Mistress: Taming the Playboy. Sharon Kendrick

desired him—what perplexed him was the answering hunger which stirred in his blood.

      Laura nodded. ‘I … I can’t stay in this uniform. I’d better change while I’m in there—so I may be a couple of minutes.’

      ‘I’ll wait,’ he ground out, but her words triggered an unwanted series of explicit and strangely powerful memories as the door closed behind her. Of the young woman who had shed her clothes with such unashamed pleasure—taking him into her pink and white body and gasping out her pleasure. Had that same woman conceived his child that night? he found himself asking, the question spinning round and round in his brain as he stared at the dingy wall of the staff corridor.

      Laura took off her uniform and, leaving it neatly folded beside one of the laundry baskets, she pulled on her jeans, T-shirt and thin jumper—she’d experienced too many cold winters not to have learnt the benefits of layering. Then she picked up her handbag and waterproof jacket and walked outside, to where Constantine stood in exactly the same spot, like a daunting dark statue.

      Beneath the harsh glare of the overhead light, she began delving around in her handbag until she pulled out the picture of Alex taken at school, just a few months ago—she handed it to him.

      Constantine stared down at it in silence for a long moment. The child had black eyes and a faint olive tint to his skin, and the dark curls of his hair looked as if an attempt had been made to tame them especially for the photo—but already they were beginning to escape. He remembered his own hair being just as stubborn at such an age.

      Narrowing his eyes, he studied the image more carefully. The child was smiling, yes—but there was an unmistakable wariness about that smile, and Constantine felt a sudden wild leap of protectiveness, mixed in with an innate sense of denial. As if the logical side of his mind refused to accept that he could start the evening by hosting a glittering party and then the evening would end with a paternity claim foisted on him out of the blue. That he should suddenly be a father. He shook his head.

      ‘He looks just like you!’ Laura blurted out, wanting him to say something—anything—to break this tense and awful silence.

      An icy feeling chilled his skin. He had never felt quite so out of control as he now found himself—not since his mother had died and he had watched his father fall to pieces before his eyes, and had decided there and then that love did dangerous things to a man. ‘Does he?’

      ‘Oh, yes.’

      ‘That proves nothing,’ he snarled as he thrust the photograph back into her hand. ‘For all I know this might just be a very clever scam.’

      Laura swayed, unable to believe that he would think her so cold and calculating. So manipulative. So sexually free and easy. But why shouldn’t he think that? He didn’t know her—just as she didn’t know him. Though the more of himself he revealed, the more she was beginning to dislike him. Had he forgotten that she had gone into his arms an innocent, unable to resist the powerful sexual pull he had exerted?

      ‘B-but you knew that I was a virgin that night,’ she reminded him painfully.

      He shrugged, as if her words meant nothing—but the concept of a woman’s purity was both potent and important to a man as traditional as Constantine. He forced himself to remember his incredulity that a young woman should so casually give her virginity to a man she knew she would never see again. Or had he been naïve? With her he had played the man he had never allowed himself to be—the itinerant traveller without a care in the world. What if her sweet and supposed ignorance of his wealth and his status had all been an act? Suppose she’d seen his yacht and started asking questions in between serving him tea and having dinner with him? Wouldn’t that make her eagerness to lose her innocence to a man who was little more than a stranger more understandable?

      Constantine had spent his whole life being surrounded by people who wanted something from him—maybe this woman was no different.

      ‘You told me you were a virgin, but those could have simply been words. And, yes, I know that you gasped as I entered you,’ he said brutally, before pausing to add a final, painful boast. ‘But women always do—maybe it is something to do with my size, or my technique.’ He shrugged as her fingertips flew to her lips, hardening his heart against her obvious distress. ‘Maybe you thought that affecting purity would guarantee you some sort of future with the kind of man you were unlikely to meet again. That if I thought you were a virgin I would think more highly of you—rather than just as a woman who had casual sex with a man she’d just met.’

      Laura felt ill. It was as if he had taken her memories of the past and ground them to dust beneath his heel. ‘Well, if you think that,’ she said, putting the photo back in her wallet with trembling fingers, ‘then there’s nothing more to be said, is there?’

      But Constantine moved closer, so close that she could feel his body heat, and she hated the thought that flashed through her mind without warning. This was the man who had planted a seed in her body … whose child had grown within her. The image was so overwhelming that it made her instinctively shudder. And wasn’t nature famously canny, if cruel—conditioning women to desire the biological father of their child, even if that man was utterly heartless? Laura swallowed, because now he was lowering his head towards her so that she was caught in the intense ebony blaze of his eyes. Surely he wasn’t going to …?

      But he was.

      He caught her against him, crushing her tiny frame against his and enfolding her within his powerful arms. She could feel the fierce hard heat of his body where it touched hers, and knew that she should cry out her protest—but she could no sooner stop this than she could have stopped the earth spinning around the sun.

      His mouth came down to capture hers, and even though Laura was desperately inexperienced when it came to men she could sense the simmering anger which lay behind his kiss. This was a kiss which had more to do with anger than desire. But that didn’t stop her responding to it—didn’t stop her body flaring up with desire as if he had just ignited it with some hidden fuse. He despises me, was her last sane thought as the expert touch of his mouth made her lips part willingly beneath his.

      His hands were tight around her waist and her own were splayed over the hard chest, where she could feel the rapid thundering of his heart. And through the kiss Laura made a little sound of disbelief—wondering how she could respond with such melting pleasure to a man who clearly viewed her with utter contempt.

      The sound seemed to startle him, for just as suddenly as he had taken her in his arms he let her go, so that she had to steady herself against the wall as she stared up at him.

      ‘Wh-what was that all about?’ she breathed.

      What, indeed? With an effort, Constantine controlled his ragged breathing and stared at her, shaking his head as if to deny the intensity of that kiss. It had been all about desire, he told himself fiercely—a powerful desire which was no respecter of circumstance or status. And how extraordinary that he should feel such overwhelming lust for this washed-out little waitress. Inappropriate, too—when to do so would surely weaken his case against her preposterous claim.

      He looked down at her, his heart pounding so powerfully in his chest and his groin so hard with need that for a moment he couldn’t think straight. ‘You will need to get a DNA test done as quickly as possible,’ he grated.

      Laura’s eyes widened in distress. ‘But … But …’

      ‘But what?’ he cut in scornfully, and gave a short laugh as the aftermath of the kiss faded and reality flashed in like a sharp knife. ‘Did you really think that I was going to acknowledge the boy as a Karantinos heir—giving him access to one of the world’s greatest fortunes—simply because you say so and because the boy bears a passing resemblance to me?’

      ‘But you—’

      ‘Yes, he looks Greek,’ he finished witheringly. ‘But for all I know you might be one of those women who turn on for Greek men.’ He gave a blistering smile as his gaze raked over her kiss-swollen lips. ‘I think you’ve just demonstrated that to