Constantinou's Mistress

by Cathy Williams

  The disparaging tone of her voice, which only just managed to escape being insolent, was not sufficient for his mind to ignore the image she had presented of herself. Wild, abandoned, coming towards him with her arms outstretched and her naked, creamy body offering itself for his inspection. For his lingering exploration. The image sent a rush of heat to his loins and he compensated for that by frowning coldly at her.

  ‘Not precisely my words…’

  ‘As good as,’ Lucy clarified brutally. ‘You can rest assured that I won’t, sir.’

  ‘There is no need to labour the point.’ Nick flushed darkly, fully aware of how he had sounded.

  ‘Nor,’ she continued, steamrolling over his interruption and barely managing to keep her voice steady, ‘will I suddenly think that I can swan in and out and do as I please because we made a mistake. I won’t.’ Never before had she deviated from her role of efficient secretary, willing to put in whatever hours were asked of her without complaint. Nor had she ever verbally struck out at him, as she was doing now, and it felt good. Good to be letting some of her crushing hurt spill out in anger. If she had to, she could get another job. It might pay half the amount she earned working for him, but at least she would be free of his presence and the havoc he wreaked on her heart without even being aware of it.

  ‘And just for the record,’ she flung at him, making no attempt to lower her voice, ‘you are no more my type than I am yours!’

  ‘So, you make a habit of sleeping with men you don’t like?’ He should have closed the conversation. Instead he found himself prolonging it, his dark face flushed and scowling.

  ‘No,’ Lucy sighed, ‘that’s not what I said at all. And I apologise for…well, for speaking my mind out of turn.’ She ran her fingers through her short blonde hair and then linked them together on her lap. ‘The circumstances were, as you said, extraordinary. I like you well enough, and I respect you, but you’re not the sort of man I would normally…normally…’

  ‘Be attracted to?’ Nick enquired silkily.

  ‘If you want to put it that way.’ Thank goodness she wasn’t Pinocchio, she thought, or her nose would be reaching the other side of the office by now.

  ‘And what sort of man are you attracted to?’

  ‘Look,’ Lucy said, horrified that she had overstepped the mark with no thought for what he had so recently gone through. As if, at this point in time, he really cared one way or another about her or what she thought! Just another instance of how easy it was for her to lose touch with reality when he was around. ‘Look, I’m sorry. This is the wrong time for us to be pursuing this conversation. You must have had a hellish weekend and you certainly do not need to come in here to work to have a hellish morning.’ She attempted a soothing, understanding smile.

  ‘You still haven’t answered my question.’

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ she said in the same soothing voice, which appeared to be having no effect whatsoever. ‘But, if you really want to know, I’m attracted to…nice, thoughtful, caring men…’

  ‘Nice. Thoughtful. Caring.’

  ‘Not,’ she amended hastily, ‘that you aren’t. I’m sure you’re all of those things.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t want to stake your house on it,’ Nick said drily, forcing a reluctant smile from her.

  ‘Maybe not,’ Lucy agreed.

  This was as close to a truce as they could get, she realised. Now the air had been cleared and work could begin. He had said his piece, she had said hers and she knew instinctively that every word spoken between them would remain behind these four walls.

  ‘So…’ Nick sat back and extracted a file in front of him ‘…I want you to get some letters out for this lot. I’ve already dictated three into the machine. You’ll need to transcribe those, and, with this one, just write and question some of the bills we’ve been charged. Find out whether our guy in Boston checked out all the suppliers before he placed this particular order. It just seems a little excessive to me…’

  He watched as she stood up and bent over to take the file from him.

  Everything back to normal. Except…he couldn’t help his eyes from drifting towards the neckline of her blouse, following it down to where, as she straightened, it fell softly over her breasts. Everything about her appearance was neat and smart, but there was a fire burning there. He had sensed it during their conversation and he could almost catch hold of wisps of memory about the Friday before, teasing little recollections of her moaning hotly as he had touched her.

  Nick shook his head.

  Not each other’s type. That much was true. His type, from as far back as when he had been an adolescent, was along Gina’s lines. Voluptuously built women with long hair and bodies that swayed with blatant sexuality.

  And Lucy… His eyes drifted back towards her. Yes, he could see that she would be attracted to the clean-cut, boy-next-door kind of man, someone pleasant, easygoing, nice. Dull, in other words.

  He turned his chair at an angle so that he had his profile towards her and stared absent-mindedly through the large window.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Nick inclined his head towards Lucy, who had gathered her various files and was standing hesitantly by the chair in which she had previously been sitting.

  ‘What did you think of Gina?’ he asked curiously. ‘You met her a few times over the months you’ve been working with me. What did you think of her?’

  The question threw Lucy, not least because she had never felt a great deal of empathy towards the woman. She had always assumed that that was because she was, quite simply, Nick’s wife.

  ‘She was amazingly beautiful,’ Lucy told him truthfully.

  ‘Disregard her looks for a moment.’

  ‘Well…I can’t say I ever really had any long conversations with her.’

  ‘You didn’t like her, did you?’

  ‘Yes, of course I did!’ She flushed hotly and he cast a jaundiced, sidelong look at her for a few brief seconds.

