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Lucy shuddered inwardly when she woke her computer from sleep and struggled to concentrate on work. Aristotle’s cynical view of how Ms Archer would receive his gift was no doubt spot-on; hadn’t she witnessed her own mother reduced to that level after years of similar treatment? Although Augustine Archer didn’t strike her as the kind of woman who had to survive on hand-outs. No, this was a different league. Lucy’s soft mouth tightened as bile rose from her belly. That kind of so-called main prize would have been just the kind of thing her mother would have used to pay for Lucy’s school uniform for another year—the sort of thing that had financed their lives.
Lucy forced her anger down. She had to think of her boss purely in professional terms. What he did or how he acted personally was none of her business. She didn’t have to like him; she just had to work for him.
Thank goodness she’d forged a different path. She would never be beholden to any man or, worse, held in his sexual or financial thrall. She’d worked too hard and her mother had sacrificed too much to make sure she avoided exactly that scenario. Just as her computer screen came back to life and she saw her bespectacled face momentarily reflected on the dark surface she felt unmitigated relief that she need never fear the kind of attention her mother and women like Augustine Archer courted. She was safe from all of that.
Aristotle watched the closed door for an inordinate amount of time. Heat still coursed through his body—heat that confounded him and every effort he made to try and dampen it. All he could see in his mind’s eye was the sway of that well-rounded bottom as she’d stopped by the door, and how he’d blurted out the first thing that had come into his head, as if he’d had to stop her, not let her leave.
He flung himself back in his seat and raked a hand through unruly hair, unusually diverted from work. He cursed the fact again that he’d had to let Augustine go at this point in negotiations. He briefly considered wooing her back, but his fists clenched in rejection of that idea. He would never debase himself by grovelling to a woman—not for anything.
He considered the request he’d just made of Lucy; he’d always made the call to a jewellers himself before, and would instruct them to compose a suitably impersonal note. Usually it wasn’t even a note—just his name. A clear indication that whatever he and the particular woman had shared was over and she shouldn’t come calling again. And invariably they knew not to. Few were as impertinent as Augustine Archer, confronting him directly. His mouth twisted in recognition of the fact that as he got older and remained single he represented some kind of irresistible challenge to those women.
He diverted his thoughts from an area he didn’t want to investigate: that of having to contemplate giving up his freedom, which he knew would be inevitable at some stage. The future was unavoidable. He would have to find a suitable wife and produce an heir, purely to protect all that he was now putting in place from the greedy clutches of others.
The prospect evoked no more emotion in him than mild un-interest and irritation. He’d long ago learnt the lesson of what marriage really meant—at the age of five, when his father had introduced Helen Savakis as his new stepmother and she’d quickly shown him the cold hatred she had for a son who wasn’t her own. Whatever dim and distant memories Ari might have had of his mother, who’d died when he was four, and a halcyon time that might never have existed except in some childish fanciful memory bank, had long been quashed and buried.
The fact that those nebulous memories rose to haunt him in dreams so vivid that he sometimes woke in tears was a shameful weakness he’d always been determined to ignore. It was one reason he’d never spent a full night with a woman.
As if drawn by a magnet his thoughts again went to his assistant, who was fast assuming a place in his imagination that he did not welcome. Why had he felt goaded into saying all he just had? And then been surprised by the blatant look of distaste on her face—annoyed by it? And he had not left it at that but engaged her in a dialogue about it. As if he even cared what her opinion of him was! He was aware of a niggling desire that he’d wanted to see her somehow … rattled. Since she’d been working for him she’d always seemed to fade into the background, barely noticeable.
But he was noticing her and she had just reacted, her cheeks flushing prettily. He frowned at that. Since when had he started thinking of her as pretty? And since when had he been interested in pretty?
And, not only that, what on earth had compelled him to tell her to call him Aristotle when he’d always preferred his PAs to call him Mr Levakis? It was something in the way she’d looked up at him and said sir.
