if she had been intending to tuck her hair behind her ear.

  But the look in his eyes told her he knew. He knew she was attracted to him. She was useless at hiding it. From the way she’d drooled as he’d dried himself down, to the way she’d been caught, open-mouthed, watching him just now.

  Of course she was attracted; who wouldn’t be? The question was, what was she going to do about it?

  She slipped silently along the hallway, her feet slipping on the marble, her silver bracelets jangling. She caught sight of herself in the mirrored doors that led out to the terrace.

  You’d better be careful, Jacquelyn, she told herself. You’re almost out of your depth. Don’t spoil it all now...

  She walked across the lamp-lit terrace. Nikos walked towards her, and her heart leaped in her chest. She breathed, she smiled. She took the cheek he offered, right, then left, and she kissed him quickly, ignoring the swirl of musky male scent and the smooth warmth of his skin.

  ‘You look very beautiful,’ he said. ‘That coral colour suits you. The cut of the dress—really nice.’

  She knew it did. The soft jersey draped over her figure, hugging her curves, the coral pink toned with her skin. She was lucky.

  ‘Thank you,’ she replied as he showed her to her seat at a round table, tucked in the corner of the trailing rose arbour, lit by candles and strings of little lamps.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ he asked as he settled himself beside her and speared a bit of melon, watching her carefully.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, looking at the plates of appetisers. But she wasn’t. She wasn’t hungry in the slightest.

  He nodded, still watching, and she lifted some food to her plate.

  ‘Your room OK?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Thanks. Very comfortable.’

  He nodded. ‘I’ve been busy, but that swim did me the world of good. Unfortunately it was all waiting for me when we got back from the beach.’

  ‘I guess you’re always on call.’

  ‘Aren’t you? As head of a business, there never seems to be a moment when someone doesn’t want an instant solution to some problem or other.’

  ‘I’m not quite in your league. My issues are more around being taken seriously.’

  He raised a sharp eyebrow.

  ‘Not by my staff. But by men. Bank managers usually.’

  ‘You feel objectified in the business world?’

  ‘Objectified. Patronised. Demoralised. Take your pick. I’m sorry if I sound bitter, but the number of times I’ve heard “Oh, isn’t your father coming?” Honestly. It would never happen if I were a man.’

  ‘People make judgements in less than a second. It takes a lot to change a preconceived idea, but I bet you can do it if you want to.’

  It was the thing that upset her more than anything else. Taking over from her father, and feeling that sense of disappointment every time it was she alone who walked into meetings. It was fine when she was just there as window dressing, but as soon as she was running the whole show she knew she’d been judged and filed before some of them had even read past the first line of her accounts.

  ‘I don’t imagine anyone has ever told you you’re far too handsome to be getting all mixed up in business before?’

  ‘No,’ he said, scathingly. ‘And I honestly can’t believe in this day and age that anyone would doubt your credentials because you’re a woman.’

  ‘It happens,’ she said, taking a sip of wine, feeling it slide warmly into her stomach.

  ‘If it’s any consolation, you wouldn’t begin to imagine what’s been said to me. The question is, do we let what other people think affect our decisions?’

  ‘Is this about to turn into my second piece of business advice?’ she asked, smiling as she took another little sip of the very delicious wine.

  ‘Life advice,’ he countered.

  ‘So why exactly does Mister Seventy-Sixth-on-the-Forbes-List feel so maligned?’

  ‘I don’t. But what I’m trying to get across is that people paint pictures in business. And in life. The perfect world you think you see here...’

  He jerked his fork around the space. Lamps were now glowing softly right along the lines of the terrace, highlighting clumps of sleeping flowers nestled in their bushy beds. Further on, the blue glimmer of the pool and
the solid lines of pale loungers stretched out expectantly under the watchful hillside, and the bright-faced moon above.

  ‘This paradise and every other paradise like it will be hiding all sorts of cracks and holes and heartache.’

  As she stared up at him lazily spearing watermelon and letting it slide down his throat, she recalled another article she had read, about his early childhood and humble beginnings.

  ‘You had it tough at one point in time, didn’t you?’

