‘Gio … you told me I needed to wise up when you informed me you were getting married and I did exactly like you said … the way I always did,’ Billie muttered tartly. ‘I wised up—and that means not listening to a word you have to say.’

‘I don’t know you like this.’

‘Why would you? It’s been two years since we were together and I’m not the same person any more,’ Billie told him with pride.

‘It might help if you could actually look me in the eye and tell me that,’ Gio quipped, scrutinising her rigid back.

Reddening, Billie finally spun round and collided dangerously with stunning dark deep-set eyes, heavily fringed with lashes. The very first time she had seen those eyes he had been ill, running a high temperature and a dangerous fever, but they’d been no less mesmerising.

She swallowed hard. ‘I’ve changed—’

‘Not convinced, moli mou.’

Gio gazed steadily back at her, enjoying the burst of sexual static now thickening the atmosphere. That her tension mirrored his told him everything he needed to know. Nothing had changed—certainly not the most basic chemistry of all.

‘I want you back.’

LYNNE GRAHAM was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen Mills & Boon® reader since her teens. She is very happily married, with an understanding husband who has learned to cook since she started to write! Her five children keep her on her toes. She has a very large dog, which knocks everything over, a very small terrier, which barks a lot, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.

The Secret His Mistress Carried

Lynne Graham

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Contents

Cover

Introduction

About the Author

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

EXTRACT

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

THE GREEK OIL BILLIONAIRE, Giorgios Letsos was throwing the party of the year at his London town house. Yet, instead of socialising, he was answering his emails, escaping the predatory females who had dogged his every footstep since the news of his divorce became public.

‘I heard,’ a female voice murmured outside the library door, which stood ajar after a maid had served her employer with a drink and failed to close it, ‘that he got rid of her because she did drugs.’

‘I heard,’ another voice piped up, ‘that he dumped her back on her father’s doorstep in the middle of the night with all her things.’

‘I heard,’ a third voice interposed,.‘that the pre-nup was so tight she didn’t get a cent.’

Gio was sardonically amused that speculation was keeping his neglected guests entertained. His cell phone pulsed and he answered it.

‘Mr Letsos? It’s Joe Henley from Henley Investigations...’

‘Yes?’ Gio asked absently, assuming it was the usual quarterly callback to report a negative result, his attention still on his laptop as he mulled over the purchase of another company with the kind of concentration and enjoyment he would never find at any party.

‘We’ve found her...er, at least I’m ninety per cent certain this time,’ the older man carefully framed because neither of them would ever forget the mistake he had once made when Gio had gone racing across the city in his limo only to find himself looking at a complete stranger. ‘I took a photo and emailed it to you. Perhaps you’d like to check it out before we go any further.’

We’ve found her... Suddenly, Gio was galvanised into action, springing out of his chair to his full imposing height of six feet four inches, squaring his wide shoulders while he flicked back to the emails. Fierce intensity had fired his dark golden eyes while he identified the right email before clicking on the attachment.

It wasn’t a great photo but the small curvaceous figure in the floral raincoat was instantly recognisable to his hard, searching gaze. Excitement and satisfaction roared in an intoxicating wave through Gio’s lean, powerful length.

‘You will be generously paid for this piece of detection,’ Gio breathed with rare warmth as he stared at the picture as though it might disappear at any moment. As she had done. She had contrived to lose herself so completely he had honestly begun to believe that even with all the resources he had at his disposal he would never track her down.

‘Where is she?’ he pressed.

‘I have the address, Mr Letsos, but I haven’t yet acquired sufficient info to make up a proper background report,’ Joe Henley explained. ‘If you give me a couple of days, I’ll proceed the usual way—’

‘All I need, all I want,’ Gio stressed with rippling impatience at the thought of waiting even an hour, ‘is her address.’

And suddenly, Gio was smiling for the first time in a very long time. He had finally found her. Of course that didn’t automatically mean he intended to forgive her, he swiftly qualified, straightening his muscular shoulders. His wide, sensual mouth compressed in a manner that would have made his chief executives quail, for he was a tough man, an inflexible, stubborn man, very much feared in the business world. After all, Billie had walked out on him, was, in fact, the only woman ever to pull that stunt on Gio Letsos. But there she was on screen, his Billie, still wearing flowery clothes like a nature explosion, a shock of caramel-coloured blonde curls flowing round her heart-shaped elfin face, her wide green eyes unusually serious.

‘You’re not a very active host,’ a voice remarked from the doorway. The speaker was as short as Gio was tall and as fair as Gio was dark but Gio and Leandros Conistis had been friends since their schooldays, both of them born into wealthy, privileged and pedigreed, if dysfunctional, Greek families and sent to England to board at exclusive fee-paying schools.

Gio closed down his laptop and studied his old friend. ‘Did you expect anything different?’

‘Even for you, that sounds arrogant,’ Leandros countered.

‘We both know that even if I threw a non-alcoholic party in a cave, it would be packed,’ Gio said drily, well aware of the pulling power of his vast wealth.

‘I didn’t know you were going to throw a divorce party.’

‘That would be tasteless. It’s not a divorce party.’

‘You can’t fool me,’ Leandros warned him.

Gio’s lean, strong face was expressionless, his famed reserve kicking in hard and fast. ‘Calisto and I had a very civilised divorce—’

‘And now you’re back on the market and the piranhas are circling,’ Leandros commented.

‘I will never marry again,’ Gio declared grimly.

‘Never is a long time...’

‘I mean it,’ Gio emphasised darkly.

His friend said nothing and then tried to lighten the atmosphere with an old joke, ‘At least you could trust Calisto to know that Canaletto isn’t the name of a race horse!’

Momentarily, Gio froze, his lean, dark, devastating features tightening, for that gag had worn thin years before he stopped hearing it. Sadly, not Billie’s most shining moment.

‘I mean...’ Leandros was still grinning ‘...I don’t blame you for ditching that one...what an airhead!’

Gio said nothing. Even with his oldest friend Gio was not given to making confidences or baring his soul. In actuality, Gio had not ditched Billie; he simply hadn’t taken her out with him in public again.

* * *

In the garage, Billie was going through garments and costume jewellery that she had acquired during the week to sell in her vintage clothes shop. She was sorting items into piles for washing, repair or specialist cleaning while dumping anything past its prime. While she worked, she talked non-stop to her son. ‘You’re absolutely the most cute and adorable baby ever born,’ she told Theo warmly as he kicked his legs in his high chair, smiled beatifically and happily got on with eating his mid-morning snacks.

