Forgiven but Not Forgotten? (5 page)

His lip curled. ‘Just like your neighbours? I didn’t see anyone rush to
their
aid.’

Siena flushed more. It made Andreas bite out, ‘Just how much money are we talking about?’

He saw Siena swallow and she licked her lips for a second, effortlessly drawing Andreas’s eye to those lush pink swells and making that heat in his body intensify. Damn her, but he wanted her—possibly even at a price.

Siena felt sick. But she was too far gone to stop now. She saw the disgust etched in the lines of his starkly handsome face. He would despise her for this, but if he could despise her and still want her that was fine with her.

She named her price. The exact amount of money she would need to ensure Serena’s care for a year. If she was going to do this then she had to make it worthwhile. Six months wouldn’t be enough to ensure Serena’s long-term recovery. A year in therapy and rehabilitation would.

Andreas whistled softly at the amount and Siena saw how his eyes became even icier. He came close again and she fought not to back away, her eyes glued to his. In a bizarre way, now that she’d said it, she found a weight lifting off her shoulders.

‘You value yourself very highly.’

Siena burned. Shame came rushing back. Nevertheless, she tossed her head and said defiantly, ‘What if I do?’

Andreas looked her up and down and walked around her. Siena could feel his eyes roving over her body.

He said from behind her, ‘For that kind of money I think it would be within my rights to sample the goods again before making a decision, don’t you? After all, that’s just good business sense.’

Siena whirled around indignantly even as heat suffused every particle of her skin, but words got lodged in her throat. She would be the worst kind of hypocrite if she were to lambast him.

She could see that Andreas was livid, with dark colour slashing his cheeks. Before she could stop him he was snaking a hand around her neck and pulling her towards him. She had to go with it or fall off balance completely.

He ground out with disgust, ‘I don’t pay women for sex. I never have and I never will. It’s heinous and disgusting and demoralising. Especially when you want it as much as I do...’

And with that his mouth was on hers and he was obliterating any sense of reality—again. Siena’s thoughts were lost in a blaze of heat. Her hands were on Andreas’s chest and he’d gathered her closer by curling his arm around her back, arching her into him, where she could feel the burgeoning evidence of his arousal against her belly.

His mouth was forcing hers open, and once that happened she didn’t have a chance. His tongue found and tangled with hers, stroking along it, demanding a response. Siena mewled deep in her throat, almost pitifully. Andreas was possessing her with sensual mastery and, far from being disgusted, she found that her arms itched to climb higher, to curl around Andreas’s neck, and her tongue was dancing just as hotly as his.

His hand left her waist and travelled up along her ribs. Siena was aware of an intense spiking of anticipation in her blood as her breasts seemed to swell in response, nipples peaking painfully, waiting for his touch.

But Andreas didn’t cup her breast as she was suddenly longing for him to do. He stopped just short and pulled his head back. She opened her eyes with an effort, to see his, hot and molten, searing her alive, damning her for her audacity and stubborn denial of their attraction. Her breath was coming in rapid bursts and a million and one things were vying for supremacy in her brain, all of them urging her to pull away—fast. But she couldn’t move.

Roughly he said, with disgust lacing his voice again, ‘Much as I hate to admit it, I think that perhaps you might just be worth paying an astronomical amount of money to bed.’

He was the one to pull away, leaving Siena feeling adrift and wobbly.

He ran a hand through his hair and looked at her, his mouth taut with condemnation. ‘You’ve learnt your lessons well, DePiero...in the beds of however many countless lovers you’ve entertained. Were they the ones to teach you that intoxicating mix of innocence and artless sensuality designed to inflame a man?’

Siena looked at Andreas, stunned at his words. He had no idea. He couldn’t tell her gauche responses were all too
real.
And she vowed then that he never would know—however she had to do it.

She fought to find some veneer of composure and said, as cynically as she could, considering she was shaking inwardly like a leaf, ‘What else did you expect? A disgraced virgin heiress? This is the twenty-first century—surely you know better than most that virgins are as mythical as the knight on a white horse you just spoke of?’