In a bid to restore some order to his life, which seemed to be morphing out of all recognition, he rang through to Lucy and gave her the name and number of the latest English socialite who had been chasing him, instructing her to set up a date for that evening. He ignored the way even her voice seemed to send a frisson of reaction straight to his groin. With that done he felt some semblance of calm wash over him. Life would return to normal. He would forget all about this bizarre obsession with his secretary’s far too provocatively well-built body and concentrate on the merger.
The following morning, when Lucy was walking the short distance from her bus stop to work, she still burned with mortification. In her hand she carried a small overnight bag which held a change of clothes and some evening wear. She’d taken a call from the head of Human Resources the day before and been informed stoutly that she needed to think a little more thoroughly about the way she dressed, and that it might be a good idea to have a change of clothes in the office at all times to cover for emergencies. Like too-tight skirts, she thought churlishly. The fact that Levakis had gone over her head and asked someone to speak to her made her skin crawl with humiliation—not to mention the fact that he’d obviously noticed her bursting out of that skirt.
With getting her mother settled in her new home she simply hadn’t had time since she’d started working for him to kit herself out with a new wardrobe, despite being given a generous allowance to do so. It had been full-on from day one.
Luckily last night had been late-night shopping, and Levakis had left relatively early for the date Lucy had set up for him. Her belly clenched at the thought of that. The woman she’d rung hadn’t been in the slightest bit fazed that Aristotle himself hadn’t bothered to call, and of course she’d been free at a moment’s notice. A wave of disgust washed through Lucy and she pushed it down along with bitter memories. She didn’t care what he did or who he did it with. A voice mocked her inwardly: who was she to judge anyway?
Just at that moment the heavens opened from a slate-grey sky and Lucy yelped as torrential rain poured down, comprehensively drenching her in seconds. No! She ran across the road towards the refuge of the huge gleaming Levakis building, her mind filled with the fact that they had an important meeting to attend in less than an hour on the other side of London.
Aristotle strode through the reception area, raking a hand through rain-wet hair, and mentally cursed the inclement English weather which had momentarily darkened the enormous glass atrium. He stepped into his own private lift—no possibility of a lush, curvaceous body colliding with his today—and stabbed at the button to whisk him all the way to the top of the building, irritated beyond belief to be thinking of that again. Was he actually hoping for it? he asked himself derisively.
His starkly handsome face was reflected back to him in the steel surface of the door, but he didn’t see that as the lift zoomed skyward. No, what he saw and what he relived was the fact that last night he’d taken a beautiful available woman on a date and she had done nothing for him. His mouth twisted. It hadn’t been for lack of trying on her part, or even on his, which had been a novel sensation.
In a bid not to be dictated to by his malfunctioning hormones, he’d escorted Arabella—or had it been Mirabella?—up to her apartment, but had realised with sickening inevitability that nothing would be happening. With her, anyway. He’d been rendered impotent from the waist down. She’d become petulant and increasingly desperate, seeing correctly that she hadn’t managed to snare Aristotle’s interest, and he’d had to extricate himself with more diplomacy than a head of state during peace negotiations.
So now, as he strode out of his lift and towards his main office, he was thoroughly disgruntled. Ignoring the assistants sitting meekly at their desks in the ante-room that preceded his and Lucy’s offices, he opened the door and took a breath, preparing to fire a series of commands at the woman who had been the singular cause of his unsatisfying night.
But the office was empty.
He had the most curious sensation of his belly hollowing out before he heard movement coming from the door which led into the bathroom just off their offices. While he had a private bathroom too, this more communal bathroom had a shower and a dressing room, which Aristotle availed himself of whenever he was required to go straight to a function from work.
Closing the main door quietly behind him, without really being aware of what he was doing, he walked silently into the office. He heard a muffled curse and then something drop.
Feeling like a voyeur, and not liking it, he halted by the door which lay slightly ajar. Through the crack he saw Lucy, and when his eyes registered what he was seeing his whole body locked, every muscle taut. Unable to move, all he could do was take in the sight with widening eyes. Lucy’s wet hair hung in long dark tendrils over luminously pale shoulders. She was bending over to pull trousers up over long, surprisingly slender legs. Her legs led upwards to those shapely thighs, which curved out to a lushly rounded bottom encased in some kind of black lace and silk concoction.
