by Maya Blake
He was quite sure he heard a collective intake of breath from the others in the room.
If he had it in him to feel sympathy for the woman who’d made him a laughing stock, he was sure he could conjure some, but her panicking eyes darting from his gaze to his outstretched hand was another wonderful response to relish.
After a pause that would be deemed impolite by anyone’s standards, a small, milky-white hand with short but shapely nails extended towards him. Her fingers wrapped around his for approximately a tenth of a second before she snatched them away. ‘Mr Nikolaidis,’ she murmured, taking her seat and putting her bag on the floor and the long tube on the table without looking at him.
‘You two know each other?’ The question came from one of the partners, a man who had to be old enough to be Helena’s father but who was looking at her with a stare that made Theo want to cause him bodily harm.
Instead of allowing his hands to do the talking—Theo had learned to control that side of himself before he’d reached double digits—he smiled again and was rewarded by the older man paling. ‘Helena and I are old friends. Aren’t we, agapi mou?’
That made her look at him. Her naturally plump lips were drawn into a tight line, her dark brown eyes sparking with fury.
She thought she was angry now? This was only the beginning.
Jerking her head into the semblance of a nod, she unscrewed the end of the tube and said, ‘Shall we get on with this?’
Theo spread his hands. ‘Yes. Show me your designs. Let me see if you are as talented as I have been led to believe.’
Her eyes narrowed before she finally plastered a wide, fake smile to her face. ‘You will have to be your own judge of that.’
‘Believe me, agapi mou, I learned the hard way that reputations are as deceptive as appearances.’ Helena was the root of that hardness. Easily the most beautiful woman he’d ever set eyes on, he’d met her on his home island of Agon. At an unexpected loose end for a few hours, he’d decided to pay a visit to his good friend Theseus Kalliakis, an Agon prince who, at the time, had lived in the palace. As it had been a beautiful day and Theo was a man who enjoyed the feel of the sun on his face, he’d decided to walk through the palace gardens to reach Theseus’s private residence. In the garden he’d spotted a young woman sitting on a bench beside a statue of the goddess Artemis with an open book on her lap and a pencil in hand. Crouched forward as she’d been, her dark chestnut hair had fallen like a sheet over her face and slender shoulders. She’d absentmindedly swiped it away and tucked it behind her ear, revealing a face that, even behind the largest pair of spectacles he’d ever seen, could in itself have been worshipped as a goddess.
He’d sucked in the longest breath of his life and stared. And stared some more.
Curiosity piqued as to what she was doing, he’d sneaked up behind her to peer over her shoulder. On an A4 sheet of paper was an intricately drawn study of the palace. It was beautiful. Using nothing but a set of graphite pencils, she’d brought the palace to life. She’d even managed to convey light bouncing off some of the windows!
No wonder he’d been so smitten. A woman with beauty, talent and brains? He’d put her straight onto a pedestal and worshipped her as his countrymen had worshipped Artemis all those millennia ago.
What a shame he’d forgotten scruples and honour were also wise things to select in the woman you intended to make your wife. He should have taken the statue who’d witnessed their first meeting as a warning sign. Artemis, one of the most revered of the ancient deities, had, according to legend, sworn never to marry.
Unlike Artemis, Helena had failed to mention her aversion to matrimony until the day before they’d been due to exchange their nuptials in Agon’s cathedral. Fool that he was, he hadn’t believed her, thought her words were shouted in nerves and anger. Of course she’d be at the cathedral!
Now, when Theo thought back on that time when Helena had broken his ego, he often thought he should thank her. He could have spent the past three years living a boring, settled life instead of re-embracing the hedonistic party lifestyle he’d been prepared to abandon for her. Truth be told, Helena’s jilting had set him free and he had made every moment of his freedom count...but only up to a point.
Three years on from his public humiliation, he was still to bed another woman. God alone knew he’d tried but his usually voracious libido had gone into obstinate hibernation. He, the man who could have any woman he wanted, had lost all interest in the opposite sex. He still dated—any excuse to rub Helena’s nose in what she was missing out on—but bedding his dates was impossible.
What had begun as a minor annoyance had become a serious problem. He didn’t want another relationship. Relationships were for naïve fools. They involved trust and emotions, neither of which he would allow himself to experience again, but he was only thirty-three, far too young to contemplate a life spent with the sex-life of a monk.
Then, six months ago, he’d seen a notice in the architectural magazine he subscribed to announcing the firm Staffords had given the newly qualified architect Helena Armstrong a permanent contract. Accompanying it had been a grainy photograph of her. The next morning he’d woken with his first erection since she’d left him. Relief that his manhood had awoken had been short-lived. A party that night on a friend’s yacht with a bevy of scantily clad nubile women and his manhood couldn’t even be bothered to wave hello. Not until he’d been alone in his bed and closed his eyes to remember Helena naked. It had sprung up like a jack-in-a-box.
And just like that, the reason for his impotence had become clear and so had the solution to cure it. Try as he might to forget about her, Helena had become like Japanese knotweed in his head, her roots dug so deep they smothered the normal functions of his masculinity. He needed to sever the roots and burn them. To accomplish that he needed Helena back in his life. This time he would bed her as he should have done three years ago. He would make her fall in love with him again. And then he would be the one to jilt and humiliate her.