Andreas stalked away from her, tension emanating from his body in waves. In that moment he hated her, and he hated himself, because he knew he didn’t have the strength to just walk away and leave her here. To show her nothing but disdain. If he did he knew she would torment him in dreams for ever. He’d spent five years haunted by her. He had to have her—had to have this closure once and for all. And he despised himself for his weakness.

He looked at Siena and to his chagrin all of his previous thoughts were blasted to smithereens and rendered to dust. Her hair was tousled from his hands, her cheeks were rosy and her lips full and pouting, pink from his kisses. Her chest still rose and fell with uneven breaths and those glorious blue eyes flashed defiantly.

Andreas had the very strong urge to take her right here in this scummy flat—to turn that expression of defiance into something much more acquiescent. And he would if he thought that once would be enough. But he knew with a preternatural prickling of awareness that it wouldn’t be enough. He hardened his resolve. She would
not
reduce him to such baseness.

Siena was slowly regaining control of herself. His words rang in her head:
‘I don’t pay women for sex. I never have and I never will. It’s heinous and disgusting and demoralizing.’
The pity of it was she agreed with every word he’d said, and had to admit to respecting him for it.

She finally dragged her almost stupefied gaze from his and walked on very shaky legs back to the door, about to open it—because surely he would be leaving now, for good? Once again Siena didn’t like the hollow feeling that thought brought with it.

Before she could open the door, Andreas said ominously, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

Siena looked at him, the breath catching in her throat for a moment. ‘But you just said you wouldn’t pay...’

Andreas’s face was like stone, his eyes so dark they looked navy. ‘Yes, I did, and I meant it.’

Siena struggled to understand. ‘So, what...?’

Andreas crossed his arms. ‘There are other means of payment that aren’t so...’ his lip curled ‘...obvious.’

Something very betraying kicked in Siena’s gut at the thought that he wasn’t leaving her. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Gifts...’ He smiled cynically. ‘After all, how many women and men have benefited from the largesse of their lovers for aeons? You can do what you like with them when our relationship is over, and if that means converting them into the money you want so badly then you’re welcome to do it.’

Suspicious now, and feeling supremely naive because she’d never been in this situation before, she said, ‘Gifts...what kind of gifts?’

Andreas’s jaw tightened. ‘The expensive kind. Jewels. Like the ones you were wearing that night.’

Siena flushed to recall the priceless diamond earrings and necklace her father had presented her with on the evening of that exclusive debutante ball in Paris. They’d belonged to her mother, but had been seized by the authorities along with everything else she had owned.

Siena found herself feeling almost a sense of sick relief that he wouldn’t just be handing her a sum of money. The thought of receiving jewellery made what she’d just asked for a little more palatable, despite the fresh shame heaped on top of old shame. Siena comforted herself with the thought that Andreas must have presented plenty of his lovers with tokens of his affection.

‘Fine,’ she said shakily, barely believing she was agreeing to this. ‘I’ll accept gifts in lieu of payment.’

Andreas smiled. ‘Of course you will.’

Siena had a vision of walking out of here with him and fresh panic galvanised her to ask, a little belatedly, ‘What..what will you expect of me?’ She held her breath.

Andreas’s smile faded. He suddenly looked harsh, forbidding. Not like a man who wanted her in his bed so badly that he’d sought her out and was prepared to pay her in kind for it.

‘Considering the price you’ve put on yourself...I will expect you to be a very willing, affectionate and inventive lover. I’m a very sexual man, Siena, and I pride myself on satisfying my lovers, so I expect the same in return. Especially from you.’

Siena struggled to hold down a hysterical giggle.
Inventive lover?
He’d be lucky if she managed not to betray her innocence, and she could imagine now with a lancing feeling of pain just how unwelcome
that
knowledge would be. It might even be enough to turn him off altogether. As tempted as Siena was to suddenly blurt out that intimate truth, she thought of her sister and clamped her mouth shut. No going back. Only forward to accept the consequences of her actions, which she’d set in motion five years before.

