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“Three months as my wife!”
Will she pay his price?
Valentina always believed in the longing that consumed her and husband, Kairos—until her devastating discovery that her marriage was a coldhearted business deal. Despite their undeniable chemistry, she refuses to remain bound to the ruthless Greek. But before granting a divorce, Kairos demands she play his adoring wife again. And when their intense fire reignites, Valentina is at the mercy of her own desire...
TARA PAMMI can’t remember a moment when she wasn’t lost in a book—especially a romance, which was much more exciting than a mathematics textbook at school. Years later, Tara’s wild imagination and love for the written word revealed what she really wanted to do. Now she pairs alpha males who think they know everything with strong women who knock that theory and them off their feet!
Also by Tara Pammi
Married for the Sheikh’s Duty
Bought with the Italian’s Ring
The Legendary Conti Brothers miniseries
The Surprise Conti Child
The Unwanted Conti Bride
The Drakon Royals miniseries
Crowned for the Drakon Legacy
The Drakon Baby Bargain
His Drakon Runaway Bride
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.
Blackmailed by the Greek’s Vows
Tara Pammi
ISBN: 978-1-474-07219-9
BLACKMAILED BY THE GREEK’S VOWS
© 2018 Tara Pammi
Published in Great Britain 2018
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
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Version: 2020-03-02
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For all the readers who asked for Valentina’s story.
Contents
Cover
Back Cover Text
About the Author
Booklist
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Extract
About the Publisher
CHAPTER ONE
SHE WAS DRESSED like a...a hooker.
No...not exactly a hooker.
No hooker he knew possessed the class, the style and the innate grace that imbued every one of his wife’s movements.
More of a high-class escort.
It took Kairos Constantinou a few seconds to clear the red haze that descended in front of his eyes.
Dios...of all the stunts he had expected his impulsive, fiery wife to pull, it hadn’t been this.
When his PI had informed him that he’d located Valentina and that she’d be aboard Kairos’s own yacht for the party tonight, he hadn’t been surprised.
Valentina had always been the life of the party scene in Milan.
Lively. Sensual. Like a beautiful butterfly that flits from flower to flower. The minute her brother Leandro had pointed her out to Kairos, standing amidst a gaggle of men, Kairos had decided he wanted her.
Three minutes into Leandro introducing them, he’d known she was going to be his wife.
She had been the best possible incentive Leandro could have offered to reel Kairos into the alliance. Kairos would gain entry into the rarefied old-world alliances that her family the Conti dynasty, swam in, and she would get a rich husband.
Not once had he questioned why Leandro had thought he needed to set up his beautiful sister like that.
All Kairos had wanted was the prize that was Valentina Conti.
Except, a week into his marriage, he had realized his wife was anything but a trophy.
She was emotionally fiery, intensely vulnerable and impulsive as hell.
The best example of which was her deserting him nine months ago without so much as a word.
And to find her here among this crowd now.
With instincts he’d honed among the street gangs of Athens, he noted three Russian investors who operated businesses barely this side of legal—the men his friend Max intended to wine and dine—another man who was a model and a friend of Valentina’s, and five women to entertain them, not counting Valentina.
Women of the oldest profession known to man. Not streetwalkers, like some of his earliest friends, but undoubtedly from an escort service.
And the most provocatively dressed among them was Valentina in a flimsy gold dress.
The slinky material pooled at her chest to create a low neckline that left her shoulders and her toned arms bare. It pushed up those small breasts that he had touched and kissed and sucked while she writhed under him, like a lover’s hands.
So much golden, soft, silky skin... His jaw tightened like a vise as three other men salivated over her.
But it was the smiles she bestowed on the men as she charmed them, those arms flying about in that way of hers while she narrated some escapade in her accented English, full of fire, the way she put a hand on Max’s arm and thanked him when he refilled her drink...that was what caused the ice to stiffen his spine.
The wall of detachment that had always been his armor against anything was his only defense.
No, this was only want. Physical want...nothing more.
He still wanted her, desperately, because she was Valentina and even with her explosive tempers and childish tantrums, she had still snuck under his skin.
He needed her as his wife for a few months. And in those few months, he’d work her out of his blood. Out of his life.
If Valentina Conti Constantinou had indulged in some fantasy delusion that her husband Kairos had arrived on the yacht to achieve some sort of romantic reunion between them, he burned the notion to ashes within the first few minutes.
It had been disturbing enough to find that not only had her photographer friend Nikolai, at whose persuasion she had come to the party, manipulated her into wearing the tackiest outfit, but that she was surrounded by women from an escort service and men expected to be entertained by them.
