by Abby Green
A colleague of Aristotle’s had just walked away. Lucy watched him go with a feeling of mounting terror. She did not want to be alone with her boss.
They were standing side by side under the seductively soft lighting of the main ballroom in the exclusive London hotel when she heard his drawling query, ‘You don’t need your glasses? Or are you wearing contacts?’
She nearly choked on her sparkling water and lowered the drink carefully, realising without even making a reflex gesture to check that she had indeed forgotten her glasses. She could picture them right now, sitting on the vanity cabinet in the dressing room of the office. She flushed guiltily and sent a quick, fleeting look to Aristotle. Standing here in this milieu, with his tall, hard body just inches away, was making her nervous. It made her so nervous, in fact, that she didn’t stop the truth from spilling out.
‘They aren’t prescription glasses.’
She saw him frown from the corner of her eyes. ‘So why do you wear them?’
He sounded aghast, and Lucy had no doubt that he could not understand why any woman would knowingly want to make herself any less attractive than she already was. A sense of extreme vulnerability washed through her.
She shrugged minutely and avoided his eye. ‘I started wearing them when I was looking for work after college.’ She squirmed inwardly. How could she explain to this man that she’d grown sick and tired of prospective bosses ogling her sizeable assets rather than her CV? A memory made her shiver with distaste: her first boss, whispering lasciviously on more than one occasion that he liked big girls.
Ever since then Lucy had made sure to be covered up at all times, hair pulled back and glasses firmly on. Yet, uncomfortably, she had to acknowledge that she’d found working with Aristotle Levakis something of a relief in that she knew there was no way on this earth a man like him would look twice at her. That assertion suddenly seemed shaky.
As if to compound the feeling, from the corner of her eye she could see Aristotle turn subtly, so that he had his back to the room full of people. She even saw one person in the act of approaching falter and turn away, as if he’d sent off some silent signal she couldn’t see. She couldn’t resist sending him another quick look. He had an expression on his face that caught and held her, and she couldn’t look away.
His eyes flicked down to her breasts—in exactly the way she’d seen men do all her life, ever since she’d developed out of all proportion in her early teens. But instead of her usual feeling of disgust and invasion, to her shame and horror she could feel herself respond. Her breasts grew heavy, their tips tight and hard. For a cataclysmic moment she actually felt the novel desire to know what it would feel like to have this man touch them. Shock at the sheer physicality of her reaction made her feel clammy.
Aristotle’s eyes glittered. A whisper of a smile hovered around his mouth and then he said, ‘And did it work?’
Shame and chagrin rushed through Lucy. Was she really so weak? With one look this man was felling all her careful defences like a bowling ball sending skittles flying.
Her voice sounded strangled. ‘I found that, yes, it did work.’
Until now.
Lucy felt like a trapped insect, flat on its back and helpless in the face of a looming predator. Determined to negate her disturbing reaction, she looked away and said crisply, ‘Plenty of people wear glasses for cosmetic reasons. I would have thought that you’d approve.’
His voice was curt. ‘Your CV and your work ethic speak for themselves, Lucy. You don’t need to bolster your image by making it more businesslike.’
Too-tight skirts, yes. Glasses, no. Aristotle swallowed a growl of irritation at his wayward mind.
Lucy looked back. She was more than surprised at his easy commendation of her ability. So far it was only the fact that she hadn’t been let go that had given her any indication of how well she was doing her job. She had to fight the urge to cross her hands defensively over her chest, but that was ridiculous. He wouldn’t be looking at her like that. He’d just been making a point.
She inclined her head and said, ‘Fine. I won’t wear them.’ She bit back the reflex to say sir. The last thing she needed now was for him to repeat his request to call him Aristotle. What she did need was for this evening to be over as soon as possible and to have a whole two days away from this man, to get her head together and clear again. Especially when the prospect of spending three weeks in Athens with him loomed on the horizon like a threatening stormcloud.