Not wanting to think of how his assertion that he was ‘a very sexual man’ had impacted her deep inside, Siena asked rather shakily, ‘How long will you want me for?’

Andreas came close to Siena, where she stood near the door, and touched her jaw with his finger, making her shiver with helpless sensation. His eyes travelled up and down her body with dark intent and then rose back to hers.

With almost insulting insouciance he said, ‘I think about a week should satisfy my desire for retribution and for you.’

Siena flinched minutely. There was a wealth of insult in his assumption that a week would be enough, and Siena hated that it felt like an insult when it should feel like a reprieve. Anyone could handle anything for a week. Even this.

‘A week, then.’ Siena assured herself that seven days was a blip in the ocean of her life. She could do it.

Andreas smiled, but it didn’t reach those dark eyes. ‘I’m already looking forward to this time next week, when the past truly will be in the past. For ever.’

Siena’s sense of vulnerability increased. ‘The feeling is mutual, believe me.’

After a tense moment Andreas dropped his hand, stepped back and said, ‘Get your stuff packed, Siena, and don’t leave anything behind.’

‘But I’ll be coming back here...’

Andreas’s mouth thinned as he took in the meagre furnishings with a disdainful glance. ‘You won’t be returning here.
Ever.
’

Siena opened her mouth to protest and then stopped. Of course he thought she wouldn’t be coming back here if she was going to turn his gifts into cash. Andreas didn’t know that in a week’s time she’d be as broke as she currently was, and she didn’t want his razor-sharp brain to pick that up.

Faintly she assured herself that she’d worry about it when the time came and went into the tiny bedroom and pulled out her case. Only a few hours ago she’d had nothing more on her mind than how to get through the evening without keeling over from exhaustion and the constant niggling worry about how she would be able to look after Serena, because they didn’t have enough money to continue paying for her psychiatric care.

But now her life had been turned upside down and she had a very unexpected and unwitting benefactor for Serena.

The next week stretched ahead like a term of penal servitude. But, treacherously, Siena felt a shiver of anticipation run through her. Would Andreas expect her to sleep with him tonight? The thought made her heart leap into her throat and her mouth went dry. She wasn’t ready—not in a million years.

The thought of all that intense masculinity focused on her was overwhelming when she was so inexperienced. Siena felt numb as she started to pull the paltry collection of clothes from the rail. She didn’t even have a wardrobe. She could almost laugh when she thought of the palatial bedroom she’d had all her life, with its medieval four-poster bed. It would have encompassed this entire flat about twice over...

A huge shadow darkened her bedroom door and Andreas rapped out with clear impatience, ‘Actually, you can leave everything here. Unless there’s something of sentimental value. I’ll be supplying you with a new wardrobe.’

Siena just looked at Andreas. She saw an austerely handsome man, eager to get out of this hole of a place and take her with him so that he could mould her into what he wanted. He was so sure of himself now—a Titan of industry, used to having what he wanted when he wanted.

Siena didn’t doubt that most of the women in Andreas’s life were only too happy to comply with his demands, and she had to quash the dart of something dark at the thought of those women. Dismay gripped her. It wasn’t jealousy. It couldn’t be jealousy. She hated this man for what he was doing and what he’d become—he was welcome to his hordes of satisfied lovers.

Self-derision that she could allow this to happen to her and the knowledge that she had no choice because this was her only hope to help Serena made Siena’s spine straighten. Tersely she bit out, ‘Give me five minutes.’

CHAPTER FOUR

‘W
HAT
WILL
HAPPEN
to my flat?’

Siena was trying not to notice Andreas’s big hands on the steering wheel of his car, the way he handled it with such lazy confidence. Of course his car hadn’t been on blocks when they’d gone outside. The young kid had been watching it like a hawk and had stared at Andreas as if he was a god.

