LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER SEVEN

      THE ROOM WAS very quiet for what seemed like a long time and, when she spoke, Jessica’s words seemed to splinter the peace. She turned onto her side and stared into the face of the man beside her.

      ‘How did you get that scar?’

      Loukas stirred and stretched. Completely comfortable in his nakedness, he raised his arms and extended his powerful legs in a movement which should have distracted her, but nothing could have distracted her right then. All Jessica could see was the livid mark zigzagging over his flesh.

      ‘How?’ she whispered again, when still he didn’t answer.

      His face became shuttered as he drifted a fingertip over her nipple and watched it wrinkle and harden. ‘As a topic for pillow talk,’ he drawled, ‘it’s not exactly up there with telling me how much you enjoyed your orgasm.’

      Jessica didn’t react. He made what had happened sound so clinical. But maybe for him it was. Did legions of women purr the morning afterwards and tell the dark and charismatic Greek how much they had enjoyed their orgasm? She scooped back her hair and peered at him. ‘Was it in Paris?’ she persisted.

      ‘Was what in Paris?’ He stopped stroking.

      ‘You told me that you were...captured there.’ She hesitated. His face was still shuttered, but she persisted. ‘Was it back then?’

      Loukas lay back, pillowing his ruffled head on his folded arms as the chandelier glittered fractured light on their bare skin. He sensed she wouldn’t give up until she had an answer and something told him he was going to find it harder to silence Jess than he would the average lover. ‘No, it wasn’t then,’ he said dismissively.

      ‘So...when?’

      He turned his head to look at her and frowned. ‘Does it matter?’

      ‘Of course it matters.’ She gave a barely perceptible sigh. ‘What is it with you, Loukas? You never talk about your past, and you never did. I was with you for months and ended up knowing almost nothing about you.’

      He gave the flicker of a smile. ‘You knew plenty.’

      ‘I’m not talking about the way your body works.’

      He gave a short laugh. She had grown up in a land of milk and honey, in a world light years away from his. He thought about the big house with the tennis court and the bright green lawns which swept down to the sea. About privilege and belonging and all the things he’d never had. ‘What difference does it make to know about my past?’

      ‘It might make me feel as if I wasn’t in bed with a stranger,’ she said quietly.

      It wasn’t the first time the accusation had been levelled at him, but, when Jess said it, it felt different. Come to think of it—everything about Jess felt different. ‘I thought the anonymity aspect appealed to you,’ he drawled. ‘You certainly seemed turned on when you had your back to me earlier. For a minute I thought you might be pretending I was someone else.’

      ‘Don’t try to change the subject.’

      ‘I’ll do anything I please. Just because I’ve made love to you doesn’t give you the right to censor my speech, or to demand answers.’

      She bit her lip. ‘Is it such an awful story, then?’

      ‘Yes.’ He said the word without planning and it was like an overfilled balloon being popped by the prick of a needle. Like a bruise beneath your fingernail which only a white-hot lance would relieve. ‘Yes,’ he repeated. ‘Awful gets pretty close to it.’

      ‘Won’t you tell me?’

      His instinct was to distract her—either by making love to her again, or by heading off to take a shower. Because she wanted to talk about the old Loukas, and he had spent a long time forging a new Loukas, a man as hard as the diamonds which were at the core of his fortune and a success beyond his wildest dreams.

      He had uncovered secrets he would have preferred to have left alone, and had hidden them away deep inside himself. But secrets left their mark, he was discovering—a dirty mark which left a stain if you didn’t expose it to the sunshine and the air. He looked into Jess’s cool features, but for once her face was showing the emotions she usually kept contained. He could see the concern shadowing her eyes. He could hear an anxious softness in her voice, and something made him start talking. ‘How much do you know?’

      She shrugged. ‘Not a lot. That you were an only child and your mother brought you up in Athens, and that you never knew who your father was.’

      Loukas twisted his mouth into a grim smile. How easily a whole life could be condensed into a single sentence—black and white, without a single shade of grey in between. ‘Did I tell you that we were poor?’

      ‘Not in so many words, but I...’ Her words tailed off.

      ‘You what, Jess?’ he said silkily. ‘You guessed?’

      She nodded.

      ‘How?’

      ‘It doesn’t matter.’

      ‘Oh, but it does. I’m interested.’

      Reluctantly, she shrugged. ‘You just always seemed so...oh, I don’t know...restless, I guess. Like a shark moving through the water. Like you were always looking for something.’

      It startled him how accurate her words were and Loukas nodded. Because she was right. He had been looking for something—he just hadn’t known what it was. And then, when he’d found it...

      ‘We were dirt poor, my mother and I,’ he said, wanting to ram home the fundamental differences between them. To shock her. To convince her—and him—that all they shared was a rare electricity in between the sheets. ‘Sometimes I used to hang around at the backs of restaurants to see what food they were throwing away at the end of a day’s trade, and I’d take it home...’ Take it home and hang around outside until his mother had finished with whoever she was currently entertaining. He remembered the different men who had stumbled out, some of them trying to cuff him on the mouth, while others had pressed a few coins into his hand. But Loukas had never kept those coins. He’d put them in the poor box at the nearby church...unwilling to accept money which was tainted, no matter how hungry he’d been. ‘Although I took what jobs I could, just as soon as I was old enough—running errands, sweeping restaurants, polishing cars— anything, really.’

      ‘And your mother?’ she questioned hesitantly. ‘Did she work?’

      ‘She didn’t have time to work,’ he said bitterly. ‘She was too busy devoting herself to whoever her current love interest was. She always had to have a man around and a child like me was only ever going to get in the way. So for the most part, I was left to my own devices.’

      ‘Oh, Loukas,’ she breathed.

      ‘I lived from hand to mouth,’ he continued grimly. ‘I worked at the ferry port in Piraeus as soon as I was old enough, until I’d saved up enough money to take myself off to a new life. I didn’t go back to Greece for a

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