With a sigh, she straightened her aching back, reflecting that all the bending and stretching had at least started knocking off a few pounds of the extra baby weight she had been carrying for months. The doctor had told her that that was normal but Billie had always had to watch her weight and she knew that while putting it on was easy, getting it back off again was not. And the problem with being only five feet two inches tall with an overly large bust and hips was that it only took a few surplus pounds and a thicker waistline to make her look like a little barrel.

She would take all the kids to the playground and walk round and round and round the little park with the pram, she decided ruefully.

‘Coffee?’ Dee called out of the back door.

‘I’d love one,’ Billie told her cousin and housemate, Dee, with a smile.

Thankfully, she hadn’t been lonely since she had rediscovered her friendship with Dee, yet they might so easily have missed out on meeting up again. Billie had been four months pregnant when she attended her aunt’s funeral in Yorkshire and got talking to Dee, whom she had gone to primary school with although Dee was several years older. Her housemate was a single parent as well. At her mother’s funeral her cousin had sported a fading black eye and more bruises than a boxer. Back then Dee had been living in a refuge for battered women with her twins. Jade and Davis were now five years old and had started school. For all of them life in the small town where Billie had bought a terraced house was a fresh start.

And life was good, Billie told herself firmly as she nursed a cup of coffee and listened to Dee complain about the amount of homework Jade was getting, which related more to Dee’s inability to understand maths in any shape or form than the teacher overloading Dee’s daughter with work. This life was ordinary and safe, she reasoned thoughtfully, soothed into relaxation by the hum of the washing machine and the silence of the children while they watched television in the sitting room next door. Admittedly there were no highs of exciting moments but there were no gigantic lows either.

Billie would never forget the agonies of her own worst low, a slough of despair that had lasted for endless weeks. That phase of her life had almost destroyed her and she could still barely repress a shudder when she recalled the depression that had engulfed her. She had been hurting so badly and there had seemed to be no way of either stopping or avoiding that pain. In fact, in the end it had taken an extraordinary and rather frightening development to show Billie a light at the end of the tunnel and a future she could actually face. She contemplated Theo with glowing satisfaction.

‘It’s not healthy to love a baby so much,’ Dee warned her with a frown. ‘Babies grow up and eventually leave you. Theo’s a lovely baby but he’s still just a child, Billie, and you can’t continue building your whole life round him. You need a man—’

‘I need a man like a fish needs a bicycle,’ Billie interposed without hesitation, reckoning that the disaster zone of her one and only real relationship was quite sufficient to have put her off men for life. ‘And who are you to talk?’

A tall, whip-thin blonde with grey eyes, Dee grimaced to concede the point. ‘Been there, done that.’

‘Exactly,’ Billie agreed.

‘But I don’t have the options you have,’ Dee argued. ‘If I were you, I’d be out there dating up a storm!’

Theo clutched Billie’s ankles and slowly levered himself upright, beaming with triumph at his achievement. Considering her son had had both legs in a special cast for months to cure his hip dysplasia, he was catching up on his mobility fast. For a split second he also reminded her powerfully of his father and she didn’t like that, didn’t go there in her mind because she didn’t allow herself to dwell on the past. Looking back on the mistakes she had made was counterproductive. Those experiences had taught her hard lessons and she had forced herself to move on past them.

Dee studied her cousin in frank frustration. Billie Smith was the equivalent of a man magnet. With the figure of a pocket Venus, a foaming mane of dense toffee-coloured curls and an exceptionally pretty face, Billie exuded the kind of natural warm and approachable sex appeal that attracted the opposite sex in droves. Men tried to chat Billie up in the supermarket, in car parks or in the street and if they were behind a car wheel they honked their horns, whistled out of the window and stopped to offer her lifts. Had it not been for Billie’s modest take on her own assets and her innate kindness, Dee was convinced she would have been consumed with envy. Of course she would have been the last to envy Billie’s unfortunate long-term affair with the ruthless, selfish swine who had broken her tender heart, she thought guiltily. Like Dee, Billie had paid a high price for falling in love with the wrong man.

The knocker on the front door sounded loudly. ‘I’ll get it,’ Billie declared because Dee was doing the ironing and Billie hated ironing with a passion.

Davis hurtled out of the sitting room, almost tripping over Theo, who was crawling earnestly in his mother’s wake. ‘There’s a big car...a really big car on the street!’ the little boy exclaimed.

It was probably a lorry with a delivery, Billie assumed, aware that any vehicle with wheels fascinated Dee’s son. She unlocked the door and then took an immediate and very abrupt step back, astonishment and panic shooting up inside her like a sudden jarring surge of adrenalin.

‘You’re a hard woman to track down,’ Gio murmured with supreme assurance.

Billie’s facial muscles were locked tight by shock. She couldn’t have shown him an expression to save her life but her wide green eyes were huge and anxious. ‘What are you doing here? Why would you have wanted to track me down, for goodness’ sake?’

Gio feasted his shrewd, dark gaze on her. Twenty four freckles adorned her nose and her upper cheekbones: having once counted them, he knew that for a fact. Her clear eyes, delicate features and lush mouth were utterly unchanged, he was relieved to note, his attention sliding inexorably down over her in a staged appraisal because he was strictly rationing himself. A faded blue cotton tee shirt stretched to capacity over her high, rounded breasts and his attention lingered there against his will, lust sending his libido leaping for the first time in a long time.

Relief rather than irritation consumed Gio because it had been far too long since he had experienced that reaction to a woman, so long indeed that he had feared that his marriage had stripped him of his essential masculinity in some peculiar fashion. But then, he would have been the first to acknowledge that he had never wanted any woman the way he had always wanted Billie. He had once flown her out to New York for a single night because he literally could not get through another week without her in his bed.

Billie was so worked up, so horrified that Gio Letsos had come looking and found her, that her feet were glued to the hall carpet. She stared at Gio, unwilling to credit that he was really there in the flesh in front of her, the man she had once loved, the man she had believed she would never see again. Her heart started to thump very, very hard and she sucked in a sudden snatch of oxygen, flinching as Theo drew her back to reality by hauling on her jeans-clad legs with his little fat hands to pull himself upright.