A few hours later Lucy breathed a sigh of relief when the car drew to a smooth halt outside her apartment block in south London. She’d tried to insist on taking a cab from the hotel, but Aristotle wouldn’t listen. Then she’d tried to insist that he be dropped home first, but again he’d been adamant.
She reached for the door on her side and looked back to say a crisp goodnight. Her ability to speak left her. Aristotle was lounging in the far corner like a huge, dark avenging angel. A surge of panic gripped her and she felt blindly for the door handle, all but scrambling in her haste to get out and away. But just as she opened the door, extending one leg out of the car, the awful sound of ripping material made her heart stop. An ominously cold breeze whistled across the tops of her thighs.
She looked down and her jaw dropped when she saw a huge rip extending down the side of her dress from mid-thigh to hem. Only peripherally was she aware that it must have snagged on something. Her white thighs gleamed up at her in the gloom.
As all this was impacting on her brain, she heard a coolly sardonic, ‘You don’t seem to have much luck with clothes, do you?’
The sensation of wanting the ground to open up and swallow her whole had never seemed more strong than at that moment. She heard Aristotle say something unintelligible to his driver and then he got out. Lucy couldn’t move. She was terrified that if she did something else would rip and her entire dress might fall off. But then Aristotle was standing there, looking down at her with a mocking smile and extending a hand.
With the utmost reluctance she put her hand in his and felt the world tilt crazily as he pulled her up. With her other hand she scrabbled to hold her dress together. Her face felt as red as a traffic light. Aristotle now had a light grip on her arm, and Lucy noticed that he held her bag in his other hand.
That, and the way he was looking at her now, made her feel extremely threatened. It was the way he’d been looking at her that morning in the office.
She felt jittery and stiff all at once, and tried to get her arm back.
‘It must have caught on something. I’ll be fine from here. You must be impatient to get home.’
But Aristotle ignored her and easily steered them towards the path, not letting go for a second. Lucy’s blood was starting to fizzle and hum in her veins. She tried again while keeping a desperate clasp on her ruined dress. ‘Really, Mr Levakis, my door is just here.’
She even dug her heels in, but he called back to the driver, ‘That’s all, Julian. You can go. I’ll get a cab from here.’
‘You’re sure, sir?’ The driver’s surprise was evident in his voice.
‘Yes. Goodnight, Julian.’
And with that, before Lucy could formulate a word or acknowledge the escalation of pure mind-numbing panic in her breast, she was being led to her door and Aristotle was looking down at her with his trademark impatience.
‘Your keys?’
Lucy spluttered. The driver was pulling away from the kerb, making her even more panicked. ‘Mr Levakis, really, you don’t have to do this. Please. Thank you for the lift, but you shouldn’t have let Julian go. You’ll never get a cab from here…’
He looked down at her, those green eyes utterly mesmerising. ‘I thought I told you to call me Aristotle. Now, your keys? Please.’
Much like earlier, when he’d told her to take down her hair, Lucy found herself obeying. She knew on some dim, rational level that it was just shock. She awkwardly dug her keys out of her handbag, while trying not to let the dress gape open, and
watched wordlessly when Aristotle took them and opened the door, leading them into the foyer and to the lift. He looked at her again with a quirked brow and Lucy said faintly, ‘Sixth floor.’
As the lift lurched skyward Lucy felt somehow as though she must be dreaming. She’d wake any moment and it would be Monday morning and everything would be back to normal. But then the lift bell pinged loudly and Aristotle, her boss, was looking at her again expectantly. She had no choice but to step out and walk to her door a few feet away.
Her brain was refusing to function coherently. She simply could not start to pose the question, even to herself, as to what he was doing here. She turned at her door with a very strong need to make sure she went through it alone and this man stayed outside.
She held out her hand for her keys, which he still held. She couldn’t look him in the eye. The bright fluorescence of the lighting was too unforgiving and harsh. Although she knew that it wouldn’t dent his appeal.
