Читать книгу: «Wedding Night With Her Enemy»

CHAPTER ONE

ALLEGRA KALLAS WASN’T expecting a fatted calf or a rolled-out red carpet and a brass band. She was used to coming home to Santorini with little or no fanfare. What she expected was her father’s usual indifference. His polite but feigned interest in her work in London as a family lawyer and his pained expression when she informed him that, yes, currently she was still single. A situation for a Greek father of a daughter aged thirty-one that was akin to having a noxious disease for which there was no known cure.

Which made her wonder why there was a bottle of champagne waiting on a bed of ice in an ice-bucket with the Kallas coat of arms engraved on it and a silver tray with three crystal glasses standing nearby, and why he was gushing about how wonderful it was to have her home.

Wonderful?

Nothing about Allegra was wonderful to her father. Nothing. What was wonderful to him now was his young wife Elena—only two years older than Allegra—and their new baby Nico, who apparently weren’t expected back from Athens until later that evening as Elena was visiting her parents. And since little Nico’s christening wasn’t until tomorrow...

Who was the third glass for?

Allegra slipped her tote bag off her shoulder and let it drop to the leather sofa next to her, the fine hairs on the back of her neck standing up. ‘What’s going on?’

Her father smiled. Admittedly it didn’t go all the way to his eyes, but then the smiles he turned her way rarely did. He had a habit of grimacing instead of smiling at her. As though he was suffering some sort of gastric upset. ‘Can’t a father be pleased to see his own flesh and blood?’

When had he ever been pleased to see her? And when had she ever felt like a valued member of the family? But she didn’t want to stir up old hurts. Not this weekend. She was home for the christening and then she would fly back to her life in London first thing Monday morning. A weekend was all she was staying. She found it too suffocating, staying any longer than that, and even that was a stretch. She glanced at the champagne flutes on the tray. ‘So who’s the third glass for? Is someone joining us?’

Her father’s expression never faltered but Allegra couldn’t help feeling he was uneasy about something. His manner was odd. It wasn’t just his overly effusive greeting but the way he kept checking his watch and fidgeting with the cuff of his sleeve, as if it was too tight against his wrist. ‘As a matter of fact, yes. He’ll be here any moment.’

Something inside Allegra’s heart kicked against her chest wall like a small cloven hoof. ‘He?’

Her father’s mouth lost its smile and a frown brought his heavy salt-and-pepper eyebrows into an intimidating bridge. ‘I hope you’re not going to be difficult. Draco Papandreou is—’

‘Draco is coming here?’ Allegra’s heart kicked again but this time the hoof was wearing steel caps. ‘But why?’

‘Elena and I have asked him to be Nico’s godfather.’

Allegra double blinked. She had thought it a huge compliment when her father and his wife had asked her to be their little son’s godmother. She’d assumed it was Elena’s idea, not her father’s. But she hadn’t realised Draco was to be Nico’s godfather. She’d thought one of her father’s older friends would have been granted the honour. She hadn’t realised he considered Draco a close friend these days, only a business associate—or rival, which seemed more appropriate. The Papandreou and Kallas names represented two powerful corporations that had once been close associates, but over the years the increasingly competitive market had caused some fault lines in the relationship.

But Allegra had her own issues with Draco. Issues that meant any meeting with him would be fraught with amusement on his part and mortification on hers. Every time she saw him she was reminded of her clumsy attempt as a gauche teenager to attract his attention by flirting with and simpering over him and, even more embarrassingly, the humiliating way in which he had put a stop to it. ‘Why on earth did you ask him?’

Her father released a rough-sounding sigh and reached for the shot of ouzo he’d poured earlier. He tipped his head back, swallowed the drink and then placed the glass down with an ominous thud. ‘The business is in a bad way. The economic crisis in Greece has hit me hard. Harder than I expected—much harder. I stand to lose everything if I don’t accept a generous bailout merger from him.’

‘Draco Papandreou is...is helping you?’ Every time Allegra said his name a sensation scuttled down her spine like a small sticky-footed creature. She hadn’t seen Draco since she’d run into him at a popular London nightspot six months ago where she’d been meeting a date—a date who had stood her up. A fact Draco had showed great mirth in witnessing. Grr.

