‘I don’t know why you need me,’ Annis muttered. ‘A child of ten could tell you what’s wrong with this company.’
He ignored that. ‘And I’m giving up my evening.’
‘What about my evening?’
He was unmoved. ‘You told me you were going to work anyway. And of course you’ll bill me for it.’
‘I will,’ muttered Annis vengefully, giving in. ‘Oh, I will.’
He took her to a small Greek restaurant, surprisingly un-smart. It was clearly a family business and, equally clearly, he was well-known there.
‘What’s wrong?’ he said, as the waiter took their coats and seated them in a candle-lit corner. ‘Don’t worry if you’re vegetarian. They do a very good vegetable stew.’
‘I’m not vegetarian.’
‘Good. Their lamb is the reason people come here.’ He looked at her over the top of his menu and his mouth quirked. ‘So what is it, then? Don’t like Greek?’
‘Greek’s fine.’ She looked round. ‘This place is just a bit—’ she hesitated ‘—unexpected.’
‘Oh? Why? Wrong part of town? Too unfashionable?’
‘Not for me,’ said Annis unwisely.
His eyes gleamed. ‘Aha. You think I’m a slave to fashion.’ He seemed delighted.
‘I’ve been reading your order book,’ Annis pointed out dryly. ‘I would have expected you to go where the beautiful people go.’
‘Would you? That’s interesting. Why?’
The waiter brought them little dishes of mezes and glasses of aromatic wine.
‘You normally do,’ said Annis, remembering the files she had just locked away in his desk. ‘Charity galas. Country house parties.’ She raised an amused eyebrow. ‘Are you trying to deny it?’
‘No. I’m wondering why don’t you approve.’ He sat back and regarded her from under lazy lids. ‘I would have thought you were more at home at country house parties than I am.’
She was genuinely startled. ‘Me? Why on earth?’
‘Rich chick,’ he said succinctly.
She had the sudden impression he did not like rich chicks. Put like that, neither did Annis. She found that she minded him thinking she was one.
‘Well, you’re wrong.’
‘No, I’m not,’ he said calmly. ‘Daddy is one of the fifty richest men in the UK. And I’ve seen your pad.’
Annis froze. ‘What?’
‘Well, I went there first tonight. I didn’t expect you still to be at the office—my office—at eight o’clock. I had the doorman call up, but of course you weren’t there.’
She relaxed. ‘I see. You went to my building. I thought—’
‘I’d talked my way in?’ He shook his head but his eyes were keen. ‘No. I’ve heard how difficult that is.’
‘H-have you?’
‘Yes.’ He leaned forward, his eyes suddenly intent. ‘I like that.’
Annis felt the whole room lurch.
‘Wh-what?’
He said, as he had said before, ‘Mystery lady.’ It was very soft, only she could hear it, and it set every cell of her skin quivering.
Annis thought, He’s teasing. You can’t take that sexy voice seriously. He’s winding you up again.
‘You called me that before,’ she said, trying for amusement and succeeding only in conveying deep uncertainty.
‘And I was right. Wasn’t I?’
He was far away, all the way across the white tablecloth. He had not even tried to touch her. But he was stroking her with his eyes. She shivered as if under a physical caress.
Maybe he isn’t teasing. Help!
She swallowed. ‘I think you’re imagining it.’
‘No, I’m not. You intrigue me.’
Annis felt as if she were walking down a road she ought to know but in such a fog that she was lost. All the signposts were there. She just didn’t know what they said. She gave a little choke of despairing laughter.
‘Do you? Why?’
‘Stimulus.’
Now completely at sea, she stared.
He leaned forward. In the light of the stumpy candle his eyes glittered.
‘You keep yourself hidden. To a man that’s a real challenge.’
Annis gulped. Loudly. She tore her eyes away and groped her way back to normality.
‘Not to the men I meet,’ she said with irony. She took a defiant swig of her retsina.
He laughed softly. ‘But then, I’ve said before, you have clearly dated some real oddballs.’