‘Billie...?’ Dee asked from the kitchen doorway. ‘Who is it? Is there something up?’

‘Nothing.’ Billie rescued her voice from her convulsed throat and stooped down in a jerky movement to scoop up Theo, her dazed gaze roaming over her cousin’s children who were studying Gio as though he had just dropped in from Mars. ‘Dee...could you take the kids?’

Her voice emerged all husky and shaken and she had to force herself to direct her attention back to Gio while Dee put out her arms for Theo and urged her own children into the kitchen with her. The kitchen door closed, sealing the hall into a sudden claustrophobic silence.

‘I asked you why you were here and why you would have looked for me in the first place,’ Billie reminded her unwelcome visitor doggedly.

‘Are you really planning to stage this long-overdue meeting on the doorstep?’ Gio drawled, all velvety smoothness and sophistication. He was taking control the way he always did and it unnerved her.

‘Why not?’ Billie whispered helplessly, struggling to drag her eyes from his devastatingly handsome features, remembering all the many times she had run her fingers through his thick black hair, loving him, loving each and every thing about him, even his flaws. ‘I don’t owe you the time of day!’

Gio was disconcerted by that comeback from a woman who had once respected his every word and done everything possible to please him, and his lean, strong face set taut and hard. ‘You’re being rude,’ he told her icily.

Billie’s hand clutched at the edge of the front door while she wondered if its support was all that was keeping her upright. He was so cool, so collected and such a bully, really couldn’t help being one. Life had spoilt Gio Letsos although he had never seen it that way. People flattered him to an extraordinary degree and went out of their way to win his approval. And once she had been the same, she acknowledged wretchedly. She had never stood up to him, never told him how she really felt, had always been far too afraid of spoiling things and then losing him. Only a very naïve woman would have failed to foresee that naturally Gio would choose to walk away from her first.

Her abstracted gaze took in the fact that her neighbour was staring over the fence at them, possibly even close enough to catch snippets of the conversation. Embarrassment made her step back from the door. ‘You’d better come in.’

Gio strode into the tiny sitting room, stepping with care round the toys strewn untidily about the room. He swallowed up all the available space, Billie thought numbly as she hastily switched off the television, which was playing a noisy children’s cartoon. He was so tall, so broad and she had forgotten the way he dominated any room he occupied.

‘You said I was rude,’ she said flatly as she carefully shut the sitting room door, ensuring their privacy.

She kept her back turned to him as long as possible, shielding herself from the explosive effects of Gio’s potent charisma as best she could. It wasn’t fair that just being in the same room with him should send a shower of sparks tingling through her and give her that oh, so dangerous sense of excitement and anticipation that had once seduced her into behaving like a very stupid woman. He was so very, very good-looking that it hurt to look at him and the effect of seeing him on the doorstep had stimulated her memories. In her mind’s eye, she was seeing the straight black brows, the utterly gorgeous dark golden eyes, the distinctly imperious blade of his nose, the high cheekbones, the bronzed Mediterranean skin, the beautiful, wide, sensual mouth that had made seduction an indescribable pleasure.

‘You were rude,’ Gio told her without hesitation.

‘But I was entitled to be. Two years ago, you married another woman,’ Billie reminded him over her shoulder, angry that it could still hurt her to have to force that statement out. Unhappily there was no escaping the demeaning truth that she had been good enough to sleep with but not good enough to be considered for anything more important or permanent in Gio’s life. ‘You’re nothing to do with me any more!’

‘I’m divorced,’ Gio breathed in a raw-edged undertone because nothing was going as he had expected. Billie had never attacked him before, never dared to question his behaviour. This new version of Billie was taking him by surprise.

‘How is that my business?’ Billie shot back at him, quick as a flash, while refusing to think that startling declaration of divorce through or react to it in any way. ‘I still remember you telling me that your marriage was none of my business.’

‘But then you made it your business by using it as an excuse to walk out on me.’

‘I didn’t need an excuse!’ A familiar sense of wonderment was gripping Billie while she listened, once again, to Gio vocalise his supremely selfish and arrogant outlook. ‘The minute you married, we were over and done. I never pretended it would be any other way—’

‘You were my mistress!’

Colour lashed Billie’s cheeks as though he had slapped her. ‘In your mind, not mine. I was only with you because I fell in love with you, not for the jewellery and the clothes and the fancy apartment,’ she spelled out thinly, her hands curling together in front of her in a defensive, nervous gesture.

‘But there was no reason for you to leave. My bride had no objection to me keeping a mistress,’ Gio stressed with growing impatience.

My bride. Even the label still hurt. The back of her eyelids stung with tears and she hated herself but she hated him more. Gio was so insensitive, so self-centred. How on earth had she ever contrived to love him? And why the heck would he have tracked her down? For what possible reason?

‘Sometimes I honestly think you talk like an alien from another planet, Gio,’ Billie countered, tightly controlling her anger and her pain. ‘In my world decent men do not marry one woman and continue sleeping with another. That is not acceptable to me and the idea that you found a woman to marry who didn’t care who you slept with just depresses me.’

‘But I am free now,’ Gio reminded her, frowning while he wondered what the hell had happened to Billie to change her so much that she could start arguing with him the minute he reappeared.

‘I don’t want to be rude but I’d like you to leave,’ Billie admitted unevenly.

‘You haven’t even heard what I have to say. What the hell is the matter with you?’ Gio demanded, shaken into outright disbelief by her aggressive attitude.

‘I don’t want to hear what you have to say. Why would I? We broke up a long time ago!’

‘We didn’t break up—you walked out, vanished,’ Gio contradicted with harsh censorious emphasis.

‘Gio...you told me I needed to wise up when you informed me you were getting married and I did exactly like you said...the way I always did,’ Billie muttered tartly. ‘I wised up and that means not listening to a word you have to say.’

‘I don’t know you like this.’

‘Why would you? It’s been two years since we were together and I’m not the same person any more,’ Billie told him with pride.

‘It might help if you could actually look me in the eye and tell me that,’ Gio quipped, scrutinising her rigid back.