She loathed the man for being so...so right about everything. It seemed every time she made one of her stupid mistakes he was there to witness it. After that embarrassing flirtation on her part when she’d been sixteen, she had quickly transferred her attention to another young man in her circle. Draco had warned her about the boy and what had she done? She’d ignored his warning and got her heart broken. Well, not broken, exactly, but certainly her ego had got knocked around a bit.

Then, when she’d been eighteen, Draco had found her helping herself to the notoriously potent punch at one of her father’s business parties she was supposed to have been helping him host and had lectured her about drinking too much. Another lecture she’d wilfully ignored...and, yes, he’d been there to see her coughing up her lungs a short time later. Double grr. Admittedly, he’d been rather handy with a cool face cloth and had gently held her hair back from her face...

But it hadn’t stopped her hating him.

Not one little bit.

Even in all the years since, when she ran into him he had an annoying habit of treating her as if she was still that gauche teenager and not a grown woman with a high-flying legal career in London.

‘Draco has offered me a deal,’ her father said. ‘A business merger that will solve all my financial problems.’

Allegra gave a disdainful snort. ‘It sounds too good to be true, which usually means it is. What does he want out of it?’

Her father didn’t meet her gaze and turned slightly to pour another drink instead. She knew her dad well enough to know he only drank to excess in one of two states: relaxed or stressed. Stressed seemed to be the ticket this time. ‘He has some conditions attached,’ he said. ‘But I have no choice but to accept. I have to think of my new family—Nico and Elena don’t deserve to be punished for my misfortune. I’ve done all I can to hold off the creditors, but it’s at crisis point. Draco is my only lifeline...or at least the only one I’m prepared to take.’

His new family. Those words hurt her more than she wanted to admit. When had she ever felt part of his old family? She’d been a ‘spare part’ child. A rescue plan, not a person. Her older brother Dion had contracted leukaemia as a toddler, and back in those days parents had been encouraged to have another child in case the new baby was a bone-marrow match. Needless to say, Allegra hadn’t come up with the goods. She had failed on both counts. Not a match. Not male. Dion had died before Allegra was two years old. She didn’t even remember him. All she remembered was she had been brought up by a series of nannies because her mother had been stricken with unrelenting grief. A grief that had morphed into depression so crippling, Allegra had been sent to boarding school to ‘give her mother a break’.

Her mother had ‘accidentally’ taken an overdose of sleeping tablets the day before Allegra was to have come home for the summer the year she turned twelve. No one had said the word ‘suicide’ but she had always believed her mother had intended to end her life that day. The hardest part for Allegra was the sad realisation she hadn’t been enough for her mother. Her father hadn’t even bothered to hide his disappointment in having a female heir instead of the son he had worshipped. Hardly a day had gone by during her childhood and adolescence when Allegra hadn’t felt the sting of that disappointment.

But now her father had moved on with a new wife and a new baby.

Allegra had never belonged and now even less so.

‘Draco will tell you about our agreement himself,’ her father said. ‘Ah, here he is now.’

Allegra whipped around to see Draco’s tall figure enter the room. Her eyes met his onyx gaze and a strange sensation spurted and then pooled deep and low in her belly. Every time she looked at him she had exactly the same reaction. Her senses jumped to attention. Her pulse raced. Her heart flip-flopped. Her breath hitched as though it were attached to strings and someone was jerking them. Hard.

He was wearing casual clothes: sandstone-coloured chinos and a white shirt rolled past his strong, tanned forearms, which took nothing away from his aura of commanding authority. When Draco Papandreou walked into a room every head turned. Every female heart fluttered...as hers was doing right now, as though there were manic moths trapped in her heart valves. He oozed sex appeal from every cell of his six-foot-three frame. She could feel it calling out to her feminine hormones like an alpha wolf calling a mate. No other man had ever made her more aware of her body than him. Her body seemed to have a mind of its own when he came anywhere near.

A wicked mind.

A mind that conjured up images of him naked and his long, hair-roughened legs entwined with hers. The only way she could disguise the way he made her feel was to hide behind a screen of sniping sarcasm. He thought her a shrew, but so what? Better that than let him think she was secretly lusting after him. That the embarrassing crush she had foolishly acted on when she’d been sixteen had completely and utterly disappeared. That her dreams didn’t feature him in various erotic poses doing all sorts of X-rated things with her. She would rather be hanged and quartered and her body parts posted to the four corners of the earth than admit the only sex she’d had in the last year or so had been by herself, with him as her fantasy.

