Wedding Night With Her Enemy. Melanie Milburne

I’ve done all I can to hold off the creditors, but it’s at crisis point. Draco is my only lifeline...or at least the only one I’m prepared to take.’

      His new family. Those words hurt her more than she wanted to admit. When had she ever felt part of his old family? She’d been a ‘spare part’ child. A rescue plan, not a person. Her older brother Dion had contracted leukaemia as a toddler, and back in those days parents had been encouraged to have another child in case the new baby was a bone-marrow match. Needless to say, Allegra hadn’t come up with the goods. She had failed on both counts. Not a match. Not male. Dion had died before Allegra was two years old. She didn’t even remember him. All she remembered was she had been brought up by a series of nannies because her mother had been stricken with unrelenting grief. A grief that had morphed into depression so crippling, Allegra had been sent to boarding school to ‘give her mother a break’.

      Her mother had ‘accidentally’ taken an overdose of sleeping tablets the day before Allegra was to have come home for the summer the year she turned twelve. No one had said the word ‘suicide’ but she had always believed her mother had intended to end her life that day. The hardest part for Allegra was the sad realisation she hadn’t been enough for her mother. Her father hadn’t even bothered to hide his disappointment in having a female heir instead of the son he had worshipped. Hardly a day had gone by during her childhood and adolescence when Allegra hadn’t felt the sting of that disappointment.

      But now her father had moved on with a new wife and a new baby.

      Allegra had never belonged and now even less so.

      ‘Draco will tell you about our agreement himself,’ her father said. ‘Ah, here he is now.’

      Allegra whipped around to see Draco’s tall figure enter the room. Her eyes met his onyx gaze and a strange sensation spurted and then pooled deep and low in her belly. Every time she looked at him she had exactly the same reaction. Her senses jumped to attention. Her pulse raced. Her heart flip-flopped. Her breath hitched as though it were attached to strings and someone was jerking them. Hard.

      He was wearing casual clothes: sandstone-coloured chinos and a white shirt rolled past his strong, tanned forearms, which took nothing away from his aura of commanding authority. When Draco Papandreou walked into a room every head turned. Every female heart fluttered...as hers was doing right now, as though there were manic moths trapped in her heart valves. He oozed sex appeal from every cell of his six-foot-three frame. She could feel it calling out to her feminine hormones like an alpha wolf calling a mate. No other man had ever made her more aware of her body than him. Her body seemed to have a mind of its own when he came anywhere near.

      A wicked mind.

      A mind that conjured up images of him naked and his long, hair-roughened legs entwined with hers. The only way she could disguise the way he made her feel was to hide behind a screen of sniping sarcasm. He thought her a shrew, but so what? Better that than let him think she was secretly lusting after him. That the embarrassing crush she had foolishly acted on when she’d been sixteen had completely and utterly disappeared. That her dreams didn’t feature him in various erotic poses doing all sorts of X-rated things with her. She would rather be hanged and quartered and her body parts posted to the four corners of the earth than admit the only sex she’d had in the last year or so had been by herself, with him as her fantasy.

      That—God help her—the last time she’d had sex with a partner it had been Draco she had thought of the whole time.

      ‘Draco, how nice of you to gate crash a private family celebration. No hot date tonight with one of your bottle-blonde bimbos?’

      His mouth lifted at one corner in his signature half-cynical, half-amused smile. ‘You’re my date, agape mou. Hasn’t your father told you?’

      Allegra gave him a look that would have snap-frozen a gas flame. ‘Dream on, Papandreou.’

      His dark eyes glinted as if the thought of her saying no to him secretly turned him on. That was the trouble with having had a crush on a man since you’d been a pimple-spotted teenager. They never let you forget it. ‘I have a proposal to put to you,’ he said. ‘Would you like your father present or shall I do it in private?’

      ‘It’s immaterial to me where you do it because nothing you propose to me would ever in a thousand, million, squillion years evoke the word “yes” from me,’ Allegra said.

      ‘Er... I think I can hear one of the servants calling me,’ her father said and left the room with such haste it looked as though he were running from an explosion. But then, whenever she and Draco were left alone together the prospect of an explosion was a very real possibility.

      Draco’s gaze held hers in a tether that made the base of her spine shiver. ‘Alone at last.’

      Allegra broke the eye contact, walked over to the drinks tray and casually poured a glass of champagne. Or at least she hoped it looked casual. She wasn’t a big drinker but right now she wanted to suck on that bottle of champagne until it was empty. Then she wanted to throw the bottle at the nearest wall. Then the glasses, one by one, until they shattered into thousands of shards. Then every stick of furniture in the room.

      Smash. Bash. Crash.

      Why was he here? Why was he helping her father? What could it possibly have to do with her? The questions tumbled through her brain like the champagne tumbling into her glass. Her father’s business was hanging in the balance? How could that be? It was one of the most well-established businesses in Greece, and had operated for several generations. Other business people looked up to him, in awe of all he had achieved. Her father had always brandished his wealth like it was a ten-thousand-strong flock of golden-egg-laying geese. How had it come to this?

      Allegra turned and gave Draco a sugar-sweet smile. ‘‘Can I offer you a drink? Weed killer? Liquid nitrogen? Cyanide?’

      He gave a deep rumble of a laugh that did strange things to her insides. Things they had no business doing. Not for him. ‘Under the circumstances, champagne would be perfect.’

      She poured a glass and handed it to him, annoyed her hand wasn’t quite steady. He took the glass but in doing so his fingers brushed against hers. It was like being touched with a live current. The shock of it sent a jolt through her entire body, making her hormones sit up and beg for more. She snatched her hand back and then wished she hadn’t. He had an uncanny ability to read her body language like a cryptographer reading code.

      Everything about him unsettled her. Made her feel things she didn’t want to feel. But no matter how hard she fought it she couldn’t take her eyes off him. It was as though magnets were attached to her eyeballs and he was true north. She had seen a lot of beautiful men over the years but no one came close to having Draco’s pulse-tripping features. Ink-black hair with just enough curl to make her want to run her fingers through it and straighten out those sexy kinks. A mouth that was not just sensual but sinfully sculpted. A mouth that made her think of long, drugging kisses. The mere thought of his hard male mouth crushing hers was enough to make her get all hot and bothered and breathless.

      She had felt that mouth on hers. Once. Had felt it and had responded to it, only to have him push her away with an ego-crushing comment about how a silly little girl like her could never satisfy a man like him. For years that cruel put-down had savaged her self-esteem. It had ruined her sexual confidence—not that she’d had much to begin with. Damn him for being so darned attractive. Why couldn’t she stop gawping at him as if she were still that stupid, star-struck kid with a crush?

      He had shaved but the potent male hormones surging around his body would be enough to defeat any decent razorblade. Dark stubble was peppered along his lean jaw and around his mouth.

      Dear God, she had to stop looking at his mouth.

      She picked up her glass of champagne but before she could take a sip he held his glass within reach of hers. ‘To us.’

      Allegra pulled her glass back before it could touch his, sloshing the champagne down the front of her blouse. Of course, she was wearing silk. The saturating liquid made her right breast stand out