Reddening, Billie finally spun round and collided dangerously with stunning deep-set dark eyes, heavily fringed with lashes. The very first time she had seen those eyes he had been ill, running a high temperature and a dangerous fever, but those eyes had been no less mesmerising. She swallowed hard. ‘I’ve changed—’

‘Not convinced, moli mou.’ Gio gazed steadily back at her, enjoying the burst of sexual static now thickening the atmosphere. That her tension mirrored his told him everything he needed to know. Nothing had changed, certainly not the most basic chemistry of all. ‘I want you back.’

In shock, Billie stopped breathing, but within seconds his admission made a crazy kind of Gio-based sense to her. By any standards, his marriage had lasted a ludicrously short time and she knew Gio didn’t like change in his private life. To his skewed way of thinking, reconciling with his former mistress might well now seem the most attractive and convenient option. ‘No way,’ she said breathlessly.

‘I still want you and you still want me—’

‘I’ve built a whole new life here. I can’t just abandon it,’ Billie muttered, wondering why on earth she was stooping to making such empty excuses. ‘You and me...it didn’t work—’

‘It worked brilliantly,’ he contradicted.

‘And your marriage didn’t?’ Billie could not resist asking.

His hard facial bones locked in an expression she remembered from the past. It closed her out, warned she had crossed a boundary. ‘Since I’m divorced, obviously not,’ he fielded, smooth as glass.

‘But you and I,’ Gio husked, reaching out to grasp her hands before she could guess his intention, ‘did work very successfully—’

‘Depends on your definition of successful,’ Billie parried, her hands trembling in his, perspiration dampening her entire skin surface. ‘I wasn’t happy—’

‘You were always happy,’ Gio had no hesitation in asserting, because her chirpy, sunny nature was what he remembered most about her.

Billie tried and failed to draw her hands free of his without making a production out of it. ‘I wasn’t happy,’ she repeated again, shivering as the almost forgotten scent of him assailed her nostrils: clean, fresh male overlaid with tones of citrus and something that was uniquely Gio, so familiar even after all the time that had passed that for a charged and very dangerous split second she wanted to lean closer and sniff him up like an intoxicating drug. ‘Please let go, Gio. Coming here was a waste of your time.’

His hot urgent mouth swooped down on hers and he feasted on her parted lips with fiery enthusiasm, plundering and ravishing with a hunger she had never forgotten. Electrifying excitement shot through Billie like a lightning bolt to stimulate every skin cell in her body. The erotic thrust of his tongue into her mouth consumed her with burning heat and a crazy urge to get even closer to that lean, virile body of his. Wild hunger started a glow of warmth in her pelvis and made her nipples tighten and strain. She wanted, she wanted...and then sanity returned like a cold drop of water on her overheated skin when Theo wailed from the kitchen, jarring every maternal sense she possessed back to wakefulness.

Wrenching her mouth free of his, Billie looked up into the smouldering dark golden eyes that had once broken her heart and said what she needed to say, what she owed it to herself to say. ‘Please leave, Gio...’

Billie stood at the window watching Gio climb into his long black limousine on the street outside, her fingernails biting into her palms like sharp-pointed knives. Without even trying he had torn her in two, teaching her that her recovery was not as complete as she had imagined. Letting Gio walk away from her had almost killed her and there was still a weak, wicked part of her that longed to snatch him back with both hands. But she knew it was pointless, because Gio would be furious if he ever found out that Theo was his child.

Right from the start, Billie had known and accepted that truth when, finding herself accidentally pregnant, she had chosen to give birth to a baby fathered by a male who had only wanted her for her body. There would be no support or understanding from Gio on the score of an illegitimate child, whom he would prefer not to have been born. She had only been with him a few weeks when he had told her that if she ever fell pregnant he would regard it as a disaster and that it would destroy their relationship, so she couldn’t say she hadn’t been warned. She had finally decided that what he didn’t know about wouldn’t hurt him and she had so much love to give their son that she had convinced herself that Theo would not suffer from the lack of a father.

Or so she had thought...until after Theo’s birth when concerns began to steadily nibble gaping holes in her one-time conviction that she had made the right decision. Then she had guiltily asked herself if she was the most selfish woman alive to have chosen to have a child in secrecy who would never have a father and she had worried even more about how Theo might react when he was older to what little she would have to tell him.

Would her son despise her some day for the role she had played in Gio’s bed? Would Theo resent the fact that although his father was rich he had grown up in comparative poverty? Would he blame her then for having brought him into the world on such terms?

CHAPTER TWO

BILLIE STUFFED HER FACE in the pillow and sobbed her heart out for the first time in two long years and once again Gio had provided the spur. When she had finally cried out all the pain and the many other unidentifiable emotions attacking her, Dee was by her side, seated on the edge of the bed and stroking her head in an effort to comfort her.

‘Where’s Theo?’ Billie whispered instantly.

‘I put him down for his nap.’

‘Sorry about this,’ Billie mumbled, sliding off the bed to go into the bathroom and splash her face with cold water because her eyes and her nose were red.

When she reappeared, Dee gave her an uncomfortable look. ‘That was him, wasn’t it? Theo’s dad?’

Billie didn’t trust herself to speak and she simply nodded.

‘He’s absolutely gorgeous,’ Dee remarked guiltily. ‘I’m not surprised you fell for him but what’s with the limousine? You said he was well off, not that he was minted...’

‘He’s minted,’ Billie confirmed gruffly. ‘Seeing him again was upsetting.’

‘What did he want?’

‘Something he’s not going to get.’

* * *

Rejection was the very last thing Gio had anticipated. After assigning two of his security team to watch Billie round the clock and ensure that she did not disappear again, it occurred to him that perhaps there was another man in her life. The idea sent him into such a violent maelstrom of reaction that he couldn’t think straight for several rage-charged minutes. For the very first time ever he wondered how Billie had felt when he had told her about Calisto and he groaned out loud. He didn’t do complicated with women but Billie was certainly making it that way.

How had he believed it would be when he turned up out of nowhere? he asked himself impatiently. Billie had asked him to leave: he still couldn’t believe that. She was angry with him: that reality had sunk in. He had married another woman and she was holding that against him but how could she? Gio raked long brown fingers of frustration through the curly black hair he kept close cropped to his skull. She could not possibly have believed that he might marry her...could she?

