Page 8 of Penniless Cinderella for the Greek
Saying nothing, she lifted her hand and wiped the phone down the front of Dimitris’s shirt, smearing him with batter mixture. His eyes narrowed and gleamed dangerously, but Savannah was past caring. Her reputation for professionalism was in tatters and things couldn’t get any worse. She wiped his phone over his shirt a second time. It felt so good to be bad.
There was a warning glint in Dimitris’s dark blue gaze as he snatched the phone out of her fingers and dropped it onto the counter. Savannah braced herself for his anger, but he merely raised his brows and his mouth curved into a mocking smile.
‘If you are so desperate for me to take my shirt off, you only had to ask,’ he drawled.
Savannah stopped breathing when he grasped the hem of his top and lifted it slowly over his head to reveal his bare bronzed chest, overlaid with black body hairs that arrowed down his taut abdomen and disappeared beneath the waistband of his jeans. She could not recall if she had moved or he had, but they were standing so close that she breathed in the spicy scent of his aftershave.
‘I...’ She wanted to deny his suggestion that she’d hoped he would remove his shirt, but her tongue had cleaved to the roof of her mouth, and all she could do was stare at him and drink in his male beauty with eyes that felt like they were stretched too wide. It was like staring at the sun, and she was dazzled by him. If she lowered her lashes she knew his image would be imprinted on her retinas.
He had haunted her dreams for a decade, but this was no fantasy. Dimitris was real. Compelled by a need she did not fully understand to evoke a response from him, she laid her hand on his naked chest and felt the erratic thud of his heart mimic her own frantic heartbeat.
‘You should not have come here, Savannah,’ he said harshly as he clamped his hand over hers where it lay on his chest and dragged it down. Embarrassed that she had touched him, she was about to move away. But with a curse he wrapped his arm around her waist and hauled her towards him so that her breasts were crushed against the hard wall of his ribcage. She lifted her stunned gaze and found his face so close to hers that she could have counted his eyelashes if her attention hadn’t been fixated on his mouth.
Ten years ago their chemistry had sizzled if they had so much as looked at each other, but Savannah’s inexperience meant she had not understood her feminine power. Last night, and again now, she recognised the hungry gleam of desire in Dimitris’s eyes and her heart thudded as she waited in breathless anticipation for him to kiss her.
He lowered his head until his lips almost met hers. His warm breath whispered across her skin, and she could not repress a shiver of longing as she inhaled the subtle scent of sweat and desire on his skin. But then, shockingly, he reared back and set her away from him, dropping his arm down to his side abruptly, so that she swayed on her feet.
‘Theós!’he bit out savagely. His breathing was laboured, and she sensed that his control was as balanced on a knife-edge as hers was.
His rejection lacerated her fragile emotions, and her brain urged her to flee from him as an injured animal might make a dash for safety to lick its wounds. But her feet seemed to be welded to the floor and she could not move. As they stared at each other she was conscious of an ache low in her pelvis and the slick warmth between her thighs added to her humiliation that he might detect the betraying musky scent of her arousal.
‘Good morning.’ A female voice came from the doorway. ‘Oh! I apologise if I am interrupting...’ the woman said as Savannah hastily stepped back from Dimitris.
‘Good morning, Tara.’ His tone was casual, and his features that seconds earlier had looked as though they were carved from granite took on a bland expression as he greeted the woman who had entered the studio. ‘You are not interrupting anything. But if you had arrived a couple of minutes ago you would have seen me accidentally spill pancake batter everywhere. Miss O’Neal was helping to clear up the mess.’
‘O’Neal?’ A frown appeared on Tara Brown’s perfectly made-up face. She was the epitome of elegance in a pale grey trouser suit and matching stiletto heels.
Savannah wished she’d worn heels instead of trainers. Out of habit she ran her fingers through her hair before remembering she’d tied it in a ponytail, which came loose so that blonde strands fell across her face. She thought she heard Dimitris make a rough noise in his throat.