‘Thank you for seeing me safely in.’
‘You’re not in yet.’
With more panic than genuine irritation Lucy sent him a fulminating glance and grabbed her keys. She opened the door with a hand that was none too steady. She could have wept with relief when the door swung open. She turned back and pasted on a smile.
‘There—see? All safe. Now, if you just take a right when you go out, the main road is about a hundred yards up the street. You should be able to get a cab from there.’
Chapter Three
ARISTOTLE leaned nonchalantly against the wall, hands in the pockets of his trousers. At some stage since they’d left the hotel in town he’d undone his bow tie, and it hung rakishly open along with the top buttons of his shirt. Dark whorls of hair were visible, and Lucy felt weak with shock again at his bizarre behaviour. Belatedly she wondered if he might be drunk and she looked at him suspiciously. But then she recalled that, like her, he’d barely touched alcohol all evening. So if he wasn’t drunk…Her belly fluttered ominously.
‘I thought you said I’d never get a cab from there? Would you let me wander the mean streets of south London alone and defenceless? I can call a cab from your apartment…and I could murder a coffee…’
This man and the word defenceless did not belong in the same sentence. He smiled and her world tipped alarmingly for a second. Lucy had to swallow her retort, along with the stomach-churning realisation that she was being subjected to her boss’s teasing and charming side. She heard the lift jerking into life again. More people arriving home from a night out. Suddenly she was terrified that it might be her very bubbly but very nosy neighbour Miranda. She could just imagine trying to explain this: a gorgeous, lounging six-foot-four Greek tycoon in their mildew stained hallway. Her dress was suddenly the least of her worries.
‘OK, fine. I’ll call you a cab and get you a coffee.’
Lucy walked in and stood back to let Aristotle through. Immediately the air seemed to be sucked out of the room and replaced with his sheer dynamism. Lucy closed her door just as she heard the very drunken-sounding laughter of her neighbour and gave a sigh of relief.
As Aristotle started to prowl around her humble sitting room Lucy spied a lacy bra hanging over the chair nearest the kitchen. She dived for it while he was turned away and hurriedly balled it up. Aristotle turned round and Lucy’s belly spasmed.
‘Coffee,’ she babbled. ‘I’ll get the coffee on.’
She turned and fled into the small kitchen off the sitting room and stuffed the bra into a cupboard, taking out coffee and setting the kettle to boil. She kept looking surreptitiously into the sitting room. Aristotle was still prowling around. Except now he’d taken off his jacket, and she could see the broad line of his back tapering down into an impossibly lean waist. Her gaze followed the line down over taut buttocks and long, long legs…
The shrill, piercing scream of the kettle made her jump, and she winced when drops of boiling water splashed on clumsy hands. She gathered her dress together and walked back into the sitting room, noticing that Aristotle had put on some lights. Their glow of warmth lent an intimacy to the scene that raised her blood pressure. She had the vague thought of going to get changed out of the dress, but couldn’t contemplate the idea of removing a stitch of clothing while he was anywhere near. She noticed then that he was studying a photo in his hand, with a slight frown between those black brows. Lucy was terrified he might recognise the woman in the picture. She handed him the coffee, forcing him to put the picture down and take the cup.
He just gestured with his head. ‘Who is that? You and your mother?’
Lucy looked down at the photo in the frame and fought the urge to snatch it out of sight. It was a favourite one of her and her mum, taken in Paris when Lucy had been about twelve. They were wrapped up against the cold, their faces close together, but even from the picture you could tell that Lucy hadn’t taken after her mother’s delicate red-haired beauty. She’d already been taller than her mother by then.
She nervously adjusted it slightly and replied, ‘Yes,’ clearly not inviting any more questions.
Aristotle looked at Lucy. She was as nervous and skittish as a foal—avoiding his eye, her hand in a white-knuckle grip on that dress. That was what had pushed him over the edge. Seeing those soft pale thighs exposed to his gaze, one long leg already out of the car. It had taken every ounce of restraint not to reach out and run his hand up the soft inner skin of one gloriously lush thigh.