She’d squared her shoulders, made Nikolai claim her for the evening, and had begun to charm the Russians. The one thing she knew how to do. She might have been living on nothing for months but she had class. Years of practice at playing the perfect socialite—well-versed in fashion and politics.
Until Kairos had walked in.
Barely sipping her G&T, she nodded at something Nikolai whispered in her ear, keeping her effusive smile firmly in place. Her throat was raw with the falsely pitched laughs, and her chest hurt at having to play the unruffled socialite the way she had all her life.
Every inch of her rebelled against the calm she had assumed from the moment Kairos had stepped onto the deck. Every cell in her roared to swat away the woman who was even now cozying up to him, far too pleased with herself.
She wanted to announce to the rest of them that he was hers.
But he had never belonged to her.
Her grip shook, clinking the ice in her tumbler.
Tina put her glass down, fighting for control.
Men scrambled around Max for an introduction to Kairos, and the women—hair fluffed, breasts pushed up to spill out of already plunging necklines—it was as if the rough, rugged masculinity of him was an inviting caress to every woman.
Dios mio, the strength of his sheer masculine appeal hit her like a punch now, shaking her up, turning her inside out.
His white shirt stretched tight across his broad shoulders, enhancing his raw, rugged appeal. His expansive chest tapered down to a narrow waist, over leaner hips and then he was all legs. Hard, muscular thighs followed by those runner’s calves that had once driven her crazy.
His hair was cut into that short style he preferred. Her fingers twitched, remembering the rough sensation of it, and she fisted them at her side. His gaze flicked down to her hands and then back up her body, slowly, possessively.
Those silvery eyes lingered on the long stretch of her legs, her thighs, noted the short hem of the dress, up to her waist, lingered again over her breasts, moved up her neck and then settled again on her face.
If he had run those hands over her body with that rough urgency that he’d always mastered before he lost control, she couldn’t have felt more owned. With one look, he plunged her into that state of mindless longing, that state of anticipation he had become used to expecting from her.
Shivering inside her skin, forgetting all the misery he had inflicted on her, Tina lifted her chin in defiance.
He had never liked her to dress provocatively. Had never liked her easy attitude with other men, that almost flirty style of talking that was her nature. They had had more than one row on the subject of her dresses, her hair, her shoes, her style, her attitude and even her body.
One of the blondes she had genuinely liked earlier—Stella of the big boobs and even bigger hips—tapped his arm. A smile curving his thin lips, he sliced his gaze away in clear, decisive dismissal.
Tears scratched up Tina’s throat and she hurriedly looked away before someone could see her mortification.
Nine months ago, she’d have slapped the woman’s face—she cringed at the memory of doing that to her sister-in-law Sophia, having been induced into a jealous, insecure rage. She’d have screamed and made a spectacle of herself, she’d have let her temper get the better of her and proved to everyone and Kairos how crazy she was about him.
Nine months ago, she’d have let the hot emotions spiraling through her dictate her every word, every move.
Nine months ago, she’d been under the stupid delusion that Kairos had married her because he wanted her, because he felt something for her, even if he didn’t put it in words.
But no, he had married her as part of an alliance with her brother Leandro. Even after learning that bitter truth, she could have given her marriage a try.
But Kairos didn’t possess a heart. Didn’t know what to do with one given into his keeping.
She had humiliated herself, she had prostrated her every thought, every feeling at his feet. And it hadn’t been enough.
She hadn’t been enough.
* * *
“So you’re truly over with him...that glowering husband of yours.”
“Si,” Tina said automatically. And then wished she hadn’t.
When the party began winding down, she had slipped below deck with the excuse of visiting the ladies’ room and hidden herself away in the lovely gray-and-blue bedroom, her nerves frayed to the hilt at the constant awareness of Kairos.
It was tiring to play the stoic, unaffected party girl. To stuff away all the longing and hurt and anger into a corner of her heart.
But Nikolai had followed her downstairs.
Although over the last couple of months she’d realized that Nikolai was harmless, he was drunk now. Her brother Luca had taught her long ago never to trust a drunken man.
“A taxi for you,” she said to Nikolai, pulling her cell phone out of her clutch.
From the foot of the bed where he made an adorably pretty picture, Nikolai stretched his leg and rubbed his leather boot against her bare calf. “Or we could spend the night here, Tina, mi amore. Now that things are truly over between you and the Greek thug—”
Using the tip of her stiletto, Tina poked his calf until he retreated with a very unmasculine squeal.
