Kyriakis's Innocent Mistress. Diana Hamilton

      

       He was everything a woman dreamed of. Male perfection. Tall, dark and handsome—and yet so much more. Toe-curlingly sexy. Formidable.

      If he wanted to flirt with her—or more—then what was wrong with that? She could recall the way some of her colleagues boasted about holiday romances. Apparently it happened all the time.

      Fun. Fun was all it was. And what was the harm in a few kisses? She craved his kisses.

      Dimitri lowered the thick fringes of his sable lashes over the silver glint in his dark eyes.

      His enemy had chosen his messenger well. A man less single-minded would have been putty in her hands, would have done anything—given up the secrets of his very soul—to possess such a woman.

      He wasn’t immune—far from it. But putty in a woman’s hand—in anyone’s hand—he wasn’t. If she was offering, he wouldn’t be resisting.

      How could he?

      Diana Hamilton is a true romantic, and fell in love with her husband at first sight. They still live in the fairytale Tudor house where they raised their three children. Now the idyll is shared with eight rescued cats and a puppy. But, despite an often chaotic lifestyle, ever since she learned to read and write Diana has had her nose in a book—either reading or writing one—and plans to go on doing just that for a very long time to come.

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      THE ITALIAN’S PRICE

      KYRIAKIS’S INNOCENT MISTRESS

      BY

      DIANA HAMILTON

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      PROLOGUE

      DIMITRI KYRIAKIS stared fixedly at his father’s home and told himself he wasn’t overawed. No way. The villa—what he could see of it at the end of the straight tree-bordered drive—was immense: a gleaming white monument to wealth and power. No way could he walk up that driveway without knowledge of the correct sequence of numbers needed to activate the high-tech mechanism that would open the massive wrought-iron gates. And to attempt to climb them would without doubt bring security guards running.

      But he’d find a way. He had to. For his mother’s sake, he had to.

      She was owed.

      He was fourteen years old. A man. Or almost. And he’d come to collect. No power on earth could keep him from what he had to do.

      Straightening his bony shoulders, he set off, scouting the high perimeter wall of the estate, the hot Greek sun burning through the cheap white fabric of his best shirt. If his mother knew what he was doing she’d throw a fit. Or several.

      He tried to smile at the mental image of the gentle, frail Eleni Kyriakis losing it, but the lump in his throat rose like a spike of hot lava and pushed any attempt out of existence.

      Late last night she’d told him. Returning from his after-school stint dogsbodying in the sweltering kitchens of one of Athens’ most prestigious hotels—owned as he now knew by his father—to the mean, claustrophobic rooms they rented in a narrow back street, he’d found his mother bent over a pile of ironing. It was part of the one-woman laundry service she’d instigated several years before, to augment the money she earned from her daily cleaning work.

      She had pushed a strand of greying hair from her forehead, and her smile had been as gently welcoming as ever, giving no clue to what was to come.

      ‘Sit with me, my son. I have something to tell you.’ She sighed softly. ‘Many times you’ve asked who your father is, and many times I’ve answered that I’d tell you all about him when you were older, when maturity has brought the wisdom to see things clearly without the fog of childish emotions. But circumstances have changed.’

      Her eyes had glittered with rare tears and he’d known then that something was wrong. Very wrong.

      He could still feel echoes of the stomach-looping, throat-clogging sensation that had weakened his bones as she’d told him that she’d been undergoing tests. There was something wrong with her heart. It could fail her at any moment. She’d smiled then, bravely, and it was a smile he’d remember for the rest of his life.

      She had taken his hands. ‘But what do they know? I’m tough. I’ll prove them wrong—you’ll see! But just in case they’re right I must tell you about your father. He was so handsome, so magnetic, and I loved him very much.’

      It had been then, as she’d given him the identity of the man who had sired him, that he’d seen his beloved mother with fresh eyes. As he’d taken in the lines of exhaustion on her once beautiful face, her sunken cheeks and the tell-tale blue of her lips, he’d known exactly what he had to do.

      With the determined tightening of his young jaw that was to become habitual, he began to climb the wall, muscles straining as he sought foot and handholds, his tension released as he swung over the top and dropped silently onto the long grass.

      Beyond the belt of trees, the seeding grasses, he could see the sweep of an immaculately manicured and watered lawn—could smell, from somewhere, the evocative scent of summer-flowering jasmine, and could hear distant voices. A male, clipped and harsh, a petulant female whine.

      Emerging into the full, relentless beat of the sun, Dimitri saw them. The man wearing a cream linen suit was his father. His photograph was splashed across the financial pages often enough to be instantly recognisable. The woman—young, supple—was dressed in something that floated around her body with every shift of the breeze, with every movement. She was carrying a parasol, her blonde head turned slightly away from his father. He could see the icy glint of diamonds hanging from her ears. The amount the gems must cost would have meant his mother wouldn’t have had to work herself half to death for at least a couple of years.

      So this had to be the second wife his mother had spoken of.

      Resolve spurred him towards them, his long, gangling legs automatically taking him out into the open, where he could be seen. This wretched man, already married for the first time, with a young son, had seduced a servant in his employ and instantly dismissed her when she’d told him she was pregnant.

      With him!

      For that he would be made to pay!

      He’d been seen; his intrusion had registered. Every nerve in Dimitri’s skinny body stretched and his mouth went dry. But his chin came up as the man who was his father walked towards him, leaving the woman who was his wife standing.

      ‘Who