And he picked up his wine and toasted her silently.
Her whole body felt hot.
‘Great,’ muttered Annis, as much to herself as to him. ‘That’s all I need.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘You need a great deal more than that. But it’s a start.’
‘I meant—’ She broke off. She could see she was in the middle of quicksand and the more she struggled the deeper she was likely to sink. ‘Never mind.’
Change the subject, her inner voice instructed. Choose your own ground and keep to it.
So she pinned a sweet smile on her stiff lips and said, ‘Would you like a rundown on my findings?’
He accepted the rebuff gracefully. ‘So soon? Do you jump to conclusions, Ms Carew?’
‘I’m very perceptive,’ said Annis firmly.
He didn’t like that. ‘And what do you perceive?’ he said, a shade less gracefully.
Annis debated whether to be tactful. Her professional self said, Don’t go to war until you’re certain of your ground. Her instincts said, Go for the jugular.
‘Too many staircases and not enough coffee cups?’ he jibed.
Her instincts won.
‘Too many tasks and not enough priorities,’ she said crisply.
‘A brilliant insight. You could say that of any expanding business.’
‘No, you couldn’t,’ said Annis now in right royal rage. ‘Only when the business in question is run by a control freak who also happens to be a magpie. Do you know what I mean by magpie, Konstantin? Someone who collects anything that crosses his path, whether he can use it or not. You.’ She jabbed a finger at him accusingly.
He blinked. His mouth opened but Annis was not giving him a chance to reply. This had been building up all day.
‘You just can’t resist, can you? You’ll do any project anyone asks you to. As long as it’s difficult and nobody else knows how to sort it out.’
She stopped, breathing hard. There was a startled silence. And here comes the volcano, she thought.
‘Are you criticising the way I run my business? Or telling me I don’t stand a chance with you?’
His eyes were slits of green glass. No teasing now. She had really made him angry, she thought.
Volcano or no, Annis found she was enjoying herself. ‘The business. That’s what you’re paying me for. The other goes without saying. It would be too unprofessional.’
Their eyes locked.
Konstantin looked at her broodingly. ‘This could just have been a mistake.’
‘Oh, I don’t think so.’ She gave him her best smile, the one she kept for photographers at her friends’ weddings. ‘You may not be willing to admit it yet but you’ll see. Believe me, you need me.’
Konstantin was stunned. He stopped looking at her as if he was a tiger prowling round a prey that he knew was smaller and slower than he was. He sat bolt upright and his eyes went dark. Even an impartial observer would say he was shaken.
Right thought Annis, suddenly excited. Konstantin Vitale was beginning to realise that she was his equal. And she was going to give him a run for his money.
The meal was not, understandably, a wild success after that. The lamb fell meltingly off the bone and the wine’s bouquet reminded her of hot summer nights in the Aegean. It made no difference. He was curt and she, after her initial vainglory, was on edge in case he decided to get his own back.
It was a relief when he paid the bill and helped her into a coat.
‘I’ll drive you back.’
‘There’s no need. I can easily get a cab.’
‘I always see my dates home.’
‘I’m not a date.’
He sent her an unsmiling look.
‘If you tell me again that dating bores you, I shall take strong action,’ he said in a level voice.
Annis subsided. It seemed wiser.
‘Thank you,’ she said in a small voice.
He left his car in the visitors’ area and took her into the lobby of her building, impervious to hints that she was now safe, thank you.
In the end she was reduced to saying baldly, ‘I’m not inviting you in.’
He had regained his equilibrium by then. He sent her a quizzical look.
‘It would disappoint me if you did.’
‘What? Why?’ she asked unwisely.
‘There has to be more to a challenge than that. There’s no fun if you don’t have to devise a smarter plot than just walking the girl home.’ He summoned the lift. ‘I’m still seeing you to your door.’
They went up to her floor in silence, Konstantin humming gently, Annis fulminating.
