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  She looked up at him, the firmness of his voice forcing her to look into those gorgeous eyes once more. As she did so he lowered his head and kissed her, the light touch of his lips so teasing and tantalising that despite all her efforts a sigh of pleasure escaped her.

  This was what she’d wanted all along. Declarations of love and sweet kisses. But were they for real?

  ‘I love you,’ he whispered, and his hands let hers go, holding her face as he kissed her again, so tenderly, so gently, she closed her eyes to the pleasure of it. ‘I won’t accept that it’s too late. I can’t. Not when I love you so much. I can’t let you go, Serena.’

  She pulled away from him, her breath ragged with desire and threatening tears. She leant against the wall, her heart beating rapidly with a confused mix of elation and disbelief. Did he love her? Or was he just saying what he thought she needed to hear? Could she take one last risk? Could she be brave just once more?

  ‘Don’t you understand?’

  He smoothed his thumb over her cheek, releasing a rush of need she had to close her eyes against. As tears threatened she inwardly cursed her emotions, all awry—and not just because of the baby.

  ‘No, I don’t, Nikos,’ she said, and she looked up at him.

  She’d known she loved him before she’d left Santorini the first time. She’d known it as she’d arrived to tell him he was going to be a father. But she didn’t know if she could risk her heart once more.

  ‘I couldn’t let myself love you. I was afraid.’ His voice was a harsh whisper, the effort of saying it aloud all too clear.

  She blinked in shock. Nikos? Afraid? How could a man as powerful and in control as him be afraid—of love?

  Before she could voice her question he answered it for her. ‘I watched my mother walk away. It tore me apart. As a young boy I resolved never to put myself in that position again. I chose never to love anyone.’

  ‘You have never loved anyone?’ Had he been alone all his adult life? Was that why he had an almost endless string of women he dated, never settling with any of them for long?

  ‘Each time I met a woman I would remind myself of how it had felt to watch the one person I loved walk away. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake again.’

  ‘And if I’m a mistake...?’ She let the question linger even as her hopes rose higher.

  ‘You could never be a mistake,’ he said softly, and he reached out and caressed her cheek, smashing down the last of her doubts.

  ‘I don’t want to get it wrong, Nikos.’

  ‘Then marry me. Let me spend the rest of my life showing you we belong together.’

  His blue eyes were dark and demanding as he looked into hers and she felt her resistance slipping away to nothing.

  He loved her. He wanted to marry her. And that would banish not only her childhood pain but his too, because she had never stopped loving him.

  Still doubt lingered. ‘But what if...?’

  She didn’t finish the sentence—didn’t manage to ask him what would happen if things went wrong between them as they’d already proved they could. He kissed her deeply, setting free the desire for him which still slumbered within her so that she couldn’t help but wrap her arms around him, pulling herself close, inhaling his heady scent.

  ‘Don’t fight me,’ he said, and pulled back from her, his warm breath caressing her lips as his stayed unbearably close. ‘I love you, Serena. Please say it’s not too late.’

  ‘It’s not,’ she whispered, unaware she was trembling in his arms. ‘I love you, Nikos, and always have.’

  His sigh of relief made her smile, lightening the mood. ‘You have the key—that’s what my grandmother said. Do you remember?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said softly, smiling shyly at him. That afternoon was etched in her mind, and she’d been wondering ever since what the old lady had meant.

  ‘You don’t have the key, Serena,’ he said as he kissed her gently on the lips, making her tremble even more.

  ‘I don’t?’

  ‘No. You are the key. The key to my heart and to my love.’

  EPILOGUE

  ‘I CAN’T BELIEVE Sally is finally coming here to Santorini.’ Serena couldn’t keep the excitement from her voice as she looked up at Nikos.

  He put down the paper he’d been reading whilst sitting in the shade, keeping a watchful eye on his sleeping young son. After satisfying himself that Yannis was still asleep he walked over to her, his sexy laugh sending a spark of pleasure all through her. It intensified when he put his arm around her, pressing his lips gently against her hair.

  ‘It will be our first family occasion here at the villa. A chance for Yannis to meet his cousins.’

  Nikos glanced across at their son and Serena’s heart filled with love and happiness.

  ‘I just hope her flight was okay...’ She couldn’t quite keep the anxiety from her voice.

  ‘Sally has twins—and, knowing what it’s like to travel with one baby, I would imagine flying with two is difficult. I did ensure extra staff were on board to help with the babies.’

  ‘I can never thank you enough for giving her the chance of motherhood, despite the fact that I left.’

  ‘I did it for you, Serena, to make you happy—and because I’m a man who honours his promises,’ he said gently, looking down at her, his expression filled with love.

  She loved how understanding Nikos could be. As soon as Sally had told them she was expecting twins he’d done everything possible to enable them to marry in England, so that Sally didn’t have to fly to Greece. His grandmother had been disappointed, but a lavish blessing on the island on their return had soon made amends.

