Married to a Mistress

by Lynne Graham

  The housesitter vacated Liz’s house after contacting her employer for instructions. Alone then, and tired out by the early start to the day, Maxie felt very low. Making herself a cup of coffee, she checked through the small pile of post in the lounge. One of the envelopes was addressed to her; it had been redirected.

  The letter appeared to be from an estate agent. Initially mystified, Maxie struggled across the barrier of her dyslexia to make sense of the communication. The agent wrote that he had been unable to reach her father at his last known address but that she had been listed by Russ as a contact point. He required instructions concerning a rental property which was now vacant. Memories began to stir in Maxie’s mind.

  Her father’s comfortably off parents had died when she was still a child. A black sheep within his own family even then, Russ had inherited only a tiny cottage on the outskirts of a Cambridgeshire village. He had been even less pleased to discover that the cottage came with an elderly sitting tenant, who had not the slightest intention of moving out to enable him to sell up.

  Abandoning the letter without having got further than the third line, Maxie telephoned the agent. ‘I can’t tell you where my father is at present,’ she admitted ruefully. ‘I haven’t heard from him in some time.’

  ‘The old lady has moved in with relatives. If your father wants to attract another tenant, he’ll have to spend a lot on repairs and modernisation. However,’ the agent continued with greater enthusiasm, ‘I believe the property would sell very well as a site for building development.’

  And of course that would be what Russ would want, Maxie reflected. He would sell and a few months down the road the proceeds would be gone again, wasted on the racecourse or the dog track. Her troubled face stiffening with resolve, Maxie slowly breathed in and found herself asking if it would be in order for her to come and pick up the keys.

  She came off the phone again, so shaken by the ideas mushrooming one after another inside her head that she could scarcely think straight. But she did need a home, and she had always loved the countryside. If she had the courage, she could make a complete fresh start. Why not? What did she have left in London? The dying remnants of a career which had done her infinitely more harm than good? She could find a job locally. Shop work, bar work; she wasn’t fussy. As a teenager Maxie had done both, and she had no false pride.

  By the time Liz came home, Maxie was bubbling with excitement. In some astonishment, Liz listened to the enthusiastic plans that the younger woman had already formulated.

  ‘If the cottage is in a bad way, it could cost a fortune to put it right, Maxie,’ she pointed out anxiously. ‘I don’t want to be a wet blanket, but by the sound of things—’

  ‘Liz…I never did want to be a model and I’m not getting any work right now,’ Maxie reminded her ruefully. ‘This could be my chance to make a new life and, whatever it takes, I want to give it a try. I’ll tell the agency where I am so that if anything does come up they can contact me, but I certainly can’t afford to sit around here doing nothing. At least if I start earning again, I can start paying back Angelos.’

  If Maxie could’ve avoided telling Liz about the housesitter and her own illness, she would’ve done so. But Liz had a right to know that a stranger had been looking after her home. However, far from being troubled by that revelation, Liz was much more concerned to learn that Maxie had been ill. She was also mortifyingly keen to glean every detail of the role which Angelos Petronides had played.

  ‘I swear that man is madly in love with you!’ Liz shook her head in wonderment.

  Maxie vented a distinctly unamused laugh, her eyes incredulous. ‘Angelos wouldn’t know love if it leapt up and bit him to the bone! But he will go to any lengths to get what he wants. I suspect he thinks that the more indebted he makes me, the easier he’ll wear down my resistance—’

  ‘Maxie…if he’d left you lying here alone in this house, you might be dead. Don’t you even feel the slightest bit grateful?’ Liz prompted uncomfortably. ‘He could’ve just called an ambulance—’

  ‘Thereby missing out on the chance to get me into his power when I was helpless?’ Maxie breathed cynically. ‘No way. I know how he operates. I know how he thinks.’ ‘Then you must have much more in common with him than you’re prepared to admit,’ Liz commented.

  Maxie arrived at the cottage two days later. With dire mutters, the cabbie nursed his car up the potholed lane. In the sunshine, the cottage looked shabby, but it had a lovely setting. There was a stream ten feet from the front door and a thick belt of mature trees that provided shelter.

