The Virgin's Secret
Forbidden or for bedding…? Leo Parnassus has returned to Greece to head the family empire. A New Yorker since childhood, he finds life is certainly different here: there are family feuds, and expectations for him to marry and produce many heirs! Amidst all this tradition, the beautiful waitress who catches Leo’s eye is a welcome distraction.Lowly waitress Angel might be, but that doesn’t mean she has no secrets! Leo will be pleased to discover she’s a virgin, but not that she’s the daughter of his adversary! Or that, in nine months, there will be one more secret to be revealed…
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‘Are you thinking about what it would feel like if my mouth was to touch yours right now?’
Angel’s gaze flew up and clashed with pure molten gold heat. An answering heat invaded her lower body, and she felt the urge to clamp her legs together, as if that might dampen the strange ache building up there.
Before she could articulate a response his hand had cupped her jaw and cheek, and suddenly there was no distance between them, only him, so tall and close that he blocked out the sky, and his head was descending, coming nearer and nearer. He smelt musky and hot. It was something so earthy that Angel could feel the response being tugged from her down low in her belly, as if she recognised it on some primitive level. Dimly she wondered if this was what people meant when they talked about animal attraction.
Desperately trying to cling onto something, anything rational, Angel brought a hand to cover his, to pull it down, to stop him, to say no…But then his mouth was so close that she could feel his breath feather there, mingling with hers. Her mouth tingled. She wanted…she wanted—
Abby Green got hooked on Mills & Boon® romances while still in her teens, when she stumbled across one belonging to her grandmother, in the west of Ireland. After many years of reading them voraciously, she sat down one day and gave it a go herself. Happily, after a few failed attempts, Mills & Boon bought her first manuscript.
Abby works freelance in the film and TV industry, but thankfully the four a.m. starts and the stresses of dealing with recalcitrant actors are becoming more and more infrequent, leaving her more time to write!
She loves to hear from readers, and you can contact her through her website at www.abby-green.com. She lives and works in Dublin.
The Virgin’s Secret
by
Table of Contents
This is for my lovely editor, Meg, who shines a torchlight into the dark corners where I’ve tied myself into knots, and helps me unravel it all again into something coherent. Thanks for everything—you’re a star.
I’d also like to dedicate this book with special thanks to Anne Mary Luttrell, whose waiting room is a magical place where many a plot has been incubated. Thanks for your healing hands (needles) and words.
Prologue
LEONIDAS PARNASSUS looked out of the window of his private plane. They’d just landed at Athens airport. To his utter consternation his chest felt tight and constricted—a sensation he didn’t welcome. He was curiously reluctant to move from his seat, even though the cabin staff were preparing to open the door, even though sitting still and not moving was anathema to him. He told himself it was because he was still chafing at the reality that he’d acquiesced to his father’s demand that he come to Athens for ‘talks’.
Leo Parnassus did not carve out time for anything or anyone he deemed a waste of his resources and energy. Not a business venture, a lover, nor a father who had put building up the family fortune and clearing their shamed name before a relationship with his son. Leo grimaced slightly, his face so harsh that the steward who had been approaching him stopped abruptly and hovered uncertainly. Leo saw nothing though but the heat haze on the tarmac outside and the darkness of his own thoughts.
He was Greek through and through, and yet he’d never set foot on Greek soil. His family had been exiled from their ancestral home before he was born, but his father had returned triumphantly just a few years ago; finally realising a lifelong dream to clear their name of a terrible crime and to glory in their new-found status and inestimable wealth.
Bitter anger rose when Leo remembered his beloved ya ya’s lined and worn face. The sadness that had grooved deep lines around her mouth and shadowed her eyes. It had been too late for her to return home. She’d died in an alien country she’d never grown to love. Even though his grandmother had urged him to return as soon as he’d had the chance, he’d condemned Athens on her behalf for breaking her heart. He’d always sworn that he wouldn’t return to the place that had spurned his family so easily.
Athens was still home to the Kassianides family who had been responsible for all that pain and sadness, and who were suffering far too belatedly and minutely for what they had done. They had cast a long shadow over his childhood which had been indelibly marked by their actions, in so many ways.
And yet, despite all that…here he was. Because something in his father’s voice, an unmistakable weakness had called to him, in spite of everything that had happened. It had touched him on some level. In short, he’d felt compelled to come. Perhaps he wanted to prove to himself that he was not at the mercy of his emotions?
The very thought of that made him go cold; at the tender age of eight he’d made an inarticulate vow never to let any intensity of emotion overwhelm him, because that’s what had killed his mother. Surely he could handle looking his ancestral home in the face and turn his back on it once and for all? Of course he could.