  Serena couldn’t possibly love him more for everything he’d done—not just for making Sally’s wish come true, but her own. She loved everything about him, and often silently thanked Christos for contacting the newspapers when he had, even if it had been with malicious intent. If he had not Nikos might never have confronted his past, nor even come to London.

  She wondered again if the headlines created by his mother to tell her own story, bringing Nikos’s past so harshly into the open, had been her way of trying to make amends. She’d counteracted the attack Christos had launched and put her life under the microscope of the press, admitting that what she’d told Nikos had been an attempt to stop him looking for her, or waiting and pining.

  ‘You should have invited your mother to the christening.’

  She looked at him reproachfully but he shook his head, still not yet able to come to terms with all he’d found out about his parents’ marriage.

  ‘It’s early days, and we both agreed that a big family celebration wouldn’t be the best time for her to meet everyone.’

  ‘I think it would be the best time. If christening a baby isn’t a day for letting go of the past and moving forward, I don’t know what is.’

  She smiled at him as he stroked her face, his love for her shining from the blue depths of his eyes.

  ‘I understand that she wants the past forgotten, especially now it’s come out just how cruel my father was to her.’

  A shadow of regret chased across his face and she knew he was thinking of the revelations about his parents’ short marriage.

  ‘You can’t punish yourself for ever, Nikos. You were a young boy. How were you to know the truth? Besides, your grandmother wants her back in the family.’

  ‘You and my grandmother are conspiring against me, I see.’ A hint of amusement lingered in his voice.

  Serena laughed. ‘Would I do such a thing?’

  ‘Yes, you would.’

  He made a show of annoyance, but Serena was too excited about the arrival of her family for the christening—including her parents, who were, amazingly, travelling together—to let anything spoil it.

  �
��Okay, you get your way. She didn’t see our wedding or the blessing, so I will ask her to come to the christening.’

  ‘You could both fly back from Athens together after your meeting tomorrow.’ She dropped the suggestion lightly as she took a sip of her iced water, pretending not to notice the suspicion narrowing his eyes.

  ‘We could...yes.’

  Nikos looked reproachfully at his wife, but she just laughed, and he fought the urge to silence her with a kiss. He thought of the long, painful talks he’d had with his mother, which had revealed that whilst she hadn’t wanted to remain married to his father she’d never wanted to leave her son. At first he hadn’t been able to understand why she hadn’t tried to mend the marriage, but then all the sorry truth had come out and bit by bit he had learned to forgive her.

  Now he just needed to let go of the past once and for all. He was married to a woman he adored, and loved with all his heart, and he had the most beautiful son. He had everything he’d thought impossible.

  ‘It would make us complete—the family, I mean,’ she said wistfully. ‘Grandparents on each side for Yannis, and even a wonderful great-grandmother.’

  ‘I love you, Serena.’ He kissed her passionately as she looked up at him. ‘And if it makes you happy I will insist she comes.’

  ‘Being with the man I love makes me happy.’

  He held her against him, his life complete, and knew he wouldn’t change a thing.

  * * * * *

  Keep reading for an excerpt from THE GREEK COMMANDS HIS MISTRESS by Lynne Graham.

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  The Greek Commands His Mistress

  by Lynne Graham

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘IT’S OVER, REBA,’ Bastien Zikos pronounced with finality.

  The stunning blonde he was addressing flashed him a pained look of reproach. ‘But we’ve been great together.’

  ‘I’ve never pretended that this is anything more than it is...sex,’ Bastien traded impatiently. ‘Now we’re done.’

  Reba blinked rapidly, as though she was fighting back tears, but Bastien wasn’t fooled. The only thing that would reduce Reba to tears would be a stingy pay-off. She was as hard as nails...and he was no more yielding. Indeed, when it came to women he was tough and cold. His mother, an eighteen-carat-gold-digging promiscuous shrew, with a polished line in fake tears and emotion, had been the first to teach her son distrust and contempt for her sex.

  ‘You got bored with me, didn’t you?’ Reba condemned. ‘I was warned that you had a short attention span. I should’ve listened.’

  Impatience shivered through Bastien’s very tall, muscular frame. Reba had been his mistress, and terrific entertainment in the bedroom, but it ended now. And he had given her a small fortune in jewellery. He took nothing for free from women—not sex, not anything.

  Bastien turned on his heel. ‘My accountant will be in touch,’ he said drily.

  ‘There’s someone else, isn’t there?’ the blonde snapped.

  ‘If there is, it’s none of your business,’ Bastien told her icily, his dark eyes chilling in their detachment as he glanced back at her, his lean, extravagantly handsome features hard as iron.

  His driver was waiting outside the building to ferry him to the airport for his scheduled flight north.

  A very faint shadow of a smile softened the tough line of Bastien’s mouth as he boarded his private jet. Someone else? Maybe...maybe not.

