LITMIR.BIZ

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a helicopter that could be taking her anywhere!

      ‘Will you listen to me?’ Desperation made her swing round so she was standing in front of him, and pure compulsion made her reach up and snatch the sunglasses from his face. She found herself staring up at his hard, tight, lean golden features with glinting black eyes that offered no hope of a compromise.

      ‘Y-you’re delusional if you think I’m just meekly going to board that thing without you explaining why the heck I should!’ Desperately she tried to grab back some control here.

      ‘Delusional?’ he repeated. ‘Well, let us see about that, shall we?'

      She saw what was coming. Her breathing feathered. She put both hands to his chest as if to ward him off but the flashing burn in his eyes told her that nothing was going to stop him as he lowered his head and claimed her mouth. The hot sting of desire leapt to life in her bloodstream and her helpless groan vibrated across each separate layer of her skin. He possessed her mouth—all of it. He threw everything into that kiss, every bit of angrily passionate frustration he was feeling. He kissed her until her legs couldn’t support her, until her fingers crushed his glasses into her palm and her other hand crawled up his chest to cling around his neck. He used his hands to keep her pressed up against his body and let her feel what was happening to him. And he did it knowingly, ruthlessly, until her mouth throbbed and her blood pounded and her thighs pulsed and danced.

      And he did it right there in full view of his watching pilot and the ground staff. When he lifted his head he waited in silence until she opened her kiss-drugged, man-possessed eyes.

      ‘Was that real enough?’ he asked then.

      ‘Yes,’ was the only breathless little answer she had to give him.

      ‘Sure you don’t want to argue the point some more?’ Pressing her pulsing lips together, she shook her head. ‘Then do you walk onto the helicopter or do I carry you there too?’

      ‘W-walk,’ she whispered.

      He nodded, then, because she looked so beaten, he sighed and said roughly, ‘Don’t look so hopeless. You know I will never harm a single golden hair on your beautiful head.'

      Strangely she did know; in fact, it was the only comfort she had to cling to as she let him walk her onto that helicopter without kicking up a screaming fuss.

      The Markonos fleet of executive helicopters were not what you could ever call standard issue. The rich cream leather and glossy walnut veneer interior made yet another statement of wealth and of power she had conveniently let herself forget.

      ‘Jamie,’ she remembered as he saw her settled into one of the seats.

      ‘Your brother is being well cared for,’ he assured her.

      ‘What is that supposed to mean?’ she asked warily, something in the cool way he had said it making her frown.

      He took a mobile phone out of his trouser pocket. ‘Jamie has been watched over by one of my people since I agreed to let him stay at the hotel instead of moving into the villa with us.’

      ‘Your people? Do you mean like the man you instructed to watch my every movement when you walked away earlier this week?'

      The tart stab made his firm mouth flex. ‘I look after my own,’ was all he said.

      Then he dropped the mobile phone on her lap and took back the sunglasses she had forgotten she was holding. ‘You have three minutes to assure your brother that everything is fine between us,’ he instructed as he turned away from her. ‘You can tell him we are on our way to Athens and will be back on the island before nightfall—'

      ‘Athens? I don’t want to go to …’

      Louisa found herself protesting to a walnut-veneered bulkhead. He’d just walked through the door and into the pilot’s cabin without giving her a chance to finish what she’d been going to say! Sitting back in her seat, she picked up the mobile. By the time she’d finished assuring her brother that everything was absolutely fine, they were lifting off the ground.

      CHAPTER TWELVE

      SHE didn’t see Andreas again until they landed at a private airstrip in Athens, which gave her more than long enough to list every nasty, sneaky thing he had done, so she was wound up like a spring-loaded clock by the time he reappeared to escort her into the waiting limousine.

      A chauffeur-driven limousine with no central partition to give her the privacy she needed to say what she wanted to say—not that a partition would have made much difference because Andreas, she discovered, was quite capable of putting up his own partition.

      So the air simmered between them as they drove into Athens and the closer they got to the luxury houses and apartment blocks of Kolaniki the more uptight she became.

      ‘I don’t want to visit your parents,’ she bit out when that horror scenario flicked into her head.

      He said nothing, his closed profile making her fingers itch so badly to slap him into a reaction that she had to curl them into fists on her lap.

      What was he up to—what was he thinking?

      Andreas knew exactly what he was up to but the hell if he was going to let her know it—he wasn’t that brave. His throat tightened when he tried to swallow as they bypassed the road leading to the luxury houses that dotted Kolaniki Hill with its famous views over Athens and he felt her stiffen in the seat beside him. He was taking such a big risk here he wasn’t that certain he could carry it through.

      ‘I hate you,’ she whispered when they pulled into the forecourt of his apartment block. She was white as a sheet now, eyes too big and too dark in the pinched strain of her face. ‘I don’t know how you can bring yourself to do this to me.'

      The chauffeur climbed out of the car.

      ‘Try cutting me a bit of slack, agape mou,’ Andreas returned huskily. ‘I need to do this. We need to do it.'

      Need to do what, though? Break her heart all over again?

      The chauffeur opened her door for her, giving her little option but to step out of the car’s air-conditioned interior into the full humid weight of the afternoon heat.

      It had taken barely an hour to get here, barely an hour to repeat a trip she had last made five years before. Now her heart was flailing around in her stomach. Any second now she knew she was going to be sick.

      Andreas climbed out on the other side of the car and gave a nod at the chauffeur, who disappeared back inside the car and drove it away around the side of the building to where the garages were situated, leaving the two of them staring at each other across the empty gap.

      He looked big, lean, tough—determined. Having got her this far with his grim bullying tactics, Louisa didn’t doubt she would find herself yanked over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift if she did not let him finish whatever it was he was so hell-bent on doing here.

      So she made herself cross the gap separating them, chin up, blue eyes so cold they even felt like chips of ice. As she continued past him into the building’s elegant foyer the flat of his hand arrived, warm against the base of her spine.

      Yet another statement of possession, she noted with a stinging tensing of her body as she flinched right away from him. She didn’t want him to touch her—she didn’t want to be here at all.

      They stepped into the waiting lift like two separate entities and rode up to the top floor without saying a word. He did not take his darkly hooded eyes from her face, while she stared at the floor and hoped to God she could get through this without throwing up.

      The lift opened directly into the apartment with its open-plan luxury that looked exactly the same as it had done five years ago, only without the evidence of partying to litter it up. It still bore the same classic modern furniture that had man stamped all over it because Andreas had owned this apartment long before she had come into his life.

      The

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