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What?
Ellie shook her head slightly. She wasn’t sure. As if she sensed something lost in him? As if, on some incomprehensible level, they were kindred spirits? Stupid crazy stuff she shouldn’t be feeling, that was for sure. Her fingers tightened around the tray. It was definitely time to excuse herself and go home.
But Alek Sarantos was still staring as if he was waiting for her to change her mind and as those blue eyes seared into her she felt a brief wobble of temptation. Because it wasn’t every day a Greek billionaire asked you to have a drink with him.
‘It’s getting on for twelve,’ she said doubtfully.
‘I’m perfectly capable of telling the time,’ he said with a touch of impatience. ‘What happens if you stay out past midnight—does your car turn into a pumpkin?’
Ellie jerked back her head in surprise. She was amazed he knew the story of Cinderella—did that mean they had the same fairy tales in Greece?—though rather less surprised that he’d associated her with the famous skivvy.
‘I don’t have a car,’ she said. ‘Just a bicycle.’
‘You live out in the middle of nowhere and you don’t have a car?’
‘No.’ She rested the tray against her hip and smiled, as if she were explaining elementary subtraction to a five-year-old. ‘A bike is much more practical round here.’
‘So what happens when you go to London—or the coast?’
‘I don’t go to London very often. And we do have such things as trains and buses, you know. It’s called public transport.’
He dropped another cube of sugar in his coffee. ‘I didn’t use any kind of public system until I was fifteen.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Absolutely.’ He glanced up at her. ‘Not a train or a bus—not even a scheduled airline.’
She stared at him. What kind of life had he led? For a moment she was tempted to offer him a glimpse of hers. Maybe she should suggest meeting tomorrow morning and taking the bus to nearby Milmouth-on-Sea. Or catching a train somewhere—anywhere. They could drink scalding tea from paper cups as the countryside sped by—she’d bet he’d never done that.
Until she realised that would be overstepping the mark, big time. He was a hotshot billionaire and she was a waitress and while guests sometimes pretended to staff that they were equals, everyone knew they weren’t. Rich people liked to play at being ordinary, but for them it was nothing but a game. He’d asked her to stay for a drink but, really, what possible interest could a tycoon like him have in someone like her? His unusually expansive mood might evaporate the moment she sat down. She knew he could be impatient and demanding. Didn’t the staff on Reception say he’d given them hell whenever he’d lost his internet connection—even though he was supposed to be on holiday and, in her opinion, people on holiday shouldn’t be working.
But then Ellie remembered something the general manager had told her when she’d first joined the hotel’s training scheme. That powerful guests sometimes wanted to talk—and if they did, you should let them.
So she looked into his blue eyes and tried to ignore the little shiver of awareness which had started whispering over her skin. ‘How come,’ she questioned, trying to make her voice sound cool and casual, ‘it took until the age of fifteen before you went on public transport?’
Alek leant back in his chair and considered her question and wondered whether now might be the right time to change the subject, no matter how easy he found it to talk to her. Because the reality of his past was something he usually kept off-limits. He had grown up in a pampered palace of a home—with every luxury known to man.
And he had hated every minute of it.
The place had been a fortress, surrounded by high walls and snarling dogs. A place which had kept people out as well as in. The most lowly of staff were vetted before being offered employment, and paid obscenely well to turn a blind eye to his father’s behaviour. Even family holidays were tainted by the old man’s paranoia about security. He was haunted by the threat of stories about his lifestyle getting into the papers—terrified that anything would be allowed to tarnish his outward veneer of respectability.
Crack teams of guards were employed to keep rubber-neckers, journalists and ex-lovers at bay. Frogmen would swim silently in reconnaissance missions around foreign jetties, before their luxury yacht was given the all-clear to sail into harbour. When he was growing up, Alek didn’t know what it was like not to be tailed by the shadowy presence of some burly bodyguard. And then one day he had escaped. At fifteen, he had walked away, leaving his home and his past behind and cutting his ties with them completely. He had gone from fabulous wealth to near penury but had embraced his new lifestyle with eagerness and hunger. No longer would he be tainted by his father’s fortune. Everything he owned, he would earn for himself and that was exactly what he’d done. It was the one thing in life he could be proud of. His mouth hardened. Maybe the only thing.