  His finance director, Richard James, was already seated in the opulent cabin. ‘Am I allowed to ask what secret allure—evidently known only to you—exists in this dull northern town we’re heading to, and about the even more dull failed business enterprise you have recently acquired?’

  ‘You can ask. I don’t promise to answer,’ Bastien traded, flicking lazily through the latest stock figures on his laptop.

  ‘Then there is something special at Moore Components that I haven’t yet picked up on?’ the stocky blond man prompted ruefully. ‘A patent? A new invention?’

  Bastien dealt the other man a wryly amused glance. ‘The factory is built on land worth millions,’ he pointed out drily. ‘A prime site for development close to the town centre.’

  ‘It’s been years since you played asset-stripper,’ Richard remarked in surprise, while Bastien’s personal staff and his security team boarded at the rear of the cabin.

  Bastien had started out buying and selling businesses and breaking them up to attain the maximum possible profit. He had no conscience about such things. Profit and loss was a fact of life in the business world. Trends came and went, as did contracts. Fortunes rose and fell as companies expanded and then contracted again.

  Bastien was exceptionally gifted when it came to spotting trends and making millions. He had a mind like a steel trap and the fierce, aggressive drive of a male who had not had a wealthy family to give him his breaks. He was a self-made billionaire, who had started out with nothing, and he took great pride in his independence.

  But just at that moment Bastien wasn’t thinking about business. No, indeed. Bastien was thinking about Delilah Moore—the only woman who had ever rejected him, leaving him tormented by lust and outraged by the frustrating new experience. His ego would have withstood the rebuff had she been genuinely uninterested in him, but Bastien knew that had not been the case. He had seen the longing in her eyes, the telling tension of her body when she was close to him, had recognised the breathy intimate note in her voice.

  He could forgive much, but unquestionably not her deceitful insistence that she didn’t want him. Fearlessly and foolishly judgemental, she had flung Bastien’s womanising reputation in his face with as much disdain as a fine lady dismissing the clumsy approaches of a street thug. In reaction, Bastien’s rage had burned, and now, almost two years on, it was still smouldering at the lack of respect she had demonstrated—not to mention her lies and her sheer nerve in daring to attack him.

  And now fortune had turned the tables on Delilah Moore and her family. Bastien savoured the fact with dark satisfaction. He didn’t believe she would be hurling defiance at him this time around...

  * * *

  ‘How is he?’ Lilah asked her stepmother in an undertone when she spotted her father, Robert, standing outside in the backyard of her small terraced house.

  ‘Much the same...’ Vickie, a small curvaceous blonde in her early thirties, groaned at the sink, where she was doing the dishes with a whinging toddler clinging to one leg. ‘Of course he’s depressed. He worked all his life to build up the firm and now it’s gone. He feels like a failure, and being unable to get a job hasn’t helped.’

  ‘Hopefully something will come up soon,’ Lilah pronounced with determined cheer as she scooped up her two-year-old half-sister Clara and settled her down with a toy to occupy her.

  When life was challenging, Lilah was convinced that it was best to look for even the smallest reason to be glad and celebrate it. Just then she was busy reminding herself that, while her father had lost his business and his home, their family was still intact and they all had their health.

  At the same time Lilah was marvelling at the reality th
at she had grown so close to the stepmother she had once loathed on sight. She had assumed that Vickie was another one of the good-time girls her father had once specialised in, and only slowly had she come to recognise that, regardless of their twenty-year age gap, the couple were genuinely in love.

  Her father and Vickie had married four years earlier and Lilah now had two half-siblings she adored: three-year-old Ben and little Clara.

  Currently Lilah’s family were sharing her own rented home. With only two small bedrooms, a cramped living room and an even tinier kitchen, it was a very tight squeeze. But until the council came up with alternative accommodation for her father and his family, or her father found a paying job, they didn’t have much choice.

  The impressive five-bedroom home that her father and his wife had once owned was gone now, along with the business. Everything had had to be sold to settle the loans her father had taken out in a desperate effort to keep Moore Components afloat.

  ‘I’m still hoping that Bastien Zikos will throw your dad a lifeline,’ Vickie confided in a sudden burst of optimism. ‘I mean, nobody knows that business better than Robert, and surely there’s a space somewhere in the office or the factory where your father could still make himself useful?’

  Lilah resisted the urge to remark that Bastien was more likely to tie a concrete block to her father’s leg and sink him. After all, the Greek billionaire had offered to buy Moore Components two years earlier and his offer had been refused. Her father should’ve sold up and got out then, she thought regretfully. But the business had been doing well and, although tempted by the offer, the older man had ultimately decided that he couldn’t face stepping down.

  It was no consolation to Lilah that Bastien himself had forecast disaster once he’d realised that the firm’s prosperity depended on the retention of one very important contract. Within weeks of losing that contract Moore Components had been struggling to survive.

  ‘I’d better get to work,’ Lilah remarked in a brittle voice, bending down to pet the miniature dachshund pushing affectionately against her legs in the hope of getting some attention.