HERankle hurt.
Sam moaned, then bit her lip against a whisper of pain.
It really, really hurt, though maybe not as bad as when she was seven and Billy Riley said she was a girl and girls didn’t have the guts to swing out on the rope over the Nautuck River, and she’d said he was too dumb to know anything about girls—except that her hands slipped and she’d ended up coming down in the shallows, coming down hard. And when Dr. Carter asked how she’d managed to break her leg, she said it was all Billy Riley’s fault and that she was gonna beat him up as soon as the cast came off.
Then the doctor gave her some medicine and she’d floated away. Just closed her eyes and floated.
“Sam? Can you hear me, sweetheart?”
“Mmm.” That was nice. Dr. Carter had his arm around her. It felt good.
“Sam?”
“Uh-huh.” She sighed. “I’m floating,” she said happily.
“Yes, kitten. I know. Does your ankle still hurt?”
Sam gave a giant yawn. “Uh-huh.”
“The ice will help bring down the swelling. I’m sorry I can’t give you anything more for the pain. You’ve had a reaction to the codeine…Sam?”
Ice. Ice on her ankle. Heat everyplace else. She was warm. Nice and warm and…
“Snugly.”
“Good. That’s my girl. Just lie back against my shoulder.”
Nice shoulder. Hard and comforting. Sam frowned. How come Dr. Carter smelled so good? He always smelled of mothballs and something her mom called Old Spice…
“Sam?”
She didn’t remember Dr. Carter’s voice being like that, either. So low. Husky. Sort of—sort of sexy.
“Can you open your eyes?”
Why would she want to do that? She felt fine. Snugly. “Issit still night?”
“Yes, sweetheart. It is.”
She sighed, burrowed against the doctor and fell asleep to the feel of his stubbled cheek brushing gently against hers.
* * *
She slept, drifted, awoke again. A voice murmured in her ear.
“Sam? Are you awake?”
“Mmm.”
“Does your ankle hurt?”
Did it? No. She shook her head, burrowed closer. “Thirsty,” she whispered.
“Sit up, then. Just a little. Fine. Good. Now, take little sips.”
She drank. The water was cool. Wonderful, going down her throat. Darkness had given way to the gray light of early morning but she didn’t want to get up. Not yet.
“Doan wanna wake up yet,” she sighed.
“No. You go on sleeping, gataki. Here, lie—Sam? What are you doing?”
But he knew what she was doing, turning in his arms so that they lay a breath apart, putting her arms around his neck, giving him the faintest, sweetest of smiles.
“Demetrios?”
He nodded, afraid to speak.
“Demetrios,” she whispered, “you’re not Dr. Carter.”
He wanted to laugh but he didn’t trust himself. “Who, sweetheart?”
“Dr. Carter. Mothballs. Liver spots. Ol’ Spice.”
“No,” he said solemnly, “that isn’t me.”
“I know.” She touched his face, let her hand linger against his cheek. “I’m glad.”
Demetrios took her hand from his face, kissed the palm and curled her fingers over the kiss. He wasn’t Dr. Carter, whoever that was. Neither was he a saint. Perhaps the best thing would be to go back to the sofa in the dressing room. A decent man would do so. A moral man…
“You’re Demetrios,” she murmured. “And you smell good.”
He groaned. His body was hard as stone. “Sam.” He curled his hand around her wrist, tried to draw back and put a little distance between them. “Sweetheart, now that you feel better, I’m going to—”
Her mouth, her sweet, soft mouth found his. He hesitated, then gave in to what was happening and kissed her.
“Sam.” Once again, he thought of how wrong that sweet nickname had seemed, and of how right it now felt on his lips. It was a soft, lovely name, just like her kiss. It belonged to her just as she belonged to him. As she would belong to him. “Sweetheart? Do you know what you’re doing?”