That—God help her—the last time she’d had sex with a partner it had been Draco she had thought of the whole time.

‘Draco, how nice of you to gate crash a private family celebration. No hot date tonight with one of your bottle-blonde bimbos?’

His mouth lifted at one corner in his signature half-cynical, half-amused smile. ‘You’re my date, agape mou. Hasn’t your father told you?’

Allegra gave him a look that would have snap-frozen a gas flame. ‘Dream on, Papandreou.’

His dark eyes glinted as if the thought of her saying no to him secretly turned him on. That was the trouble with having had a crush on a man since you’d been a pimple-spotted teenager. They never let you forget it. ‘I have a proposal to put to you,’ he said. ‘Would you like your father present or shall I do it in private?’

‘It’s immaterial to me where you do it because nothing you propose to me would ever in a thousand, million, squillion years evoke the word “yes” from me,’ Allegra said.

‘Er... I think I can hear one of the servants calling me,’ her father said and left the room with such haste it looked as though he were running from an explosion. But then, whenever she and Draco were left alone together the prospect of an explosion was a very real possibility.

Draco’s gaze held hers in a tether that made the base of her spine shiver. ‘Alone at last.’

Allegra broke the eye contact, walked over to the drinks tray and casually poured a glass of champagne. Or at least she hoped it looked casual. She wasn’t a big drinker but right now she wanted to suck on that bottle of champagne until it was empty. Then she wanted to throw the bottle at the nearest wall. Then the glasses, one by one, until they shattered into thousands of shards. Then every stick of furniture in the room.

Smash. Bash. Crash.

Why was he here? Why was he helping her father? What could it possibly have to do with her? The questions tumbled through her brain like the champagne tumbling into her glass. Her father’s business was hanging in the balance? How could that be? It was one of the most well-established businesses in Greece, and had operated for several generations. Other business people looked up to him, in awe of all he had achieved. Her father had always brandished his wealth like it was a ten-thousand-strong flock of golden-egg-laying geese. How had it come to this?

Allegra turned and gave Draco a sugar-sweet smile. ‘‘Can I offer you a drink? Weed killer? Liquid nitrogen? Cyanide?’

He gave a deep rumble of a laugh that did strange things to her insides. Things they had no business doing. Not for him. ‘Under the circumstances, champagne would be perfect.’

She poured a glass and handed it to him, annoyed her hand wasn’t quite steady. He took the glass but in doing so his fingers brushed against hers. It was like being touched with a live current. The shock of it sent a jolt through her entire body, making her hormones sit up and beg for more. She snatched her hand back and then wished she hadn’t. He had an uncanny ability to read her body language like a cryptographer reading code.

Everything about him unsettled her. Made her feel things she didn’t want to feel. But no matter how hard she fought it she couldn’t take her eyes off him. It was as though magnets were attached to her eyeballs and he was true north. She had seen a lot of beautiful men over the years but no one came close to having Draco’s pulse-tripping features. Ink-black hair with just enough curl to make her want to run her fingers through it and straighten out those sexy kinks. A mouth that was not just sensual but sinfully sculpted. A mouth that made her think of long, drugging kisses. The mere thought of his hard male mouth crushing hers was enough to make her get all hot and bothered and breathless.

She had felt that mouth on hers. Once. Had felt it and had responded to it, only to have him push her away with an ego-crushing comment about how a silly little girl like her could never satisfy a man like him. For years that cruel put-down had savaged her self-esteem. It had ruined her sexual confidence—not that she’d had much to begin with. Damn him for being so darned attractive. Why couldn’t she stop gawping at him as if she were still that stupid, star-struck kid with a crush?

He had shaved but the potent male hormones surging around his body would be enough to defeat any decent razorblade. Dark stubble was peppered along his lean jaw and around his mouth.

Dear God, she had to stop looking at his mouth.

She picked up her glass of champagne but before she could take a sip he held his glass within reach of hers. ‘To us.’

