Page 14 of Greek's Temporary Cinderella

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?

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.

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