  Of course she hadn’t liked her, he thought with blinding clarity. Gina had never been the sort of woman who had felt the need to cultivate the friendship of other women. They would never have been able to give her the undiluted attention she craved. He couldn’t remember her having any close female friends, simply wives of wealthy men whose company she maintained because they had been a necessary part of her vital social life.

  ‘Did you?’ he murmured more to himself than to her, and Lucy held herself very still, straining forward to catch his words. ‘My mother never approved, you know.’ Another confidence that he now somehow found himself compelled to confess. ‘She thought that Gina and I weren’t suited. As far as she was concerned, Gina was too flamboyant.’

  ‘Which just goes to show that love can survive other people’s opinions,’ Lucy said stoically. ‘Parents can be very critical when it comes to their children’s partners,’ she continued lamely when he failed to reply.

  Nick sighed and swivelled round to face her. ‘Now, I would bet that you have never given your parents any cause to be critical.’

  Lucy looked at his dark, handsome face, each hard line and angle a revelation of power and beauty, his every movement as economically graceful as an athlete’s, and she thought that her parents would be vastly critical were they ever to find out what had taken place between their well-behaved, respectable daughter and her charismatic boss. Shocked and critical.

  ‘No,’ she said, turning away. ‘Is that all? Shall I get back to work now?’

  ‘Yes. I think we have said all there is to say.’

  ‘I think we have,’ Lucy agreed quietly. ‘And I would be grateful if…if no more is mentioned about…’

  ‘Our little mistake. I quite agree.’ Nick tapped the keyboard of his computer and it whirred softly into gear. He barely glanced as she left his office, gently closing the door behind her.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE trip in to work this morning had been worse than usual. Lucy had missed her usual tube, had had
to wait twenty minutes before she could get on the next one, and when she had managed to squeeze into a compartment had had to spend the entire thirty-minute journey hanging onto the pole by the door so that she was constantly buffeted by people getting in and getting off at every stop.

  And on top of that she had the first stirrings of a sore throat, which probably meant that she was coming down with a cold.

  So she was not in the best of moods when she finally made it to her office to find Nick waiting for her.

  ‘You’re late.’

  Lucy calmly hung her lightweight jacket on the coat stand by the door and turned around to look at him. The connecting door between their offices was flung open and he was sitting behind his desk with his chair pushed well back so that he could stretch out his long legs at an angle. He looked as though he had been there for hours already, even though it was only a little after nine. His white shirt was rolled to the elbows and his tie had been loosened so that he could undo the first two buttons of his shirt.

  ‘I’m sorry. I slept through my alarm clock and then I missed my tube and had to wait ages before I could get on another one. Shall I sort out the post and bring it in to you?’

  ‘Just get in here. With your notepad.’ He watched her through the open door as she walked towards her desk, leant over and fished out her pad from the drawer on the right-hand side.

  Sometimes the line of her jaw when she turned her head or the flick of her wrist took him spinning back over eight months to when they had made love, right here on the sofa in his own office. When that happened he was left feeling oddly shaken and disoriented. It was as if his mind was holding out something for him to take, but, whatever that something was, it was just a little too far out of reach.

  He abruptly dragged his eyes away from her slender body, now straightening with notepad obediently in one hand and pen in the other.

  ‘Can I expect you in here before the year is out?’ he rasped, pulling himself towards the desk and flicking through some files in front of him.

  ‘Sorry.’ Lucy hurried in, flustered, and took her seat opposite him, poised to take notes.

  ‘If you don’t think you can function properly today, then it’s better if you have the day off and send Terri in to cover for you.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Have there been any developments with this Rawlings business?’ he asked, glancing up at her.

  Even now that her life was seemingly swimming along, she still couldn’t look at him without that stirring of awareness, as forbidden now as it had been when he had been married and out of bounds.

  ‘We received a fax from them yesterday evening. Actually I stuck it on your desk.’

  ‘Just tell me what it said,’ Nick told her shortly, frowning.

  ‘Another dip in profits. No reason given. The usual optimistic forecasts for the next six months and no excuse as to why the past six months have been so sluggish.’

  ‘And you phoned Rawlings himself?’

  ‘He was out.’

  ‘Out where?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lucy said with a rebellious tide of irritation at his attitude. What was the matter with him? Even for him, this was more of a foul mood than normal. ‘Perhaps we could employ someone to act as an undercover agent and track his every movement.’

  Nick regarded her narrowly, noting the slow flush spreading along her cheekbones. Hell, he knew he was being aggressive, unnecessarily so, but he couldn’t stop himself. It had been like this for the past eight months. She had seen a side to him that had never been revealed to the public eye, had seen him at his most vulnerable, and some demon in him now drove him to punish her for that.

  Lord, he knew that he should just have her transferred to another department. There were enough of them to choose from. He could raise her pay extravagantly to make the move justified and irresistible, but whenever he thought of walking into the office and not being able to see her he weakened and told himself that he needed to hang on to her, that she was the best secretary he could ever hope for.

