Blackmailed By The Greek's Vows. Tara Pammi

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       CHAPTER ONE

      SHE WAS DRESSED like a...a hooker.

      No...not exactly a hooker.

      No hooker he knew possessed the class, the style and the innate grace that imbued every one of his wife’s movements.

      More of a high-class escort.

      It took Kairos Constantinou a few seconds to clear the red haze that descended in front of his eyes.

      Dios...of all the stunts he had expected his impulsive, fiery wife to pull, it hadn’t been this.

      When his PI had informed him that he’d located Valentina and that she’d be aboard Kairos’s own yacht for the party tonight, he hadn’t been surprised.

      Valentina had always been the life of the party scene in Milan.

      Lively. Sensual. Like a beautiful butterfly that flits from flower to flower. The minute her brother Leandro had pointed her out to Kairos, standing amidst a gaggle of men, Kairos had decided he wanted her.

      Three minutes into Leandro introducing them, he’d known she was going to be his wife.

      She had been the best possible incentive Leandro could have offered to reel Kairos into the alliance. Kairos would gain entry into the rarefied old-world alliances that her family the Conti dynasty, swam in, and she would get a rich husband.

      Not once had he questioned why Leandro had thought he needed to set up his beautiful sister like that.

      All Kairos had wanted was the prize that was Valentina Conti.

      Except, a week into his marriage, he had realized his wife was anything but a trophy.

      She was emotionally fiery, intensely vulnerable and impulsive as hell.

      The best example of which was her deserting him nine months ago without so much as a word.

      And to find her here among this crowd now.

      With instincts he’d honed among the street gangs of Athens, he noted three Russian investors who operated businesses barely this side of legal—the men his friend Max intended to wine and dine—another man who was a model and a friend of Valentina’s, and five women to entertain them, not counting Valentina.

      Women of the oldest profession known to man. Not streetwalkers, like some of his earliest friends, but undoubtedly from an escort service.

      And the most provocatively dressed among them was Valentina in a flimsy gold dress.

      The slinky material pooled at her chest to create a low neckline that left her shoulders and her toned arms bare. It pushed up those small breasts that he had touched and kissed and sucked while she writhed under him, like a lover’s hands.

      So much golden, soft, silky skin... His jaw tightened like a vise as three other men salivated over her.

      But it was the smiles she bestowed on the men as she charmed them, those arms flying about in that way of hers while she narrated some escapade in her accented English, full of fire, the way she put a hand on Max’s arm and thanked him when he refilled her drink...that was what caused the ice to stiffen his spine.

      The wall of detachment that had always been his armor against anything was his only defense.

      No, this was only want. Physical want...nothing more.

      He still wanted her, desperately, because she was Valentina and even with her explosive tempers and childish tantrums, she had still snuck under his skin.

      He needed her as his wife for a few months. And in those few months, he’d work her out of his blood. Out of his life.

      If Valentina Conti Constantinou had indulged in some fantasy delusion that her husband Kairos had arrived on the yacht to achieve some sort of romantic reunion between them, he burned the notion to ashes within the first few minutes.

      It had been disturbing enough to find that not only had her photographer friend Nikolai, at whose persuasion she had come to the party, manipulated her into wearing the tackiest outfit, but that she was surrounded by women from an escort service and men expected to be entertained by them.

      She’d squared her shoulders, made Nikolai claim her for the evening, and had begun to charm the Russians. The one thing she knew how to do. She might have been living on nothing for months but she had class. Years of practice at playing the perfect socialite—well-versed in fashion and politics.

      Until Kairos had walked in.

      Barely sipping her G&T, she nodded at something Nikolai whispered in her ear, keeping her effusive smile firmly in place. Her throat was raw with the falsely pitched laughs, and her chest hurt at having to play the unruffled socialite the way she had all her life.

      Every inch of her rebelled against the calm she had assumed from the moment Kairos had stepped onto the deck. Every cell in her roared to swat away the woman who was even now cozying up to him, far too pleased with herself.

      She wanted to announce to the rest of them that he was hers.

       But he had never belonged to her.

      Her grip shook, clinking the ice in her tumbler.

      Tina put her glass down, fighting for control.

      Men scrambled around Max for an introduction to Kairos, and the women—hair fluffed, breasts pushed up to spill out of already СКАЧАТЬ