Page 25 of Greek's Temporary "I Do"

The first kiss had been a shock—an assault to her senses. She had fantasised so much and for so long that she couldn’t believe it was happening.

But it was the second kiss—the one that hadn’t been Leander kissing his wife, but Leo kissing her—that shifted the sands beneath her feet. It was a drugging kiss, lowering her defences and igniting her desires. His tongue stroked her into submission, filling her in a way that only partially satiated her desires, whilst igniting more. She felt how much he wanted her. Straddling his thighs, the hard ridge of his arousal pressed heavy and hot against her core and it wasn’t nearly enough. From this position she was above him, Leo reaching for her, pulling her down onto him, and it made her feel invincible—wanted and needed in a way she’d never experienced before.

When he finally pulled back, desire blazing in his eyes like a forest fire, one that matched her own, flame for flame, it was she that wanted to go back for more.

Until she heard Mina saying, ‘Get a room.’

Shock snapped her back into the present, back into the VIP room, where a few other guests had seen them and broken into gentle giggles and one wolf whistle.

‘Careful, Mina,’ Leo warned his ex-fiancée over Helena’s shoulder, desire morphing into disdain. ‘Your jealousy is showing.’

‘Me?’ Mina practically screeched. ‘Jealous of her? You’re kidding, right? She was never anything more than a puppy that followed you and your brother around, picking up whatever scraps of attention you dropped on the floor.’

And just like that, Helena was back outside Leo’s bedroom, listening to the conversation that had broken her teenage heart. Hurt bloomed beneath the truth of Mina’s words. She had followed them around, desperate for whatever attention the Liassidis twins would give her.

‘Mina,’ Leo warned, the tone of his voice enough to raise the hair on the back of Helena’s neck.

But it was too late. Helena’s memories crashed around her in a red haze, the desire filling her chest replaced with a thick, painful ache. That last Christmas she had spent on the Liassidis island with her parents before everything changed. Before Leo started to treat her like a stranger, before he and Leander began to argue in earnest. Before her father had passed away and her mother had ruined everything.

All of it followed on from that one overheard conversation that had fed painfully into insecurities already burgeoning within her teenage sense of self.

‘She’s just a child. She’s nothing to me.’

Helena clenched her teeth to stop the tremor of tears from creeping onto her tongue, to keep her mouth from wobbling.

‘Do you have to dress like that?’

‘Do you have to wear that?’

‘Do you have to want so much, Helena?’

‘You should be able to do this on your own. I can’t do everything for you.’

Her mother’s voice mixed with the memory and it became louder than a drumbeat. She slipped from Leo’s lap, cold and shivery from the stark difference in mood and tone, and looked up at the woman currently glaring at her with such undisguised jealousy it actually hurt to look.

It was clear that Leo’s ex-fiancée had her own demons and it wasn’t Helena’s responsibility to carry them. But she wanted Mina to know. To know that she had heard what Mina had said that day. And perhaps a small, devastated part of her wanted Leo to know too.

‘Well,’ Helena said to Mina, finding her strength, ‘I guess someone trained me better in the end. Because even though I’m just the daughter of Giorgos’s business partner, I’m the one wearing a Liassidis ring.’

Mina’s eyes flashed in the dark of the nightclub, clearly realising that Helena had overheard her conversation with Leo. It was a petty shot and she shouldn’t have said it, but Helena was hitting back at all her childhood hurts any way she could.

Beside her, Leo flinched but Helena didn’t pay it heed. ‘It takes a really troubled woman to blame a girl of fifteen years old, Mina. And as for Leo. If I remember rightly, you left him. You chose to walk away from him because it looked like he could lose his company. You walked away because you couldn’t see his worth. It had nothing to do with me.’

‘Nothing to do with you? You and your mother—’

‘Enough,’ Leo said, standing up, cutting off Mina’s words before she could do any more damage. ‘He knew, Mina,’ he announced with cold disdain. ‘Leo knew what kind of woman you were. He might not have realised it at the time, but the moment you left, it was a blessed relief for him.’

His words caused goosebumps to scatter over Helena’s skin, beginning the healing of a part of her she had refused to acknowledge. Leo turned and held his hand out to her and she took it, leaving Mina, open-mouthed with shock, watching them as they left the club.

They stepped into the night, emotions so thick between them they were almost visible, like hot breath on a cold winter’s night. She could all but feel the fury rolling off Leo in waves.

‘Leo?’ she asked uncertainly as he pulled her along practically at a jog out into the night.

‘Not here,’ he growled. ‘I will not talk about this here,’ he went on, his words harsh and final. A car pulled up to take them back to the helipad and Leo was silent all the way back to the villa.

Leo stalked into the villa, wanting to slam doors and punch walls. He hadn’t been like this since those first few years after Leander had walked away from everything they’d planned—from the company that they were supposed to take over from their father together. From the lives they were supposed to lead together.

And somehow all of it had been made worse by the Haddens and it had just become a jumbled mess in his mind that he’d refused to think on. Only now it seemed that the fates were conspiring against him and finally forcing him to face it all.

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