The Virgin's Secret Read online

  Her only fear now was that someone at the party might recognise her. But, knowing these people as she did, she’d no doubt that in her uniform of black skirt and white shirt they’d not take a second look at her. She worried her lip again. Perhaps she could just stay in the kitchen and get the trays together and avoid—

  Angel started suddenly when she heard the splash of water coming from nearby. Someone was in the pool. Carefully she placed the last candle down and made to slip away, back up to the kitchen. As if she’d been subliminally aware of it but had blocked it out, she realised that someone must have been in the pool all along—but not swimming, so she hadn’t noticed them.

  The sky was a dusky violet colour, so perhaps that was also why she hadn’t—Angel glanced quickly to her right as a flash of movement caught her eye, and her legs stopped functioning when the sight before her registered on her retina and in her brain.

  An olive-skinned Greek god was hauling himself in one powerfully sleek move out of the water, droplets of water cascading off taut muscles. Everything seemed to go into slow motion as the sheer height and breadth of him was revealed. Angel shook her head stupidly, but it felt as if it had been stuffed with cotton wool. Greek gods didn’t exist. This was a man, a flesh-and-blood man. And the minute she registered that she was standing transfixed, staring at him, she panicked.

  But her body wouldn’t obey her order to move, or it would, but her limbs all moved in independent directions, and to her utter horror she found herself backing into a poolside chair and almost toppling over it. And she would have, if the man hadn’t moved like lightning and grabbed her, so that instead of falling back she fell forward into his chest, with his hands around her upper arms.

  For a long moment Angel tried to tell herself that this wasn’t happening. That she wasn’t breathing in an intoxicating mix of spice and earthiness. That she wasn’t all but plastered against a bare, wet chest which felt as hard as steel, her lips just a breath away from pressing against skin covered in a light dusting of intensely masculine hair.

  Angel tried to break away, and pulled back, forcing his hands to drop. Heat scorched upwards over her cheeks as she finally stood upright again and found her eyes level with hard, flat brown nipples. She looked up, swallowing, and her gaze skittered up and past broad shoulders to his face.

  ‘I’m so sorry. I just…got startled. The light… I didn’t see…’

  The man quirked an ebony brow. Angel swallowed again. Lord, but his face was as beautiful as the rest of him. Not beautiful, she amended, that was too girly a word. He was devastating. Thick black hair lay sleek against his head, and high cheekbones offset an impossibly hard jaw. His mouth was forbidding, but held a promise of sensuality that resonated deep in her body.

  Suddenly that mouth stopped being forbidding and quirked. She nearly had to put out a hand again to steady herself. A thin scar ran from his upper lip to his nose, making her fight the absurd urge to reach up and trace it. Making her wonder how he’d got it—this complete stranger!

  ‘Are you okay?’

  Angel nodded vaguely. He sounded American; perhaps he was a business colleague, a guest who was staying over. Although somehow, in her muddled brain, that didn’t fit either. He was someone. She struggled to remember where she was, what she was here to do. Who she was.

  She nodded. ‘I’m…I’m fine.’

  He frowned slightly, seemingly completely at ease with his lack of dress. ‘You’re not Greek?’

  Angel alternately shook and nodded her head. ‘I am Greek. But I’m also half-Irish. I spent a lot of time in boarding school there…so my accent is more neutral.’ She clamped her mouth shut. What was she blathering on about?

  The man frowned a little deeper, his glance up and down taking in her uniform. ‘And yet you’re waitressing here?’

  The incredulity in his tone made Angel’s sanity rush back. Only girls from privileged backgrounds in Greece went abroad for schooling. Immediately she felt vulnerable. She was meant to be fading into the background, not engaging in conversation with the guests of the hosts.

  She backed away, looking somewhere in the region of his shoulder. ‘Please excuse me. I have to get back to work.’

  She was about to turn when she heard him drawl laconically, ‘You might want to dry off before you start handing out champagne.’

