CHAPTER FIVE
“COME ON, STAV. IT’S Christmas.” Kristos, his younger brother, was unrelenting.
“Oh, is it? I had not realized,” he murmured, thinking of the enormous tree downstairs and the carols Claudia had been singing as she’d decorated it. His eyes were focused beyond the window of his study, on the raging river. It was a crisp winter’s day. The grass was frosted over and the sky was bleak grey, and yet she stood at the edge of the water without a coat, her hair long down her back, her shoulders slumped forward.
Something inside of him clenched as though he’d been hit in the gut.
“So come back. We are all anxious to see you. Rhiannon as well.”
She walked a little further along the bank of the river and he had to shift position to see her properly. She was barely dressed for the weather, the coat she’d grabbed from the boot room a lightweight trench.
“Rhiannon is anxious to see me?” Stavros drawled. “Somehow, I doubt that.”
“Is that what this is about? Your pride is hurt by the fact she has moved onto your own brother?”
“My pride isn’t hurt,” Stavros laughed. “My ego isn’t that fragile. I don’t particularly relish the fact she’s going to be my sister-in-law, though.”
“You broke up years ago.”
“Yes,” Stavros rubbed a palm over his chin. “Exactly.”
“So? What’s the problem?”
“I have business here. In England.”
“Business? Everything is closed for the holidays. What business could you possibly have?”
“It’s … personal.” He said quietly, his eyes knitting together as Claudia spun around and looked towards the mansion. He fought an instinct to step away from her view. Her eyes were roaming the walls, but she wasn’t looking for anything in particular. It was more of a contemplative watch. And it allowed him an opportunity to study her face. To read the emotions that flicked across it.
“What do you mean?” Kristos’s question was unheard by Stavros.
She was such a contradiction! An attention-seeking, glamorous heiress who worried herself only with her tan and her hairstyles one minute, and the next?
He frowned.
What?
What had he felt from her on this trip?
Uncertainty. Vulnerability. Anger. Frustration. Impotence.
But why? She had made it clear to him on plenty of occasions that she was happy with her life. More than happy. She just wanted him to stay out of it. She had a huge circle of equally drama-loving friends, who courted the media’s attention as though they needed it for their survival. She’d had a string of high-profile relationships. No, not relationships, he thought.
Lovers.
The word did something strange to him, though he had no right to feel it. He didn’t like the idea of her being with any guy who looked her way. With Lord This and Duke That. Out of nowhere, he imagined taking her to bed and showing her how a real man felt.
He wanted to dominate her. He wanted to own her. He wanted to mark himself on her so that she’d never be with another man without wishing it was him.
“Stav?”
He brought his attention back to the phone conversation unwillingly, something like danger blaring in his mind. He couldn’t act on this temptation. He wouldn’t.
“Nai?” An impatient bark that Kristos didn’t deserve.
“What personal matter are you attending to?”
“It’s my ward,” he said on a heavy sigh.
“Your… the La Roche girl?”
“Yes,” Stavros propped his elbow against the window frame, and through the distance her eyes skidded to the window he was at, pausing there for a moment. Her frown deepened and then she continued her idle inspection of the ancient home.
“You can’t stand her.”
“Yes,” he said, a firm nod confirming his brother’s summation even when something inside Stavros rejected the words.
“Yet you choose her over your family?”
“Christopher would have expected me to do this. I owe it to him.”
Stavros disconnected the call, a grim line equaling the grim sense of concern that ran down his spine.
*
CLAUDIA STARED AT THE water. It moved quickly, angrily, bubbling at the edges of the river. If she squinted she could see some kind of dark brown fish moving just beneath the surface.
She reached down, scooping a stone from the garden and palming it, her eyes reflecting a similar turmoil to that of the water. She lifted her arm and pitched the rock into the water, following its progress through the air and then watching as it disappeared from view altogether.
Her conversation with Stavros, from the day before, sat heavily in her heart and her mind.
She didn’t want to argue with the man about her father. She didn’t want to find herself in a position where she had to own the true feelings that ran deep within her. But the truth was, and she’d had many years to analyse it and make peace with how she felt, her father had failed her.
Apart from financially, of course, but then, how much she would have preferred to still have her father alive than to know herself in possession of such a significant trust fund? To be alive and interested in her life, no matter how disappointing he found it.
