Page 30 of Greek's Temporary Cinderella

CHAPTER EIGHT

LEANDROS TOOK A slow mouthful of the cognac he’d poured for himself and taken into his bedroom. On their return to their suite, Eliana had made a point of murmuring goodnight to him and disappearing into her own room. Leandros had watched her go, wondering whether to stay her. His mood was strange—but then so was hers.

She seemed...different. He wasn’t sure how, only that she was. Since the curtain had fallen at the opera she had been different. Over dinner—different. In the car on the way back to the hotel—different. But he didn’t know how, or why.

What he did know, as he took another mouthful of the fiery liquid, was that all evening it had become increasingly impossible to take his eyes from her. Even now he could feel heat beating up in his body, filling him with a restlessness that he knew could be assuaged in only one way.

Should he respond to it? Go to her room? Fulfil the reason he had brought her here to Paris with him? Why should he not? She’d agreed to it, gone along with it, so why should he feel this reluctance now?

He swirled the cognac slowly in its glass. His body was telling him—increasingly so—that now was the hour. Her beauty, so breathtakingly displayed in that ice-blue evening gown, had been inflaming him all evening. Yet his own scathing words to her the previous night, spoken right here in this room, saying that he wanted no sacrificial martyr in his bed, that he wanted her as eager for him as he was for her, were sounding in his mind.

But there was no sign of that. Not tonight. His mouth twisted a moment. Maybe he should stop jibing at her, cutting at her to relieve his own bitterness, indulging in his accusations of her. He’d made an effort over dinner, keeping conversation civil, even though sometimes it had been an effort. His mouth twisted again. Not for that reason, but because his eyes had kept going to her, distracting his attention.

He had known his blood was quickening... And it was doing so again now. Tormentingly so.

He knocked back the rest of his cognac, knowing he was doing a disservice to its XXO status.

Maybe he should consider a shower—that might take his mind off where it wanted to go.

He set the empty cognac glass down on the antique mahogany chest of drawers with a click, reaching up to rid himself of his bow tie, loosen his collar.

Restlessness was possessing him again.

And he knew why.

Carefully, Eliana cleansed her face of make-up, taking trouble to do so, making full use of the generously supplied toiletries in her en suite bathroom, then she washed her face with scented soap, patting it dry gently with a soft towel.

She gazed at her reflection, eyes wide and clear.

I told myself I came to Paris because I owed it to Leandros—because I saw it as a way of finally getting closure for myself.

But she knew that now for the self-deception it had always been. She knew the truth now—had seen it, felt it, faced it as Puccini’s heartbreaking music had soared all around her, revealing to her the truth she had been hiding from, denying.

Her hands lifted to her head, removing the pins one by one from her hair, so that it started to fall in luxuriant tresses to her shoulders. She shook it out, cascading down her back in soft, silken folds that framed her face, then reached to the bodice of her gown from which she now removed the two safety pins. Immediately, the drapery dipped across her breasts, exposing her cleavage, the soft swell of her breasts.

She gazed once more at her reflection.

Glorying now in her own beauty.

Beauty that had one purpose only.

She felt a quickening of her pulse, felt a quiver go through her...a shimmering awareness of her own body. With shallow breathing, she turned away, walking out of the en suite bathroom, back into her bedroom. She felt the silken folds of the beautiful gown she was wearing brush her thighs as she crossed to the door, opened it and stepped beyond.

A replay of what she had done last night.

But now, this night...

Oh, it was so different.

As different as dark from light.

As denial from acceptance.

Lie from truth.

Softly, slowly, she opened the door to Leandros’s bedroom and stepped inside.

Leandros turned. He was unknotting his tie, his dinner jacket already discarded, draped around the back of a chair, cuff-links slipped off and placed on the tallboy.

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