Siena didn’t know how to drive. Her father hadn’t deemed it necessary. Why would she need to drive if she was going to be chauffeur-driven everywhere?

Sounding crisp, Andreas replied, ‘I’ll have my assistant settle up with your landlord. She can also inform your employers that you won’t be coming back.’

Siena’s hands tightened in her lap. In a way it was karma. She’d lost him his job and now he was losing her hers. Just like that. With a mere click of his fingers, Andreas was changing her life and ripping her very new independence out from under her feet. If she only had herself to worry about she wouldn’t be here now, she assured herself inwardly, and hated the tiny seed of doubt that even then she could have held out against Andreas’s will, or the guilt she felt.

She wondered what Andreas would have done if he’d known that she couldn’t care less for his fortune? That his money wasn’t for her at all? But she was forgetting that this man didn’t care. Just as the younger man from five years ago hadn’t cared. He’d only wanted her because it had been a coup to seduce one of the untouchable debutantes; their supposed virtue had been more prized and guarded than a priceless heirloom in a museum.

Except that virtue had been a myth. Siena had known all too well just how
touchable
the vast majority of her fellow debs had been. They’d looked innocent and pure, but had been anything but. She could recall with vivid clarity, how one of the girls—a princess from a small but insanely wealthy European principality—had boasted about seducing the porter who had brought her bags up to her room while her mother had slept in a drug-fuelled haze in the next room. She’d threatened the man with losing his job if he told anyone.

Siena’s mouth hadn’t dropped open—but only because her own sister had told her far more hair-raising stories than that, and had inevitably been a main participant when she’d been a debutante.

That evening she’d managed to escape from her father and had tried to find Andreas, to explain why she’d lied, hating herself for the awful falsehood. She’d explored an area reserved for staff only, and had come to an abrupt halt outside a half-open door when she’d heard a newly familiar voice saying heatedly, ‘If I’d known how poisonous she was I’d never have touched her.’

A voice had pointed out coldly, ‘You’ve done it now, Xenakis. You shouldn’t have touched her in any case. Do you really think you would ever have had a chance with someone like her? She’ll be married within a couple of years to one of those pale-faced pretty boys in that ballroom, or to some old relic of medieval Italian royalty.’

Andreas had said bitterly, ‘I only kissed her because she was looking at me as if I was her last supper—’

The other voice came again, harder now. ‘Don’t be such a fool Xenakis. She seduced you because like every other spoilt brat in there she was bored—and you were game. Do you seriously think she hasn’t already got a string of lovers to her name? Those girls are not the innocents they seem. They’re hardened and experienced.’

Siena had barely been breathing by then, her back all but flattened to the wall by the door. She’d heard Andreas emit an expletive and then she’d heard footsteps and fled, unable to countenance offering up an apology after that character assassination—after hearing his words,
‘I only kissed her because she was looking at me as if I was her last supper.’

The following morning Siena had woken early and felt stifled in her opulent bedroom. She’d dressed in jeans and a loose sweatshirt and had sneaked out through the lobby at dawn, with a baseball cap on her head in case she saw anyone she knew. She’d craved air and space—time to think about what had happened.

That searing conversation she’d overheard had been reverberating in her head and she had run smack into a stone wall. Except it hadn’t been a wall. It had been Andreas, standing beside a motorbike, in the act of putting on a helmet. Siena’s baseball cap had fallen off, and she’d felt her long hair tumble around her shoulders, but shock had kept her rigid. In the cold light of day, in a black leather jacket and jeans, he’d looked dark and menacing. But she’d been captivated by his black eye and swollen jaw.

Startled recognition had turned to blistering anger. ‘Don’t look so shocked, sweetheart. Don’t you recognise the work of your father’s men? Don’t you know they did this to avenge your honour?’

Siena had felt nauseous, and had realised why his voice had sounded so thick the previous evening. She should have known. Hadn’t her father done the same thing, and worse, to her half-brother—his own son?