So she wasn’t a genius. She wasn’t smart. Not in the bookish way.
What Claudia excelled at was people. She charmed people effortlessly, and the results had led to great things for the charities she supported. She’d raised millions of pounds just by greasing the wheels and bringing people together.
She was a professional networker, and she did it without recognition and without pay. Perhaps if she’d sought more plaudits for the work she did, he would have understood that she wasn’t just attention-seeking. Maybe he would have realized that she was leveraging her exposure to connect people to charities, to raise money for those who needed it most. It was something she did because it was right for people with her kind of social media and celebrity platform to make a difference. How dare Stavros stand in judgement of her fame without attempting to understand it!
And why did it bother her so much that he was so scathing and condescending about her lifestyle choices? Why did she care? Did she want his approval?
Of course she didn’t.
She sat down on the edge of the river, spreading her coat down to keep her bottom dry from the wet grass. It was still cold beneath her but she didn’t care. She looked out at the river and let it swirl her right back into the past.
“You’re very handsome, you know.”
“Are you drunk, Claudia?”
She hiccoughed, and pouted her bright red lips, lifting a hand and tossing her hair aside. “Only a very little.” She smiled and moved closer, breathing in her handsome guardian’s masculine fragrance. Every pulse point in her body went into overdrive and heat slicked between her legs.
“I left you alone for precisely thirty minutes. What the hell happened?”
Claudia’s eyes moved betrayingly to the table, to where an empty bottle of champagne now sat. “Umm, nothing?”
He followed her gaze and swore in his native tongue. “You finished the bottle? Jesus, you are barely the size of a child and you drank all that? You should be in A&E.”
“Perhaps you’ll need to keep an eye on me tonight,” she murmured in what, at the time, she believed to be a husky voice. And it must have conveyed something of her feelings because he’d frozen, and stared at her with a new look in his eyes.
“Oh, I will be.”
She lifted a hand to his chest and walked her fingers downwards, slowly, her eyes latched to his. “You know, I’ve been at an all girls’ boarding school my whole life.”
He arched a brow, his face a mask of disinterest. “I am aware of this fact.”
“It hasn’t left a whole lot of time for… exploring.”
“I’m glad to hear it. School is for your education, though I have to say, I’m not sure your grades reflect the effort you’re implying you gave to your school work.”
Her eyes narrowed and a fleck of something like determination filled out her face. She was beautiful. Far more mature than she looked, with a wisdom that came from grief, perhaps, adding to her charms. “Grades aren’t everything,” she shrugged carelessly. “Tonight, I’m thinking about other things I want to learn.”
He froze, his eyes locked to hers. “Are you trying to flirt with me, Claudia?”
She blinked her lashes, smiling slowly and moving closer. “I think I must be.” She stood on tiptoes and still her lips only reached the base of his throat, so she whispered there. “I’m a virgin. And I don’t want to be.”
He jerked his head downwards, fury in his features and she’d kissed him before he could tell her not to. She’d kissed him with all the clumsy ineptitude of a girl who’d never been kissed before.
And then he ended it, pushing her aside, stepping backwards.
“You’re out of your Goddamned mind. You are a child. And you are my ward! You actually think I’d want to sleep with you? I’m fifteen years older than you are. I date women. My lovers are experienced, mature grown-ups, not spoiled little kids high on their first binge of alcohol. Get your bag. I’m taking you home.”
He’d slept in her spare room, to make sure she was okay, so when she’d woken the next morning it wasn’t just with an unimaginable hangover, it was with the consequences of her behavior staring her straight in the face. He’d yelled at her – in a subdued, restrained way, but his anger had been a palpable force. So too his disappointment.
Claudia had given as good as she’d got, laughing off his criticism as though it didn’t matter, laughing at his prudishness and old-fashioned approach to the world. And when he’d left, she’d cried.
Their relationship, always strained, became even more distant from then onwards. They’d observed the bare minimum interactions as required by his guardianship. A brief catch-up on her birthday, when he’d given her a small gift – gifts she stupidly kept all together, on display in her lounge room, though she couldn’t have said why. He called once or twice a year.
Nothing more.
And that suited her fine.
