LITMIR.BIZ

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believe he was taking it on himself, but then hadn’t she always known he was no common man? He stood above all others in her mind and had been elevated to almost saint status with his understanding of her rejection.

      He didn’t know why she had pulled back and had not asked, creating a well of gratitude that ran soul deep inside her.

      “I didn’t mean to let it go that far,” she said, remembering accusations from the past of being a tease, tormenting words that haunted her nightmares.

      “I did not mean for it to happen at all,” he admitted ruefully, making her smile when it should have been impossible. “I saw you from my room and came out to check on you and to apologize for my inappropriate remark earlier. Instead, I took advantage of an attraction neither of us would benefit from acting on.”

      While his words completely exonerated her from blame and set her mind at ease, they left gaping wounds in her heart. He was saying that they did not belong together in any sense.

      She’d known that.

      Had always understood he was way out of her league, but it still hurt. He’d given her her first taste of real passion and the possibility she could know the entire gamut of sexual experience with him tantalized her. She’d gotten frightened, but only when he touched her like she’d been touched that one fateful night.

      If she could tell him about it…ask him to avoid doing that, would she be able to make love completely without fear?

      Why was she even asking herself these questions? He had made no secret of the fact that he was appalled by the fact he’d kissed her. Sexual intimacy with Sebastian Kouros was not on the cards for her.

      She forced her lips into a semblance of a smile. “You’re right. A relationship between the two of us would be out of the question.” She was trying to sound sophisticated and casually accepting of his reading of the situation, but she was afraid the façade would crack any second. “I—I think, I’ll go to bed now.”

      He insisted on walking her to her room, not relieving her of his now grim presence until she shut the door on his formal goodnight.

      Sebastian walked away from Rachel’s room calling himself six kinds of a fool. What in the hell had he been thinking to kiss her like that?

      To kiss her at all?

      Okay, so he had wanted her for years, but she was not the woman for him. Not even for a brief affair. She might be different from Andrea, but Rachel was still daughter to a piranha.

      As well, it would hurt his family if he got involved with her. They deserved better than a second serving of the kind of gossip that had surrounded Matthias’s marriage. He had loved his great-uncle very much, but the old man had been ruled by his libido when it came to Andrea and he had brought shame upon their family.

      How could a Greek man with any kind of pride stay married to a woman he knew to be unfaithful?

      And yet Matthias had.

      The night of the crash had not been the first time his uncle had found evidence of his much younger wife’s sexual exploits outside the bounds of their marriage. Each time, Sebastian had been sure the old man would finally come to his senses and kick the bitch out of his life, but Matthias never had.

      Sebastian would never allow a woman to make such a fool of him. He had no tolerance for lies and subterfuge of the type that had marked Matthias’s second marriage. He abhorred any type of dishonesty and would not give the time of day to a woman who lied about her age, much less her fidelity.

      His great-uncle had been smart enough to prevent his beautiful, conscience-less wife from cleaning him out financially and had shown his brain was still functioning on some level within the bounds of his marriage in not leaving her anything in his will, but there was no doubt Andrea Demakis had bankrupted the old man’s pride.

      For a Greek male, that was the worst consequence imaginable.

      Sebastian had found it impossible to comprehend Matthias’s willingness to stay married. How could he have allowed himself to be manipulated by his sexuality into pursuing a lifestyle the total antithesis of what he had known his first sixty-plus years? A man should live his final years with dignity, but his uncle had not.

      Humiliation had been his companion, particularly for the past year. What had spurred Andrea to wave her sexual conquests in her elderly husband’s face? What had made her behave so foully? And why had Rachel ignored it all, never once attempting to stop the abhorrent behavior?

      The dark night outside his bedroom window offered no answers, but the questions served to remind him that no matter how different Rachel appeared on the surface, she had been too self-interested to care about Matthias Demakis.

      Just like her mother.

      Rachel finished packing the last box in her mother’s bedroom and closed it. A sense of accomplishment warred with disappointment. She’d searched Andrea’s room thoroughly and found nothing related to her life before she married Matthias Demakis. No indication of who the man who had fathered Rachel might be.

      Considering her mother’s taste in companions, she would have given up her desire to find him years ago but for two poignant memories from her childhood.

      She’d been little, three, maybe four, and sitting on a man’s lap. He’d been reading to her and while she had no idea what he’d been reading, she could still remember the sense of love and security she’d felt. She’d called him, “Daddy,” and kissed his cheek when he’d finished. He’d hugged her tight and when she closed her eyes she could remember that hug.

      It had made her feel safe.

      And she remembered waking in the night and searching an apartment in the dark for her daddy, crying and calling his name. She’d been about five, or six then. Her mother had slept on, no doubt passed out from alcohol or something more potent, but Rachel had stayed up all night, accepting that her daddy wasn’t coming back only when the first rays of sun indicated a new day.

      She didn’t know if her father had chosen to stay out of their lives as her mother had claimed or if he had been unable to find them. Andrea and Rachel had lived in various parts of Europe since Rachel had started school. Her mother’s exploits had made the gutter press at times, but wouldn’t have been noteworthy in the States. She had been neither filthy rich, until Matthias, nor a celebrity.

      Even her marriage to Matthias Demakis had only made her of interest to a few gossip rags in the States. While other students at her university had learned enough about her exploits to judge Rachel on them, that didn’t mean a man who hadn’t seen Andrea in over twenty years would recognize her in publicized photos, or even read that type of paper.

      Rachel wanted to believe her father was an American man, unaware of Andrea’s recent notoriety and longtime residence in Europe. However, she had to acknowledge that he could very well be as permanently gone as Andrea.

      Shaking off thoughts that led nowhere, Rachel ran tape along the box’s seam. For whatever reason, her father was lost to her and that was that. She tore the tape off and straightened, blowing at a strand of hair that had fallen from her ponytail. Emotionally detached, she surveyed the once decadent room now stripped of much of its sumptuous decor.

      Sebastian had encouraged her to pack everything for the auction. He planned to redo the room in the near future, erasing Andrea’s influence on the villa as thoroughly as possible. Of course, that’s not how he’d put it. He’d been very tactful since their discussion in the study three days ago, but his feelings regarding Andrea Demakis were no secret.

      Stretching tired muscles, Rachel reached toward the ceiling and then bent from one side to the other. Her muscles ached and her eyes burned with fatigue. She’d spent a lot of time on her knees packing and sorting in the past three days and had slept poorly at night, too much time given to reliving Sebastian’s kiss.

      Bending forward, she touched her fingertips to the plush carpeting. Straightening, she leaned backward, doing almost a backbend, and saw a pair of trouser

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