He was the acknowledged head of his family owing to his grandfather’s long-term ill health, and it had always been Gio’s role and responsibility to rebuild the aristocratic, conservative and hugely wealthy Letsos clan. He had vowed as a boy that he would never repeat the mistakes his own father had made. His great-grandfather had had a mistress, his grandfather had had a mistress but Gio’s father had been less conventional. Dmitri Letsos had divorced Gio’s mother to marry his mistress in a seriously destructive act of disloyalty to his own blood. Family unity had never recovered from that blow and the older man had forfeited all respect. Gio’s mother had died and he and his sisters’ childhoods had been wrecked while Dmitri had almost bankrupted the family business in an effort to satisfy his spendthrift second wife’s caviar tastes.

Well, if there was another man in Billie’s bed, he would soon find out, Gio rationalised with clenched teeth and a jaw line set rock hard with tension. In twenty-four hours he would have the background report from Henley Investigations. Regrettably he was not a patient man and he had assumed she would throw herself back into his arms the instant he told her that he was divorced. Why hadn’t she?

Her response when he’d kissed her had been...hot. In fact Gio got hard just thinking about it, his libido as much as his brain telling him exactly what and who he needed back in his life. He wondered if he should send her flowers. She was crazy about flowers, had always been buying them, arranging them, sniffing them, growing them. It had been selfish of him not to buy her a house with a garden, he conceded darkly, wondering what other oversights he must’ve made when the woman who had once worshipped the ground he walked on now felt able to show him the door. No woman had ever done that to Gio Letsos. He knew he could have virtually any woman he wanted but that wasn’t a consolation when he only wanted Billie back where she belonged: in his bed.

* * *

After a disturbed night of sleep, Billie rose around dawn, fed all the kids and tidied up. It was only at weekends that she and Dee saw much of each other. On weekdays, she took the kids to school to allow Dee, who worked evenings as a bartender in a local pub, a little longer in bed. Theo went to work with Billie in the mornings and Dee collected him at lunchtime and minded the three kids for the afternoon. After the shop closed, they all ate an early evening meal together before Dee went off to do her shift. It was an arrangement that worked very well for both women and Billie was fond of Dee and her company because her two years in a city apartment where Gio was only an occasional visitor had been full of lonely days and nights.

Of course, in those days she had learned to make good use of her free time, she acknowledged wryly. In those two years with Gio she had acquired GCSEs and two A-levels, not to mention certificates in various courses ranging from cordon-bleu cookery and flower arranging to business start-up qualifications. Gio might not have noticed any of that or have shown the smallest interest in what she did when he wasn’t around, but making up for the education she had missed out on while she was acting as her grandmother’s carer throughout the teenage years had done much to raise Billie’s low self-esteem. After all, when she had first met Gio she had been working as a cleaner because she had lacked the qualifications that would have helped her to aspire to a better-paid job.

As she placed the new pieces of costume jewellery on display in the battered antique armoire she had bought for that purpose, she was a thousand mental miles away on an instinctive walk down the memory lane of her past. Unlike Gio, Billie did not have a proper family tree or at least if she did it was unknown to her. Her mother, Sally, had been an only child, who had reputedly gone wild as a teenager. As Billie’s only source of information about her mother had been her mean-spirited grandmother she was inclined to take that story with a pinch of salt. Billie had no memory of ever meeting Sally and absolutely no idea who had fathered her, although she strongly suspected that his name had been Billy.

Billie’s grandma and her mother had lived separate lives for years before the day Sally turned up without warning on her parents’ doorstep with Billie as a baby. Her grandfather had persuaded her grandmother to allow Sally to stay for one night, a decision she had had Billie’s lifetime to loudly and repeatedly regret because when the older woman got up the next morning she had discovered that Sally had gone, leaving her child behind her.

Unfortunately, Billie’s grandma had neither wanted nor loved her and, even though she received an allowance from social services for raising her grandchild, her resentment of the responsibility had never faded. Billie’s grandpa had been more caring but he had also been a drunk and only occasionally in a fit state to take an interest in her. Indeed, Billie had often thought that her background was the main reason why she had been such a pushover for Gio. His desire for her, his apparent need to look after her, had been the closest thing to love that she had ever known. So, although she would never have admitted it to him, she had been madly, insanely happy with Gio because he had made her feel loved...right up until the dreadful day he’d told her that he had to get married and father a child for the sake of his all-important snobby Greek family and his precious business empire.

Chilled by the sobering and humiliating recollection that Gio had not even considered her a possible candidate for a ring, Billie brought out the new garments she had prepared at home and began to price the stock. Theo was napping peacefully in his travel cot in his little cubbyhole at the back of the shop. Customers browsed, purchased and departed as she served them while she worked. Only a month earlier, she had hired her first employee, a Polish woman called Iwona, who did part-time hours when Billie couldn’t be at the shop. In fact, the business was doing well and was steadily fulfilling all Billie’s hopes. But then she had always loved the character and superior workmanship of vintage clothes and she was careful only to stock quality items. Slowly but surely she had built up a list of regular customers.

Gio climbed out of his limo while his chauffeur argued with the traffic warden and his security team were disgorged from the vehicle behind. He scanned the shop front, adorned with the name, ‘Billie’s Vintage’, and frowned, positively transfixed by the idea that Billie could have opened up her own business. Yet there was the proof in front of him. Theos! He shook his arrogant dark head, thinking that women were strange, unpredictable creatures and finally wondering if he had ever really known Billie at all because nothing that she had done or said so far had appeared on his list of her potential reactions. His frown grew even darker, lending a saturnine quality to his hard, dark features. He had important projects to manage and people to see and yet here he was still stuck after twenty-four exceedingly boring hours in a back-end-of-nowhere Yorkshire town chasing Billie! What kind of sense did that make?

Dee and Iwona arrived at the shop within minutes of each other. Dee strapped Theo into his pram and asked Billie what she fancied eating for supper while Iwona wrapped a purchase for a customer. That was when Gio strode in, utterly frying Billie’s brain cells because she stopped mid-conversation with Dee and totally forgot what she had been about to say.

Garbed in a charcoal designer pinstripe suit that sheathed his tall, muscular body like a tailor-made glove, Gio simply took her breath away. His white shirt accentuated his bronzed complexion and the very masculine black stubble already beginning to shadow his handsome jaw line. A startling sunburst of honeyed heat blossomed between Billie’s thighs and she pressed them tight together, her colour steadily climbing. She was even more painfully aware of the swelling heaviness of her breasts and the sudden tightening of her nipples. She was appalled that Gio could still have that immediate an effect on her, an effect that was markedly more intense than the day before when she had blamed her surrender to that kiss on the fact that he had caught her unprepared. What was her excuse this time?