She wriggled her bottom and her hips as she pulled the trousers up fully, and then twisted towards Aristotle to tie the fastening at the side. Heat engulfed him. His blood hummed and his heart picked up an unsteady beat. Facing him as she did, both hands to one side, her perfectly formed breasts were enticingly pushed together and towards him with unknowing and unbelievably erotic appeal. Her bra looked hardly adequate to contain the generous mounds of alabaster flesh—he wondered dimly if any of her clothes fitted properly. And who would have known that she’d have such exotic tastes in undergarments underneath that prim exterior? Arousal soared.
Another muffled curse came as an even longer tendril of dark hair swung over her shoulder and clung wetly to the slope of one unashamedly voluptuous breast. Aristotle’s gaze moved up with supreme difficulty, and he saw that gap in her front teeth as she bit her lip, a hectic flush across her cheeks.
As if entranced by a siren song, he couldn’t move. His gaze slid down again and took in that small waist, which he’d only noted yesterday, and her belly, which was sucked in to help with the obstinate fastening. It was soft but gently contoured, as if she fought some kind of battle to keep her body in check but it was determined to thwart her efforts and retain its inherently seductive softness. Her hips flared out generously from that waist with such hourglass perfection Aristotle felt momentarily dizzy.
Abruptly she moved, having at last managed to fasten her trousers, and straightened. Her belly was still sucked in, pushing her breasts out even more as she reached for something else which Aristotle could see was a shirt.
His brain wouldn’t function. He couldn’t move. All he could see was Lucy and her half-naked body, that long dark hair clinging provocatively to her skin like wet skeins of silk.
That thing that he called awareness had just exploded into full-on lust.
Lucy yanked the tag off her new shirt and pulled it on impatiently, all fingers and thumbs on the buttons of the slippery grey silk material. She’d never have gone for something like this normally, but after being hauled over the coals the day before she’d known that she had no choice but to buy the kind of uniform that someone like Aristotle Levakis would expect—and that meant expense, and things like silk as opposed to cotton. She breathed out thankfully. At least she’d had that change of clothes. No way could she have faced him this morning looking like the drowned rat she’d been just moments before.
With the shirt finally closed she tucked it in hurriedly and desperately listened out for a heavy footfall or the door opening. She knew he was due in any minute—he was more punctual than any boss she’d ever known. That had to be the reason her heart was thumping so hard: the fear of being caught like this. She raked a brush through her hair, wincing as it caught on the still-damp strands, and quickly twisted it up into a chignon of sorts. It would have to do.
Slipping her feet into flat shoes, she stuck her glasses back on, gathered up her wet things, looked up—and stopped breathing. In the crack of the open door her boss was just standing there, looking at her.
CHAPTER TWO
How long had he been standing there? The words barely impinged on Lucy’s consciousness. She was too full of raging heat, embarrassment, and something more disturbing.
On some self-protective level she refused to believe he had seen her yanking her clothes on with all the grace of a baby elephant. He wasn’t moving. He looked slightly shell-shocked, and mortification rushed through Lucy. She managed to move and opened the door fully, gabbling something she hoped was coherent to fill the awful silence.
‘I got caught in the rain shower. I was just changing.’
She stepped out and past Aristotle, who turned to follow her with his eyes as she retreated to the safe zone behind her desk, not even sure why she needed to feel safe.
When she could bring herself to look at him, she registered that his hair was damp, his suit slightly wet. She met his eyes, and in that instant something passed between them, something electric and elemental, and Lucy knew that he had seen her dressing—even though stubbornly she still refused to believe it. She recoiled from the uncomfortable awareness deep within her. It scared the life out of her.
Still babbling, she said, ‘Looks like you got caught too. Do you want to change before we go? I’ve instructed Julian to have the car downstairs in fifteen minutes, and I can have your suit sent out to be cleaned.’
Aristotle, seemingly completely unconcerned about the meeting or changing his clothes, lounged back against the doorjamb and crossed his arms. His gaze swept down over Lucy’s outfit and she cringed, wondering if she’d left a tag on somewhere. She fought the urge to check herself.
He just continued to look at her with that disturbing intensity before saying, ‘Tell me, did you wear that skirt yesterday on purpose? Aware of how provocative it was?’