  He raised an eyebrow, continued to munch melon and she watched in a hazy trance now as his muscled forearms flexed with each movement of his fork, and the thick column of his throat constricted with each swallow. It was poetry in motion, dark and male and utterly magnetic.

  ‘No tougher than any other kid growing up in an abusive, dysfunctional family. All things considered, I had it pretty easy.’

  ‘I’m sure you could take care of yourself,’ she said, a trifle dismissively. He might have had humble beginnings but he had it all laid out at his feet now. He had no idea how she’d had to struggle.

  ‘Well, you see, that’s where you’re wrong, Jacquelyn. I couldn’t. So that’s how I ended up here.’

  He sounded so different, so quiet. He glanced down at the plate where a few glistening pink cubes of melon remained, but then he put his fork down, stared at it for a moment.

  ‘I ran away. I met my wife at the side of the road when she was still someone else’s wife. I knew what she was doing was wrong but I was eighteen. I was in so much trouble, with the police, with the gangs, with my father. I knew if I stayed in Sydney I’d be dead within a year. And then along comes Maria. And she wanted to be my wife and so I married her, I “reinvented myself” and now here I am. And here you are.’

  As he spoke she felt the ghosts of his past swirl around. She saw him look at her, really look at her. He wasn’t looking at her like a boss, he was looking at her like a man.

  ‘Here we are indeed,’ she said, and she glanced around with a nervousness that she wasn’t sure was real.

  ‘So, you see, I’ve bought the T-shirt with the whole marriage crap. It doesn’t really do it for me now that I’ve grown up. No offence,’ he said.

  ‘None taken. For the record, I may work at one end of the marriage production line, but I’m well aware of how it can end up.’

  ‘Things didn’t work out for you either, did they?’

  She flushed. She hated bringing all that up again. Not here, not now.

  ‘Things worked out,’ she said, but she couldn’t meet his eye.

  ‘Still hurts, huh? You’re not alone. Men can tend to have the upper hand in relationships. Things seem a bit less complicated for us.’

  ‘That’s just an excuse for dishonourable people to act in a dishonourable way,’ she said, and there was the bitterness in her voice, still there because she really didn’t buy the argument that men were different from women. There were people who were good and there were people who weren’t. There were good men in the world, like her father. The trouble was, they all appeared to be taken...

  ‘OK. I hear you. But relationships come in many forms. I’m not saying it’s OK to lie, but if everyone is clear about the boundaries, who are you to judge?’

  ‘Not everyone is as clear about the boundaries as you think they are,’ she said.

  Nikos looked at her with understanding painted in his eyes.

  ‘That Tim guy,’ he said, quietly. ‘What did he do to you?’

  She’d told no one apart from her mother the facts of that night, but somehow the whole story had made it around town before she’d even taken her ring off and flushed it down the toilet.

  ‘It’s no secret. We were going out for four years, engaged for two and he left me five weeks before we were due to get married.’

  He nodded. He reached over and squeezed her hand, but she drew it back again quickly. ‘I’m sorry, but people split up, all the time. It happens. Better that it happened before you got married than after.’

  ‘I know that. And believe me, I thank my lucky stars every day now. But it was how he did it. We were out for dinner. He ordered fillet steak, medium rare—he even said that—and then he just excused himself to go to the bathroom and never came back.’

  She’d sipped her gin and tonic, watching the light dance off the self-same engagement ring, and feeling so proud and pleased that she would soon have a golden band there beside it. And she’d sipped some more as she’d waited on Tim, and then some more until she’d finished her drink. And then she’d realised, he was away too long. Far too long.

  The shame, the humiliation. How long she had sat there, calling for help. ‘My fiancé is stuck in the toilet...something must have happened to him. Please call the police...he’s been abducted...’

  All the silly nonsense she’d convinced herself was true until, gently but firmly, the police officer had told her he had driven away in his own car—and had shown it to her there on the CCTV.

  ‘That’s pretty tough. You mean you didn’t actually split up—he just split? Was there someone else?’

  Nikos poured a little more wine, the gentle slosh of liquid in the glass a mesmeric accompaniment to his words.

  ‘I think so. I heard he went abroad, met someone else, a woman with children of her own. He’s only been back in the country a few months.’

