One he would enjoy—relish—to the full.
The waiter appeared, and Markos slipped out his wallet, handing the man one of his cards. Hurriedly Vanessa fumbled for some euro notes, and pushed them across the table.
‘I think that covers my share,’ she said.
Markos looked blankly at her. There was, he could see, a glint in those golden eyes. A sudden smile tugged at his mouth.
‘Thank you,’ he said smoothly, and took the notes. ‘Sometimes it is a case of reculer pour mieux sauter.’
It was Vanessa’s turn to look blank.
‘To retreat in order the better to advance,’ Markos translated.
She still looked blank. Clearly she had no idea why he had said what he had.
But Markos did not mind. He did not mind at all.
There was one very clear destination to which he was advancing, and that this exquisite redhead did not yet seem to realise it only added a piquancy that was as pleasurable as it was novel.
‘Now,’ he said urbanely, ‘where shall we go? Les Invalides or the Rodin museum? You said you couldn’t decide which to see first.’
Somehow—and Vanessa really couldn’t work out how afterwards, even though she thought about it and thought about it—she went with him, as meekly as a lamb.
CHAPTER TWO
IT TOOK HIM a week to get her to bed. He did not rush it. Indeed, the novelty of her company was such that he savoured the slow, leisurely seduction. Not that she was aware of it—and that, as ever, added its own piquancy. That first afternoon he had taken her to the Musée de Rodin, taking pleasure in watching her make her slow, absorbed way among the works of France’s greatest sculptor.
He’d watched her gaze, awestruck, at the famous Le Penseur in the museum grounds, the sunlight playing on the red-gold of her tumbled pre-Raphaelite locks. No sculptor could catch that, he’d thought. Even paint on canvas would be inadequate—stiff and lifeless. Her hair was almost a living thing, and he’d wanted to spear his fingers through it, draw her face towards him, lift her mouth to his, taste the bounty of her parted lips…
A leaf had fluttered down from one of the overhanging trees, catching in her mane of hair.
‘Hold still,’ he’d instructed softly.
She had halted, half twisting her head up towards him. Deftly his fingers had freed the trapped leaf and sent it spinning down to the path. Yet he had not released her, one hand resting on her shoulder, one still held against her hair. For one long moment he had luxuriated in the way she was looking up at him.
The lustrous, amber eyes gazing helplessly up at him had been rich with emotions—part afraid, part tantalised, part bewildered—and he had been able to tell with every experienced sinew of his body, part dawning with the awareness that was quivering through her.
For that long moment, in the dappled sunlight, in the afternoon warmth, there had been a stillness netting them. At the very edge of his consciousness, Markos had felt something stir. Something quite alien to him.
He had not known what it was.
What he had known, with a sure and certain knowledge, was that he was about to embark on an affair that would banish his ennui very, very effectively.
And that, right then, was exactly what he’d wanted.
As the days had unfolded his certainty had been confirmed. Vanessa Ovington was different from any other woman he had pursued. Not just because she was so completely unaware of being pursued, not just because she seemed to be genuinely interested in seeing the sights of Paris, around which he escorted her assiduously—from the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe to the splendours of Versailles and the Sacré Coeur and everything in between—not just because she kept insisting on paying her share of entrance tickets and restaurant bills—an insistence that amused him so much that he continued to banish Taki and Stelios and resort to taxis instead of his customary limo, and he made no attempt to take her to any of Paris’s fabled couture houses and lavish on her the wealth she seemed to have neither inkling of nor interest in—but because…because…
It wasn’t something he found he could quite put into words—either in English or in Greek. Vanessa was different, that was all—and her difference intrigued and fascinated him almost as much as her beauty captivated him.
And on the night that he finally brought his leisurely pursuit to its inevitable conclusion he discovered something else about her that was quite unique in his experience of women.
She came willingly to his apartment, situated in a fashionable Right Bank arrondissement. She was in no state of mind by then to do otherwise, and like someone in a dream she let him lead her inside. Her eyes widened as she took in the rich interior, but she said nothing. He was not surprised. In the time they had spent together she had shown absolutely no interest in discovering the state of his wealth. So far as she was concerned, he concluded, he was merely a businessman—what his business was, or whether it was lucrative or not, she had never asked. A single enquiry by her the first time he took her to dinner had been more for politeness than anything else, and when he’d replied, ‘Oh, import and export,’ she’d simply nodded vaguely and left it at that. She’d clearly never heard of the Makarios Corporation, let alone that it was worth several billion euros, or that he was owner of a substantial portion of it.
But if she were indifferent to whether he was rich or not, she was not, he knew, indifferent to him. Day after day, in his slow, leisurely seduction, he had been making her more and more aware of him—of his desire for her. But he had done so with infinite slowness, infinite care. She was not a woman to rush; she was a woman to bring, step by step, to this point in time where, at last, after longer than he had ever had to wait for a woman—another source of pleasurable novelty—he would finally taste her sweetness to the full.
As she stood gazing around the opulent apartment, her eyes widening as she took in an Impressionist painting on the wall—clearly assuming, Markos noted with suppressed amusement, that it was a mere copy, not the priceless original it really was—he strolled across to the eighteenth-century cabinet that had been converted to a modern drinks cabinet inside, and took out a chilled bottle of vintage champagne.
The soft pop of the cork startled her.