  She had some money in her bank account again too. She had liquidated a good half of her wardrobe. Ruthlessly piling up all the expensive designer clothes which Leland had insisted on buying her, Maxie had sold them to a couple of those wonderful shops which recycle used quality garments.

  Half an hour later, having explored her new home, Maxie’s enthusiasm was undimmed. So what if the accommodation was basic and the entire place crying out for paint and a seriously good scrub? As for the repairs the agent had mentioned, Maxie was much inclined to think he had been exaggerating.

  She was utterly charmed by the inglenook fireplace in the little front room and determined not to take fright at the minuscule scullery and the spooky bathroom with its ancient cracked china. Although the furnishings were worn and basic, there were a couple of quite passable Edwardian pieces. The new bed she had bought would be delivered later in the day.

  She was about a mile from the nearest town. As soon as she had the bed made up, she would call in at the hotel she had noticed on the main street to see if there was any work going. In the middle of the tourist season, she would be very much surprised if there wasn’t an opening somewhere…

  Five days later, Maxie was three days into an evening job that was proving infinitely more stressful than she had anticipated. The pace of a waitress in a big, busy bar was frantic.

  And why, oh, why hadn’t she asked whether the hotel bar served meals before she accepted the job? She could carry drinks orders quite easily in her head, but she had been driven into trying to employ a frantic shorthand of numbers when it came to trying to cope at speed with the demands of a large menu and all the innumerable combinations possible. She just couldn’t write fast enough.

  Maxie saw Angelos the minute he walked into the bar. The double doors thrust back noisily. He made an entrance. People twisted their heads to glance and then paused to stare. Command and authority written in every taut line of his tall, powerful frame, Angelos stood out like a giant among pygmies.

  Charcoal-grey suit, white silk shirt, smooth gold tie. He looked filthy rich, imposing and utterly out of place. And Maxie’s heart started to go bang-bang-bang beneath her uniform. He had the most incredible traffic-stopping presence. Suddenly the crowded room with its low ceiling and atmospheric lighting felt suffocatingly hot and airless.

  For a split second Angelos remained poised, black eyes raking across the bar to close in on Maxie. She had the mesmerised, panicked look of a rabbit caught in car headlights. His incredulous stare of savage impatience zapped her even at a distance of thirty feet.

  Sucking in oxygen in a great gulp, Maxie struggled to finish writing down the order she was taking on her notepad. Gathering up the menus again, she headed for the kitchens at a fast trot. But it wasn’t fast enough. Angelos somehow got in the way.

  ‘Take a break,’ he instructed in a blistering undertone.

  ‘How the heck did you find out where I was?’

  ‘Catriona Ferguson at the Star modelling agency was eager to please.’ Angelos watched Maxie’s eyes flare with angry comprehension. ‘Most people are rather reluctant to say no to me.’

  In an abrupt move, Maxie sidestepped him and hurried into the kitchen. When she re-emerged, Angelos was sitting at one of her tables. She ignored him, but never had she been more outrageously aware of being watched. Her body felt uncoordinated and clumsy. Her hands perspired and developed a shake. She spilt
a drink and had to fetch another while the woman complained scathingly about the single tiny spot that had splashed her handbag.

  Finally the young bar manager, Dennis, approached her. ‘That big dark bloke at table six…haven’t you noticed him?’ he enquired apologetically, studying her beautiful face with the same poleaxed expression he had been wearing ever since he’d hired her. With an abstracted frown, he looked across at Angelos, who was tapping long brown fingers with rampant impatience on the tabletop. ‘It’s odd. There’s something incredibly familiar about the bloke but I can’t think where I’ve seen him before.’

  Maxie forced herself over to table six. ‘Yes?’ she prompted tautly, and focused exclusively on that expensive gold tie while all the time inwardly picturing the derision in those penetrating black eyes.

  ‘That uniform is so short you look like a bloody French maid in a bedroom farce!’ Angelos informed her grittily. ‘Every time you bend over, every guy in here is craning his neck to get a better view! And that practice appears to include the management.’

