LITMIR.BIZ

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his bodyguard.’

      ‘And that was when you met me,’ she said slowly.

      Loukas nodded slowly. Yes. That was when he’d met his fairy-tale princess, with her white skin and her blue eyes and the cutest little bottom he’d ever seen. Her coolness had fascinated him; she’d been restrained and cautious—nothing like his mother or all the women he’d subsequently been intimate with. She hadn’t been predatory or coquettish. In fact she’d fought against an attraction which had been almost palpable. And hadn’t the fact that his princess had presented him with her virginity been like a master stroke in capturing his heart as well as his body, culminating in that proud proposal of marriage which had been thrown back in his face? He gave a bitter laugh. What a fool he had been.

      ‘Yes,’ he said, with a note of finality. ‘That was when I met you.’

      ‘And did you ever...?’ She drew in a deep breath and he saw the rise of her tiny breasts. ‘Did you ever see your mother again?’

      Loukas flinched, because it didn’t matter what hurt and what pain she had caused him—she was still his mother.

      ‘Only once,’ he said flatly. ‘I’d been sending her money for years, but I couldn’t face returning. And then, when she was dying I went back to find her living in a...hovel.’ His voice tailed off, before taking on a bitter note. ‘In thrall to her latest boyfriend—a vulture who was systematically bleeding her dry of her dignity, as well as all the money I’d sent her. I remember how weak she was when she took my hand and told me that she loved this particular loser. And even though she’d been a notoriously bad picker of men all her life—this one was in a class of his own. He had neglected to give her any pain relief—he’d been too busy spending her money at the casino.’

      ‘Was that when you got the scar?’ she said slowly.

      Loukas nodded, realising how alien this must all sound to someone like her. ‘Neh,’ he drawled, the flicker of anger not far from the surface. He remembered being young and fit and prepared to fight fairly, but his mother’s lover had not. He hadn’t seen the glint of steel as the knife had come flashing down out of nowhere, and at first he hadn’t even registered the strange, digging sensation in his flesh, which had heralded the eruption of blood. Loukas’s voice shook with rage. ‘The only good thing that came out of it was that he was arrested and jailed and no longer able to steal money from my mother. But by then it was too late anyway.’

      ‘What do you mean?’ she whispered.

      ‘She died later that week, just as I was being discharged from hospital,’ he said, his face twisted with pain. ‘I found all her paperwork and I understood at last why she had never wanted to talk about my father.’ He met the question in her eyes. ‘Like I said, she was a bad picker of men and that my father was abusive to her came as no real surprise. But the most interesting thing was that I discovered I had a twin brother.’

      She tipped her head back, her eyes huge. ‘A twin brother?’

      He nodded. ‘Alek had been brought up by my father—a very different kind of upbringing from mine. I had him tracked down and I met him in Paris.’ It had been that meeting which had made Loukas decide to lay all of his ghosts to rest. To make him want to move on and live his life in a different way. And hadn’t Jess been the most persistent ghost of them all—the one who had hovered on the periphery of his mind like some pale and interesting beauty?

      ‘How...’ her voice trembled ‘...how can you possibly have discovered that you have a twin? Why didn’t your mother ever tell you?’

      ‘Because my father was powerful,’ he said. ‘And she was running away from him. She couldn’t physically—or financially—take two tiny babies, so she chose to leave Alek.’

      ‘How? How did she choose?’

      He shook his head. ‘Doesn’t matter how. She knew she could never go back and so she decided to cut out that part of her life completely. To pretend it had never happened.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘And if I’m being objective, I think I can almost understand why. Far better to cut her losses and run, than to face up to the fact that she’d left her other son with a cruel tyrant.’

      ‘Oh, Loukas.’

      She reached her hand towards his face as if to stroke his cheek but he caught her wrist in an iron-hard grip of his own. Turning her palm upwards, he ran his tongue slowly over the salty flesh, his eyes never leaving her face.

      ‘I don’t want your pity, Jess,’ he said softly. ‘That’s not the reason I told you.’

      She trembled beneath the lick of his tongue. ‘Why did you tell me?’

      He thought about it. It was more a question of why he had kept it hidden before but now he could see that he had been ashamed. Ashamed of the circumstances which had forged him. So hungry for his cool and classy Englishwoman that he had cultured a deliberate elusiveness, so that she would accept him for his present, and not his past.

      But she had not accepted him at all. He had still not been good enough and maybe for someone like her, he never would be.

      He didn’t answer her question, but fixed her with a steady gaze. He remembered the way she’d breathlessly whispered that she loved him and how, for a short while, he had believed her. But words were easy, weren’t they? His mother used to profess love, then leave him alone and frightened while she went out with her latest man. ‘Why did you turn down my proposal?’ he said suddenly.

      She bit her lip and looked down at the rumpled sheets. ‘Because...because I thought you were doing it to be chivalrous. To save me from my father’s anger.’

      ‘First time in my life I’ve ever been called chivalrous,’ he said sardonically. ‘But I don’t think you’re being entirely honest, are you, Jess? Maybe you did it to protect your fortune from a man who had nothing—who might want to marry you for all the wrong reasons?’ he said, and the faint flush of colour to her cheeks told him everything he wanted to know.

      ‘Well, there was that too,’ she admitted haltingly, lifting her eyes to his as if she should be applauded for her honesty.

      Loukas gave a bitter laugh. She had looked on him as someone with an eye for the main chance—able to provide her with sex, but best kept at arm’s length when it came to permanency, or commitment.

      And wasn’t it crazy that even now it still hurt to realise that?

      He didn’t handle pain well. Physical pain was no problem, but emotional pain he found unendurable and he’d learnt that there was only one way to guarantee immunity. Don’t get involved. Don’t let anyone close enough to inflict it. It was a simple but effective rule as long as you stuck to it. And with Jess he’d been stupid enough to take his eye off the ball for a while.

      ‘But you know something?’ he questioned. ‘You did me a kind of favour, in a way. I realised that marriage was completely wrong for someone like me.’

      ‘Is that why you’ve never settled down with anyone else? Why you still live in luxury hotels, instead of having a real home?’

      ‘Neh.’ He gave a soft, cynical laugh. ‘I’ve grown used to my life. I wouldn’t have it any other way.’

      ‘And children? What about them?’

      ‘What about them? Why the hell would I want to bring children in the world, just to screw them up? I know what that’s like and so does my twin brother.’

      ‘Right,’ she said uncertainly.

      He thought he could see a flicker of darkness in her eyes—as if his words were hurting her. As if she wanted to reach out and stroke his pain away. And he didn’t need that. He didn’t need her sympathy, or understanding. He didn’t want her looking at him as if he were a puzzle she could solve, because he was fine just the way he was. He didn’t want her making him feel stuff, because life was so much easier when you didn’t. There were a

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