  Angel followed his gaze down to where it rested on her chest. On her breasts. She gasped when she saw that she was indeed drenched, her shirt opaque and her plain white bra clearly visible, along with two very pointedly hard nipples. How long had she been plastered against him like some mindless groupie?

  With a strangled gasp of mortification Angel scrambled backwards, nearly tripping over a chair again and only just righting it and herself before there could be a repeat rescue performance. All she heard as she fled back up the steps was a mocking, deep-throated chuckle.

  A little later, Leonidas Parnassus looked around the thronged salon and tried to stifle his irritation when he couldn’t see the waitress. It had made him uncomfortable, how urgent his need to see her again had been as soon as he’d walked into the main reception room. It had also made him uncomfortable how vividly her image had come back to him in his recent shower, forcing him to turn the temperature to cold.

  And now her image surged back again, mocking his attempts to thrust it aside. He recalled how she’d looked, with a dark flush on her cheeks, those intensely light blue eyes wide and ringed with thick black lashes, staring at him like a startled fawn. As if she’d never seen a man before.

  She had a tiny beauty spot just on the edge of a full lower lip, and he grimaced when he felt the effect remembering that had on his lower body. He hated having such an arbitrary response. But when he’d seen her arrive by the pool and do her work, with quick, economic movements, her glossy light brown hair pulled into a high topknot, something about her had stirred him. Something about her intense preoccupation, for patently she hadn’t noticed him in the pool. And Leo was not a man who was used to going unnoticed.

  When he’d caught her against him in that completely instinctive move tendrils of her hair had come free and framed her face and the defined line of her jaw, making him want to slip his hand into the glossy strands and cause it to fall down around her shoulders. He could almost feel it over his hands now, the heavy silky weight.

  Irritation spiked again. Where was she? Had she been a figment of his imagination? His father approached then, with a colleague, and Leo forced a benign smile to his mouth, hating the fact that he was in thrall to a nameless waitress.

  Distracting him momentarily was the reality he now faced of just how frail his father had become, even since he’d seen him last. As if something within him had shifted subtly but profoundly. He felt a deep-seated sense of inevitability steal over him, he was needed here, his own empire notwithstanding. But was his place really here? He tried out the word now: home. His heart beat fast.

  He thought of his sterile, yet state-of-the-art penthouse apartment in New York; the steel and silver skyscrapers of the world he inhabited. He thought of his impeccably groomed and very experienced blonde mistress; he thought of what it might be like to walk away from all of that—and he felt…nothing.

  Athens, being here for the past week, had confounded his every expectation. He’d thought he’d feel nothing. On the contrary, he felt as though he’d been plugged into something deeply primal within his soul. Something had been brought to life, and wouldn’t be pushed back to some dim and distant recess.

  Just then, as if to compound this feeling, he caught sight of something in the far corner of the room. Glossy hair piled high, a long neck. A familiar slim back. Leo’s heart started to thud, this time to a very different beat.

  Angel was trying to keep her head down and not meet anyone’s eye. She’d done her best to stay in the kitchen, preparing the trays, but her boss had eventually sent her up to the main salon as she was his most experienced staff member.

  At that moment she cau
ght a pointed frowning look from Aristotle Levakis across the room—he was business partner to Parnassus, and her stomach quivered with renewed panic. This was a disaster in the making. Aristotle Levakis knew her, because their fathers had been friendly before Aristotle’s father had died. Angel could remember that Aristotle had been to one or two parties at her father’s house over the years.

  In the act of offering some red wine to a small group of people, she had to keep going, but then she got accidentally jostled by another waiter. The tray tipped off balance, and with mounting horror Angel watched four glasses full of red wine disgorge their contents all over a beautiful woman’s pristine and very white designer dress.

  For a second nothing happened. The woman was just looking down at her dress, aghast. And then it came, her voice so shrill that Angel winced. Conversely, at the same time, an awful silence seemed to descend.