Allegra pulled her glass back before it could touch his, sloshing the champagne down the front of her blouse. Of course, she was wearing silk. The saturating liquid made her right breast stand out even though it was inside a lace bra. Why was she so ridiculously clumsy around him? It was mortifying. She brushed off the excess liquid with her hand but it only made the dampness worse, making the upper curve of her breast cling to the fabric as though she were in a wet T-shirt competition.

Draco handed her a clean white handkerchief. Of course he would be carrying a clean white handkerchief. ‘Would you like me to—?’

Allegra snatched the square of cloth off him before he could finish the sentence. No way was she letting him touch her breast even if it was through four folds of cotton. She couldn’t guarantee a suit of armour and Kevlar vest would keep her from responding to his touch. She dabbed at her wet breast and never had such a task seemed so erotic. Even her breast thought so. It was tingling and her nipple peaking...but maybe that was because Draco’s dark obsidian gaze was following her every movement over it. She screwed the handkerchief into a tight ball and tossed it to the coffee table. ‘I’ll have it laundered and returned to you.’

‘Keep it as a souvenir.’

‘The only souvenir I want from you is the word “goodbye”.’

His eyes held hers again in a spine-shuddering, resolve-melting lock. ‘The only way that’s going to happen is if I pull out of this business merger.’

‘I don’t care about the merger.’

‘Maybe not, but you should. It rests solely on your compliance with the terms of the deal.’

Terms? What terms?

Allegra disguised her unease by shaking her loose hair back behind her shoulders in a gesture of indifference. But she was far from indifferent. Something about his unwavering gaze made her feel he was toying with her, like a cat with a mouse it had cleverly cornered. What on earth could he want her compliance over?

Since that kiss years before, there had always been a climate of tension between them. A tug of war of wills. A power struggle that crackled the air when they were in the same room together. He was her enemy and she didn’t care who knew it. Hating him made it easier for her to forget how much she’d wanted him. Hating him kept her safe from her own traitorous hormones that were annoyingly, persistently, immune to every other man but him. ‘My father’s business affairs are of no concern to me. I am completely independent of him and have been for the last ten or so years.’

‘Independent financially, maybe, but you’re his only daughter. His only child. He paid for your stellar education. He gave you everything money could buy. Don’t you care he’s about to lose everything without my help?’ His deeply carved frown added to the grave delivery of his words.

Allegra wished she didn’t care. But the trouble was, she did. It was her Achilles’ heel—her weak spot, the raw, vulnerable part of her personality—the need to feel loved and valued by her only living parent. She had sought it all her life to no avail. In spite of her father’s shortcomings, inside she was still that small child looking for his approval. Pathetic, but true. ‘I fail to see what any of this has to do with me. I simply don’t care what state my father’s business is in.’ She knew she sounded cold and unfeeling but why should she care what Draco thought of her?

He studied her for a long moment. ‘I don’t believe you. You do care. Which is why you’ll agree to marry me to keep the business afloat.’

Shock hit her in the chest like a punch. Marry him? Allegra widened her eyes. Not saucer-wide. Not dinner-dish-wide. Platter-dish-wide. Surely he hadn’t just said that? The M word? Him and her? Married? To each other? She blinked and then laughed but even to her ears it sounded on the verge of hysterical. ‘If you think for one second I would marry anyone, let alone you, then you are even more of an egomaniac than I thought.’

Draco’s gaze continued to hold hers in an intractable lock that was a tantalising tickle to her girly bits. ‘You will do it, Allegra, or see your father’s business die a slow and painful death. It’s on life support as it is. I’ve been drip-feeding your father money for the last year. He hasn’t got the funds to repay me even if I waive the interest. No one will lend him anything now, not after the way things have panned out in our economy. I came up with this solution instead. This way everyone wins...in particular, you.’

Allegra couldn’t believe his arrogance. Did he really think she would agree to such a preposterous deal? She hated him with a passion. She couldn’t think of a single person she would less like to marry. Well, she could, given her line of work, but that wasn’t the point. He was a playboy. A fast-living Lothario who churned through women like a speed-reader churned through cheap paperbacks. Marriage to Draco would be emotional suicide, even if she didn’t hate him. ‘You’re unbelievable. What planet are you on that you would think I would see this as a win for me? Marriage isn’t a win for any woman. It’s a one-way ticket to serfdom, that’s what it is, and I won’t have a bar of it.’