Her head was pounding. She’d barely drunk any water. Her body and mind were engaged in a boxing match over Kairos. The last thing she needed was Nikolai hitting on her.
“Kairos and I are not divorced. Also, I’m not interested in a relationship,” she added for good measure.
“I noticed him tonight, cara mia. He spared you not a single glance.” A claw against her heart. “As if you were total strangers.” A bruise over her chest. “He seemed pretty interested in that whore Stella.” Bile in her throat.
Just like a man to use the woman and then call her crude names. Oh, why had she come tonight? “Per favore, Nik, don’t call her that.”
“You called Claudia Vanderbilt much worse for marrying a sixty-year-old man.”
Tina cringed, shame and regret washing over her like a cold wave.
She had.
She’d been privileged and pampered and had behaved so badly. She should keep Nikolai in her life. If nothing, he’d keep reminding her what a bitch she’d once been.
While Valentina held up her phone and walked around the bedroom looking for a signal—she’d spend the night here if it meant avoiding seeing Kairos leave with one of the women, not that he’d need to pay for the pleasure—Nikolai had moved closer.
Valentina froze when his hands landed on her hips. She arrested his questing hands. “Please, Nikolai. I would like to keep the single friend I have.”
“You have really changed, Tina. Transformed from a poisonous viper to a—” his alcoholic fumes invaded her nostrils while he tilted his head, seemingly in deep thought “—an innocent lamb? A lovely gazelle?”
Christo, the man was deeply drunk if he was calling her innocent.
Before Tina could shove Nikolai’s hands away—she really didn’t want to plant her knee in his groin like Luca had taught her—his hands were gone. Whether he skidded due to his drunken state or was pushed, Tina would never know. He landed with a soft thump against the bed, slid down it and let out a pathetic moan.
Tina whirled around, her breath hitching.
CHAPTER TWO
KAIROS STOOD AGAINST the back door, not a single hair out of place.
There was that stillness around him again, a stillness that seemed to contain passion and violence and emotion.
And yet nothing.
Emotions surged through her, like a wave cresting. But just like a wave broken by the strongest dam, Kairos had come pretty close to breaking her.
Ignoring the fact that her dress climbed up her thighs and she was probably flashing her thong at the inebriated Nikolai, she went to her knees next to him, sliding her fingers through his gelled hair.
Nikolai’s hot, alcohol-laden breath fluttered over the expanse of her chest. But it was the silver gaze drilling holes into her back that pebbled goose bumps over her skin.
A sound like a swallowed curse emanated from behind her. She ignored it, just as she tried to ignore her pounding heart.
“What are you doing?”
It had been nine months since she’d seen him. Nine months since he’d spoken to her. The hope that he would come after her had died after the first month. She swallowed to keep her voice steady. “Checking for a bump.”
“Why?”
She snorted. “Because he’s my friend and I care what happens to him.”
Tina stared down at Nikolai’s picture-pretty face and sighed. He was her friend.
He had gotten her the entry-level job in a fashion agency when she had returned to Milan from Paris, her tail tucked between her legs and ready to admit defeat, and found her a place with four other girls in a tiny one-bedroom hovel.
Not out of the generosity of his heart, but because he’d wanted to see her humiliated, wanted to enjoy how she’d come down in the world. Maybe even to get into her pants.
Whatever his motivations, Nikolai was the only one who’d helped her out, the only one who hadn’t laughed at her pathetic attempts.
Unlike the man behind her, whose mocking laugh even now pinged over her nerves. “You have no friends. At least not true ones. Shallow women flock to you for approval of their clothes and shoes. Men flock to you because they...”
Truth—every word was truth. Humiliating, wretched truth.
But it hurt. Like something heavy was pressing down on her chest. “Don’t hold back now, Kairos,” she said, smarting at the stinging behind her eyes.
“Because they assume that you’ll be wild and fiery in bed. That you will bring all that passion and lack of self-control and that volatility to sex. Once your friend here gets what he wants, he will be through with you.”
If she’d had any doubt what he thought of her, he’d just decimated it.
She had fallen in love with a man who thought she was good for sex and nothing else.
A need to claw back pounded through her. “I’m shallow and vapid, si, but what you see is what you get. I don’t make false promises, Kairos.”
The silence reverberated with his shock. “I’ve never made a promise to you that I didn’t keep. I promised your brother to keep you in style when I agreed to marry you and I did. I promised you on the night of our engagement that I would show you pleasure unlike anything you’ve ever known and I believe I kept that promise.”
I never said I loved you.
His unsaid statement hung in the air.
No...he hadn’t said it. Not once.
