Reluctant Mistress, Blackmailed Wife. Lynne Graham

was a man of action, and playing a waiting game when Katie had asked for help ran contrary to his masculine code of ethics. Ignoring legal advice and doing what he felt had to be done came much more naturally to his dominant nature.

      But Alexandros had never before come into personal contact with the kind of poverty that now confronted him. The room was tiny, cramped and shabby. A clothes airer stacked with damp washing, a pram and a bed were crammed up against a cot from which he swiftly averted his attention. In the single patch of space between the battered wardrobe and a sink stacked with baby bottles stood Katie. His golden gaze arrowed in on her like a laser. Against the riot of copper curls tumbling round her startled face her eyes shimmered green as emeralds, and, that fast, his body responded with a testosterone-charged surge of sexual hunger.

      Even as the unreasoning shock of that lust hit, the darker side of him revelled in its resurgence. Instantly memories he had buried so deep he only dreamt about them surfaced. Katie up against the kitchen wall, tumbled in a pile of white linen, in a bubble bath with a ring of candles round her. The candles had been snuffed out by the overflowing water when he had hauled her up into his arms. Time after time he had discovered that he could never get enough of her, and that lack of control so foreign to his temperament had gone very much against the grain.

      ‘I wasn’t expecting you…’ Katie could feel the tension in the air leaping and crackling round her like mini-lightning bolts, and she could not dredge her attention from him. He had always had that effect on her. He walked into room and owned it and the occupants until he chose to release them from the power of his potent presence and forceful personality.

      ‘If I hadn’t had a dinner engagement I would have called earlier.’ Belatedly registering the brief camisole and shorts she wore, Alexandros was striving not to notice the milky pale swell of her round breasts above and below the worn fabric. His even white teeth gritted while he tried to work out why she should have such a dramatic effect on his libido.

      ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ Katie admitted, feeling that her faith in him had been justified. She was pleased and proud that he had not lived down to Leanne’s low expectations.

      A little snuffling whimper drifted from the cot. Alexandros went rigid. A tiny hand curled round a bar in the cot and a small face appeared behind the bars. Gripped by the most excruciating curiosity, in spite of his resistance to the very idea of parenthood, Alexandros slowly moved closer. Katie’s acquiescence to the demand for DNA testing without a single objection had convinced him that she was very probably telling him the truth.

      ‘Boys?’ Alexandros almost whispered, looking down at the two curly dark heads.

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘But not identical.’ The cynosure of two pairs of curious dark brown eyes, Alexandros was frozen to the spot. They were his. One observant glance was sufficient to persuade him of that reality. For both small faces bore compelling evidence of their Christakis lineage: straight brows that were a light baby version of his own, an early hint of the family cleft chin that even his grandfather carried, skin and eyes a little paler than his, but hair as blue-black. The curls were their mother’s, and the only proof that he could see of her input into their gene pool. His level regard was being returned by the babies without fear. He was a father, he registered in shock, whether he liked it or not.

      ‘No,’ she agreed in a taut rush, for she was desperate to know what he was thinking. ‘But well-spotted! At first glance most people do think the twins are identical.’

      Unaffected by that hint of a compliment, Alexandros continued to survey the two little boys with brooding force. There they were, sharing the same cot, like orphans in some squalid children’s home. His sons, his responsibility. Life as he knew it was over, he conceded bleakly. His freedom had just been imprisoned and was awaiting sentence to be hung drawn and quartered. There would be no escape from the agonies ahead. He would have to offer her marriage. It was his own fault. He had brought this punishment on himself. What a mess. What a bloody mess!

      One of the babies cried, and she bent over the side of the cot to lift the child, treating Alexandros to a provocative view of her apple-shaped derriere. Tiny and slight she might be, but she was still one hundred per cent woman in the places that mattered, he found himself thinking—until he cracked down on that inappropriate reflection.

      ‘I think you should get some clothes on,’ Alexandros told her, with the censorious air of a Puritan being tempted by a loose woman.

      Only then registering that she was hardly dressed for visitors, Katie straightened, clutching Connor, her face pink with embarrassment. ‘For goodness’ sake, I’m wearing my pyjamas.’

      ‘It’s barely nine-thirty in the evening—’

      ‘So? I sleep whenever I get the chance!’ She stuffed her son into Alexandros’s arms without even thinking about what she was doing, and turned away in a hurry to snatch up her dressing gown. Her cheeks were burning. Had he told her to cover up because he believed she was trying to tempt him with her body? Did she look that desperate? Perhaps she did, she thought painfully.

      As Katie thrust Connor into his arms, Alexandros turned to stone. Connor also froze. The little boy then reacted to his father’s extreme tension by opening his mouth and howling like a burglar alarm. Aghast, Alexandros studied the screaming child and put him straight down on the carpet. ‘No more,’ he told his son in reproving Greek, as if he was a misbehaving seven-year-old.

      As Connor’s ear-splitting cry mounted to a shriek, Katie scooped him up and hugged his squirming little body protectively close. ‘How could you just put him down like that? Don’t you think he has feelings?’

      Alexandros winced as Toby loosed a first warning squeal from the cot. ‘I’m a stranger to him. I thought I had frightened him. I have never held a child before.’

      ‘Neither had I when the twins were born. But I had no choice but to learn!’

      ‘I don’t need to learn,’ Alexandros drawled, sardonic in tone and equally dry. ‘I can afford a nanny.’

      ‘I’m thrilled for you.’

      Backing off to the door, Alexandros watched her efforts to placate the babies. With two little screeching horrors to look after, it was little wonder that she looked exhausted. He held at bay the knowledge that he had helped to create those screeching horrors now dogging her daily existence, and imposed a strict mental block on the noise of their cries while he watched Katie. He was still fiercely determined to penetrate the mystery of her attraction, since she bore not the smallest resemblance to the women he normally went for. She wasn’t tall, she wasn’t blonde, and she wasn’t ravishingly beautiful.

      Tiny and slender though she was, however, there was something about the arrangement of her delicate features and the unexpectedly lush curve of breast and hip that raised her to a seriously appetising level of desirability, Alexandros acknowledged abstractedly. He considered the reality that she had conceived and given birth to his children. All of a sudden that seemed an extraordinarily sexy achievement to him. He imagined sliding his hands under the thin camisole she wore, and the exquisite feel of the silky skin on her narrow ribcage beneath his palms before he curved his fingers up and round…

      ‘Just what is the matter with you?’ Katie launched at Alexandros in almost sobbing frustration. She could not cope when both the twins cried at once, and was enraged by his supreme detachment from the rising decibel level in the room. ‘Haven’t you got any interest in your own children?’

      Unwillingly forced from the realms of erotic fantasy, Alexandros dealt her an enquiring glance from below his luxuriant black lashes, the faintest hint of colour scoring his stunning high cheekbones. ‘I’m here,’ he fielded without expression. ‘That should tell you something.’

      ‘That you don’t want to be here!’ Katie condemned helplessly, devastated by his failure even to ask the twins’ names. ‘That’s what your attitude is telling me!’

      ‘How may I help?’ Alexandros ground out, his accent very thick.

      ‘Lift