Claudia was happy in her life. She was happy in a life that had nothing to do with her father or her failings. She didn’t want to be constantly reminded of what a disappointment she would have been to him.
And however much she knew that she would have been a disappointment to Christopher La Roche, hearing that voiced by Stavros cut her deeply. It spread an ache through her gut and filled her with an unimaginable sense of … failure. Of abject failure.
“There you are.” His voice came to her from close by. She stiffened and turned slowly, bracing herself to see him.
But she could never brace herself sufficiently. Not for the reality of Stavros. He strode across the grass, leaving darker footprints in the frost-tipped blades, his jeans pale blue, his pullover black and his coat grey. His hair was thick and tousled and her eyes lifted to it on autopilot, observing the way it spiked as though he’d been dragging his fingers through it. He held something dark in his hands; another coat, she surmised, once he was close enough.
“Were you looking for me?” She asked, turning her attention back to the river. She didn’t have the strength to look at him. The memories of that night were too warm in her mind. The way his body had felt. The way she’d wanted him. The way he’d rejected her.
“That’s why I said, ‘there you are’,” he drawled mockingly.
Claudia rolled her eyes. “Did you come just to belittle me?”
“Belittle you?” He responded, crouching down beside her, his powerful haunches in her peripheral vision, all distracting and tempting.
“Yeah.”
“No, Claudia. I came to tell you I am going into Bath. Would you like to join me?”
“To join you?” Her head whipped around to his. It was a mistake. They were only inches apart, and her eyes dropped to his mouth with confusion, then lifted to meet his. He was watching her, so undoubtedly he saw the way her breath was held and her cheeks flushed pink.
“Nai.” He lifted a hand up caught a thick clump of hair between his finger and thumb. “I like your hair long.”
Alarm bells were bleeting in Claudia’s mind. But she didn’t pull away, out of his touch. No. She closed her eyes and inhaled, a shaky breath of heat and confusion.
It was only a moment in time, and then he dropped his hand, and spoke with his usual crisp authority. “Well?” He stood. “I don’t have all day for you to make up your mind.”
Claudia blinked up at him. The bleak sky behind him backlit his body, so that he looked larger than life and so very dark and sexy.
“Claudia?” She loved the way he said her name. He opted for the Italian pronunciation, so that her name was Cloud-eyah. It was musical.
“Yes,” She stood abruptly and almost backed into him. He stepped away.
“Here, then. You’re barely dressed.” He thrust the coat in her direction and strode off, his legs long as they took his across the grass, towards the car they’d arrived in only days earlier.
Claudia’s frown was one of bemusement. She pushed her arms into the jacket and wished she hadn’t when his fragrance surrounded her. It was his?
Of course it was. She hadn’t brought a jacket with her, and the trench coat had been the only women’s coat she could find in the boots room. A smile spread across her symmetrical face as she decided she’d buy herself a new coat in Bath. Perhaps two. If he thought she was a money-wasting heiress then she might as well prove him right.
“Claudia?” His voice barreled to her from across the grass.
She made a noise and began to move in his wake, not rushing, lest he think she was afraid of him.
Fear was indeed coursing through her veins, but it was fear of how she wanted him. Despite all that had happened, despite the fact she hated him for his heavy-handed treatment of her, despite the fact she loathed him for rejecting her at eighteen and treating her like a pariah ever since, despite the fact he belittled her lifestyle and hadn’t believed her when she’d tried to explain that her image wasn’t the truth of who she was.
Yes, she wanted him.
She wanted him to be her first lover as much as ever, and suddenly, she was very tempted to throw caution to the wind. If he thought her to be someone who hooked up with any man who caught her fancy, why not do exactly that? Her smile broadened to a grin as she reached the car.
“What are you smiling about?” He prompted darkly, his manner thick with disapproval.
“Oh, just thinking about something.”
He pulled his door open and lifted into the driver’s seat at the same time she took the passenger position. “I’m surprised,” he grumbled. “Thinking doesn’t really seem like your forte.”
Claudia sucked in an angry breath. She was mad to want him despite how he treated her. Mad. “Just like kindness doesn’t seem to be yours,” she volleyed back, snapping her seatbelt into place and glaring at him.
He pushed the car into reverse and did a manouever that had them pointing down the drive. “Is that what you want from me?” He asked, as they moved down the drive.