He realised that the waitress was still waiting for an answer to his question and that she no longer seemed to be in any hurry to get off duty. He smiled, expectation making his heart beat a little faster. ‘Because I grew up on a Greek island where there were no trains and few buses.’
‘Sounds idyllic,’ she said.
Alek’s smile faded. It was such a cliché. The moment you said Greek island, everyone thought you were talking about paradise, because that was the image they’d been fed. But serpents lurked in paradise, didn’t they? There were any number of tortured souls living in those blindingly white houses which overlooked the deep blue sea. There were all kinds of dark secrets which lay hidden at the heart of seemingly normal lives. Hadn’t he found that out, the hard way? ‘It looked very idyllic from the outside,’ he said. ‘But things are rarely what they seem when you dig a little deeper.’
‘I suppose not,’ she said. She transferred the tray to her other hand. ‘And does your family still live there?’
His smile was slow—like a knife sinking into wet concrete. His family? That wouldn’t be his word of choice to describe the people who had raised him. His father’s whores had done their best, with limited success—but surely even they were better than no mother at all. Than one who’d run out on you and never cared enough to lift the phone to find out how you were.
‘No,’ he said. ‘The island was sold after my father died.’
‘A whole island?’ Her lips parted. ‘You mean your father actually owned an island?’
Another stab of lust went kicking to his groin as her lips parted. If he’d announced that he had a home on Mars, she couldn’t have looked more shocked. But then, it was easy to forget how isolating wealth could be—especially to someone like her. If she didn’t even own a car, then she might have trouble getting her head around someone having their own island. He glanced at her hands and, for some reason, the sight of her unmanicured nails only intensified his desire and he realised that he hadn’t been entirely honest when he’d told her he wasn’t planning to drag her away to a dark corner. He thought he’d like that very much.
‘You’ve been standing there so long that you’ve probably come to the end of your shift,’ he said drily. ‘You could have had that drink with me after all.’
‘I suppose I could.’ Ellie hesitated. He was so persistent. Flatteringly so. She wondered why. Because he’d been almost friendly since he’d helped with the little boy who’d cut his knee? Or because she’d displayed a degree of reluctance to spend time with him and he wasn’t used to that? Probably. She wondered what it must be like, to be Alek Sarantos—so sure of yourself that nobody ever turned you down.
‘What are you so scared of?’ he taunted. ‘Don’t you think I’m capable of behaving like a gentleman?’
It was one of those life-defining moments. Sensible Ellie would have shaken her head and said no thanks. She would have carried the tray back to the kitchen, unlocked her bike and cycled home to her room in the nearby village. But the moonlight and the powerful scent of the roses were making her feel the opposite of sensible. The last time a man had asked her on a date—and you couldn’t really call this a date—was over a year ago. She’d been working such unsociable hours that there hadn’t been a lot of opportunity for down time.
She looked into his eyes. ‘I hadn’t really thought about it.’
‘Well, think about it now. You’ve been waiting on me all week, so why not let me wait on you for a change? I have a fridge stocked with liquor I haven’t touched. If you’re hungry, I can feed you chocolate or apricots.’ He rose to his feet and raised his eyebrows. ‘So why don’t I pour you a glass of champagne?’
‘Why? Are you celebrating something?’
He gave a low laugh. ‘Celebration isn’t mandatory. I thought all women liked champagne.’
‘Not me.’ She shook her head. ‘The bubbles make me sneeze. And I’m cycling home—I don’t want to run over some poor, unsuspecting pony who’s wandered out into the middle of the road. I think I’d prefer something soft.’
‘Of course you would.’ He slanted her an odd kind of smile. ‘Sit down and let me see what I can find.’
He went inside the self-contained villa which stood within the extensive hotel grounds and Ellie perched awkwardly on one of the cane chairs, praying nobody would see her, because she shouldn’t be sitting on a guest’s veranda as if she had every right to do so.