  ‘You stupid, stupid girl—’

  But then, just as suddenly, a huge dark shape appeared at Angel’s side, and she barely had time to take in a breath before she registered that it was the man from the pool. Her heart skipped a beat, before starting again erratically. He sent her a quick wink before taking the gasping woman aside to speak to her in low, hushed tones, and Angel saw her boss hurry forward to take the matter in hand.

  Her boss and the woman were summarily dispatched, and then the man turned around to face Angel. Words dropped into her head but made no sense. He was so downright intimidating in an exquisite tuxedo that shock was rendering her speechless, breathless and motionless.

  He calmly took the now empty tray from her hand and passed it to another waiter. The mess from the fallen drinks was already being cleared up. Angel would have protested that she should look after it, if she could have spoken.

  Everyone else in the immediate vicinity seemed to melt away, and with a light, yet commanding touch from his hand on her arm Angel felt herself being manoeuvred across the room, until they’d walked through a set of open patio doors and out to the blessed quiet of the grand terrace.

  The cool and fragrant evening air curled around Angel like a caress, but she felt hot, right down to her very core. Hot from embarrassment and hot from where this man’s big hand was curled around her upper arm. They came to a stop beside a low wall, beyond which a pristine lawn sloped gently downwards and off into the distance.

  Silence surrounded them, thick and heavy, the muted sounds of the party coming from behind the closed patio doors. Had he closed the doors? The thought of him doing that to give them privacy made her shiver. She looked up, and with a disconcerting amount of effort pulled her arm free from his light, yet devastating grip. He smiled down at her, putting his hands in his pockets, and he looked so rakishly handsome that Angel felt weak all over again. Hair that had been slicked back with water was now thick and glossy, a little over-long.

  ‘So…we meet again.’

  Angel forced her brain to retain a small sliver of sanity, but no matter how much she wanted it to, she feared her voice wouldn’t come out as cool as she hoped for. ‘I’m sorry…you must think me an awful klutz. I’m not normally so clumsy. Thank you for…’ She gestured to the room, thinking of the red stain spreading over the woman’s white dress again and feeling sick. ‘For defusing the situation, but I don’t think my boss will forgive me for it. That dress looked like it was worth about a year’s worth of my wages.’

  He took a hand out of his pocket and waved it nonchalantly. ‘Consider it taken care of. I saw what happened, it was an accident.’

  Angel gasped. ‘I can’t let you do a thing like that. I don’t even know you.’ His insouciance and casual display of wealth made something cold lodge in her chest. It was a rejection from deep within her of this whole social scene. She’d grown up with it and it reminded her too much of the darkness in her own family.

  His eyes glinted with something dangerous. ‘On the contrary, I’d say that we’re well on the way to becoming…acquainted.’

  An electric current seemed to spring into action in that moment. The man moved closer to Angel, closing the small distance between them, and the breath lodged in her throat. She couldn’t think, couldn’t speak. His eyes held hers, and for the second time that day she noted the way they seemed to burn with a golden light.

  He lifted a hand and trailed his finger down one cheek to the delicate line of her jaw. It left a line of tingling fire in its wake.

  ‘I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you.’

  The something cold that had lodged in Angel’s chest melted. ‘You…haven’t?’

  He shook his head. ‘Or your mouth.’

  ‘My mouth…’ Angel repeated stupidly. Her gaze dropped to his mouth then, and she saw once again the jagged line of the scar extending from his upper lip. She had the strongest desire to reach up and trace it with a finger, so strong that she shook.

  ‘Are you thinking about what it would feel like if my mouth was to touch yours right now?’

  Angel’s gaze flew up and clashed with pure molten golden heat. An answering heat invaded her lower body. She felt the urge to clamp her legs together, as if that might calm the disturbing ache building up there.

  Before she could answer, or articulate a response, his hand had cupped her jaw and cheek, and suddenly there was no distance between them, only him, so tall and close that he blocked out the sky, and his head was descending, coming nearer and nearer.