Shock, disbelief and cold horror slammed into Lucy. Her mouth opened for a moment but nothing emerged. She couldn’t articulate, but finally managed a strangled, ‘Of course not. I would never be so …’ Words failed her again and she closed her mouth helplessly.
Aristotle could see injured pride straighten her spine, the shock on her face. He had the absurd impulse to apologise, but couldn’t help remembering the way she’d looked so wantonly luscious in it, straining against the material. He could imagine inching it up over those pale quivering thighs as she stood with her back against him, how the full globes of her bottom would press into him as he pushed her forward over his desk, reaching down between them to hitch her skirt higher and free his own—What the hell was wrong with him? His mind never deviated to lurid sexual fantasies with so little provocation.
He stood away from the door abruptly and curtly informed Lucy to make sure she had all the necessary papers and documents required for the meeting ready. He then went into the dressing room and breathed deep, as if he could inhale some common sense. But instead an evocatively feminine scent teased his nostrils and brought the last few minutes vividly back. Along with his libido.
With a growl of intense irritation Aristotle yanked a clean suit from the well-stocked wardrobe and stripped off to step into the shower, turning it onto cold. It did little to help.
Lucy flinched minutely and scowled at her computer when she heard the phone being slammed down in her boss’s office. He’d just taken a call from his half-brother in Athens, and while he never seemed to welcome those calls he usually acted with more restraint than that. She shook her head. He’d been in a foul humour for two weeks now. Ever since that morning. Heat still crawled over her skin when she thought of the way he’d lounged against the door and looked at her, and mentioned that skirt. He believed she might have worn it like that on purpose.
And yet since then he had proceeded to treat her either as if a) he couldn’t bring himself even to mention her name, or b) as if he might turn to stone if he so much as looked at her for longer than two seconds.
Lucy had to assure herself that nothing had happened, and if anything this was just a normal working relationship. Aristotle was famous for his brusque, no-nonsense approach. What had she expected? Warm and fuzzy? She shifted in her seat uncomfortably, the fact was she did feel inordinately warm—especially when he was around. She also felt constantly on edge, as if a kind of prickly heat lay just under the surface of her skin. She felt achy and jittery, but no symptoms of a flu or a cold had developed, so she couldn’t put it down to that. She was beginning to despair of ever having any sense of equilibrium again. At times like this she longed for the uncomplicated working relationship she’d had with her last boss. Her mouth quirked wryly. But then, he had been nearing seventy, well past retirement age, and had a huge typically Greek family.
Lucy nearly shot out of her chair when she heard a coolly drawled, ‘Something funny on the internet today?’
She quickly pressed a key so that her blank document disappeared, and took a breath before looking up, steeling herself. She had to steel herself a lot around this man. She smiled brightly, but it faded when she saw something dark cross his face.
‘No … I was just … going over the latest mail from the Parnassus Corporation.’
She mentally crossed her fingers and breathed a sigh of relief, because that was exactly what she had been doing—before she’d been looking at a blank document for minutes on end like some moon-eyed idiot.
Aristotle emerged from his office and prowled towards Lucy. Her blood-rate shot up.
‘Liar,’ he said softly.
Her back straightened. ‘Excuse me?’
He came to her desk and rested on his hands over it, looming over her. She fought against shrinking back as his eyes bored into hers. It was making her dizzy after days of only the most cursory eye contact.
He arched one slashing dark brow. ‘If that’s the case, tell me what Parnassus proposes we do in the final stages of sealing the merger?’
Lucy looked up, spellbound. As if from a long way away her more rational and professional self, the one that wasn’t melting into a puddle in her chair, came back. Miraculously, information came into her brain, and she clung onto it like a life-raft.
Unable to break eye contact, and feeling as if her voice had been dipped in rust, Lucy said, ‘He … he suggests that the final stages take place in Athens, as that’s where the two companies originated one hundred years ago. He thinks it should be there that the merger is finally revealed. He wants it to be a triumphant homecoming to the country he and his family fled from when he was young, and for Athens to be the symbolic and actual birthplace of the greatest merger in Greek shipping and industrial history.’
