The Mistresses Collection. Оливия Гейтс

the room where Emmie had stayed on her previous visit to his home. ‘Why are you interested?’

      Emmie thought fast and hard, desperate to come up with an unemotional angle to conceal her revealing hunger for every detail she could glean about Bastian and his background. ‘Your mother will be my children’s grandmother.’

      ‘But Cinzia will never visit your children. Even when I was a little boy she found the idea of being seen with a child as “too aging”,’ he retorted drily. ‘She’s very vain and will never accept being a grandparent. She was a film star when my father met her but her earning power was fading because she was getting older. She married him because she needed a meal ticket and when she got tired of him, she divorced him in a process that took half of everything he possessed.’

      Emmie winced as a servant settled her cases down in the beautifully appointed bedroom and withdrew. ‘Nasty.’

      ‘His ego battered, my father found comfort in the arms of his secretary instead,’ Bastian continued even more drily. ‘The secretary got pregnant and he married her within weeks of his divorce from my mother being granted.’

      ‘Oh dear,’ Emmie remarked a good deal less securely as she wondered if he saw a dangerous parallel in that development between past and present: his father had married a woman because she fell pregnant by him and clearly it hadn’t worked out.

      ‘She was Nessa’s mother and the only decent woman my father ever married,’ Bastian explained wryly. ‘But because my father wasn’t in love with her…’ contempt edged his tone as he voiced that particular word ‘…he thought it was acceptable to start an affair with the woman who became his third wife.’

      ‘Then I gather that Nessa’s mother didn’t last long?’

      ‘Two years.’

      Emmie recalled Nessa telling her that her mother had been the only stepmother who was kind to Bastian and, considering his own mother had not set a good example of maternal affection, she found it sad that his father’s marriage to Nessa’s mother had been so brief. ‘And wife number three?’

      ‘Had one affair after another. My father hit the bottle hard before he finally got shot of her.’

      ‘He sounds—’

      ‘Foolish?’ Bastian scorned.

      ‘I was going to say vulnerable. I mean, he kept on trying so hard to find a happy relationship.’

      ‘Only the grass on the other side of the fence was always greener and he couldn’t content himself,’ Bastian completed grimly. ‘Wife number four spent most of her time trying to get me into bed because younger men gave her a buzz.’

      That revelation made Emmie turn pink. ‘That must have been ghastly.’

      ‘While that marriage went on, I spent a lot of time at my grandfather’s house—I was only eighteen,’ Bastian admitted flatly, staring out of the bedroom window, broad shoulders rigid. ‘Tragically my father’s fourth marriage literally killed him. He came home unexpectedly one day and overheard his wife trying to seduce me. He got back into his car and crashed it into a tree a few miles down the road. The happy widow got what was left of my father’s estate, which wasn’t much. His marriages had virtually bankrupted him.’

      ‘With a family history like that I’m surprised you were even considering getting married,’ Emmie confided truthfully.

      Bastian turned away from the window, tall, darkly handsome and intensely charismatic. His dark eyes glittered like gleaming gold ingots in sunlight. ‘But unlike my father I didn’t have any stupid ideas about love having anything to do with marriage…’

      Emmie was relieved to think that Bastian had not been in love with Lilah, but his words and his attitude certainly didn’t offer her much room for hope that he might develop such feelings for her in the future. ‘Have you ever been in love?’ she asked baldly, reasoning that subtlety was wasted on Bastian.

      ‘In lust many times,’ Bastian quipped. ‘In love…never. I’m probably too practical.’

      So, at the very least he must have been in lust with Lilah, Emmie assumed uneasily, and she certainly couldn’t blame him for that because his ex-fiancée was exquisitely easy on the eye. ‘I fell in love when I was at university,’ she heard herself admit.

      Unaccustomed to such personal conversations with a woman, Bastian dealt her a disconcerted look.

      Emmie compressed her lush mouth. ‘It turned out that Toby was only with me because he had a poster of my sister the supermodel on his bedroom wall—she was his fantasy and I was just the closest he could get to her,’ she related ruefully.

      ‘What a fool when you’re even more beautiful,’ Bastian breathed huskily.

      ‘I’m not more beautiful than Saffy,’ Emmie protested.

      ‘I think you are,’ Bastian admitted, his dark gaze roaming over her lovely face. ‘You’re more natural, not all made up and artificial like your sibling.’

      Without warning and for the first time in her life, Emmie found herself laughing at a comparison being made that could not leave her feeling inadequate. ‘Well, I’m certainly not anywhere near as well groomed as my sister,’ she conceded with a smile. ‘She always looks perfect.’

      Bastian rested lean brown hands on her slim shoulders, gazing down at her with smouldering heat in his heavily fringed dark golden eyes. ‘I don’t want or need perfect, khriso mou.’

      Emmie stiffened, suddenly unsure of what should happen next, wanting him with every skin cell in her treacherous body but conscious that intimacy would plunge her deeper into a relationship that had no safe boundaries to protect her from hurt. ‘Bastian…er—’

      Long brown fingers brushed her cheekbone in a lazy caress and he kissed her with hungry driving urgency. Her heart hammered so fast she was scared it would burst out of her chest. The glorious swell of emotion and sensation that only he could give her was waiting in the wings like a terrible temptation, making nonsense of her firm conviction that she could take care of herself. For a split second she wanted Bastian so much it was terrifying, her body kindling like dry twigs touched by a flame, senses awakening with a surge of slumberous intensity. Her breasts stirred beneath her clothing, full and swollen and ripe for his touch, an ache biting deep in her pelvis to leave a sense of hollowness in its wake.

      ‘I should unpack,’ she said breathlessly, drawing back in a movement that demanded every atom of her self-discipline while her glance briefly skimmed over the door that led into Bastian’s bedroom, and she wondered how long she could possibly keep her distance from him.

      In a rare act for a male in the grip of fierce arousal, Bastian backed off several steps, lean, strong face taut and flushed. Emmie was in Greece, on the island of Treikos, safely beneath his roof, and that was enough for one day, he reflected ruefully, apprehensive for the first time ever of making a wrong move with a woman.

      Conscious of the tension in the air, Emmie coloured and turned aside to her luggage. Her legs were shaking, her rebellious body screaming with tight, strained nerve endings and she was ashamed of her weakness. Somehow it had not occurred to her that Bastian might still exert that much physical power over her even when she was several months pregnant. Where he was concerned, she badly needed an off switch.

      Four days later, Nessa arrived for the weekend and mortified Emmie straight away by walking out to the terrace where Emmie and Bastian were having lunch and saying cheerfully, ‘So, when’s the wedding?’

      Bastian frowned. ‘What wedding?’ he queried, standing up to pull out a chair for his sister.

      Nessa simply laughed. ‘Your wedding, of course,’ she said teasingly, studying the pair of them with amused brown eyes.

      ‘We’re not getting married,’ Emmie declared with red cheeks hot enough to fry eggs on.

      Nessa raised a brow as though