The Highest Stakes of All by Sara Craven

It was the stout man, his face unsmiling, who’d detained her. ‘You must forget him and understand that you belong now to Kyrios Gordanis.’
    ‘No.’ She tried to dodge past him, intent on reaching the outside corridor and finding her father, refusing to be parted from him, but he was immovable. ‘I don’t belong to him or anyone else—and I never will,’ she added, flinging the words at Vassos Gordanis, who was still lounging in his chair, his cheroot held in his long fingers.
    He looked back at her, his face impassive. ‘You speak as if the choice was ever yours to make,’ he retorted coldly. ‘Now, go quietly with Stavros. I have no wish to force you.’
    The threat of it was enough to quell her, temporarily at least.
    With a sob of pure fright, she allowed herself to be ushered away, conducted into an adjoining room, lavishly appointed with sofas, chairs and occasional tables. However, her escort led her across it without pause, and through another door into the bedroom beyond.
    ‘You will wait here,’ she was brusquely instructed. ‘And before he comes to you, Kyrios Gordanis requires that you go to his bathroom and wash the make-up from your face.’
    Joanna wrenched herself free. ‘Tell him I’ll do nothing of the kind,’ she said hoarsely. ‘And that he can go to hell.’
    He gave her a sour smile. ‘Tell him that yourself, thespinis —if you are brave enough. But I do not advise it. You are here to obey his wishes, not defy them. It will be better for you to remember that.’
    He turned and left, closing the door behind him.
    She sank to her knees on the thick carpet, hugging her arms round her trembling body.
    She’d never experienced this feeling before. Even during that terrible time in Australia she’d always known that her father would keep her safe. That nothing bad would happen to her.
    Only the fragile cornerstone of her security had been removed, and her entire world was tottering on the edge of disaster.
    As the minutes dragged past, she lifted her head slowly and looked around her, taking reluctant stock of her surroundings.
    It was a large room, elegantly furnished in the Empire style, and dominated by the widest bed she had ever seen. The coverlet was deep blue quilted silk and had been turned down on both sides, revealing white linen sheets and plump, frilled pillows.
    As she assimilated this, Joanna felt physically sick, realising all the chilling personal implications of what she saw. The dire consequences of that last reckless bet which had delivered her into the power of a man like Vassos Gordanis.
    As she recognised, too, that no one was going to put a hand on her shoulder and say Wake up. You’re having a bad dream.
    Her worst nightmare was about to become reality, and there was nothing she could do, and no one she could turn to.
    Because a man whose existence she hadn’t been aware of before today was going to walk into this room at any moment and claim the kind of intimacies she’d thought she would only share with someone she both knew and loved. Someone that in all probability she was going to marry.
    Now, instead of tenderness, she would be subjected to a man’s demands for raw passion. And nothing in her life so far had prepared her for this. On the contrary.
    She drew a quivering breath. She knew, of course, the basics of what would be expected of her. She was neither ignorant, nor completely stupid, having sat through the embarrassment of sex education classes. But her actual experience had never proceeded beyond a few tentative kisses.
    And there’d only been that one encounter that she’d found even remotely threatening, and even then Denys’s approach down the moonlit garden, his voice calling to her, had provided her with instant protection from kisses that had suddenly become too rough and hands that had tried, with clumsy determination, to grope at her shrinking body.
    And if those fairly trivial advances had repelled her, how could she possibly cope