She was on fire and desperate to escape to the restroom so that she could hold her wrists under the cold tap to try to bring her temperature down. Perhaps spending a few minutes away from Giannis would allow her to regain her composure. ‘Please excuse me,’ she muttered as she shoved her chair back and stood up abruptly.
‘Ow!’ For a few seconds she could not understand why scalding liquid was soaking into the front of her dress. The reason became clear when she saw a waiter hovering close by. He was holding a cafetière, and she guessed that he had leaned over her shoulder in order to refill her coffee cup at the same time that she had jumped up and knocked into him.
‘I am so sorry, madam.’
‘It’s all right—it was my fault,’ Ava choked, wanting to die of embarrassment. She hated being the centre of attention but everyone at the table, everyone in the banqueting room, it seemed, was looking at her. The head waiter hurried over and added his profuse apologies to those of the waiter who had spilled the coffee.
Giannis had risen from his seat. ‘Were you burned by the hot coffee?’ His deep voice was calm in the midst of the chaos.
‘I think I’m all right. My dress took the brunt of it.’ The coffee was cooling as it soaked through the material, but her dress was drenched and her attempts to blot the liquid with her napkin were ineffective. At least it was a black dress and the coffee stain might wash out, Ava thought. But she couldn’t spend the rest of the evening in her wet dress and she would have to go home without having had an opportunity to speak to Giannis about her brother.
The hotel manager had been called and he arrived at the table to add his apologies and reprimand the hapless waiter. ‘Really, it’s my fault,’ Ava tried to explain. She just wanted to get out of the banqueting hall, away from the curious stares of the other diners.
‘Come with me.’ Giannis slipped his hand under her elbow, and she was relieved when he escorted her out of the room. She knew she would have to call for a taxi to take her home, but while she was searching in her bag for her phone she barely noticed that they had stepped into a lift until the doors slid smoothly shut.
‘We will go to my hotel suite so that you can use the bathroom to freshen up, and meanwhile I’ll arrange for your dress to be laundered,’ Giannis answered her unspoken question.
Ava was about to say that there was no need for him to go to all that trouble. But it occurred to her that while she waited for her dress to be cleaned she would have the perfect opportunity to ask him to drop the charges against her brother. Was it sensible to go to a hotel room with a man she had never met before? questioned her common sense. This might be her only chance to save Sam, she reminded herself.
The doors opened and she discovered that the lift had brought them directly to Giannis’s suite. Ignoring the lurch of her heart, she followed him across the vast sitting room. ‘The bathroom is through there,’ he said, pointing towards a door. ‘There is a spare robe that you can use and I’ll call room service and have someone collect your dress. Would you like some more wine, or coffee?’
‘I think I’ve had enough coffee for one night.’ She gave him a rueful smile and her stomach muscles tightened when his eyes focused intently on her mouth.
She had definitely had enough wine, Ava thought as she shot into the opulent marble-tiled bathroom and locked the door, before releasing her breath on a shaky sigh. It must be her out-of-control imagination that made her think she had seen a predatory hunger in Giannis’s gaze. She wondered if he looked at every woman that way, and made them feel as though they were the most beautiful, the most desirable woman he had ever met. Probably. Giannis had a reputation as a playboy and he possessed an effortless charm that was irresistible.
But not to her. She was immune to Giannis’s magnetism, she assured herself. As she stripped off her coffee-soaked dress and reached for the folded towelling robe on a shelf, she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror above the vanity unit. Her face was flushed and her eyes looked huge beneath her fringe. Usually she wore her hair up in a chignon but tonight she had left it loose and it reached halfway down her back. The layers that the hairdresser had cut into it made her hair look thick and lustrous, gleaming like spun gold beneath the bright bathroom light.
Ava stared at herself in the mirror, startled by her transformation from ordinary and unexciting to a sensual Siren. She had bought a seamless black bra to wear beneath her dress and her nipples were visible through the semi-transparent cups. The matching black thong that she had worn for practical reasons—so that she would not have a visible panty-line—was the most daring piece of lingerie she had ever owned.
She ran her hands over her smooth thighs above the lacy bands of her hold-up stockings and felt a delicious ache low in her pelvis. She felt sexy and seductive for the first time since Craig had dumped her as she pictured Giannis’s reaction if he saw her in her revealing underwear.
She shook her head. It must be the effects of the wine that had lowered her inhibitions and filled her mind with erotic images. Cursing her wayward thoughts, she slipped her arms into the robe and tied the belt firmly around her waist. Of course he was not going to see her underwear. She had come to his hotel suite for one purpose only—to ask him to give her brother another chance. Taking a deep breath, Ava opened the bathroom door and prepared to throw herself on Giannis Gekas’s mercy.
HE WAS SPRAWLED on a sofa, his long legs stretched out in front of him and his arms lying along the back of the cushions. He had removed his jacket and tie and unfastened the top few shirt buttons, to reveal a vee of olive-gold skin and a sprinkling of black chest hairs. Giannis looked indolent and yet Ava sensed that beneath his civilised veneer he was a buccaneer who lived life by his rules and ruthlessly took what he wanted. Plenty of women would want to try to tame him but she was sure that none would succeed. Giannis Gekas answered to no one, and her nerve almost deserted her.
He stood up as she entered the sitting room and walked over to take her dress from her. ‘I rinsed out most of the coffee and wrung out as much water as I could,’ she explained as she handed him the soggy bundle of material.
‘I have been assured that your dress will be laundered and returned to you as quickly as possible,’ he told her as he strode across the room and opened the door of the suite to give the dress to a member of the hotel’s staff who was waiting in the corridor.
Giannis closed the door and came back to Ava. ‘I ordered you some English tea and some petits fours,’ he said, indicating the silver tea service on the low table in front of the sofa. ‘Please, sit down.’
‘Thank you.’ She tore her eyes from him, her attention caught by a large canvas leaning against the wall. ‘That’s the Mark Derring painting from the auction.’
‘I followed your advice and bid for it. You were sitting next to me,’ he reminded her in a sardonic voice that made her think he was remembering how she had swapped the place name cards. ‘Didn’t you realise that I had offered the highest bid for the painting?’
Heat spread across her face. She could hardly admit that she had been so busy trying to hide her fierce awareness of him that she hadn’t taken much notice of the auction. Giannis gave one of his lazy smiles, as if he knew how fast her heart was beating, and Ava forgot to breathe as she was trapped by the gleam in his eyes. She did not remember when he had moved closer to her, but she was conscious of how much taller than her he was when she had to tilt her head to look at his face.
He was utterly gorgeous, but it was not just his impossibly handsome features that made her feel weak and oddly vulnerable. Self-assurance shimmered from him and, combined with his simmering sensuality, it was a potent mix that made her head spin.
‘Congratulations on winning the painting in the auction,’ she murmured, desperate to say something and shatter the spell that his fathomless dark eyes and his far too sexy smile had cast on her. She was stupidly flattered that he had taken her advice about