It had all been her.
Stupid, naive Valentina building castles of love around this hard man.
She found no bump on Nikolai’s thick skull and sighed with relief. His head lolling onto her chest, he fell asleep with an undignified snore. She’d have gagged at the sweat from Nikolai’s flushed head trickling down her meager cleavage if all her reactions weren’t attuned to the man behind her.
The small hairs on her neck stood up before Kairos spoke. “Leave him alone.”
Ignoring him, she rose to her feet, and planted her hands under Nikolai’s arms.
“Move, Valentina.”
Before she could blink, Kairos hefted Nikolai up onto his shoulders and raised a brow at her.
He had carried her like that once, the hard muscles of his shoulders digging into her belly, his big hands wrapped around her upper thighs, after she had jumped into the pool at a business retreat in front of his colleagues and their wives because he’d ignored her all weekend.
He’d stripped her and thrown her into the cold shower, rage simmering in his eyes. And when he’d extracted her from the shower and rubbed her down, all that rage had converted into passion.
She’d been self-destructive just to get a rise out of him.
She looked away from the memory of that night in his eyes.
Masculine arrogance filled his eyes. “Now that the poor fool has served his purpose, shall I throw him overboard?”
“His purpose?”
“You used him to make me jealous—laughing at his jokes, dancing with him, touching him, to rile my temper. It is done, so you don’t need him anymore.”
“I told you, Nik is my friend.” She jerked her gaze to his face and flushed. “And I did nothing tonight with you on my mind. My world doesn’t revolve around you, Kairos. Not anymore.” She wouldn’t ask whether his temper was riled.
She wouldn’t.
With a shrug, he dumped Nikolai on the bed like a sack of potatoes.
Nik’s soft snores punctured the silence. If she weren’t so caught up in the confusing cascade of emotions Kairos evoked, the whole thing would have been hilarious.
But nothing could cut through her awareness of six feet four inches of pure muscle and utter masculinity. She pressed her fingers to her temple. “Please leave now.”
“Enough, Valentina. You’ve got my attention now. Tell me, did you really sign up with the escort service or was that just a dramatic touch to push me over the edge?”
“Are you asking me if I’ve been prostituting myself all these months?” She was proud of how steady she sounded while her heart thundered away in her chest.
“I thought perhaps no first. But knowing you and your vicious tendencies, who knows how far you went to shock me, to teach me a lesson, to bring me to heel?”
She walked to the door and held it for Kairos. “Get out.”
He leaned against the foot of the bed, dwarfing the room with his presence. “You’re not staying here with him.”
She folded her hands and tilted her head. The sheer breadth of his shoulders sucked the air from the room. “I’ve been doing what and who I want since the day I left you nine months ago, since I realized what a joke our marriage is. So it’s a little late to play the possessive husband.”
Hadn’t she promised herself that she’d never stoop to provoking him like that again?
She cringed, closed her eyes at the dirty, inflammatory insinuation in her own words.
But she saw the imperceptible lick of fire in his gaze, the tiny flinch of that cruel upper lip. At one time, the little fracture in his control would have been a minor victory to her.
Not anymore.
“It is a good thing then, is it not, Valentina—” the way he said her name sent a curl of longing through her “—that I did not believe all your passionate avowals of love, ne?”
Something vibrated in the smooth calmness of his tone. The presence of that anger was a physical slap. Her eyes wide, she stared as he continued, his mouth taking on a cruel tilt.
“No more pathetic displays of your jealousy. No grand declarations of love. No snarling at and slapping every woman I’m friends with. Now we both can work with each other on the same footing.”
Dios, she’d always been a melodramatic fool. But Kairos, his inability to feel anything, his unwillingness to share a thought, an emotion...it had turned her into much worse. “Non, Kairos. No more of that,” she agreed tiredly.
She didn’t even have cash for a taxi, but if she’d learnt anything in the last nine months of this flailing about she’d been doing in the name of independence, it was that she could survive.
She could survive without designer clothes and shoes, she could survive without the adulation she’d taken as her due as the fashionista that Milan looked up to, she could survive without the Conti villa and the cars and the expensive lifestyle.
She picked up her clutch from the bed, her phone from the floor. “If you won’t leave, I will.”
He blocked the door with his shoulders. “Not dressed like a cheap hooker, strutting for business at dawn, you’re not.”
“I don’t want—”
“I will throw you over my shoulder and lock you up in the stateroom.”
It should have sounded dramatic, emotional. But Kairos didn’t do drama. Didn’t utter a word he didn’t mean. And if he so much as touched her...