‘I—’ she’d started, but Andreas had cut her off with a slash of his hand through the air.

‘I don’t want to hear it. As much as I hate you right now, I hate myself more for being stupid enough to get caught. You know I’ve lost my job? I’ll be lucky to get work cleaning toilets in a camping site after this...’

He’d burnt her up and down with a scathing look.

‘I’d love to say that what we shared was worth it, but the only thing that would have made it remotely worth it is if you’d stopped acting the innocent and let me take you up against the wall of that dressing room as I wanted to.
Then
your father might not have caught us in the act.’

The crudeness of his words—the very confirmation that all the time she’d been quivering and shivering with burgeoning need, half scared to death, he’d assumed she was putting on some sort of an act and had wanted to take her standing up against the wall—had frozen Siena inside. Not to mention the excoriating knowledge that he’d merely made the most of an opportunity, and she’d all but thrown herself at him like some kind of sex-crazed groupie.

He’d taken her chin in his fingers, holding her tight enough to hurt, and he’d said, ‘As the French say,
au revoir,
Siena DePiero. Because some day our paths will cross again. You can be sure of that.’

He’d let her go, looked at her and uttered an expletive. With that he’d put on his helmet, swung his leg over the powerful bike and with a roar of the throttle had left her standing there, staring after him as if she’d been turned to stone.

The streets of London at night made Siena’s memories fade. But the tangible anger she’d felt from Andreas that day would never fade.

‘We’re here.’

Siena looked to see that they were indeed pulling up outside Andreas’s apartment. Butterflies erupted in her belly. It felt as if aeons had passed since she’d been there already that evening.

The same young man who had parked the car earlier appeared to open her door. Siena was relieved, not wanting to touch Andreas. He was waiting as she emerged from the car with her one case in his hand. She couldn’t stop him putting a hand to her back as he guided her into the apartment block. Futile anger burned down low inside her at being so vulnerable to this man...

* * *

Andreas was very aware of Siena’s pale and tightly drawn features as they stood in the lift. He held her pathetically small case in his hand and had to quash the dart of something that felt ridiculously like pity at the knowledge that this was all she possessed now, when she had been one of the most privileged women in Europe. He reminded himself that this woman was one of the most invulnerable on the planet. She’d contrived every single moment of that evening in Paris, and when it had come to it she’d saved her own pretty neck.

Back in that grotty flat, when she’d asked how long this would last, Andreas had been about to say a month until he’d stopped himself. He’d never spent longer than a week with a lover, finding that he invariably needed his space or grew bored. So to find himself automatically assuming he’d need a
month
was unprecedented. He wanted Siena with a hunger that bordered uncomfortably on the obsessional, but there was no way she was going to turn out to be any different from his other lovers.

But, a snide inner voice pointed out, this was already different, because he was bringing her back to his apartment without even thinking about it. He’d never lived with a lover before. He’d always instinctively avoided that cloying intimacy. It made him feel claustrophobic. Andreas cursed himself now and wondered why he hadn’t automatically decided to put Siena in a suite in a hotel, rather than bring her to his place. He didn’t want to investigate his adverse gut reaction to that idea, when it was exactly what he
should
be doing.

Andreas hated that she was already making him question his motives and impulses. It made him think of dark, tragic memories and feelings of suffocation.

Before Andreas had left his home town at the age of seventeen he’d had a best friend who had been planning on leaving with Andreas. They were going to make something of themselves—
make a difference.
But that final summer his friend had fallen for a local girl and had become a slave to his emotions, telling Andreas he no longer wanted to travel or achieve anything special. He just wanted to settle down. Andreas had been incapable of changing his mind, and he’d watched his smart, ambitious friend throw away his hopes and dreams.

When his friend had found his girlfriend in bed with someone else he’d been so distraught that he’d killed himself. Andreas had been deeply affected by this awful violence. By the way someone could lose themselves so completely and invest so much in another person.
For love
. When that love hadn’t even been reciprocated.