‘Billie...’ Gio breathed in his dark, velvet drawl, poised several feet away and acting as if his appearance in her shop were the most natural thing in the world.

‘G-Gio...’ she stammered half under her breath, quickly closing the space between them, fearful of being overheard. ‘Why are you here?’

‘You’re not stupid, don’t act it,’ Gio advised, glancing around. ‘So, you left me to open a shop—’

‘You. Left. Me,’ Billie spelt out with a bitterness she could not restrain but it was the truth: he had left her to place a wedding ring on another woman’s finger.

‘We can’t talk here. We’ll catch up back at my hotel over lunch,’ Gio decreed, closing a hand round her arm.

‘If you don’t let go, I’ll slap you!’ Billie hissed, determined not to be railroaded by his overpowering personality and drive.

His dark eyes glittered like pyrite as if the prospect of a good slap was an entertaining challenge. ‘Lunch, pouli mou?’

‘We’ve got nothing to say to each other,’ Billie told him, noting that his entire hand was still wrapped round her arm, forcing her to stay by his side.

His sensual mouth quirked as he studied her full pink mouth. ‘Then you can listen—’

Butterflies danced in her tummy as she looked up at him. ‘Don’t want to talk, don’t want to listen either—’

‘Tough,’ Gio pronounced and then he did something she would never ever have dreamt he would do in public. He just bent down and scooped her up off her feet and headed for the door.

‘Put me down, Gio!’ she gasped, making a wild grab at the flouncy skirt of her dress, which had flown up to expose her thighs. ‘Have you gone crazy?’

Gio glanced at the two women standing together behind the counter. ‘I’m taking Billie out for lunch. She’ll be back in a couple of hours,’ he explained with complete cool.

‘Gio!’ Billie launched in disbelief, catching a glimpse of Dee’s laughing face before Gio shouldered open the door and hid her cousin from view.

The chauffeur swept open the passenger door as if they were royalty and Gio shoved her into the back seat with scant ceremony. ‘You should’ve known that I wouldn’t stand there arguing with an audience,’ he pointed out smoothly. ‘In any case, I’m out of patience and I’m hungry.’

In a series of angry motions, Billie smoothed down her dress, tugging it over her knees. ‘Why didn’t you go back to London yesterday?’

‘You should know by now that saying no to me only makes me try harder.’

Billie rolled her bright green eyes in mockery and said angrily, ‘Well, how would I know that when I never did say no to you?’

Disconcertingly Gio laughed, genuine amusement illuminating his darkly handsome face. ‘I’ve missed you, Billie.’

Her annoyance fell away and she turned her head in a sharp movement, both shaken and hurt by that claim and by how very empty it was. ‘You got married. How could you possibly have missed me?’

‘I don’t know but I did,’ Gio ground out truthfully. ‘You were so much a part of my life.’

‘No, I was like one tiny little drawer in a big busy cabinet of drawers,’ Billie countered. ‘I was never part of the rest of your life.’

Gio was sincerely astonished by that statement. He had phoned her twice a day every day no matter where he was in the world and no matter how busy he was. Her soothing happy-go-lucky chatter had provided him with necessary downtime from a hectic schedule. In truth he had never had so close a relationship with any woman either before or after her. He had trusted her and he had been honest with her, which was a very rare thing between a single man and a single woman in Gio’s world. But it was steadily sinking in on him that none of that mattered because he had married Calisto. Billie, who had never shown a jealous, distrustful streak in her life, had clearly been jealous and distressed by that development. He didn’t like that idea, he didn’t like it at all, and he kicked out that thought so fast it might never have existed.

Gio had constructed a protective shell while he was still a child to ensure that he could remain untouched by emotional reactions. Emotion didn’t need to get involved. Emotion complicated and only exacerbated an already difficult situation. Calm, common sense and control had always worked far more efficiently for Gio in every field of his life, only not with Billie, he acknowledged grudgingly. But the past was the past and he couldn’t change it, while life had taught him that with enough money, energy and purpose he could form the future into any shape he wanted.

Billie, however, was not practical; she was all about emotion and perhaps that essential difference between them had been one of the things that attracted him to her and which was now sending her in the wrong direction. His shrewd, dark eyes rested on her angry, flushed face and suddenly he wanted to flatten her to the seat of the limo and teach her that there were far more satisfying responses. Inky spiky lashes lowering, he scanned her from her bright eyes to her lush mouth right down over the glorious breasts he had loved to play with and the long shapely legs he had loved to slide between. Sex with Billie was amazing. Just thinking about her made heaviness stir at his groin. Being with her without being able to reach out and take what he wanted, what he had once taken for granted, not only felt weird, but also struck him as a form of refined torture.

‘I want you back,’ Gio declared with stubborn force. ‘I’ve been looking for you ever since you disappeared.’

‘Your wife must’ve liked that.’

‘Leave Calisto out of this...’

Even the sound of her name on Gio’s lips stung Billie like a whip across tender skin. She knew she was being too sensitive. He had married another woman two years ago and she needed to move on. Even if he hadn’t moved on? That was too complex for her, shouted too loudly of wishful thinking. And, my goodness, she had done enough of that while she was still with him and what had those optimistic hopes got her? A broken heart and, right now, the pieces of that foolish heart were rattling like funeral bells. This was the guy she had loved as she had never dreamt she could ever love anyone and he had damaged her beyond forgiveness. Even walking away as she had known she must had almost destroyed her, but not even for him would she have sunk low enough to sleep with another woman’s husband.

‘I can’t believe you’re wasting your time with this,’ Billie admitted abruptly, her soft full mouth compressed to a flat, tense line. ‘I mean, what are you doing here? Why do you even want to see me again? It makes no sense for either of us!’

Gio searched her animated face and wondered what made her seem so beautiful to him. In some corner of his brain, he knew that from a purist’s point of view she never had met and never would meet the standard tenets of beauty because her nose turned up at the end and her eyes and her mouth were too big for her face and in a sudden shower of rain her hair turned into an unbelievably frizzy mess. But dry it fell in a silky tangle of curls the colour of toffee halfway to her waist and that hair had cloaked his body many, many times on occasions so intimate it hurt to remember them and still be deprived of the right to repeat them.

