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Without the slightest hesitation, Dio was the one asking questions now. And Ellie told him about her mother. The only child of a prosperous widower, beautiful and sweet-natured Leigh Morgan had been cocooned from life's tougher realities by a parent who had idolised her. At twenty-two she had fallen in love and got engaged to Ellie's father, Tony. Then her own father had gone bankrupt and the happy days had come to an end.
'Tony didn't want Mum without her father's money,' Ellie confided. 'He broke off the engagement and not long after¬wards he married the daughter of a wealthy manufacturer.'
'So he ditched your mother when she was pregnant—?'
'No, it wasn't that simple. A few weeks after he got mar¬ried he went to Mum and told her that he'd made a dreadful mistake, that he still loved her. I was conceived the same day. She thought he would leave his wife.'
'Ah...' Dio murmured with expressive softness. 'But he had no such intention.'
'Mum was as green as grass and still mad about him,' Ellie conceded heavily, and then she sighed. 'I don't want to talk about them any more.'
'No problem,' Dio told her huskily, letting his big hands slide down her taut spine to curve over her hips and mould her against his lean, hard body.
'Now it's your turn...' Ellie muttered unevenly as she quivered, thought about pulling away, decided to do it, and then discovered that she didn't have that much will-power.
'My turn...?' Dio echoed thickly.
'Your turn,' she repeated unsteadily, a twist of heat snaking through her lower belly and tightening every tiny muscle she possessed.
'My father told me it was time I got married. I said, No, I'm not ready yet...and he said, "I don't want to see you or speak to you until you are ready,"' Dio recited with raw edged emphasis, half under his breath.
Ellie tipped back her head to frown up at him. "That's your joky way of telling me to mind my own business...right?'
'Wrong.'
'You mean your father just expected you to get married when he said so?' Ellie couldn't hide her astonishment.
'My own parents didn't just meet and date, Ellie. They knew each other from childhood, grew up knowing what was expected of them, and when the time seemed right,' Dio specified in a taut undertone, 'their fathers got together set the wedding date.'
For goodness' sake, that's medieval!'
'To you, perhaps. But my parents were very happy together.' Dio smoothed her tousled hair back from her damp brow with incredibly gentle fingers, making her shiver and automatically curve closer, her legs increasingly wobbly supports. 'Marriage can still be very much a family affair in Greece.'
'I don't want to criticise your father...' Ellie began hesitantly, turning the side of her face into his palm, like a sensuous cat begging to be stroked, and snatching in a fracturing breath as she struggled to concentrate. 'But I think he should've appreciated that times have changed. You're a grown man and he treated you like—'
'He knew what was best for me,' Dio slotted in with velvet-soft finality. 'I may speak public school English, Ellie, but I am Greek, and marriage is a very serious step. The English rely on love and have a very high divorce rate—'
'Yes, but—'
'It's more important to pick a life partner with intelligence,' Dio stated, and then he rifted her high in his strong arms, as if he was tired of that particular subject, and sealed his sensual mouth with hungry mastery to hers.
Ellie's head spun, her heart jumping violently. He needed to talk. This wasn't what she had planned; this wasn't what was supposed to happen. In another minute, she swore fe¬verishly, she would pull back, stop this before it got out of hand. But somehow her arms had got round his neck and her fingers were already sliding into the thick luxuriance of his black hair. A cloud of such debilitating weakness enveloped her that by the time she promised herself another thirty sec¬onds she could no longer recall why that strange idea of a time-frame should come into her head.
"This was inevitable,' Dio growled, sweeping her right off her feet when she stumbled on her no longer reliable lower limbs and carrying her back into the beach house.
CHAPTER FOUR
A THOUGHT almost made it to the surface of Ellie's blank mind. And then she locked into Dio's black glittering eyes. Her heart lurched; her pulses raced. Dizzy and mindless eu¬phoria took a hold again.
She raised an uncertain hand to cover one hard flushed cheekbone with a shy possessiveness entirely new to her. Her spread fingers rejoiced in the rougher texture of his skin, her dilated pupils searching out every tiny detail of him that close.
The lush black spiky lashes, so ridiculously long, the dra¬matic set of his eyes below those dark defined brows; the sheer masculine beauty of his hard bone structure; the lean, arrogant perfection of his nose. She caressed his aggressive jawline with wondering tenderness, her whole being intensely absorbed in that appraisal. Nothing had ever felt so right or so natural.