His question was answered by a gentle snore. Demetrios smiled. His beautiful Sam, his sweetly drunken Sam, had fallen asleep at the worst possible moment—or maybe at the best. Sighing, he gathered her close. Would she remember any of this tomorrow? Would she hate him? Would she want him? And, if she didn’t remember, what was he going to do about it?
She threw her uninjured leg across his.
Demetrios could feel the sweat bead on his forehead. He counted to ten in Greek, in English, in every language he knew. Then, carefully, stealthily, he eased Sam onto her back, brushed his mouth over hers, rose from the bed and tiptoed from the room.
* * *
Sam opened her eyes.
The room was filled with sunlight. She was thirsty, her head ached, and her ankle felt as if someone had used it for an anvil.
Of course. The rain. The curb. The hospital. And then, what? She frowned. Everything after that was a blank. She couldn’t dredge up so much as an image.
Well, maybe a couple. Demetrios, carrying her to his car. Demetrios, carrying her into his house. There was more, something hovering just around the edges of her mind. Something about the night. The night, and this bed. And a warm, hard body pressed against hers.
What kind of crazy dreams had she had? And what was she doing in this room? She sat up against the pillows, ran her fingers through her tangled curls, felt the soft breeze from the partly opened window on her naked skin.
Naked? She never slept naked. She always wore something. A T-shirt. A cotton nightgown, but all she had on now were her panties.
Sam grabbed the duvet, drew it to her throat. Then she pushed it down and looked at her ankle. No cast, just an elastic bandage. Good. It wasn’t broken. Probably just a little sprain, she thought, as she swung her legs to the floor…
“Ah!”
Pain knifed through the joint the second she put weight on her foot. She’d had sprains before. Were they supposed to hurt this much? She thought back to the last time she’d gone sky diving. Some guy had landed wrong. No break, just a bad sprain, but he’d had to stay off his ankle for days.
Yes, but she couldn’t just lie here and wait for somebody to come along and tell her what the prognosis was. Why was she in this room? Why was she half naked? How was she supposed to get around?
Why did she keep thinking about a hard, warm body pressed to hers?
If only she could remember something. Anything. Something beyond the rain. The car. The hospital. Demetrios, carrying her. To his car. To this bedroom. To this bed.
“Kaliméra sas.”
Sam yanked the duvet to her chin again and swung towards the door. “Oh.” She gave a little laugh, told both her heart and her imagination to calm down. “Good morning, Cosimia.”
The housekeeper smiled. They’d reached a kind of language accommodation over the weeks, a brew made up of the few words of Greek Sam knew, the few words of English Cosimia had acquired, and a lot of body language. It probably sounded and looked weird, but it worked.
Cosimia lifted her eyebrows, jerked her head towards the bathroom. “Banyío, yes?”
“I wish the banyío, definitely. But first…” How did you say ‘naked’? “Um, I need something to put on, Cosimia. A robe. Something.”
Cosimia raised her eyebrows. Sam mimed wrapping herself in the duvet.
“Clothes?” she said.
“Ah.” The housekeeper nodded, made motions with her hands. Evidently, her things were being washed.
“In that case, I hate to ask, but could you go to the guest cottage? Bring me a sweat suit? Jeans? Shorts and a T-shirt?” Nothing. Sam sighed in resignation and mimed slipping her arms into a garment and tying it at her waist. “How about a robe?”
“Robe,” Cosimia said, and beamed. She went to the closet and took out a navy blue robe. Sam smiled her thanks as she put it on. There was a pair of white terry-cloth robes in the guest cottage. Was she in a guest suite? Was the robe for the convenience of…
No. Sam froze. Then she lifted the collar and brought it to her nose. This robe belonged to Demetrios. It carried a musky scent mixed with the tang of the sea that she’d come to associate with these islands. It was his smell, and slipping into the robe was like going into his arms.
His arms, holding her through the long night.
“Banyío,” Cosimia said politely, “yes?”
Sam blinked. “Yes, please,” she said, and concentrated on leaning on the housekeeper’s shoulder while she hopped to the bathroom.
