The Wealthy Greek's Contract Wife Read Free Page B

low-slung jeans that rode his hips, and strode towards her.
    ‘Manos land can never belong to anyone other than a Manos.’
    He was savagely angry. The hardness of the gaze from golden eagle eyes fringed with thick dark lashes speared her like a piece of helpless prey.
    Lizzie stepped back from him in panic, and lost her footing as she stumbled on a rough tussock of grass.
    As she started to fall the man reached for her, hard fingers biting into her jacket-clad arms as she was hauled upright and kept there by his hold on her. The golden gaze raked her with a predatory male boldness that infuriated her. He was looking at her as though…as though he was indeed a mythical Greek god, with the right and the power to take and use vulnerable female mortal flesh for his own pleasure as and when he wished. Sex with a man like this would be dangerous for the woman who was drawn to risk herself in his hostile embrace. Would he take without giving, or would he subjugate a woman foolish enough to think she could make him want her by overpowering her with his sensuality and leaving her a prisoner to it whilst he remained unmoved? That mouth, with its full bottom lip, suggested that he possessed a cruel sensuality that matched his manner towards her.
    Lizzie shivered, shocked by the inappropriateness and the unfamiliar sensuality of her own thoughts. She tried to concentrate on something practical.
    Somehow as he’d moved he’d also found time to push back the protective hard hat he was wearing, so that now she could see the thick darkness of his hair. She was five foot six. He was much taller—well over six foot—and of course far more powerful that her. Lizzie could see that the effort of holding her had hardly raised the biceps in his powerful arms, but that didn’t stop her from trying break free of him.
    He stopped her with contemptuous ease, pulling her closer to him. He smelled of earth, and hard work, and ofbeing a man. From somewhere deep down, in the place where she kept her most special memories, she had a sudden mental image of being held in her father’s arms in the garden at her parents’ lovely house in Cheshire, laughing in delight as she looked down from that height to where her mother was kneeling beside her two younger sisters. Those had been such wonderful years—years when she had felt safe and secure and loved.
    But this man was not her father. With this man there would be no safety, no security, and certainly no love.
    Love? She was so close to the dirt-streaked tee shirt that she could see the dark shadow of his body hair through it. She could almost feel the force of his hostility towards her. And she felt equally hostile to him. That was why her heart was banging into her chest wall and why her senses were recoiling from the intense awareness of him that his proximity was forcing on her.
    What kind of awareness? Awareness of him as a man? Awareness of his maleness? Awareness of his sexuality? Awareness that within her something long denied, something starved of the right to express itself, was pushing against the barriers she had erected against it. Because of this man?
    No, of course not. That was impossible. Her heart was thudding even more frantically, pumping adrenalin-fuelled denial through her veins. Why was she reacting to him like this? She had no interest in his sexuality. She must not have any interest in his sexuality. She must not want to stay here in his arms.
    The panic caused by her own feelings had Lizzie demanding fiercely, ‘Let go of me.’
    Ilios wasn’t used to women demanding to be set free when he was holding them—quite the opposite. Normallywomen—especially women like he knew this one to be: selfish, shallow, self-seeking women who cared nothing for others—were all too keen to inveigle themselves into situations of intimacy with him. Which was, of course, why he felt so reluctant to release her.
    When she pulled back against him the movement of her body released the scent