  Maxie’s face burned, outrage flashing in her blue eyes. The bar had a Victorian theme, and the uniform was a striped overall with a silly little frilly apron on top. It did look rather odd on a woman of her height and unusually long length of leg, but she had already let down the hemline as far as it would go. ‘Do you or do you not want a drink?’ she demanded thinly.

  ‘I’d like the table cleared and cleaned first,’ Angelos announced with a glance of speaking distaste at the cluttered surface. ‘Then you can bring me a brandy and sit down.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous…I’m working.’ Maxie piled up the dishes with a noisy clatter, and in accidentally slopping coffee over the table forced him to lunge back at speed from the spreading flood.

  ‘You’re working for me, and if I say you can sit down, I expect you to do as you’re told,’ Angelos delivered in his deep, dark, domineering drawl.

  Engaged in mopping up, Maxie stilled. ‘I beg your pardon? You said…I was working for you?’ she queried.

  ‘This hotel belongs to my chain,’ Angelos ground out. ‘And I am anything but impressed by what I see here.’

  Maxie turned cold with shock. Angelos owned this hotel? She backed away with the dishes. As she was hailed from the kitchen, she watched with a sinking stomach as Angelos signalled Dennis. When she reappeared with a loaded tray, Dennis was seated like a pale, perspiring graven image in front of Angelos.

  She hurried to deliver the meals she had collected but there was a general outcry of loud and exasperated complaint.

  ‘I didn’t order this…’ the first customer objected. ‘I asked for salad, not French fries—’

  ‘And I wanted garlic potatoes—’

  ‘This steak is rare, not well-done—’

  The whole order was hopelessly mixed up. A tall, dark shadow fell menacingly over the table. In one easy movement, Angelos lifted Maxie’s pad from her pocket, presumably to check out the protests. ‘What is this?’ he demanded, frowning down at the pages as he flipped. ‘Egyptian hieroglyphics…some secret code? Nobody could read this back!’

  Maxie was paralysed to the spot; her face was bone-white. Her tummy lurched with nausea and her legs began to shake. ‘I got confused, I’m sorry. I—’

  Angelos angled a smooth smile at the irate diners and ignored her. ‘Don’t worry, it will be sorted out as quickly as possible. Your meals are on the house. Move, Maxie,’ he added in a whiplike warning aside.

  Dennis, she noticed sickly, was over at the bar using the internal phone. He looked like a man living a nightmare. And when she came out of the kitchen again, an older man, whom she recognised as the manager of the entire hotel, was with Angelos, and he had the desperate air of a man walking a tightrope above a terrifying drop. Suddenly Maxie felt like the albatross that had brought tragedy to an entire ship’s crew. Angelos, it seemed, was taking out his black temper on his staff. Her own temper rose accordingly.

  How the heck could she have guessed that he owned this hotel? She recalled the innumerable marble plaques in the huge foyer of the Petronides building in London. Those plaques had listed the components of Angelos’s vast and diverse business empire. Petronides Steel, Petronides Property, and ditto Shipping, Haulage, Communications, Construction, Media Services, Investments, Insurance. No doubt she had forgotten a good half-dozen. PAI—Petronides Amalgamated Industries—had been somewhat easier to recall.

  ‘Maxie…I mean, Miss Kendall,’ Dennis said awkwardly, stealing an uneasy glance at her and making her wonder what Angelos had said or done to make him behave like that. But not for very long. ‘Mr Petronides says you can take the rest of the night off.’

  Maxie stiffened. ‘Sorry, I’m working.’

  Dennis looked aghast. ‘But—’

  ‘I was engaged to work tonight and I need the money.’ Maxie tilted her chin in challenge.

  She banged a brandy down in front of Angelos. ‘You’re nothing but a big, egocentric bully!’ she slung at him with stinging scorn.

  A lean hand closed round her elbow before she could stalk away again. Colour burnished her cheeks as Angelos forced her back to his side with the kind of male strength that could not be fought without making a scene. Black eyes as dark as the legendary underworld of Hades slashed threat into hers. ‘If I gave you a spade, you would happily dig your own grave. Go and get your coat—’

  ‘No…this is my job and I’m not walking out on it.’