‘Stop looking at me like that,’ Billie told him thinly, the colour of awareness mantling her cheeks, a warm glow unfurling low in her body to remind her of how much time had passed since she had last been touched. She had got pregnant, become a new mother, set up a new home and business and kept so busy-busy-busy for months on end that she fell into bed exhausted every night. It took Gio’s reappearance to remind her that life could offer more self-indulgent pastimes.

‘Like what?’

‘Like we’re still...you know,’ she completed, eyelashes lowering.

‘Like I still want to be inside you?’ Gio queried thickly. ‘But I do and right at this very minute I’m aching for you...’

A tiny clenching sensation in a place she refused to think about forced Billie to shift uneasily on the seat. ‘I really didn’t need to know that, Gio. That was a very inappropriate comment to make—’

Gio skated a long forefinger down over the back of the hand she had tautly braced to the leather seat. ‘At least it was honest and you’re not being honest—’

‘I’m not coming back to you!’ Billie interrupted loudly. ‘I’ve got another life now—’

‘Another man?’ Gio slotted in, deep accented voice raw with unspoken vibrations.

And Billie seized on that convenient excuse like a drowning swimmer thrown a lifebelt. ‘Yes. There’s someone else.’

Every lean, long line of Gio’s big body tensed. ‘Tell me about him.’

Billie was thinking about her son. ‘He’s extremely important to me and I would never do anything to hurt or upset him.’

‘There’s nothing I won’t do to get you back,’ Gio warned as the limousine drew up outside his country-house hotel and the chauffeur leapt out to open the door. He also grasped at that same moment that he was not as law-abiding as he had always assumed because he knew that he was willing to break rules in order to get Billie back.

Billie stole a reluctant glance at his lean, hard face, clashing with the golden glitter of his stunning eyes. She froze in consternation at that expression of menace she had never seen there before. ‘Is there some reason you can’t let me be happy without you?’ she asked suddenly. ‘I think I’ve paid my dues, Gio.’

Gio’s nostrils flared at that declaration, exasperation roughening the edges of an anger he knew he had no right to express. If she had another man, she would naturally get rid of him because he refused to credit that any other man could set her on fire the way he did. But nothing could assuage his bone-deep ferocious reaction to being forced to imagine Billie in bed with someone else. Billie had always been his alone, indisputably his.

As they crossed the foyer of the opulent hotel a familiar voice hailed Billie and she stopped dead and flipped round with a smile as a tall blond man in expensive country casuals moved towards her eagerly to greet her.

‘Simon, how are you?’ she said warmly.

‘I’ve got an address for you.’ Simon dug into his wallet to produce a piece of paper. ‘Got a pen?’

Billie realised her bag had been left behind at the shop and looked expectantly at Gio. ‘Pen?’ she pressed.

Totally unaccustomed to being ignored while others went about their business around him, Gio withdrew a gold pen from his pocket with pronounced reluctance, his beautiful obstinate mouth sardonic.

Simon borrowed the pen and wrote the address on the back of a business card. ‘There’s a heap of stuff there you’ll like and it won’t cost you much either. The seller just wants the house cleared.’

Impervious to the reality that Gio was standing by her side like a towering and forbidding pillar of black ice, Billie beamed at the taller man. ‘Thanks, Simon. I really appreciate this.’

Simon studied her with the same appreciation Gio had often seen on male faces around Billie and his perfect white teeth gritted. ‘Maybe you’ll let me treat you to lunch here some day soon?’

Gio shot an arm like a statement round Billie’s slender spine. ‘Regrettably she’s already taken.’

Ignoring that intercession, Billie reddened but kept on valiantly smiling. ‘I’d like that, Simon. Call me,’ she suggested while knowing that she was only encouraging the other man to make a point for Gio’s benefit and feeling guilty about that because Gio was making her behave badly as well.

‘What was that all about?’ Gio demanded grittily as he urged her into the lift.

‘Simon’s an antique dealer. He tips me off about house clearances. I know a lot of dealers. That’s how I built up my business,’ Billie advanced with pride.

‘You can open a shop in London. I’ll pay for it,’ Gio told her grimly.

Unimpressed, Billie glanced wryly at him. ‘Well, in a roundabout way you paid for this one and my house, so I don’t think it would be right for you to pay anything more.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I sold a piece of jewellery for cash. It was something you gave me.’

Gio frowned. ‘You left everything I ever gave you behind.’

‘No, I took one piece. Your very first gift,’ Billie extended. ‘I had no idea how much it was worth. That was a surprise, I can tell you.’

‘Was it?’ Gio couldn’t even remember his first gift to her and he would have been prepared to swear, having checked the jewellery she left behind, that she had taken nothing with her when she walked out.

‘Yes, you’re so extravagant it’s a wonder you’re not broke. You hardly knew me and yet you spent an absolute fortune on that diamond pendant,’ Billie told him critically. ‘It paid for my house and setting up the shop. I couldn’t believe how valuable it was!’

Gio thrust open the door of his suite. And just like that, the memory of the gift returned to him. He had bought the pendant after their first night together and he was furious that she had just sold it as if it meant nothing to her. ‘I don’t believe that there’s another man in your life.’

‘I’m not coming back to you,’ Billie told him in the most ludicrously apologetic tone. ‘Why would I want a shop in London? Why would I want to move? I’m happy here. And believe it or not there are men out there who would take me out with them into a public restaurant instead of hiding me inside their suite!’

Billie had served a direct hit. Gio paled beneath his Mediterranean tan. ‘We’re in my suite only because we need a private setting in which to talk.’

Billie gave him a wry smile. ‘Maybe that’s true this one time, Gio, but when it went on for almost two years, even I got the message. You might as well have been married from the moment I met you. I was like a guilty, dirty secret in your life.’

‘That is not true.’

‘No point arguing about the past now,’ Billie parried with determination. ‘It’s not worth it.’

‘Of course it is...I want you back.’ A spasm of open exasperation crossed Gio’s lean dark face when a knock sounded on the door, announcing the arrival of two waiters pushing a rattling trolley: lunch had arrived.