And then he could, finally, forget about her and move on with his life.
* * *
Helena would never know how she made it through the next hour. Later that evening, on her journey home on the Tube, travelling so late she found a seat easily, she put her head back and closed her eyes.
Had she dreamt it all?
Had Theodoros Nikolaidis really been the mystery client who’d kept them on their toes these past two months?
Somehow she’d managed to pull herself together and deliver the pitch. She’d known every word she spoke was wasted air, but pride would not allow her to do anything less than her best. When Theo passed her over for a different architect in a different firm, at least her colleagues wouldn’t be able to say her professionalism had let her or them down.
And Theo would never know that under her calm, professional exterior had beat a crying heart.
His face had been poker straight when she’d finished her presentation. He hadn’t asked a single question. He’d merely looked at his watch, risen to his feet, thanked them all for their efforts, winked at Helena then swept out of the boardroom without a backward glance, leaving five mouths open with astonishment in his wake.
Neither Helena, the senior partners nor the other staff needed to vocalise it but the subdued atmosphere in the aftermath had told its own story. All the work Helena had put in for the pitch, all the help and support her colleagues had given her...it had all been for nothing.
She breathed in deeply, needing oxygen so badly she didn’t care that it was the lingering stale body odour of other commuters filling her lungs.
Seeing Theo again after all that time...
Don’t think about him.
She could no more stop her memory box opening than a child could resist a bag of sweets. Despite her best endeavours, Helena found herself thrown back over three years to a time when her heart had been intac
t and her body a flower primed and ready to bloom for the sun.
The sun had appeared in the form of the sexiest man she had ever set eyes on.
It was only on a whim that she’d gone to the palace that day. Needing a break after the first year of slogging for her master’s degree, she’d decided to visit her mother’s family in Agon. The sun always shone in Agon and life always felt freer. Simpler. Even her father relaxed enough to stop fault-finding every five minutes when he was there.
On her third morning, she’d woken early and decided to visit the palace she’d loved as a child.
Armed with nothing but her sketchbook, drawing pencils, a bottle of water and a picnic lunch, she’d parked her bottom on a bench and drawn her favourite building in the world.
After five hours of stillness cocooned in her own head, tuning out the hordes of tourists drifting around her, she’d suddenly become aware of being watched. She’d looked up at the same moment a voice had spoken behind her ear. ‘That is some talent you have there, lady. Name your price.’
She’d turned her head sharply and found herself face to face with a man who’d immediately made her heart swell. Tall—he had to be at least a foot taller than her own five-foot-one frame—and muscular, he’d had messy, short brown hair, the tips highlighted by the sun, and a deep tan that suggested a life spent enjoying the great outdoors. When she’d met the ice-blue eyes surrounded by laughter lines, her swelling heart had set off at a canter.
Over three years later and she’d had the exact same reaction to seeing him again.
Over three years later and Helena was still paying the price for that impulsive visit to the palace.
She’d reached her station. Hooking her bag over her shoulder, she trudged off the Tube and up the steep escalators. The sun had been setting when she’d begun her commute home but when she left the long, wide tunnel that brought her back out into the world, rain lashed the night sky. So much for the light cloud the forecasters had promised. Naturally, the first thing she did was step into a puddle that immediately soaked through the flat canvas shoe she’d changed into after the disastrous pitch.
Marvellous. All she needed was to be hit by a bus and her day would be complete.
By the time she reached her basement flat, the rest of her body was as soaked to the bone as her left foot.
Her flat was freezing and, shivering, she chided herself for believing that early May would bring glorious sunshine.
She’d turned the heating on, stripped off her soaking clothes and put on a thick towelling robe, and was running herself a hot bath when her doorbell rang.
Helena sighed, removed her glasses and covered her face with her hands. All the energy had been sapped out of her.
When the bell rang again, she turned the taps off and shoved her glasses back on. In the three years she’d rented her little breadcrumb of London she’d had one unannounced visitor: a delivery man hoping she’d take in a parcel for the couple in the flat upstairs.
She padded to the front door and, out of precautionary habit, put her eye to the spy hole...and immediately reared back in fright.
How the hell had he found her?
The bell rang again.
Heart thumping, she backed away. Unless Theo had developed X-ray vision, he couldn’t know she was in. She would slip back to the bathroom...
The bell that rang out this time was continuous, as if a Greek man famed for his impatience had decided to keep his finger on it until he’d annoyed every resident who lived in the building.
The infuriating, egotistical, sneaky little... She couldn’t think of a name to call him that wouldn’t earn her a slap from her grandmother.
The shock that had cloaked her since she’d come face to face with him in the boardroom lifted and a spike of furious energy shot through her veins, making her legs stride to the front door and her hands remove the three chains, deadlock and ordinary lock to fling the door open.
And there he stood, in a black shirt and black trousers, rain lashing down on him, black overcoat billowing in the growing wind, the widest grin on his face that could have been mistaken for rapture had she not seen the danger sparking from his ice-blue eyes.
Raising his hands and spreading them palm up, Theo tilted his head. ‘Surprise!’
Copyright © 2020 by Michelle Smart
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ISBN: 9781488059360
Kidnapped for His Royal Heir
Copyright © 2020 by Maya Blake
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
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