Bathing, washing her hair, then drying it took time. Cosimia fussed; Sam asked questions but unless they were about soap and shampoo and toothpaste, she got no answers. Cosimia’s English and her Greek couldn’t seem to cover the night just past. The housekeeper shrugged her shoulders until, finally, Sam gave up.
“Okay,” she said, while Cosimia brushed her hair as she sat on a vanity stool, “never mind. What I need now is a cane. A cane,” she said, looking up. “You know…” She curled her hand over an imaginary handle and tapped the equally imaginary tip of a cane against the tile floor. “A cane, so I can go downstairs.”
“Ah.” Cosimia shook her head. “You stay, please.”
An entire sentence, more or less, but not one Sam wished to hear. “I don’t want to stay here,” she said patiently.
“Mr. Karas—”
“Yes. I know. But Mr. Karas doesn’t make rules for me, Cosimia.”
“He say—”
“Never mind,” Sam said, through her teeth. “House arrest,” she mumbled, as she hobbled back to bed with Cosimia’s help.
“Kahfeh, yes?”
“Yes. If you’re sure I’m permitted coffee. I mean, shouldn’t you check with Mr. Karas?”
Cosimia looked blank. Sam sighed and grasped her hand. “I’m sorry. It’s not your fault you work for a dictator. Yes, please. Coffee would be lovely.”
Coffee turned out to be breakfast. Juice, toast, fruit, eggs, bacon. Sam ignored everything but the toast and the coffee. Cosimia had brought two cups. Did that mean the Great Man himself was going to put in an appearance? Was she supposed to wait for his permission to leave this room?
The hell with that.
Sam lifted the tray from her lap, put it on the nightstand and took a long look around her. Bed, nightstand, chair, dresser. She could make it from one piece of furniture to the other, then to the door, and figure out the rest when she had to deal with it.
She flung back the blanket, stood up and balanced carefully on her good leg. Yes. It would work. She was not helpless. Did Demetrios think she would be? Was he still ticked off because she’d walked out instead of taking his orders? And had he forgotten he’d arranged a meeting for this morning? She remembered that, clearly enough. She remembered everything that had gone on in those last humiliating minutes in the conference room, how he’d barked at her, how he’d—
“What in hell do you think you’re doing?”
Sam let out a thin shriek, swung towards the door, overbalanced, windmilled her arms and toppled backwards. Demetrios cursed, sprang towards her and caught her just before she went down.
“You are an impossible woman,” he said furiously. “And you cannot be trusted.”
“I’m impossible?” Sam shot back. “That’s great, coming from you. I wake up in a strange bed, in a strange room, my ankle trussed up like a—a lamb chop ready for the skillet, with no clothes, no cane, no way to so much as get from the bed to the bathroom on my own, and I’m impossible?” She glared at him. “Please put me down.”
“With pleasure.”
He dropped her onto the bed, put his hands on his hips and eyed her coldly. So much for the sweet, soft woman who’d sighed in his arms last night.
“I regret the accommodations aren’t to your liking, Miss Brewster. It was the best I could do on short notice. Next time, perhaps, you might consider announcing that you intend to sprain your ankle in advance.”
“Oh, that’s really funny.” Sam huffed out a breath, folded her arms and considered the situation. “I suppose,” she said grudgingly, “I should thank you.”
“For what? The fact that you feel like a lamb chop? Please, don’t bother.”
“Look, maybe I went overboard just now. The thing is, I—I was feeling a little sorry for myself. And then you came into the room and scared the dickens out of me.” She sighed, looked up. “And—and—”
“And?” Demetrios demanded, but Sam’s brain had stopped functioning.
She’d never seen him like this, casually dressed in faded jeans and a snug, equally faded black T-shirt. His feet were shoved into a pair of moccasins that looked as if they’d been around for quite a while. His dark hair was damp, his jaw was shadowed with stubble, and not even the glower on his face could change the fact that he was early morning gorgeous.