Billie folded her arms, thinking of her grandpa’s favourite winning racehorse, Canaletto, and the reality that just four years ago she had never heard of the artist called Canaletto before. Recalling that blunder still made Billie cringe and die inside herself, for the moment she had entered the conversation she had known her mistake but it had been far too late to cover it up. Unhappily for her, the one and only time Gio had taken her out to mix with his friends she had made an outsize fool of herself...and him.

Although he had reacted with neither anger nor criticism, he had dismissed her attempts to talk about the incident and explain that she had grown up more at home in betting shops than museums. But she had known that she had seriously embarrassed him in public in a way that would not be forgotten and, even worse, in a manner that had literally signposted the reality that she and Gio came from worlds and educational backgrounds that were light years apart.

That was why she had never complained about being excluded from his social life and why she had happily settled for dinners out alone in discreet locations where he was unlikely to meet anyone he knew. She had guessed that he was worried she would let him down again and without his awareness she had swiftly set about a self-improvement course in the hope that eventually he would notice and give her another chance. Sadness filled Billie when she recalled that naivety born in the early months of their relationship before she had reached the daunting moment of discovery and slow, painful acceptance that she was not Gio’s girlfriend but instead his mistress, there to dispense sexual entertainment and not much else and never ever to be taken seriously.

‘You’re so quiet. I’m not accustomed to you being quiet with me,’ Gio confessed in growing frustration, closing his hands over her slender, taut shoulders, massaging the tense muscles there as the door flipped shut behind the waiters. ‘Talk to me, Billie. Tell me what you want.’

Feeling the warm tingling of his touch snaking down her rigid spine and the pinching tautness of her nipples while resisting a powerfully seductive urge to lean back into the strong, sheltering heat of Gio, Billie pulled away and quickly sank down into one of the chairs by the beautifully set table. Talk to me. That was an insanely perplexing invitation to receive from a male like Gio, who didn’t like serious conversations and who smoothly sidestepped or downright ignored emotional moments and phrases.

‘We’ve got nothing to discuss,’ she pointed out, tucking into the first course with sudden appetite because while she ate she did not have to speak and had less excuse to be looking at Gio. Gio, surely one of the most beautiful men ever born? She glanced at him from below her lashes, roaming with helpless appreciation across his sculpted features to relish the spectacular slash of his high cheekbones and the tough masculine angle of his jaw. He was out of her reach. He was rich and successful, handsome and sophisticated, educated and pedigreed, everything she was not. He had always been out of her reach. If only she had had the wit to accept that obvious fact, she would never have got involved and never have got hurt.

‘Is there really another man?’ Gio asked very quietly, the rich velvety depth of his accented drawl filling her with pleasure, no matter how hard she tried not to react that way. But that was the same voice she had once lived to hear on the phone when he was away from her, and she could not break her instinctive appreciation.

Billie worked out the question and flushed as she collided with stunning tigerish golden eyes surrounded by ebony lashes. She breathed in, intending to lie, breathed out, knew that for some reason she didn’t want to lie. Perhaps it was because if she lied he would come down on her like a granite block to get further information about the supposed man in her life and would eventually cleverly trip her up and learn that she was lying, which would only make her look stupid. ‘No, there isn’t,’ she admitted grudgingly. ‘But that doesn’t change anything between us.’

‘Then we’re both free,’ Gio murmured lazily, topping up her glass with the bottle of wine.

‘I have no intention of getting involved with you again,’ Billie declared, taking a hasty gulp of the mellow red, wondering if he would laugh if she told him what the flavour reminded her of. After all, she had once attended a wine course as well as an art-appreciation course and had never had the opportunity to show off what she had learned there.

‘But we work well together.’

Billie shook her head in vehement rejection of that statement and concentrated on her food again.

Sipping his wine, Gio watched her. He suspected she was wearing vintage clothes and the pale green linen dress she wore teamed with a light blouse-like jacket embroidered with flowers didn’t bear any resemblance to what he deemed to be current fashion, but the colours and plain styling had an understated elegance. The minute she sat down, however, the fabric of the dress pulled taut across the swell of her ample bosom. Gio tensed, hunger stabbing through him while he wondered how he was supposed to tempt a woman so utterly lacking in greed. She didn’t want his money, had never wanted his money, had once told him in no uncertain terms that he didn’t need a yacht because he would never take the time off to use it. His yacht, sitting idle and costing a fortune to maintain, was currently moored at Southampton.

The waiters came back to serve the main course. She saw their sidewise glances and recognised their curiosity about her. By now the hotel staff would have established who Gio was—Giorgios Letsos, the oil billionaire was a legend the world over. The press loved him because he lived a rich man’s life and looked great in print. Calisto had looked brilliant in print too with her sleek straight blonde hair, her perfect features and her terrifyingly tiny size-zero body. Beside her, Billie would have appeared plump, short and ungainly and, from seeing that first photo, Billie had accepted that no comparison could ever be made between them. After all, she and Calisto weren’t even on the same page in the looks department.

Gio wound down the tension by talking about his recent travels round the world. She asked small, safe, impersonal questions about some of his staff, a couple of whom she had met and some she had only got to know by speaking to them often on the phone.

While eating her dessert, a glorious concoction of fresh berries and meringue, she enquired whether or not he still had the apartment.

‘No...like you, it’s long gone,’ he stated.

Billie took that to mean that he had not installed a more malleable woman in her place and when a sense of relief filtered through her she gulped more of her wine and tried hard to direct her thoughts to safer topics. It was no longer her business to wonder who he slept with. Once he had married Calisto the question had become academic. Billie had been replaced in every way. Calisto had been chosen to sit at the other end of the dining table in his probably very beautiful Greek home, which Billie had naturally never visited. Gio would have socialised with Calisto because they were a real couple and obviously he had planned to make Calisto the mother of his children...

CHAPTER THREE

AS THE PAIN of that never-to-be-forgotten reality pierced Billie, she suddenly reached the limits of her tolerance. Her attempt to be civilised for the sake of appearances was shattered and, forced cruelly out of her comfort zone, she thrust her hands down on the edge of the table and suddenly stood up. ‘I can’t do this!’ she told Gio with ragged abruptness. ‘I want to go home right now!’

Taken aback, Gio sprang upright, a frown line drawing his ebony brows together, his lustrous dark eyes locked to her flushed and unhappy face with wary, searching curiosity. ‘What’s wrong?’