“Fine. Let’s talk.” She threw her clutch back on the bed and faced him. “Even better, why don’t you call your lawyer and have him bring divorce papers? I’ll sign them right now and we won’t see each other ever again.”
He didn’t exactly startle. But again, Tina had the feeling that something in him became alert. She had...surprised him? Shocked him?
What did he think her leaving him had meant?
He stretched out his wrists, undid the cufflinks on his right hand—platinum cufflinks she’d bought him for their three-month anniversary with her brother’s credit card—and pushed back the sleeve.
A shiver of anticipation curled around her spine.
He stretched his left hand toward her. Being left-handed, he’d always undone the right cuff link first. But the right hand...his fingers didn’t do fine motor skills well. She’d noted it on their wedding night, how they had felt clumsy when he tried to do anything.
For a physically perfect specimen of masculinity, it had been a shock to note that the fingers of his right hand didn’t work quite right. When she’d asked if he’d hurt his hand, he’d kissed her instead. The second time she’d asked, he’d just shrugged.
His usual response when he didn’t want to talk.
She’d taken his left hand in hers and deftly undone the cufflink on their wedding night. And a thousand times after that.
It was one of a hundred rituals they’d had as man and wife. Such intimacy in a simple action. So much history in an everyday thing.
Tina stared at the blunt, square nails now, her breath ballooning up in her chest; the long fingers sprinkled with hair to the plain platinum band on his ring finger; the rough calluses on his palm because he didn’t wear gloves when he lifted weights. It was a strong, powerful hand and yet when he touched her in the most sensitive places, it was capable of such feathery, tender movements.
A sheen of sweat coated every inch of her skin.
Dios, she couldn’t bear to touch him.
Without meeting his gaze, she took a few steps away from him. “What do I have to do to make you believe that I’m done with this marriage? That my behavior is not dictated anymore by trying to get you to acknowledge my existence?”
He smirked, noting the distance she’d put between them. “Is that what you did during our marriage?”
She leaned against the opposite wall and shrugged. “I want to talk about the divorce.”
“You really want one?”
“Si. Whatever we had was not healthy and I don’t want to live like that anymore.”
“So Leandro enlightened you about the fat settlement you will receive then.”
“What?”
“Your brother made sure you would receive a huge chunk of everything I own should we separate. Bloody insistent, if I remember correctly.” His shrug highlighted those muscle-packed shoulders. “Maybe Leandro knew how hard you would make it for any man to stay married to you.”
“You think that will hurt me? Leandro...” Her voice caught, the gulf she had put between her brothers and her a physical ache. “He practically raised me, he loved me when he could have hated me for our mother deserting him and Luca. And I still cut him out of my life because he thought so little of me that he had to bribe you to marry me. In the grand scheme of things that I’ve lost and learned, this marriage and anything I get by dissolving it...they mean nothing to me, Kairos.”
He was upon her in the blink of an eye. The scent of him—a hint of male sweat and the mild thread of his cologne—hit her first. Awareness pooled low in her belly. He didn’t touch her, and yet the heat of his body was a languid caress.
“How will you afford your haute couture and your designer stilettos then?”
“I haven’t touched your credit cards in months. I haven’t taken a single Euro from Leandro or Luca. Even the clothes I wear belong to Nikolai.”
“Ah...” His gaze raked down the length of her body. The edge of cruelty in it stole her breath even as her skin tingled at his perusal. He nodded toward the happily snoring figure behind him on the bed. “Of course, your pimp dresses you now.”
“Nikolai is not a pimp and he tricked me into believing tonight was just a party.”
“I have to admit, only Valentina Constantinou could make a tacky, slinky dress look stylish and sophisticated. But that skill is not really helping, is it? Paris chewed you out and threw you back to Milan after a mere two months. Since then, you’ve been licking the boots of everyone at that fashion magazine. Fetching coffee for those bitchy socialites, when you had once been their queen bee, running errands in the rain for photographers and models that salivated over you for years...” His gaze swept over her in that dismissive way of his. “Have you had enough of reality? Are you ready to return to your life of luxury?”
She wasn’t surprised he knew what she’d been up to in the last few months. “I don’t care how long it takes, I mean to—”
“Is that why you decided to try your hand at the oldest profession in the world?”
“You’re the one who bought me from Leandro, remember? If anyone made me a whore, Kairos, it was you.” Every hurt she felt poured out into her words, all her promises to herself to keep it civil forgotten.
“I did not pursue you under false pretenses. I did not take you to bed, hoping that a good performance would bring me closer to the CEO position of the Conti board.”