Or that memories were returning. Demetrios, his hands on her skin. His breath mingling with hers. His arms holding her close…
“And?” he said again.
“And,” she said slowly, “I apologize. I shouldn’t have snapped your head off.”
Nothing changed in the way he was looking at her, not for what seemed forever. Then, gradually, a smile began at the corners of his mouth.
“Apology accepted.” He nodded at the tray on the nightstand. “I thought we could have our coffee together.”
“Don’t you have a meeting this morning?”
“I canceled it. How do you feel?”
“Better. Well, my ankle’s not good enough to walk on, but—”
“No walking. The doctor says you’re to stay off that ankle for a couple of days. It needs time to heal.”
“The thing is…” She hesitated. “The thing is…I don’t seem to be able to remember much about last night.”
Was she imagining things or did two bands of pink suddenly stripe his cheeks? “There isn’t much to remember,” he said briskly. “Is that coffee still hot?”
“I’m sure it is. But—”
He sat down beside her on the bed, his thigh just brushing hers. There were layers between them, her robe and his jeans; there was the silk duvet and its matching top sheet, but she could feel the point of their contact burn like a hot iron. Carefully, she drew her leg away from his.
He poured his coffee, topped off hers, and smiled at her. “Cosimia has made you comfortable?”
“Is this your room?”
“You have a habit of answering a question with a question.”
“Is it?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“Why, what? Why are you here and not in the cottage?” He shrugged, drank some of his coffee. “It seemed unwise to leave you alone in case your ankle troubled you during the night. That turned out to be a good idea, because you had a strong reaction to the medication the doctor gave you.”
“Reaction?” Now her loss of memory was beginning to make sense. “Was it codeine?”
He nodded, gave her a little smile. “It made you drunk.”
“Floaty.”
“Yes. That was what you said. I phoned the doctor when I realized what was happening. He said you’d be fine as soon as you slept it off.”
“I remember now. The nurse gave me some pills…I only took codeine once, when I was a little girl. I took a tumble—”
“—and broke your leg after Billy Riley dared you to use a rope swing over the river.” Demetrios smiled. “I know.”
“You know?” Sam stared at him. “I told you about that?”
He shrugged. “As you say, you were—”
“Floaty,” she said quickly. “Exactly. I don’t remember anything after you took me to the hospital.”
“There isn’t much to remember.”
His voice was a little rough and she could sense a tension in him. Something had happened; something had changed. If only she could remember…
“I brought you home. To my house.”
“Your house.” Her voice shook and she cleared her throat. “And—and to your room?”
“My room. And my bed.” He put his cup on the tray, then took hers and put it there, too. “Samantha. I want you to remember last night. I want you to remember all of it.”
“Demetrios—”
“Do you know how long I’ve waited to hear you say my name?” He moved closer to her, framed her face with his hands. “I see more questions in your eyes, gataki. Ask them. You want to know why I put you here and not in one of the other bedrooms. You want to know who put you to bed and who took care of you.” A muscle knotted in his jaw. “Ask, and I will give you the answers—or are you afraid to hear them? Would you prefer we went on with this silly pretense?”
“What pretense? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He nodded. He’d expected that she would choose not to know what had happened. What she felt. What she wanted. Why would he want her to? It was foolish to pursue a woman who preferred a lie to the truth when there were so many others who were eager to acknowledge desire. The world was filled with women who could be easily seduced.
Except, he didn’t want any of them. He wanted this one, who was afraid to admit her need for him. He didn’t fully understand her fear but he was willing to confront it because, in the grayness of early morning, he’d admitted a truth of his own.
He was afraid, too.
After he’d left her, he’d gone to his library, watched the sun feather the sky with pink and fuchsia while he drank bad coffee he’d made himself because not even the cook had been awake at that hour. Alone, he’d contemplated the sunrise as if he’d never seen it before. It had been in the way of a lesson, reminding him that the sun would rise tomorrow and all the tomorrows after that, even if neither he or she acknowledged what had happened in that bedroom.