Especially after an evening that had been a form of torture, trying to focus on work while she’d stood beside him. Following her out of the car and up to this apartment had felt as necessary as breathing. But now he forced himself to take a step back, sensing her extreme nervousness.
She gestured jerkily to a seat. ‘Please, sit down while you have your coffee. I’ll call a cab. It may take a while to come at this hour.’
Aristotle sat down on a springy couch under the window and watched as Lucy went to the phone on the other side of the room and made the call, turning her back firmly to him. He tried to bank down the intense surge of desire even her back was igniting within him and thought back to the function.
She’d been a surprisingly pleasurable and easy date, offering intelligently insightful comments on more than one person, showing snippets of dry humour. At one point she’d caught him off-guard entirely, when she’d seamlessly switched to accentless and fluent French. He’d become accustomed to people saying they were multi-lingual and meaning they had the basics, like hello and goodbye. Something dark lodged in his chest. He’d also been inordinately aware of the keen male interest she’d generated and how seemingly oblivious she’d been to it. He wasn’t used to that.
Fighting the sudden surge of something very primal, he let his eyes drift down over her body and long legs; a vivid image exploded into his head of the moment her dress had split. He wondered how those legs might feel wrapped around his waist as he thrust deeper and deeper into her slick heat. Arousal was immediate and uncomfortable. He shifted on the seat, and even the evident relief in Lucy’s voice when she got through to the cab company did little to dampen it.
When Lucy put the phone down, she could finally turn and look her boss in the eye. Escape was imminent. She just had to make some small talk. ‘Ten minutes for the cab.’ She sat down gratefully in the chair beside the phone, relief making her feel weak. She was still clutching the torn dress over her legs, hanging on to it like a lifeline.
Aristotle leant forward and put down his coffee cup. He had an intense gleam in his green eyes. ‘We’re going to be spending a lot of time together in Athens.’ He looked around her apartment, and then back to her. ‘I thought this might be a good opportunity to get to know each other a little better.’
Something treacherously like disappointment rushed through Lucy, but everything within her rejected it. Had she been so blind? Had she truly suspected for a moment that Aristotle had been rushing her up here to try and make love to her? She felt very brittle all of a sudden.
&
nbsp; ‘Of course. I mean, I could…’ She racked her brain. Evidently she had to find some way of giving some information to Aristotle, so he didn’t feel as if he had to follow her up to her apartment to talk to her. ‘I could fill out a questionnaire…?’
He arched a brow.
‘A personal questionnaire…if you want to get to know more…about my history.’ A leaden weight made her feel heavy inside. She’d become an expert at putting a glamorous spin on her life with her mother. On her history. Glossing over the reality.
But Aristotle was shaking his head and standing up, coming towards her. He came and stood right in front of her, and Lucy realised that she was in a very vulnerable position, her eye level at his crotch. She stood too, so suddenly that she swayed, and Aristotle put out his hands to steady her. They were on her waist. Immediately it was an invasion of her space—especially when she was so self-conscious about her body.
With one hand she tried to knock him away but his hands were immovable. Her other hand was still clinging onto her dress with a death grip. She looked at him and her brain felt hot, fuzzy. He was too close. She could smell his fresh citrusy scent, mixed in with something much more male, elemental. All she could see were his eyes; all she could feel were those hands, like a brand on her body.
He was talking. She tried to concentrate on his words.
‘…more along the lines of this…’
And then, as realisation exploded inside her, Aristotle’s head was coming down, closer and closer. Everything went dark as his mouth covered hers, warm and firm and so exotic that she couldn’t move.
It was so shocking that Lucy continued standing there like a statue. Through her mind ran the comforting words, You won’t feel anything. You’re cold inside. You’re not your mother. You don’t react to this. You don’t crave men…sex…You’ve proved this to yourself…
