by Abby Green
She forced herself to sound non-committal. ‘How would you like the note to read?’
He shrugged one broad shoulder and smiled sardonically, cruelly. ‘Make it up. What kind of platitude would you like to hear from a man who has just dumped you?’ His mouth twisted even more. ‘I think it’s safe to say that someone like Ms Archer will throw away the card and move straight to the main prize, so I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Just keep it as impersonal as possible.’
Shock at his cold words impacted Lucy right in her belly. Her face must have given something away, because Aristotle lounged back in his chair and looked at her with a dangerous gleam in those fascinating green eyes.
‘You don’t approve of my methods?’
Lucy could feel a tide of heat climb up from her chest. She alternately shook and nodded her head, and some garbled words came out. ‘Not at all…’ She realised what she’d said and groaned inwardly when she saw a flash of something dark cross his face. She could not let her own personal opinion of his behaviour jeopardise this job. Too much now depended on her wages.
She gestured clumsily. ‘I mean, I have no problem doing as you suggest. Your methods…are your methods. It’s not for me to judge.’
He sat up and raised a brow, and Lucy wondered dismally how on earth they had got onto this. She wanted to be back outside, with a wall and door between them, catching her breath and restoring her equilibrium, not discussing how best to let his mistress down.
But he said, ‘So you admit there is something to judge, then?’
Lucy shook her head, drowning in heat now. ‘No—look, I’m sorry, I’m not being very articulate. I’ll do as you ask and make sure that the accompanying note is appropriate.’ She added hurriedly, ‘I can show it to you before I send it…?’
He shook his head and his face became impassive, hard. Lucy stood there for another moment, not sure what to do and then he bit out,
‘That’ll be all.’
Stung, and more than mortified, Lucy mumbled something incoherent and fled, shutting the door behind her. Amidst the embarrassment, anger surged—why was she surprised or, worse, disappointed? She’d seen this kind of behaviour from men all her life.
But still, what an absolute—She halted her racing thoughts as she sat behind her desk and fought to steady her breathing and hammering heart. The last five minutes was the closest she’d come to a personal discussion with her new boss. She should have just bowed her head and walked out. She cursed her expressive face. Her mother had always told her it would get her into trouble. And hadn’t it just? Her inherent distaste for his coldly generous dismissive treatment of his ex-mistress hadn’t been well hidden enough. But the truth was it had tapped into a deeply buried pain, a very familiar pain. She’d witnessed the other side of someone on the receiving end of that treatment. Over and over again.
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 uninterest 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 mor
ning, 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.