She glanced across the silent lawn, where a huge oak tree was casting an enormous shadow. The wild flowers which edged the grass swayed gently in the breeze and, in the background, lights blazed brightly from the hotel. The dining room was still lit with candles and she could see people lingering over coffee. In the kitchen, staff would be frantically washing up and longing to get home. Upstairs, couples would be removing complimentary chocolates from on top of the Egyptian linen pillows, before getting into bed. Or maybe they would be sampling the deep, twin baths for which The Hog was so famous.
She thought she saw something glinting from behind the oak tree and instinctively she shrank back into the shadows, but before she could work out exactly what it was—Alek had returned with a frosted glass of cola for her, and what looked like whisky, for him.
‘I guess I should have put them on a tray,’ he said.
She took a sip. ‘And worn an apron.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Perhaps I could borrow yours?’
The implication being that she remove her apron... Ellie put her glass down, glad that the darkness disguised her suddenly hot cheeks because the thought of removing anything was making her heart race. Suddenly, the moonlight and the roses and the glint in his eyes was making her feel way too vulnerable.
‘I can’t stay long,’ she said quickly.
‘Somehow I wasn’t expecting you to. How’s your cola?’
‘Delicious.’
He leant back in his chair. ‘So tell me why a young woman of twenty...?’ He raised his eyebrows.
‘I’m twenty-five,’ she supplied.
‘Twenty-five.’ He took a sip of whisky. ‘Ends up working in a place like this.’
‘It’s a great hotel.’
‘Quiet location.’
‘I like that. And it has a training scheme which is world famous.’
‘But what about...’ he paused ‘...nightlife? Clubs and boyfriends and parties? The kind of thing most twenty-five-year-olds enjoy.’
Ellie watched the bubbles fizzing around the ice cubes he’d put in her cola. Should she explain that she’d deliberately opted for a quiet life which contrasted with the chaos which had defined her childhood? Somewhere where she could concentrate on her work, because she didn’t want to end up like her mother, who thought a woman’s ambition should be to acquire a man who was a meal ticket. Ellie had quickly learnt how she didn’t want to live. She was never going to trawl the internet, or hang around nightclubs. She had never owned a thigh-skimming skirt or push-up bra. She was never going to date someone just because of what they had in their wallet.
‘Because I’m concentrating on my career,’ she said. ‘My ambition is to travel and I’m going to make that happen. One day I’m hoping to be a general manager—if not here, then in one of the group’s other hotels. Competition is pretty fierce, but there’s no harm in aiming high.’ She sipped her cola and looked at him. ‘So that’s me. What about you?’
Alek swirled the whisky around in his glass. Usually he would have changed the subject, because he didn’t like talking about himself. But she had a way of asking questions which made him want to answer and he still couldn’t work out why.
He shrugged. ‘I’m a self-made man.’
‘But you said—’
‘That my father owned an island? He did. But he didn’t leave his money to me.’ And if he had, Alek would have thrown it back in his face. He would sooner have embraced a deadly viper than taken a single drachma of the old man’s fortune. He felt his gut tighten. ‘Everything I own, I earned for myself.’
‘And was that...difficult?’
The softness of her voice was hypnotic. It felt like balm being smoothed over a wound which had never really healed. And wasn’t this what men had done since the beginning of time? Drunk a little too much whisky and then offloaded on some random woman they would never see again?
‘It was a liberation,’ he said truthfully. ‘To cut my ties with the past.’
She nodded, as if she understood. ‘And start over?’
‘Exactly that. To know that every decision I make is one I can live with.’
His cell phone chose precisely that moment to start ringing and automatically he reached into his pocket, glancing at the small screen.
Work, he mouthed as he took the call.
He launched into a long torrent of Greek, before breaking into English—so that Ellie couldn’t help but sit there and listen. Though if she was being honest, it was very interesting listening to a conversation, which seemed to involve some high-powered forthcoming deal with the Chinese. And then he said other stuff, too—which was even more interesting.
‘I am taking a holiday. You know I am. I just thought it wise to check with the New York office first.’ He tapped his finger impatiently against the arm of the chair. ‘Okay. I take your point. Okay.’
He cut the connection and saw her staring at him. ‘What is it?’ he demanded.
She shrugged. ‘It’s none of my business.’
‘No, I’m interested.’
She put her drink down. ‘Don’t you ever stop working?’
