Page 14 of The Billionaire's Demand

I don’t need this, and I don’t want it—I don’t, I don’t, I don’t!

She had enough to cope with—oh, so much more than enough.

She stretched up, replenishing the packets of pasta and rice. The tangled mess of her thoughts and emotions was writhing now, like a nest of snakes, and Leandros’s voice was in her head, over and over and over again.

‘I want you to come back to me.’

She closed her eyes in anguish. She must not listen to those words—must not heed their power...their tainted temptation to claim again in any way, on any terms, what she once had had.

Leandros desiring her...

As she still desired him...had always done...would always do...

The knowledge was impossible to deny.

In her mind’s vivid eye she saw him again as he had been at that fateful party to celebrate Chloe’s engagement—and then as he had been only a handful of days ago, striding back into her life. Saw that he still possessed exactly what he had always possessed—the ability to kindle in her that flame of desire.

But I forfeited my right to desire him.

Her eyes shadowed. She had no right to him...to anything of him. Not any more...

Yet memory played again in her head of how they’d walked along the seafront, how she had denied him, all the while trembling in his arms at his kisses.

Guilt smote her again—always, always guilt. Guilt at having betrayed his love for her and denied him his desire for her. The desire he had told her he now wanted to slake...

The tangled, tormenting knot of thoughts and feelings in her head writhed again. How could she be free of her endless guilt? Free of Leandros—finally free? Free of what she had once felt for him? Free of the desire that now could only be tainted by what she’d done to him?

Slowly, fatefully, the words shaped themselves in her head.

If I went to him now, as he asks of me—if I did I could finally move on...put behind me what I did, what I destroyed.

Her guilt would go—the guilt she had felt ever since she had returned his ring, accepted Damian’s in its place.

I could be free of it—free of that guilt. Because I would be offering him now what I never offered him then, what is all that he wants of me. And that would free him, too, wouldn’t it? He can be purged of me. He can hate me still, but I can make amends—and in doing so free myself.

If she simply went to Paris with Leandros...

All through her shift the thought stayed with her.

All the while she walked back to her studio that evening.

Stayed with her as she sat down on her narrow bed with its lumpy mattress, reached inside her handbag. Took out the business card in the zip pocket. Stared down at it.

She got out her cheap phone and numbly, without thinking about it, without letting herself think about it, she started to tap in the number from the stiff white card.

Sent a text to Leandros.

Scarcely believing that she was doing so.

And yet she was.

Leandros sat in one of the several business lounges at Thessaloniki airport, where he’d just arrived off the shuttle from Athens, drumming his fingers on his briefcase. His flight to Paris was about to be called—and there was no sign of Eliana.

Yet she had agreed to be here. He hadn’t spoken to her—she wouldn’t take his calls—but she had texted, and it had been by text that he’d told her when to arrive.

So, where was she?

Was she going to show up or not?

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