Silence lengthened and tautened between them. Electric awareness quivered in the air until finally Aristotle just said quietly, ‘Good. And I presume you have everything in order for you to travel to Athens for three weeks?’
Lucy just blinked stupidly for a moment as numerous things impacted her brain. Primarily the fact that she hadn’t actually considered the fact that of course she’d be expected to go to Athens too, in little over a week from now.
All she could say was, ‘Yes, I do,’ when in actual fact for some reason—even though it had been talked about for weeks—she’d never considered for a moment that she’d be accompanying Aristotle on such a prestigious engagement.
Her lack of foresight mocked her; of course it had to be her, no one else had had access to all the vital and top secret information—information so secret that she’d had to sign a contract the day she’d been hired, forbidding her to divulge any information to anyone. If she committed such an offence it could see her being fired on the spot, and certainly ruined for any future employment within these circles …
The full enormity of the size of this merger and the importance of the man in front of her started to sink in very belatedly. Mortifyingly, Lucy knew that a large part of her distraction had to do with finding herself working for someone who had reached into a secret part of her and shaken her up so much that she had to spend an inordinate amount of time just denying it to herself. Even now, as he still loomed over her, she denied it to herself.
She reassured herself desperately that she was just reacting to Aristotle Levakis’ undeniable charisma, like any other red-blooded human being.
With that in mind she took a sheaf of papers that needed filing off her desk and stood up, clutching them to her chest.
It was a blatant attempt to put some distance between them. Aristotle straightened too, and with arms folded surveyed her closely. That treacherous heat pooled within her again, but now she knew what it was she could deflect her own reaction to it.
She hitched up her chin. ‘Was there anything else?’
He shook his head slowly and a lazy smile curved his lips. Lucy felt like clinging onto something.
‘No, that’s all for now.’ He turned to go back to his office, but just when Lucy was about to let out a sigh of relief he turned back. With his forearm resting high on the doorjamb, drawing her eye to his long and hard muscled body, he said, ‘Don’t forget we have that engagement tonight. Be ready to leave at six-thirty. I’ll get dressed in my office; you can use the dressing room.’
He disappeared into his own office then, shutting the door behind him, and Lucy all but sagged onto the floor in a heap. She had forgotten all about the function they were to attend that night. She cursed herself as she sank down heavily into her chair. What was wrong with her? Forgetting the function, not realising she would have to go to Athens … Her brain was turning to mush. And in this job that was not a luxury she could afford.
How could she have forgotten that terse conversation just days ago, when he’d said to her with a grimace on his face, ‘You’re going to have to come to the Black and White Ball with me.’
Lucy’s belly had clenched. She’d expected that she might have to accompany her boss to some functions, but with Aristotle’s extremely healthy social life she hadn’t considered it would become a reality so soon. And did he have to look so reluctant at the prospect?
She’d ignored the ridiculous feeling of hurt and asked hopefully, ‘But surely there must be someone else …’ anyone else ‘… you could call?’
After all, as she’d restrained herself from pointing out, last-minute dates were not something he shied away from. He’d had more than a few since the Honourable Augustine Archer and then the even more Honourable Mirabella Ashton, each one well-documented in the press that gloried in his playboy exploits. And yet the morning after each date he’d appeared taciturn and as irritable as she’d ever seen him.
He’d curtly instructed her to send each night’s delectation a disgustingly expensive bunch of flowers. Lucy had cynically assumed that none of the women were performing well enough to hold his interest and merit a piece of jewellery.
It was then that she’d realised that she hadn’t arranged a date for him in at least a week. The thought had unsettled her more than she’d liked to admit.
He’d looked at her with narrowed eyes. ‘As I am currently partnerless, not that it’s any of your business, I’ve decided that you will accompany me. Do you have a problem with that?’
Feeling sick, Lucy had shaken her head rapidly. She had to stop reacting to this man and provoking him. ‘No. Not at all. I’ll put it in the diary now.’