‘You’ve been hanging around divorce courts way too long,’ he said. ‘Plenty of marriages work well for both parties. It could work for us. We have a lot in common.’

‘The only thing we have in common is we both breathe oxygen,’ Allegra said. ‘I dislike everything about you. Even if I were on the hunt for a husband, I would never consider someone like you. You’re the sort of man who would expect his pipe and slippers brought to him when he gets home. You don’t want a wife, you want a servant.’

His half-smile was back, making his impossibly black eyes twinkle. ‘I love you too, glykia mou.’

Allegra thinned her gaze to hairpin slits. ‘Read my lips. I am not marrying you. Not to save my father’s business. Not for any reason. No. No. No. No.’

Draco took a leisurely sip of his champagne and put the glass down on the coffee table with exacting precision. ‘Of course, you’ll have to commute between London and my home for work, but you can use my private jet—that is, if I’m not using it myself.’

Allegra clenched her hands into fists. ‘Are you listening to me? I said I am not marrying you.’

He sat on the sofa and leaned back with his hands behind his head, one ankle crossed over the other with indolent grace. ‘You haven’t got a choice. If you don’t marry me then your father will blame you for the collapse of his company. It’s a good company but it’s been badly run of late. That business manager your father appointed a couple of years ago when he had that health scare didn’t do him any favours. I can undo that damage and turn the business around so it’s profitable again. Your father will stay on the board and have a share of the profits I guarantee will be more than he has received in decades.’

Allegra bit down on her lip. It had been a worrying time when her father had had a cancer scare. She had flown back and forth as much as she could to help him through his bout of chemo and radiation. Not that he’d shown any great appreciation, of course. But to marry Draco to save her father from financial ruin? It was as if she had suddenly stepped into the pages of a Regency novel.

But her father needed her. Really needed her. There could have been worse men than Draco to offer for her, she had to admit. The sort of men she faced down in court. Mean men. Dangerous men. Men who had no respect for women and who used their children as weapons and pay-backs. Men who stalked, bullied, threatened and even killed to get their own way.

Draco might be arrogant but he wasn’t mean. Dangerous? Well, maybe to her senses, yes. Her senses went into a dazzled and dizzying frenzy when he came close. Which was a very good reason why she couldn’t marry him.

Wouldn’t marry him.

‘Why me?’ Allegra said. ‘Why would you possibly want me for a wife when you can have any woman you want?’

His eyes did a lazy sweep of her from head to foot and back again, sending a frisson through every cell in her body. ‘I want you.’

Those sexily drawled words should not have made her feminine core do a happy dance. She wasn’t vain but knew she was considered attractive in a classical sort of way. She had her mother’s English peaches-and-cream complexion, her dark blue eyes and slim build, but she had her father’s jet-black hair and drive to achieve.

But Draco dated super-models, starlets and nubile nymphets. Why would he want to shackle himself to a hard-nosed career woman like her, especially when they fought at every chance they got?

Over the years she had done her level best to hide her attraction to him. The Embarrassing Incident when she’d been sixteen was filed away in her mind in the drawer marked ‘Do Not Open’. These days she sneered instead of simpered. She derided instead of drooled. She flayed instead of flirted.

Falling in love with Draco Papandreou would be asking for the sort of trouble she helped other women extricate themselves from on a daily basis. Love did weird things to women. They got blindsided, hoodwinked, charmed into looking at their men through rosy love-tinted glasses that failed to show up their faults until it was too late.

Allegra wasn’t going to be one of those women—a victim of some man’s power game, leaving her as vulnerable as a rain-soaked kitten. ‘Listen, I appreciate the compliment, such as it is, but I’m not in the marriage market. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to—’

‘The offer is for today and today only. After that I start asking for my money back. With interest.’

She sent her tongue over her lips but they felt as dry as the cardboard cover on one of her expert reports. The economic crisis in Greece was serious. So serious that many well-established companies had hit the wall like over-ripe peaches. She might have some issues with her father but not to the point where she wanted to see him ruined and publicly humiliated. Not now he had a wife and young baby to provide for. Allegra liked Elena. She hadn’t expected to, with Elena only being two years older than her, but she did. It some ways Elena reminded her of herself—trying too hard to please everyone in an effort to be loved and accepted.