‘I just tried calling you to let you know that a problem has arisen with the photoshoot,’ Tara Brown told him.
Savannah’s heart sank as she waited for Dimitris to denounce her. But, to her surprise, he slipped his phone that still bore traces of batter mixture into the back pocket of his jeans.
‘I dropped my phone earlier and it doesn’t appear to be working,’ he murmured. ‘Give me a couple of minutes to change my shirt and then you can explain the situation.’ He nodded to Tara and did not look at Savannah as he swung round and strode to the far end of the studio to disappear through a doorway.
The team of production assistants were arriving. Bright, confident professionals who were chatting and laughing as if they did not have a care in the world, Savannah thought enviously. She was certain that Dimitris would tell Tara Brown what she had done to his phone, and in all honesty she could not blame him. Her career as a food photographer was effectively over as a result of her stupid behaviour. No one wanted a diva on a photoshoot. Her common sense belatedly put in an appearance, and she decided to slink away and avoid an embarrassing conversation with Philpot’s PR executive.
Dimitris slammed the door of his office that doubled up as a dressing room when his cooking programmes were filmed at the kitchen studio. He headed into the adjoining shower room, threw his shirt into the laundry basket and braced his hands on the vanity unit. Resting his forehead on the cool tiles above the sink, he dragged oxygen into his lungs.
Damn her.
The previous evening’s unexpected encounter with Savannah had disturbed him sufficiently that he’d taken steps to prevent a second meeting today. But evidently she hadn’t been informed by the photographic agency that she was not required for the photoshoot. When he’d spotted Savannah in the garden he had been dismayed by his body’s reaction to her.
Among his friends it was a joke that the media had labelled him the Hot Chef. The nickname was a tongue-in-cheek reference to his sex appeal rather than his temperament. In fact he was renowned for his coolness under pressure. Nothing fazed him. Working in professional kitchens was a notoriously stressful environment, but Dimitris always remained calm. However, meeting Savannah again had evoked a primitive response in him.
He pictured her in slim-fitting black trousers and a stretchy tee shirt that showed off her toned figure and those firm breasts that he’d glimpsed rather more of last night when they had spilled out of the front of her dress. When he’d found Savannah in a hotel room with his would-be brother-in-law she had looked like a seductress in her sexy dress. Dimitris told himself he could not be blamed for his assumption that she was Matt Collier’s mistress. But she had insisted that she hadn’t known Collier was engaged to Eleni. Ten years ago Savannah had been fiercely honest.
‘Maybe you don’t love me, but you can’t stop me feeling the way I do about you. I love you, Dimitris.’
Cursing the unwanted memories of his relationship with a teenage Savannah that Dimitris had known from the start was a mistake, he strode across to the wardrobe and took out a clean shirt. In truth, the real reason he had asked Philpot’s to arrange for a different photographer was because he’d wanted to avoid the edgy feeling Savannah aroused in him.
It was not the only thing she aroused, he thought self-derisively. He had been uncomfortably hard from the moment he’d found her in the garden, looking entirely too beautiful and still with that air of vulnerability that tugged on his protective instincts. Unfortunately, those instincts had not been apparent when he’d almost kissed her.
Dimitris did not know what disturbed him most—that he’d been overwhelmed by an urgent desire to cover Savannah’s mouth with his, or that he’d come to his senses in time and pulled back. The flare of disappointment in her hazel-green eyes had nearly tempted him to take her in his arms again, and to hell with the consequences.
But he’d had to deal with the consequences of his actions on that fateful car journey eighteen years ago. He bitterly regretted his hot-headedness when he had been a teenager. Emotions were dangerous, which was why he channelled his passion into cooking, and why he never allowed any woman too close.
‘You are an empty shell,’one of his ex-lovers had accused him, when inevitably he’d ended the relationship after a few weeks.
