Page 15 of The Billionaire's Demand

He could feel tension whipping across his shoulders. His expression was set, his gaze fixed on the entrance to the lounge. He was oblivious to the fact that he was being eyed up both by the hostess in charge of refreshments and by a female passenger across the lounge, trying to catch his eye. Oblivious to everything except his impatience to see Eliana walk through that damn door...

The flight announcement started, and his tension cranked up even more. OK, so they would want to board the business class passengers first, but there was no immediate urgency. All the same...

She was burning in his head.

And there was only one way to extinguish that flame, that fire.

His gaze darkened. He hated it that it should be so... Despising himself for his weakness... Resenting her for her power to make him so weak.

I should not want her. I should not want to have her with me, to take her to Paris, to claim what she denied me—denied me before she betrayed me, my faithless fiancée...

But it did not matter that he could hear his own thoughts jeering at him—it made no difference. Nothing had made any difference—not since seeing her again in Athens, and then, last week, succumbing to the temptation, to the fire in his head that she had kindled, to confront her here in Thessaloniki. To put to her his contemptuous offer, knowing she would accept it—because how else was she going to get herself out of the gutter she’d fallen into by failing to give Jonas Makris the grandson he’d craved?

So... His darkening thoughts circled back to the present. Where the hell was she?

One of the airline staff was approaching him, a smile on her face and a clipboard in her hand, inviting him to board.

‘I’m waiting for someone,’ he said curtly, and she nodded smilingly and moved on to another passenger—but not without a lingering glance back at him, to which he was as oblivious as he was any other female’s attention.

There was only one female he wanted to pay him attention—to turn up.

And she was there—there in the entrance to the lounge.

He felt emotions stab through him—a mix of them. Anger that she’d run so late, relief that she’d arrived at all, and something even more potent...more stabbing. Something that made his gaze focus on her like a laser beam, taking in the entirety of her in an instant, imprinting it on his retinas.

She was looking fraught—that was the only word for it. Strain in her face, in her eyes, as she hesitantly showed her boarding pass to the attendant at the door, gripping her bag—a shoulder bag that seemed, he thought, to be doubling as a carry-on, bulky and bulging.

He’d told her not to pack, that he’d be supplying her wardrobe, but presumably there were first-night necessities she would need before he took her shopping in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré tomorrow.

He pushed the thought of ‘first-night’ from him...got to his feet, strode across to her.

‘You’ve cut it fine,’ he said. His voice was still curt, and it came out like an admonishment.

She flushed. ‘The bus took longer than I thought it would,’ she said.

He frowned. ‘I told you to take a taxi—that I’d reimburse you the fare.’

She didn’t answer, only paid attention to the airline staffer who was hovering, keen for them to board.

Leandros nodded, taking Eliana’s elbow. He felt her freeze, and for some reason it annoyed him. But she went with him all the same, disengaging as they left the lounge to make their way towards their gate.

Leandros glanced at her as they walked. She was looking neat, but that was about the only compliment he could pay her. He frowned inwardly. It was...strange... That was the only word he could come up with. To see her dressed so cheaply. Almost as strange—and that was definitely not the only word—as seeing her reduced to living in that squalid rental apartment.

He quickened his pace slightly, unconsciously. Well, that poverty-stricken, squalid existence she’d been forced into was about to change. From now on her luck was looking up—courtesy of himself. Courtesy of the fire burning in his head that only she could extinguish.

When he had got what he wanted from her—then, and only then—he could be free of that burning fire, so disastrously rekindled. He wished to God it wasn’t so—wished to God he’d never set eyes on her again. Wished to God that she’d never been widowed, simply so that their paths would never have crossed again and she would have remained out of his reach for ever by her marriage, instead of only six long years.

But now...

Now she was boarding a plane with him, and they were heading to Paris. To have the ‘honeymoon’ she had denied him. And after that, and only after that, he would, if there was any justice in this world, finally be free of her.

Finally.

‘Champagne, madam?’

The steward was proffering a tray with two glasses of gently foaming flutes on it, together with little bowls of salted almonds.

Eliana shook her head, but Leandros simply reached out and took the two flutes with a swift ‘thank you’, placing them on the table set between their spacious seats. The steward placed the nuts down as well, and then disappeared.

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