Every instinct had warned him to do the sensible thing, greet Samantha politely when she awakened and pretend the way she’d sighed in his arms was nothing but a dream. They’d struck sparks against each other from the beginning but he’d lived long enough to know that sparks could as easily sputter and die as they could blaze into a conflagration.
Yes, he’d decided, forgetting what had gone on in that bedroom was the best solution.
He’d poured himself another cup of coffee—drinkable, this time, because the cook had made it. He’d climbed the stairs, prepared to smile and say the right thing…and saw Samantha, sitting up in his bed, wearing his robe, and he’d wondered how he could have imagined letting her leave him until they’d faced what they felt and saw it through to its inevitable end. Even as he’d thought it, she’d tossed back the covers, lurched to her feet, that damnable independence of hers driving her to risk her injured ankle…
“I never would have imagined you to be a coward,” he said huskily.
“You’re wasting your time.” Her voice was strong but she hadn’t tried to move away. She was trembling under his hands. “Do you really think you can trick me into another silly challenge? Frankly, I don’t give a damn whether I woke up in your bed or—”
“I brought you into my house because you needed someone to watch over you. Cosimia suggested I put you in one of the guest suites. She offered to sleep in the room with you.” Demetrios took a deep breath. “I said no. Do you know why?”
“Yes,” she said fiercely. “You said ‘no’ because you can’t imagine not being in charge of everything and everyone. You have to control the world, Demetrios, and I don’t like men who—”
He covered her mouth with his, silencing her with his kiss.
“Please,” she whispered, even as she raised her hands and curled them into his shirt, “I beg you. Don’t do this. Don’t say any more.”
“I wanted to be with you, to be the one you turned to in the night.” He lifted her face and forced her to meet his eyes. “I undressed you, gataki. I put you to bed. And I held you in my arms most of the night, after you begged me not to leave you.”
Sam drew an unsteady breath. She’d known it. Sensed it. Recalled it all happening, if not as a memory than as something burned into her very soul.
“No more lies, matyá mou, not for either of us.” He slid his hands down her back, then gathered her to him. “We made a bad bargain that day in New York. We thought the challenge of working together would be enough to quench the fire of what we felt but it isn’t. I want you more than ever, now that I know you. And you want me.”
“We agreed—”
“Yes. We did.” He lowered his forehead to hers. “If you tell me, I will walk out of this room and never mention any of this again.”
She said nothing. He waited, hearing the beat of his own heart, seeing the blurring in her eyes. He could make her admit the truth; he knew that as surely as he’d seen the sun rise this morning. All it would take would be a caress. A kiss. He could breach all her defenses with a touch but he wanted more than that. He needed her to come to him. To reach for him.
She made a little sound, closed her eyes, caught her lip between her teeth. He could feel his resolve slipping. To hold her in his arms, to feel her warmth and not make love to her, was rapidly becoming impossible. He reminded himself, once again, that he was a man and not a saint…but if he spent many more moments like this, he might yet become one.
Enough, he thought, and let go of her.
“I release you from our contract,” he said softly. “I will pay you the full amount we agreed upon, gataki. You may leave for the States as soon as your ankle is healed.”
“Demetrios—”
“No. It’s all right.” He rose from the bed and walked to the door, a man destined for sainthood and already damning himself for it.
“Please. Don’t go.”
Her voice was soft but it stopped his heart. He turned and looked at her, saw her lips curve in a smile so intimate, so filled with promise, it almost brought him to his knees. Slowly, so slowly that it seemed to take forever, she opened the robe. The edges parted; he saw the rounded curves of her breasts and the gentle rise of her belly.
“Come to me,” she whispered.
Sam held out her arms. Demetrios turned the lock and went to claim the woman who had surely been his from the very beginning of time.