  ‘I don’t believe I pay you to be sarcastic,’ he informed her coolly and, without waiting for an answer, proceeded to give his undivided attention to the Rawlings fax in front of him. ‘This doesn’t make any sense,’ he continued, while she simmered away in the chair, hating him and hating herself even more for the fact that he could get to her every time. ‘The hotel should be harvesting money. It is on an island, in the sun, good airline connections from the US, no political instability. So what the hell is going on? Dammit, I should have handled this one myself instead of handing it over to Bob. What does he have to say about this? No, better still, I’ll get him on the line. Stay here so that I can dictate a letter to you when I’m through with Bob.’

  Lucy let her eyes wander as she listened to Nick speak curtly down the phone to his financial director. She was aware of him leaning forward as he spoke, his brows meeting in a slight frown, his black hair shorter than it was when she had run her fingers through it, and combed neatly back. His restless energy manifested itself in the tapping of his fountain pen on the sheaf of paper in front of him. After a few minutes he dropped the receiver back in its handset and sat back in the leather swivel chair to look at her.

  ‘Take this letter,’ he ordered. His dictation was always faultless. He composed fluently and without any need for her to make revisions. He was one of the few people whose clarity of thought was translated into clarity of speech without any hesitancy or confusion along the way.

  When she stood up to leave he snapped impatiently, ‘Sit back down. I haven’t finished with you as yet.’ God, but he could shake her out of that docility! His eyes involuntarily moved to her breasts, totally hidden behind her neat shirt with its severe little row of buttons and prim rounded collar, and he looked away immediately. Unwelcome thoughts had a nasty habit of creeping up on him when he was least expecting it, thoughts of ripping off her shirt and scooping those breasts out of their constraints so that he could taste them once again, prove once and for all whether their lovemaking had been as magnificent as his hazy memory recalled, or whether that had been an illusion.

  ‘I want you to order some flowers to be sent for me.’

  ‘Flowers?’ Lucy’s hand froze momentarily over her notepad, then she plastered her usual bland smile on her face.

  ‘You heard me. Flowers.’

  ‘Right. What kind of flowers?’

  Nick shrugged nonchalantly. ‘You tell me…what kind of flowers does a woman like? Roses? Violets? Orchids? Anything, but make it expensive.’

  ‘And should there be a message to accompany the flowers?’ She knew that there had been women in the past few months. He had made no effort to conceal his love life from her, and from what she had deduced his love life was very hectic indeed. But never before had she been requested to act as a link between him and any of his women and the thought of that made her feel ill.

  ‘Just “Thanks for the good times.”’ He had pushed his chair back so that his profile was to her and he was staring out of the window.

  “‘Thanks for the good times,’” Lucy repeated. ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘What else is there to say when a relationship comes to an end?’ Nick asked with an edge of sarcasm.

  ‘Nothing.’ She snapped shut her notepad. ‘Will that be all?’

  ‘Are you in some kind of hurry to go? Urgent ten o’clock appointment somewhere?’

  ‘Just a lot of work to get through before I leave this afternoon,’ Lucy answered vaguely.

  ‘Which reminds me. I have scheduled a meeting with Bob this evening at six to discuss what the hell is going on with the Tradewinds Hotel and Rawlings. I will want you to stay so that you can take notes.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I can’t.’

  Nick swivelled his chair so that he was now facing her. ‘Can’t?’ He pronounced the single word as though it belonged to some little-used foreign dialect and Lucy flushed and looked away. This was a first for her.

&nb
sp; ‘I’ve made plans for this evening…’

  ‘In which case you can cancel them. Bob is flying to the Far East tomorrow and I want this Rawlings business sorted out before he goes and I need you here.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised again, ‘perhaps I can arrange for Terri to work late and I can transcribe the notes tomorrow morning when I come in.’

  ‘What are you doing that is so important?’ he demanded. He stood up and began prowling through the office, hands thrust into his trouser pockets. Out of the corner of his eye he could see her trying hard to formulate a suitable reply, staring straight ahead as if afraid that one unwary move might bring her eyes clashing to his. Good ploy, he thought with a sudden, savage sourness, but not good enough.

  He came to stand directly in front of her, so that she had nowhere to turn without seeing him, and to further ram home his presence he leant forward, propping his hands on either side of her chair and effectively forming an unassailable cage.

  ‘Well?’ he enquired. ‘Part of the unwritten agreement between myself and my secretary is the understanding that overtime is a given. As and when. It is why you are paid so exorbitantly.’

  ‘And I’ve never let you down before!’ Lucy raised her eyes to his and flinched back at the proximity. She couldn’t focus her thoughts properly when he was this close. In fact, her head felt as though it was stuffed with cotton wool.

  He continued to stare at her in thunderous silence, watching her wriggle like a worm on a hook and ferociously determined to find out just what the hell was so important that she couldn’t stay for an extra two hours after work.

  ‘I’m going out with…someone,’ Lucy finally admitted. ‘We made an arrangement to go to the theatre and it’s been hard work getting hold of these tickets, and afterwards we’re going out for a meal.’

  ‘You are going out with someone,’ Nick said flatly. He pushed himself away, only to perch on the edge of his desk so that she had an uninterrupted view of his thighs and his linked fingers resting lightly on them. ‘In other words, you are going on a date.’