  She wasn’t going to tell him about the email he’d finally sent a month later. Saying it was all her fault, that she wouldn’t listen. She’d driven him away.

  ‘Rubbish,’ her mother had said.

  ‘I’ll kill him if I get my hands on him,’ her father had said.

  ‘And yet you’re “pure as the driven snow”. Wasn’t that what he called you?’

  So he’d heard that. She wondered what else he’d heard. She swallowed and looked away.

  ‘I might not have had the same experiences as some other people.’

  ‘Experiences?’ he asked. ‘What kind of experiences are we talking about?’

  How could he lace a simple word with such meaning? The hairs on the back of her neck stood up, a shiver ran through her and she forced herself to stare at her wine glass. She was hardly going to tell him about her sexual experiences, or lack of.

  ‘I don’t really care for the things other people care for.’

  He watched her as he poured her another glass of wine. His eyes sparkled wickedly in the candlelight. He was as intoxicating as the wine. One more lingering stare and she’d be drunk. She reached for the water.

  ‘You’ve been a good girl your whole life long.’

  And look where it’s got me, she thought, but sipped her water, said nothing. Being good was the only way she knew how to be. She didn’t ask for it to be this way; she simply couldn’t imagine any other way.

  Her teenaged years with Tim had been innocent. They’d had their fun, but she’d been told by her mum and Nonna what wearing white meant. It had been drummed into her, like her date of birth, her address, her vital statistics.

  All she’d wanted was to wait until they were married. What was so wrong with that? Why couldn’t Tim do the same?

  ‘Have you ever stepped onto the dark side, Jacquelyn?’

  She swallowed, looked at him hard.

  ‘I’ve never been tempted,’ she said.

  He smiled then and all over his face was temptation. In every hard line of his jaw, every brooding inch of his eyes, in the devilish swirl of his tattoo, she could see now, clearly, the other side of Nikos Karellis. The profit-driven retail mogul was gone and in his place was the Sydney Hell’s Angel, and there was nothing remotely gentlemanly about him.

  No more polite tolerance, no more board-meeting manners, now she was picking up something else entirely. Now he was seeing her as a woman, and nothing else.

  Her heart thundered in her ears. Her body was swirling, she felt drun
k, out of control, exhilarated, afraid.

  ‘Never been tempted?’

  He pushed away his plate and sat back, one hand resting on the white linen cloth. She shook her head. Things were shifting, the ground moving from under her, the world reforming into another place entirely. She was suddenly conscious of her legs, bare, her arms resting on the chair, her spine erect, the bodice of her dress with its revealing view of cleavage.

  She pushed herself back from the table and the silk jersey of the dress slid over her bare legs as she crossed them, leaving her thigh exposed. He looked right there, at her leg, and she knew he liked what he saw.

  ‘Not even a little?’ he said, his fingers drumming a slow tattoo on the white linen.

  Prickles of awareness swept over her arms, her legs and right to the tips of her breasts. She felt a tingling at the nape of her neck. Her body was waking up from a long sleep. And it felt good. It felt exciting.

  Her fingers curled around the cushion of the seat as she leaned forward to pull the skirt of the dress back over her legs.

  ‘Leave that,’ he whispered. ‘Let yourself be tempted.’

  Her breath quickened. Her heart picked up a strong, thudding beat. She felt herself rooted to the spot, hot and heavy and utterly under his spell. She was in very dangerous territory.

  He pushed his chair back too, turned himself round to face her. She was afraid now—but only of herself and the calm, cool exterior that was slipping and sliding and beginning to feel like a puddle of watery ice at her feet.

  Kiss me, kiss me, she thought, willing him closer. Her eyes fixed on his lips, her breasts ached under her dress and her back now arched into a curve all by itself, inviting him to savour her and take her.

  But he sat there, just watching, drumming his fingers, slowly, slowly.

  ‘I’ll make the first move,’ he said, and he stood then and closed the two steps to stand beside her. His groin was level with her eyes and her mouth. It was huge and she longed to reach out and touch him.

  She was shocked, shocked that these thoughts were in her mind. And it was as if he knew. He stood still as a rock, watching her, then suddenly she felt his hand on the crown of her head, and with a jerk her head was tugged back.