Lucy came back to the present moment. She was still holding the sheaf of papers clutched to her chest like some kind of shield. She looked at the open diary beside her and there in stark letters was written ‘Black and White Ball, Park Lane Hotel. Seven p.m.’ The thought of spending any more time than was absolutely necessary with this man was causing nothing short of sheer panic inside her.
She put down the papers and picked up the phone to make a call to the home where her mother was resident. She asked them to pass on the message that she wouldn’t be able to visit that evening.
The matron on the other end said gently, ‘I’ll pass on the message, Lucy love, but you do know that it won’t make any difference, don’t you?’
Lucy felt very alone all of a sudden. She swallowed back the ever-present guilt, pain and grief, and nodded even though the other woman couldn’t see her. Her voice was thick with emotion. ‘I know … but I’d appreciate it all the same, if you don’t mind.’
Lucy could hear Aristotle moving around in his own office as she changed in the dressing room. This was a formal event, so she had to wear a long dress, and the one she looked at now in the mirror was perfectly respectable—if completely boring. It was black, which meant it was slimming, and it had a high neck which covered her breasts adequately. Anything that did that was fine with her. And anyway, she told herself stoutly, she wasn’t dressing to impress, she was dressing to accompany her boss in a work capacity.
She left her hair up and put on some make-up: mascara and a little blusher. Then, slipping her feet into a pair of plain black high heels, she picked up her weekend bag stuffed with her work clothes and took a deep breath before walking out, feeling ridiculously nervous and hating herself for it.
That breath hitched in her throat and her brain stopped functioning when she saw Aristotle emerge from his own office, resplendent in a traditional tuxedo. The black made him look even darker, and very dangerous. Lucy fought back the wave of awareness, her hands gripping her bag.
He looked up from adjusting his cufflinks then, and the snowy perfection of his shirt made the green of his eyes pop out. He ran quick eyes over Lucy, making her squirm inwardly before quirking a brow and saying mockingly, ‘Well, if you’re trying to fade into the background it’s already working.’
Lucy swallowed past a dry throat. ‘I’m your assistant, not your date.’
More’s the pity, Aristotle surprised himself with thinking as he took her in, just a few feet away. Although not in that dress. It was basically a sack: a black sack covering her from neck to toe. It might as well have been a burkha for all he could see of her body, and he knew with a hunger that had been growing day by day and minute by minute that he very much wanted to see her body showcased in something much more revealing and tight. Like that skirt which had assumed mythic proportions in his fantasies. He beat back an intense surge of desire, in spite of the awful dress, and noted the hectic flush on her cheeks, the wary glitter of her eyes.
She was intriguing him more and more—not only with her luscious curves, but in the way she reacted to him, his spikily quick responses. Every expression was an open book as it crossed her face. She wasn’t afraid of him, and that was heady in itself. That she didn’t approve of him was glaringly obvious, and it was a novel sensation to have that from a woman.
Aristotle was looking at her far too assessingly. Lucy’s belly quivered in response and she told herself sternly that she wasn’t responding to him; she was just responding to the charisma of the man.
But then he strolled towards her nonchalantly and she had to fight the urge to turn tail and run. He walked around her as if inspecting a horse, and she turned around, unable to bear the thought of him looking at her too-large bottom. She cursed her genes again and felt acutely self-conscious. Why couldn’t she be a slim, petite little thing like her mother?
Her voice was high and defensive. ‘Is there something wrong? This dress fits perfectly well. It’s not too tight, if that’s what you’re afraid of.’ She wouldn’t be making that mistake again.
Aristotle’s eyes flicked to hers. They glittered with something dark and indefinable.
‘The dress is fine. For an old lady.’
Lucy sucked in a shocked breath. She’d spent a small fortune from her allowance on this dress. But before she could say anything he was gesturing to her head.
‘It’s too late to do anything about the dress, but leave down your hair. You look like you’re going to work.’
His normally accentless voice had lapsed into something unmistakably Greek, and it resonated within Lucy. Her mind blanked and her hand went up instinctively in a protective gesture. Her hair was part of her armour, she suddenly realised. No way could she take it down. She might as well just strip off the dress and stand in front of him in her underwear. Treacherous heat licked through her again, making a mockery of her attempts to rationalise it. She shook her head dumbly.
