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A lesser woman—many lesser women, she was sure—would have fallen panting at his feet,
Mari Lewis was made of sterner stuff.
She had a job to fulfill, a reputation to uphold, a magazine ad and article to live up to, and a pair of lovable, impractical, dangerously gullible aunts to support.
And despite the fact that her heart was still hammering and her head was still spinning and her lips were still tingling, she needed to find Stavros Costanides. And she needed to do it fast.
But how? When Mr. Whoever-he-was was sitting next to the door, looking as if he would pounce on her if she made a move in that direction.
“Look, Mr....” She paused.
“Costanides,” he said helpfully. He smiled again. The same humorless smile he’d smiled before. However heart-stopping it was, his smile wasn’t meant to be friendly. It wasn’t even, she was fairly sure, meant to be attractive. Unfortunately it was. The dimple deepened again.
She wanted to touch it, To touch him. Again. Help! Determinedly Mari looked away and forced herself to say in a level tone, “Mr. Costanides, then. I don’t know why you’re doing this, but—”
“You’d do better wondering why my father is doing this.”
“Your father?”
“The well-known despot, Stavros Costanides. You know? Older than me. Mustache.” He parroted back her description. “The man who hired you.”
“To take care of his little boy.”
“To take care of Nikos,” her fully-grown, very masculine nemesis agreed. He poked his chest. “Me.”
“But that’s ridiculous!”
“You’re telling me,” he muttered. His smile faded and suddenly he rubbed fiercely at his forehead. “Damn.”
Mari frowned. Maybe he wasn’t totally mad, after all, she thought. Maybe he was suffering from concussion—a head injury that made him think he was someone else. He certainly looked as if he’d recently done battle with something formidable—and lost.
His left leg was in a cast; he held one arm close to his body, as if he was protecting his ribs; he had a fresh scar on his jaw, and his very handsome face still showed the lingering signs of bruising beneath the left eye and temple.
“Are you all right?” she asked quickly.
He lifted his gaze to meet hers. “Would you be?”
The very bleakness of his tone startled her. It also stopped her cold, having the effect that his words hadn’t had. It made her think that he wasn’t talking only about his physical condition at all.
It made her worry that he might be telling her the truth. Mari swallowed. Pushed the notion away. Tried not to think about it.
Stavros Costanides had hired her to be a nanny to his son. His little boy! She knew he had a little boy. She’d glimpsed a picture of him on the credenza in Stavros’s office.
“Is that Nikos?” she’d asked him.
He’d smiled a proud papa smile and had picked up the picture, saying proudly, “That’s my son.”
Nikos, she’d thought
But he hadn’t actually said, “That’s my son, Nikos,” she realized now. He’d just agreed, “That’s my son.”
And the devilishly handsome man sitting across from her now was...?
“You’re Nikos?” she asked faintly. “You’re not... kidding?”
Deep brown eyes met hers. Slowly he shook his head. “I’m not kidding.”
Outside in the distance Mari could hear the gabble of cheerful women. Overhead a jet engine droned. A bird twittered.
“But...but it doesn’t make sense. I mean, why would he—?” she faltered. “You’re not—” She broke off. “I understood he had a four-year-old. He showed me a picture of a four-year-old!” She gave him an accusing look.
“He does have a four-year-old. My half-brother. Alexander.”
“Then it’s obviously a mistake.”
“It’s not a mistake.”
“But—”
“It’s his way of making a point. He thinks I’m wasting my life. He thinks I don’t take things seriously enough, that I haven’t accepted my responsibilities as heir to his damned empire, that I’m shirking my duty to follow in his footsteps as the eldest son.” His tone became more and more bitter as he spoke. His dark eyes flashed, and it was all Mari could do not to flinch under his gaze.
She didn’t, because as a nanny she knew that the slightest crack in her armor could do her in. Don’t let them intimidate you, was the cardinal rule of dealing with one’s charges.
One of her charges?
She wasn’t seriously thinking she was this man’s nanny, was she?
It was a joke. Any minute now Stavros Costanides would come along to say he’d made his point and they would all laugh about it—though this particular son might laugh a little harshly—and then she would get her real job as nanny to Alexander.
Wouldn’t she?
Oh, heavens, she’d better! She had to have a job. She couldn’t not have a job!
Aunt Emmaline and Aunt Bett would be out on the street if she didn’t keep this job. It had been a godsend when Stavros Costanides had called her two days ago and wanted to hire her.
“I read about you in a magazine my wife gets,” he told her. “You’re the woman who could make Little Lord Fauntleroy out of a Katzenjammer Kid?”
Mari remembered laughing a little self-consciously. “The writer might have been exaggerating a little,” she allowed, recalling the article that had appeared in last month’s issue of an upscale magazine for parents. The article had been subtitled “Mari’s not Mary, But This Nanny Could Make That Poppins Woman Take a Back Seat” and it raved about Mari’s ability to deal with problem kids. “I was nanny to her nephew for two years.”