His irritated look gave way to a faint smile which seemed to tug reluctantly at the corners of his lips. ‘Ironically, that’s just what my assistant was saying. He said I couldn’t really nag other people to take holidays if I wasn’t prepared to do so myself. They’ve been pushing me towards this one for ages.’
‘So how come you’re taking business calls at this time of night?’
‘It was an important call.’
‘So important that it couldn’t have waited until the morning?’
‘Actually, yes,’ he said coolly, but Alek’s heart had begun beating very fast. He told himself he should be irritated with her for butting in where she wasn’t wanted, yet right then he saw it as nothing but a rather disarming honesty. Was this why people went on vacation—because it took you right out of your normal environment and shook you up? In his daily life, nobody like Ellie would have got near him for long enough to deliver a damning judgement on his inability to relax. He was always surrounded by people—people who kept the rest of the world at arm’s length.
But the protective nucleus of his business life suddenly seemed unimportant and it was as if everything was centred on the soft face in front of him. He wondered what her hair would look like if he shook it free from its ponytail and laid it over his pillow. How that soft flesh would feel beneath him as he parted her legs. He drained the last of his whisky and put the glass down, intending to walk across the veranda and take her into his arms.
But she chose that moment to push the heavy fringe away from her eyes and the jerky gesture suddenly brought him to his senses. He frowned, like someone wakening from a sleep. Had he really been planning to seduce her? He looked at the cheap shoes and unvarnished nails. At the heavy fringe, which looked as if she might trim it herself. Was he insane? She was much too sweet for someone like him.
‘It’s getting late,’ he said roughly, rising to his feet. ‘Where’s your bike?’
She blinked at him in surprise, as if the question wasn’t one she had been expecting. ‘In the bike shed.’
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll walk you there.’
He could see the faint tremble of her lips as she shook her head.
‘Honestly, there’s no need. I see myself home every night,’ she said. ‘And it’s probably best if I’m not seen with you.’
‘I am walking you back,’ he said stubbornly. ‘And I won’t take no for an answer.’
He could sense her disappointment as they walked over the moonlit grass and he told himself that he was doing the right thing. There were a million women who could be his for the taking—better steer clear of the sweet and sensible waitress.
They reached the hotel and she gave him an awkward smile. ‘I have to go and change and fetch my bag,’ she said. ‘So I’d better say goodnight. Thanks for the drink.’
Alek nodded. ‘Goodnight, Ellie,’ he said and leant towards her, intending to give her a quick kiss on either cheek, but somehow that didn’t happen.
Did she turn her head, or did he? Was that why their mouths met and melded, in a proper kiss? He saw her eyes widen. He felt the warmth of her breath. He could taste the sweetness of cola and it reminded him of a youth and an innocence which had never been his. It was purely reflex which made him pull her into his arms and deepen the kiss and her tiny gasp of pleasure was one he’d heard countless times before.
And that was all he needed. All his frustration and hunger broke free; his hands skimmed hungrily over her body as he moved her further into the shadows and pressed her up against a wall. He groaned as he felt the softness of her belly and it made him want to imprint his hardness against her. To show her just what he had and demonstrate how good it would feel if he were deep inside her. Circling his palm over one peaking nipple, he closed his eyes. Should he slip his hand beneath her uniform skirt and discover whether she was as wet as he suspected? Slide her panties down her legs and take her right here, where they stood?
The tiny moan she made in response to the increased pressure of his lips was almost enough for him to act out his erotic thoughts.
Almost, but not quite.
Reason seeped into his brain like the cold drip of a tap and he drew back, even though his body was screaming out its protest. Somehow he ignored the siren call of his senses, just as he ignored the silent plea in her eyes. Because didn’t he value his reputation too much to make out with some anonymous waitress?
It was several moments before he could trust himself to speak and he shook his head in faint disbelief. ‘That should never have happened.’
Ellie felt as if he’d thrown ice-cold water over her and she wondered why he had stopped. Surely he had felt it, too? That amazing chemistry. That sheer magic. Nobody had ever kissed her quite like that before and she wanted him to carry on doing it. And somehow her bold words tumbled out before she could stop them.
‘Why not?’
