The Virgin's Secret Read Free Page A

I’m also half-Irish. I spent a lot of time in boarding school there…so my accent is more neutral.’ She clamped her mouth shut. What was she blathering on about?
    The man frowned a little deeper, his glance up and down taking in her uniform. ‘And yet you’re waitressing here?’
    The incredulity in his tone made Angel’s sanity rush back. Only girls from privileged backgrounds in Greece went abroad for schooling. Immediately she felt vulnerable. She was meant to be fading into the background, not engaging in conversation with the guests of the hosts.
    She backed away, looking somewhere in the region of his shoulder. ‘Please excuse me. I have to get back to work.’
    She was about to turn when she heard him drawl laconically, ‘You might want to dry off before you start handing out champagne.’
    Angel followed his gaze down to where it rested on her chest. On her breasts. She gasped when she saw that she was indeed drenched, her shirt opaque and her plain white bra clearly visible, along with two very pointedly hard nipples. How long had she been plastered against him like some mindless groupie?
    With a strangled gasp of mortification Angel scrambled backwards, nearly tripping over a chair again and only justrighting it and herself before there could be a repeat rescue performance. All she heard as she fled back up the steps was a mocking, deep-throated chuckle.
    Â 
    A little later, Leonidas Parnassus looked around the thronged salon and tried to stifle his irritation when he couldn’t see the waitress. It had made him uncomfortable, how urgent his need to see her again had been as soon as he’d walked into the main reception room. It had also made him uncomfortable how vividly her image had come back to him in his recent shower, forcing him to turn the temperature to cold.
    And now her image surged back again, mocking his attempts to thrust it aside. He recalled how she’d looked, with a dark flush on her cheeks, those intensely light blue eyes wide and ringed with thick black lashes, staring at him like a startled fawn. As if she’d never seen a man before.
    She had a tiny beauty spot just on the edge of a full lower lip, and he grimaced when he felt the effect remembering that had on his lower body. He hated having such an arbitrary response. But when he’d seen her arrive by the pool and do her work, with quick, economic movements, her glossy light brown hair pulled into a high topknot, something about her had stirred him. Something about her intense preoccupation, for patently she hadn’t noticed him in the pool. And Leo was not a man who was used to going unnoticed.
    When he’d caught her against him in that completely instinctive move tendrils of her hair had come free and framed her face and the defined line of her jaw, making him want to slip his hand into the glossy strands and cause it to fall down around her shoulders. He could almost feel it over his hands now, the heavy silky weight.
    Irritation spiked again. Where was she? Had she been afigment of his imagination? His father approached then, with a colleague, and Leo forced a benign smile to his mouth, hating the fact that he was in thrall to a nameless waitress.
    Distracting him momentarily was the reality he now faced of just how frail his father had become, even since he’d seen him last. As if something within him had shifted subtly but profoundly. He felt a deep-seated sense of inevitability steal over him, he was needed here, his own empire notwithstanding. But was his place really here? He tried out the word now: home . His heart beat fast.
    He thought of his sterile, yet state-of-the-art penthouse apartment in New York; the steel and silver skyscrapers of the world he inhabited. He thought of his impeccably groomed and very experienced blonde mistress; he thought of what it might be like to walk away from all of that—and he felt…nothing.
    Athens, being here for the