  He smelt musky and hot. It was something so earthy that Angel could feel the response being tugged from down low in her belly, as if she recognised it on some primitive level. Dimly she wondered if this was what people meant when they talked about animal attraction.

  Desperately trying to cling onto something, anything rational, Angel brought a hand up to cover his, to pull it down, to stop him, to say no… But then his mouth was so close that she could feel his breath feather there, mingling with hers. Her mouth tingled. She wanted…she wanted—

  ‘Sir?’

  Angel wanted his mouth on hers so badly that she made a telling move closer–

  ‘Mr Parnassus…sir?’

  Angel’s eyes had been fluttering closed, but suddenly flew open again. Their mouths were just about touching. If Angel was to put out her tongue she’d be able to explore his lips, their shape and texture. And then the name that had just been uttered exploded into her consciousness properly.

  Mr Parnassus.

  Reality slammed back, and the cacophony of the party rushed out to meet them through open doors. Angel was barely aware of pulling his hand down and moving back. Shock was starting to spread through her entire body. Someone else came out to the patio then. The butler who had been standing there—for how long?—melted away discreetly. The new arrival was the host’s wife, Olympia Parnassus. Angel knew this because she’d given all the waiting staff a pep talk in the kitchen earlier.

  ‘Leo, darling, your father is looking for you, it’s almost time for the speech.’

  In a smooth move, Angel realised that she’d been effectively shielded from view. She felt more than heard the deep rumble of response.

  ‘Give me two minutes here, Olympia.’

  His tone was implacable. Clearly he was someone used to giving commands and having them met. He was Leonidas Parnassus.

  Angel barely heard the older woman make some comment before she turned and clipped her way back into the party in her high heels, pulling the doors shut again. Shock was gathering force, and Angel started to react. She had to get out of here.

  She knew that Leonidas Parnassus had turned back to face her, but she couldn’t look at him. A warm hand tipped her chin up and she felt sick. She couldn’t avoid his eyes unless she closed her own, and the thought of doing that made panic rise. He smiled a sexy smile.

  ‘Please forgive the interruption. I’ll have to go in a minute, but…where were we?’

  Angel had to get out of here right now. She’d just been about to kiss Leonidas Parnassus, the very man who must be gloating over her family’s v
ery public ruination. A sudden spurt of anger bloomed. They were in dire straits, and it was all because of his family and their lust for revenge. She thought of Delphi, who was so vulnerable now; she and her sister didn’t deserve to be paying for something that had happened decades before.

  Angel pulled down his hand and forced frost into her voice. ‘Look, I don’t know what you’re playing at. I have to get back to work. if my boss saw me out here with you I’d be sacked on the spot, which is obviously something that hasn’t occurred to you.’

  Leonidas Parnassus looked at her for a long moment before straightening to his full intimidating height and moving back a pace. Gone was the sexily teasing man of just moments before and in his place now stood the son and heir of a vast fortune. The man who was already a self-made millionaire. No wonder she’d had that feeling earlier that he was someone.

  Arrogant confidence oozed from every pore, and Angel had to repress a shiver at the cold of his eyes—not tawny gold any more, but almost black, like flint.

  ‘Forgive me.’ His voice was frigid. ‘I would never have attempted to kiss you if I’d known you found the prospect so repugnant.’

  His demeanour made a mockery of his words. He was completely unrepentant. At that moment he reached out and cupped her jaw again. Her heart hammered against her ribs, she felt herself flushing.

  Any pretence of remorse was gone, or charm. ‘Who do you think you’re kidding, sweetheart? Don’t ever fool yourself like that again. I know the signs of desire, and you’re practically panting for me right now, just like you were by the pool.’

  Angel ripped his hand down again, panic surging in earnest. If he had even an inkling of who she was… ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I am not. I want you to get out of my way, please, so I can get back to work.’