Andreas’s own father had achieved a scholarship to a university in Athens—the first in his family to do so. But before he could go he’d met and fallen in love with Andreas’s mother. She’d become pregnant and his father had decided to stay and get married, giving up his chance to study medicine.

Andreas had always been aware of his father’s missed chance at another life. And after witnessing his friend’s descent into horrific tragedy he’d been more determined than ever to leave. He had vowed never to let himself be side-tracked by
feelings.

And he hadn’t... Until he’d had far too close a brush with disaster in Paris, when he’d lost himself for a moment with a blonde seductress who had blown hot and then colder than the Arctic. She’d been a necessary wake-up call. A startling reminder of what was important. Not to get side-tracked.

Andreas reassured himself that this time things were different. When the lift stopped and the doors opened a rush of anticipaton and pleasure seized him, washing aside all his doubts. Siena DePiero was here and that was all he needed to know. Having her anywhere but close to him was not an option.

He’d been waiting for this moment for a long time—ever since that night, when he’d felt a kind of helpless anger and a sense of betrayal that he never wanted to feel again. Ever since that following morning, when she’d emerged from the hotel like a manifestation of his fantasies, her hair tumbled around her shoulders, backlit against the Paris dawn light. He’d wanted her then—fiercely. Even after what she’d done. It had taken all of his strength to get on his motorcycle and leave her behind.

* * *

‘This is your room.’

Andreas was standing back to let Siena go into a vast bedroom. She’d just been given a tour of the jaw-dropping apartment. Silently she went in, relieved to hear Andreas say:
‘your room’.
It was stunning, decked out in sumptuous but understated dark blues and complementary greys. A king-sized bed dominated the room, and Siena could see a glimpse of a white-tiled
en suite
bathroom and an entrance to another room.

Exploring, she found herself walking through a large dressing alcove to a separate lounge area, with a sofa, chairs, desk and a TV. Effectively she had her own suite.

She turned around to see Andreas leaning with his shoulder against the entrance to the dressing room, his hands in his pockets giving him a rakish air.

‘This is...lovely,’ she said stiffly, knowing that
lovely
was woefully inadequate in the face of this opulence. She was stunned again at Andreas’s world now, and stunned anew to see him in his open-shirted tuxedo and realise that only hours before Andreas Xenakis had still been firmly in her shameful guilt-ridden past, not her tumultuous present.

But he was going to find you sooner or later,
an inner voice reminded her.

‘I’ll arrange for a stylist and a beautician to come tomorrow, to attend to whatever you need.’

To make her beautiful for
him.

Siena felt light-headed all of a sudden and swayed ever so slightly.

Immediately Andreas was standing straight, alert. ‘What is it? Are you hungry?’

Siena beat back the waves of weakness, determined not to show Andreas any vulnerability. She shook her head. ‘No. It’s nothing. I’m just tired. I’d like to go to bed now.’

Andreas just looked at her for a long moment and then as if deciding something, he stepped back and said, ‘By all means, Siena. You’re my guest now and you know where everything is. Help yourself to anything you want.’

He backed away, and just before he got to her bedroom door he said softly, ‘You should sleep while you can, Siena. You’ll need it.’

Siena fought back a fresh wave of light-headedness at hearing him say that and watched as he walked out of the room, closing the bedroom door behind him. Sudden weariness nearly felled her. Her head hurt after everything that had happened. She couldn’t take any more in.

Finding her small suitcase, she extracted what she needed and dressed for bed. She couldn’t block out the way her weak body rejoiced to sink into expensive bedclothes, and gratefully slipped into what felt like a coma.

* * *

Andreas knew he was in the grip of a dream but he couldn’t seem to pull himself out of it. He was back in that glittering ballroom in Paris. He could feel the ambition rising up within him to
own
such a place one day. It would be a remarkable achievement for a boy from a small town outside Athens with only the most basic qualifications to his name.