“He was a handful?”
“Oh, yes.”
“My son is, too.”
His four-year-old, she’d thought.
The more fool she.
It certainly explained the bonus offer he’d made her when she’d met him at his office yesterday afternoon. He’d detailed his son’s stubbornness, his reluctance to toe the line, his determined rebellion in the face of parental authority.
“I thought I could handle it myself,” he’d said gruffly. “Now I don’t think so. But I need it done. If you bring him up to scratch at the end of six months—if you last six months—I’ll give you a hundred thousand dollars bonus.”
Mari had gaped at him.
And then, steepling his hands on his desk, and looking at her over the tops of his fingers, he’d said, “And if you quit before six months are up, you owe me ten.”
“Ten?”
“Thousand dollars.”
To him it was chicken feed. To her, in her family’s straitened circumstances, it was more than she could promise.
But she wouldn’t have to give him ten thousand dollars, she’d reminded herself—if she didn’t quit. She wouldn’t quit She knew she couldn’t quit!
“All right,” she’d agreed.
“He must have been kidding,” she said hopefully now to the dark brooding man who sat and watched as all these thoughts flitted across her face.
Slowly, deliberately, Nikos Costanides shook his head. “No.”
“But—”
“He’s hired you to reform me.”
Mari wanted to deny it. She couldn’t. She had the awful sinking feeling that it was true.
“I can‘t—”
“You bet your sweet tail you can’t!” he said harshly. “So just march yourself up to the house and tell him the joke is on him.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, go tell him you’re not going to play. That whatever he’s paying you, it’s not enough. That there’s no way on earth he can con you into staying.”
Ah, but there was. There was that enormous white elephant of a house her aunts owned—their pride and joy, their legacy from their profligate father. It ate money. They couldn’t give it up.
“Where would we go, dear?” Aunt Em’s frail voice echoed in her ears. “We’ve always lived here.”
“Can’t put Em in one of those homes,” Aunt Bett said over and over. “It’d kill her.”
Probably, Mari acknowledged, it would. Aunt Em had a bad heart. It wouldn’t feel any better if she learned about Aunt Bett’s disastrous attempt to bail them out by playing the ponies, either.
Actually having to leave their home would likely kill them both. And Mari could see that they didn’t have to leave it—she could even see that the gambling debt was paid and the house had new struts, new paint and a new roof—if she managed to keep this job and earn Stavros Costanides’ bonus.
“No,” she said. “I can’t.”
Nikos Costanides scowled at her. “Why the hell not?”
“Because I need the job.”
“What did he offer you?”
Mari blinked. “What?”
“Obviously he offered you a bundle,” Nikos said impatiently. “Fine. I’ll offer you more to leave.”
It was tempting. Terribly tempting. She wanted to take it. And yet—
She shook her head. “I can’t.”
He glared at her. “What do you mean, you can’t?”
She knotted her fingers. “My reputation is at stake.”
“What?” He looked thunderous.
“I have a professional reputation, as I said before.” She felt her cheeks warm and, certain that he could see how flimsy that excuse was, she felt compelled to add, “Not the sort you imagined, but such as it is, it’s important to me,”
His jaw clenched. Their eyes battled.
Mari’s heart beat faster, her pulses raced. She felt like a racehorse in the home stretch, given its head. “All you have to do is shape up,” she reminded him a little breathlessly.
“Like hell. I’ll be damned if I’ll knuckle under to his threats!”
“Yes, well—” She took a careful shallow breath, then shrugged lightly. “Maybe you can’t.”
A nerve in his temple pulsed. He shoved a hand through disheveled dark hair. His eyes narrowed. “You’re saying you’re staying, Ms. Lewis?”
Say no, she told herself. Walk out. To hell with your reputation, your aunts, the hundred thousand dollars, the way he kisses! Where’s your common sense?
She didn’t know. She only knew that something had happened when Nikos Costanides kissed her. She had been kissed before. Heavens, she’d even been engaged before. But when Ward had kissed her it had been pleasant, warm, and in a few seconds, gone.
Even now the imprint of Nikos’s mouth was still on hers. The taste of him was a part of her, reaching into her. And somewhere deep inside it was as if a fundamental answering chord responded.
She hadn’t known such a response existed. She wanted desperately—perhaps foolishly—to know more.
Sanity—despite her reputation, her aunts, the money——told her to say no. It was foolish. It was insane to agree to be nanny to a grown man for any reason or any amount of money.
Mari was practical. Mari was sensible. Mari was grounded.
“People who are grounded have never flown,” her free spirit uncle Arthur always said with a twinkle and a hint of challenge in his eye.
She took a deep breath and said, “Yes.”
CHAPTER TWO
SHE had lost her mind.
