“Can we just say I’m tired of playing games and leave it at that? I want to be close to you because I like you for yourself. So do you want the same thing or have I misread the signs?”

“No, you haven’t,” she admitted. “But you said just this afternoon that I was a complication you didn’t need.”

“Over-analyzing is second nature to me. It’s saved my skin more often than I care to count. But in this case I took it too far.”

“Maybe not,” she said judiciously. “Maybe you simply realized there was no future in a relationship with me.”

“Never counting on the future is another by-product of my job. The only certainty is the here and now.”

He took a step toward her, then another, until he was close enough to inhale the scent of her skin. “What do you say, Emily?” he asked hoarsely. “Will you take a chance with me?”

Catherine Spencer, once an English teacher, fell into writing through eavesdropping on a conversation about Harlequin^® Romances. Within two months she changed careers, and sold her first book to Mills & Boon^® in 1984. She moved to Canada from England thirty years ago and lives in Vancouver. She is married to a Canadian and has four grown children—two daughters and two sons (and now eight grandchildren)—plus two dogs. In her spare time she plays the piano, collects antiques, and grows tropical shrubs.

You can visit Catherine Spencer’s website at www.catherinespencer.com

Recent titles by the same author:

SICILIAN BILLIONAIRE, BOUGHT BRIDE

THE GIANNAKIS BRIDE

THE ITALIAN BILLIONAIRE’S CHRISTMAS MIRACLE

BY

CATHERINE SPENCER

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

EMILY singled him out immediately, not because his father had described him so well that she couldn’t miss him, but because even though he stood well back from everyone else, he dominated the throng waiting to meet passengers newly arrived at Athens’s Venizelos Airport. At more than six feet of lean, toned masculinity blessed with the face of a fallen angel, he could hardly help it. One look at him was enough to tell her he was the kind of man other men envied, and women fought over.

As if on cue, his gaze locked with hers. Locked and lingered a small eternity, long enough for her insides to roll over in fascinated trepidation. Every instinct of self-preservation told her he was bad news; that she’d live to rue the day she met him. Then he nodded, as though he knew exactly the effect he’d had on her, and cutting a swath through the crowd, strode forward.

Given her first unobstructed view, she noted how his jeans emphasized his narrow hips and long legs, the way his black leather bomber jacket rode smoothly over his powerful shoulders, and the startling contrast of his throat rising strong and tanned against the open collar of his white shirt. As he drew closer, she saw, too, that his mouth and his jaw, the latter firm and faintly dusted with new beard shadow, betrayed the stubbornness his father had spoken of.

When he reached them, he asked in a voice as sinfully seductive as the rest of him, “So you beat the odds and made it back in one piece. How was the flight?”

“Long,” Pavlos replied, sounding every bit as worn and weary as he surely must feel. Not even painkillers and the luxury of first-class air travel had been enough to cushion his discomfort. “Very long. But as you can see, I have my guardian angel at my side.” He reached over his shoulder, groped for her hand and squeezed it affectionately. “Emily, my dear, I am pleased to introduce my son, Nikolaos. And this, Niko, is my nurse, Emily Tyler. What I would have done without her, I cannot imagine.”

Again, Nikolaos Leonidas’s gaze lingered, touring the length of her in insolent appraisal. Behind his chiseled good looks lurked a certain arrogance. He was not a man to be crossed, she thought. “Yiasu, Emily Tyler,” he said.

Even though her sweater and slacks pretty much covered all of her, she felt naked under that sweeping regard. His eyes were the problem, she thought dizzily. Not brown like his father’s, as she’d expected, but a deep green reminiscent of fine jade, they added an arresting final touch to a face already possessed of more than its rightful share of dark beauty.

Swallowing, she managed an answering, “Yiasu.”

“You speak a little Greek?”

“A very little,” she said. “I just exhausted my entire vocabulary.”

“That’s what I thought.”

The comment might have stung if he hadn’t tempered it with a smile that assaulted her with such charm, it was all she could do not to buckle at the knees. For heaven’s sake, what was the matter with her? She was twenty-seven, and if not exactly the most sexually experienced woman in the world, hardly in the first flush of innocent youth, either. She knew well enough that appearances counted for little. It was the person inside that mattered, and from everything she’d been told, Niko Leonidas fell sadly short in that respect.

His manner as he turned his attention again to Pavlos did nothing to persuade her otherwise. He made no effort to embrace his father, to reassure him with a touch to the shoulder or hand that the old man could count on his son for whatever support he might need during his convalescence. Instead he commandeered a porter to take care of the loaded luggage cart one of the flight attendants had brought, and with a terse, “Well, since we seem to have exhausted the formalities, let’s get out of here,” marched toward the exit, leaving Emily to follow with Pavlos.

Only when they arrived at the waiting Mercedes did he betray a hint of compassion. “Don’t,” he ordered, when she went to help her patient out of the wheelchair and with surprising tenderness, scooped his father into his arms, laid him carefully on the car’s roomy back seat and draped a blanket over his legs. “You didn’t have to do that,” Pavlos snapped, trying unsuccessfully to mask a grimace of pain.

Noticing, Niko said, “Apparently I did. Or would you have preferred I stand idly by and watch you fall on your face?”

“I would prefer to be standing on my own two feet without needing assistance of any kind.”

“Then you should have taken better care of yourself when you were away—or else had the good sense to stay home in the first place, instead of deciding you had to see Alaska before you die.”

Emily was tempted to kick the man, hard, but made do with a glare. “Accidents happen, Mr. Leonidas.”

“Especially to globe-trotting eighty-six-year-old men.”

“It was hardly his fault that the cruise ship ran aground, nor was he the only passenger on board who was injured. All things considered, and given his age, your father’s done amazingly well. In time, and with adequate follow-up physical therapy, he should make a reasonably good recovery.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then I guess you’re going to have to step up to the plate and start acting like a proper son.”

He favored her with a slow blink made all the more disturbing by the sweep of his lashes, which were indecently long and silky. “Nurse and family counselor all rolled into one,” he drawled. “How lucky is that?”

“Well, you did ask.”

“And you told me.” He tipped the porter, left him to return the airport’s borrowed wheelchair, then slammed closed the car trunk and opened the front passenger door with a flourish. “Climb in. We can continue this conversation later.”

As she might have expected, he drove with flair and expertise. Within half an hour of leaving the airport, they were cruising the leafy green streets of Vouliagmeni, the exclusive Athens suburb overlooking the Saronic Gulf on the east coast of the Attic Peninsula, which Pavlos had described to her so vividly. Soon after, at the end of a quiet road running parallel to the beach, Niko steered the car through a pair of ornate wrought-iron gates, which opened at the touch of a remote control button on the dash.