  ‘Let me assist you to make that decision. You’re sacked…’ Angelos slotted in with ruthless bite.

  With her free hand, Maxie swept up the brandy and upended it over his lap. In an instant she was free. With an unbelieving growl of anger, Angelos vaulted upright.

  ‘If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen!’ Maxie flung fiercely, and stalked off, shoulders back, classic nose in the air.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  DENNIS was waiting for Maxie outside the staff-room when she emerged in her jeans and T-shirt. Pale and still bug-eyed with shock, he gaped at her. ‘You must be out of your mind to treat Angelos Petronides like that!’

  ‘Envy me…I don’t work for him any more.’ Maxie flung her golden head high. ‘May I have my pay now, please?’

  ‘Y-your pay?’ the young bar manager stammered.

  ‘Is my reaction to being forcibly held to the spot by the owner of this hotel chain sufficient excuse to withhold it?’ Maxie enquired very drily.

  The silence thundered.

  ‘I’ll get your money…I don’t really think I want to raise that angle with Mr Petronides right now,’ Dennis confided weakly.

  Ten minutes later Maxie walked out of the hotel, grimacing when she realised that it was still pouring with rain. It had been lashing down all day and she had got soaked walking into town in spite of her umbrella. Every passing car had splashed her. A long, low-slung sports car pulled into the kerb beside her and the window buzzed down.

  ‘Get in,’ Angelos told her in a positive snarl.

  ‘Go take a hike! You can push around your staff but you can’t push me around!’

  ‘Push around? Surely you noticed how sloppily that bar was being run?’ Angelos growled in disbelief. Thrusting open the car door, he climbed out to glower down at her in angry reproof. ‘Insufficient and surly staff, customers kept waiting, the kitchens in chaos, the tables dirty and even the carpet in need of replacement! If the management don’t get their act together fast, I’ll replace them. They’re not doing their jobs.’

  Taken aback by his genuine vehemence, Maxie nonetheless suppressed the just awareness that she herself had been less than impressed by what she had seen. He had changed too, she noticed furiously. He must have had a change of clothes with him, because now he was wearing a spectacular suit of palest grey that had the exquisite fit of a kid glove on his lean powerful frame.

  Powered by sizzling adrenaline alone, Maxie studied that lean, strong face. ‘I hate you for following me down here—’

&nbs
p; ‘You were waiting for me to show up…’

  Her facial muscles froze. The minute Angelos said it, she knew it was true. She had known he would track her down and find her.

  ‘I’m walking home. I’m not getting into your car,’ she informed him while she absently noted that, yet again, he was getting wet for her. Black hair curling, bronzed cheekbones shimmering damply in the street lights.

  ‘I have not got all night to waste, waiting for you to walk home,’ Angelos asserted wrathfully.

  ‘So you know where I’m living,’ Maxie gathered in growing rage, and then she thought, What am I doing here standing talking to him? ‘Well, don’t you dare come there because I won’t open the door!’

  ‘You could be attacked walking down a dark country road,’ Angelos ground out, shooting her a flaming look of antipathy. ‘Is it worth the risk?’

  Angling her umbrella to a martial angle, Maxie spun on her heel and proceeded to walk. She hadn’t gone ten yards before her flowing hair and long easy stride attracted the attention of a bunch of hard-faced youths lounging in a shop doorway. Their shouted obscenities made her stiffen and quicken her pace.

  From behind her, she heard Angelos grate something savage.

  A hand came down without warning on Maxie’s tense shoulder and she uttered a startled yelp. As she attempted to yank herself free, everything happened very fast. Angelos waded in and slung a punch at the offender. With a menacing roar, the boy’s mates rushed to the rescue. Angelos disappeared into the fray and Maxie screamed and screamed at the top of her voice in absolute panic.

  ‘Get off him!’ she shrieked, laying about the squirming clutch of heaving bodies with vicious jabs of her umbrella and her feet as well.