The Heiress Bride. LYNNE GRAHAM

in the morning, Ione reminded herself as she stood like a small, rigid statue by her burly father’s side.

      But she had chosen to forget the sheer raw impact of Alexio in the flesh and the closer he got, the less she breathed and her chest tightened, for he was so incredibly good-looking. The golden light shimmered over the luxuriant blue-black hair cropped to his arrogant head, accentuated his superb bone structure, the stunning dark, deepset eyes, the bold brows, aggressive jawline and wide, charismatic mouth. His pearl-grey business suit was cut to fit wide shoulders, lean hips and long, powerful thighs that required no helpful enhancement from his tailor. He strolled towards them not one whit put out by a reception committee and a situation that would have filled ninety-nine out of a hundred men with a sizeable degree of discomfiture.

      Her own heart was hammering with nervous tension and, had she not been holding herself taut with the self-discipline of years of training, she would have trembled. His vibrant self-assurance infuriated her, but on another level she could only be impressed by that show of strength, that cool, contained tough front. One wrong move, one word out of place and her father would ruin him. Didn’t he realise that he was walking into the lion’s den? Didn’t he appreciate that if he married into the Gakis family he would be selling his soul to the devil?

      ‘Ione…’ Alexio looked down into eyes the same shade as precious jade, the most unreadable female eyes he had ever met, utterly empty of any impression, and the smooth and polished greeting ready on his tongue somehow died there. She had the pale, still face of a madonna, possessed of pure, perfect symmetry and…untouchable. At a distance she had looked like a doll, now she bore a very close resemblance to an ice statue: frigid from head to toe. The wedding night promised to be a real challenge.

      ‘Alexio…’ Ione squeezed out his name in acknowledgement, straining with all her might to get enough oxygen back to manage that feat.

      Alexio watched the flow of warm pink colour burnish her cheeks, the uncertain flutter of her silky brown lashes and the brief relaxation of her taut lipline into soft, sexy fullness as she spoke. As he noted the tiny pulse beating out her tension below her delicate collar-bone, he recognised that she was neither indifferent nor cold, but raw with nerves and struggling to hide the fact. A primal sense of satisfaction lancing through him, his slow, dangerous smile curved his handsome mouth…

      CHAPTER TWO

      ‘BRING us coffee…’ Minos Gakis rapped out to Ione the instant the three of them entered the air-conditioned cool of the villa.

      Conscious of Alexio’s veiled surprise at that harsh demand, Ione reddened. It was an effort at that instant to recall what mattered most, for somehow being treated like an object of derision in Alexio’s presence hit her even harder than usual. However, suppressing her embarrassment, Ione pushed her head up high and lifted her slight shoulders back. Praying that her father was too busy talking to notice, she walked down the long marble hall with small, slow, measured steps that made her slim hips sway in what she hoped was a subtle but enticing manner.

      She knew how experienced women practised such small visual wiles on the male sex. Goodness knew, she had had ample opportunity to observe the behaviour of the voluptuous giggling blondes her father brought over to Lexos when he entertained. Of course, on such occasions she was supposed to behave as though she were quite unaware of what went on in her own home and keep to her own wing of the villa, but as the years had passed Minos Gakis had become less discreet. She had often seen those women basking round the pool and had watched them switch on the seductive charm to attract lustful male visitors. Her soft mouth tightened with helpless distaste.

      Engaged in listening to his host, Alexio watched Ione progress down the hall, a faint hint of a frownline marking his winged black brows as he questioned his own reluctance to take his attention from her. The fluid slowness of her walk attracted his gaze first to the intrinsically feminine curve of her derrière and then to the soft rise of her hemline above her slender, shapely legs. She moved with the grace of a dancer but it was another, far more disturbing quality that caused the sudden startling ache of fullness in Alexio’s groin.

      Seconds later, Ione moved out of view and slumped back against the cold corridor wall, all of a quiver from the stress of a masquerade she found demeaning. But she had to try to engage Alexio’s interest and convince him that she was content to marry him, for if he suspected otherwise he might change his mind and, if he did so, even her father couldn’t force him to marry her and all hope of her getting off the island would be lost. She shivered at that awareness. Yet to attempt for the first time ever to attract a man and to do so in her father’s vicinity demanded a degree of courageous subtlety she feared she did not possess.

      She had worked so hard at forgetting just how unnerving a personality Alexio Christoulakis was, Ione acknowledged uneasily as she collected the already prepared coffee tray. His arrival had shaken her up a lot more than she had expected. With reluctance, she recalled their first brief encounter.

      That night a couple of months earlier she had been relieved to be mistaken for an employee, for it was humiliating to be treated like a servant by her father in front of his discomfited guests. Alexio had been in too much of a rage to be more discerning, she recalled abstractedly. Dark eyes blazing gold with fierce pride, aggressive jawline hard as iron. And she had had a very fair idea of what hoops her father had put him through for his own amusement.

      But she had still been struck as dumb as a tongue-tied schoolgirl when she’d first laid eyes on Alexio Christoulakis. Even though she had seen those same lean, dark, handsome features in the magazines she read, he had always looked so impossibly cool and reserved. She had not been prepared for a male so vibrant and so volatile in the flesh that raw energy literally sizzled from him.

      And when he had called her back to change those satin sheets that her aunt believed to be the last word in sophistication, she had had no need to make that her own personal task for the villa had staff on duty twenty-four hours a day. Yet inexplicably she had hurried off to fetch fresh linen. When she had returned to his bedroom, he had been standing by the open doors onto the balcony, exuding a ferocious tension that had sent her own sensory processes into overload.

      Guilty as a sneak thief but unable to resist her own fascination, she had kept on stealing covert glances at him. It had taken her for ever to make up the bed again, for her hands had been all fingers and thumbs. But he had seemed indifferent to her lingering presence and her lack of dexterity. Only once had their eyes met head-on and her mouth had run dry as she’d fallen victim to those spectacular golden eyes. A split second later he had swung away as though he were alone and had strode out onto the balcony where he had remained until she had departed again.

      As she emerged from that unsettling recollection, perspiration beaded Ione’s short upper lip. As she entered the main salon with the laden tray, she could see the shaded, vine-encrusted loggia outside where her father was seated in regal splendour and her heart sank at his choice of location. Evidently impervious to any fear of heights, Alexio was lounging back against the low retaining wall that was built into the very edge of the cliff, the relaxed angle of his lean, powerful frame pronounced.

      Ione’s hands clenched bone-white round the tray handles as she attempted to blank out the panoramic view and forestall the sick sense of dizzy terror that always threatened her in the loggia.

      His keen gaze narrowing with questioning force on her drawn face, Alexio straightened and strode forward. ‘Let me take that for you.’

      Dismayed that he had broken off the conversation to offer her assistance, Ione froze. She collided with gleaming dark golden eyes fringed with dense black lashes and her heart seemed to crash inside her. He detached her death grip from the tray and strolled back to set it on the stone table. Screening her bemused gaze, she edged as close to the house wall as she dared to reach the table and serve the coffee.

      ‘You’re afraid of heights,’ Alexio murmured.

      Minos Gakis said drily, ‘She must overcome it.’

      Conscious of her father’s annoyance that she should have interrupted their dialogue, Ione breathed jerkily, ‘It’s foolish, irrational. I mustn’t give way to it.’