“Everyone should be kind.”
“Well, newsflash, Princess. I am being kind. Getting you the hell out of your life in London, away from the idiots who are using you to further their own tenuous claim to celebrity, this is being kind.”
She shook her head. “How can you speak like that about my friends?”
“Friends,” he snapped sarcastically, shaking his head. “They’re your groupies.”
She sucked in a breath. “That’s not true!”
“You’ve surrounded yourself with people who worship you because you don’t like hearing the truth. Well, guess what? You need to hear the truth. You need to be hit over the head with it.”
“You don’t know anything about me,” she said, so loudly it was almost a shout.
“We have already discussed this! I know everything about you.” He stopped the car at the bottom of the drive, putting it into park before heading out of the gates. “Three nights after your eighteenth birthday, you were all over the papers. Do you remember why?”
Colour ran right to her hairline.
“Yes.” She turned away, facing straight ahead, her teeth gritted mutinously.
“Because you were making a fool of yourself with some equally entitled kid in a paparazzi-den.”
“We were just kissing,” she said stonily.
“His tongue was down your throat and his hands were up your dress.”
She squeezed her eyes shut.
She’d been drunk and she’d been furious. Being scorned by Stavros had left her with a gaping hole where her confidence had once been. She’d wanted to be with someone else to diminish Stavros’s power over her. She’d even gone home with … what was his name? Clive? Clyde? But she’d stayed ten minutes and then called a cab, feeling disgusted by the very idea of sleeping with someone just to get revenge on Stavros.
“So?” She jerked her gaze back to his face. “You didn’t want me. What was the harm in finding someone who did?”
His eyes flashed with barely contained fury. “This is what you think of your worth? You wanted to get rid of your virginity and anyone would do?”
She pulled in a breath and for a brief moment of insanity, she wanted to blurt out the truth. She wanted to tell him how wrong he was about her. She wanted to be honest about how much she’d regretted that whole night with whatever-his-name-was.
But she didn’t have the chance. “I should have slept with you that night.” His words shocked her. “I should have taught you what good sex feels like rather than letting you run off with pre-pubescent children.”
“He was nineteen,” she whispered, the words husky, her mouth as arid as the Sahara.
“And was he good in bed?” Stavros demanded, moving closer. “Did he pleasure you?”
She bit down on her lower lip and his eyes dropped to the gesture and then, with a guttural noise of anger, he reached behind her head and tangled his fingers in her hair, pushing her head forward. He mashed his mouth to hers angrily, his tongue colliding with hers.
“This is how a man kisses a woman he wants,” he held her to his mouth, dominating every single one of her senses. He didn’t touch her, beyond the hand in her hair, but she whimpered as desire slicked her body, churning her gut and making her tremble.
His mouth was her reason for being. He rolled his tongue around hers, and she made another noise of surrender. He didn’t stop. He didn’t want her surrender; he wanted all of her. He dragged his mouth lower, to the soft spot beneath her ear lobe and she cried out as he flicked it with his tongue, and then he brought his mouth back to hers, taking her once more, removing any thoughts she had, making this her only imperative in life.
And then he pulled away abruptly, lifting his head, but leaving his hand in place.
“Was it like that, princess?”
Claudia could only stare. Her eyes latched to his and her heart was rabbiting so loudly in her chest she was sure he must have been able to hear it. As if she could barely believe it had happened, she lifted her fingertips to her mouth, and felt the ghost of his touch.
“Well?” He demanded, throatily, his attention dropping back to her lips so that, for a heart-stopping second, she thought he was going to kiss her again.
Claudia’s senses were shooting all over the place, her mind was in absolute disarray. But she knew enough of hurt pride at this man’s hands to rally and retort fiercely. “It was better.” She pulled out of his grip, shaking his hand free from her hair and staring resolutely ahead.
But his laugh was soft and dismissive, as though he knew she was lying. As though he knew she’d never been kissed or touched like that, never been made to feel even a hint of what Stavros had just done to her. He pressed the button above his visor and the gates swung inwards.
There was silence in the car as he moved them onto the road and turned towards nearby Bath. Claudia crossed her arms over her chest and didn’t dare look at him, but she felt his every single movement. She felt when he changed gear and when he moved the indicator stick to overtake a slow-moving van.