Not speaking, she marched to a door, turned with her back to it like a prisoner facing a firing squad and thrust out her hand like a bayonet.
Konstantin gave her a kindly smile, ignored the hand, and whipped her into his arms as if he had done it a thousand times before. He bent her back in an embrace that would have shaken her to the core if she hadn’t been absolutely certain that he was teasing again. She looked straight past his shoulder and saw the ceiling.
‘Thank you for a wonderful evening, Kosta,’ he prompted.
‘Let me up.’ She was so off balance that she had to cling to his shoulders and it infuriated her. ‘I’ll never forgive…’
And then the ceiling disappeared and she found that it was possible to be kissed by a man who was laughing his head off. Kissed, what was more, into a positive storm of sensation. There might be no passion in it for Konstantin. He might be no more than piqued into a moment’s curiosity. But for a sober twenty-nine-year-old who did not easily lose her cool, there was enough electricity in the kiss to light up several cities.
Even Jamie, when she had loved him and thought he’d loved her, had never made her internal reactor go critical with a simple kiss.
Horrified, Annis pushed Konstantin away with all her might. She hauled herself upright, with the assistance of a console table. It rocked and water splashed onto the French polish from an elegant flower arrangement. For once she did not even notice what her clumsiness had done.
She had lost a shoe. She found it and stabbed her foot into it as if it were a personal enemy. She was shivering helplessly inside.
‘Touch me again,’ she said between her teeth, to hide that seismic throb, ‘I resign.’
She banged the door behind her.
Outside there was a crash followed by an ominous dripping noise. It sounded as if the console table had finally collapsed. Annis stopped, momentarily conscience stricken.
Then she hardened her heart. Konstantin Vitale had made her destabilise the thing in the first place. Konstantin Vitale could handle the fall-out.
She bolted the door loudly and slammed off to bed.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE musicians retreated into the sunlight. Annis felt her eyelids flicker and fought it. She did not want to leave the dream.
As dreams did, it let her do things that in real life were impossible. She was dancing with a masked stranger. He whispered in her ear and she shivered voluptuously at the things he was saying.
They were in a panelled room. Its inlaid floor gleamed. Its doors were flung back to reveal a sparkling lagoon beyond. Moreover she was dancing lightly, sinuously, following the stranger’s every move as if they were ideal physical partners. She, Annis Carew, who danced like an elephant with two left feet! And of course, now she remembered that, she began to stumble…The masked man was suddenly a long way away…
Annis sighed and gave up the struggle. The fantasy evaporated. She opened her eyes and stared around the shadows.
She checked. Yes, she was in her bed—she knew the poles at each corner because she had painted them herself. She knew the shape of the room and its furniture, although it was all in the dark. But the sound…In her dream it had been lutes but now she was awake she realised it was not musical at all. It was the telephone.
‘How the—?’ said Annis, sitting up in annoyance.
Annis did not permit telephones in her bedroom. It was her special place, a haven she had constructed very carefully. No anxieties were allowed to intrude into its sybaritic ambience. And telephones, in her experience, only allowed the problems to get through.
Yet somehow, in her temper last night, she must have brought her mobile phone in with her, instead of leaving it on the desk as she normally did.
Muttering, she got out of bed and began to search. Whoever was calling her was not giving up. The ringing went on. In the end she tracked it to its source—her handbag, thrown squashily onto the carved bench under the window last night. Annis fumbled with it, growling, and put it to her ear.
‘What?’
‘Good morning, Kosta, thank you for a wonderful evening,’ prompted her caller.
Annis nearly dropped the telephone. It was the voice of her masked dream partner.
‘Hello?’
Annis pulled herself together. She looked at the window. She had not drawn the velvet curtains last night and she could see the sky clearly. It was black, apart from pinpoint lights flickering at the wing tip of an incoming jet plane.
‘It’s not morning yet,’ she said evilly.
‘Were you asleep?’ he said.
She thought with indignation that he was not even pretending that his solicitude was genuine. The little undertone of laughter was one of the sexiest things she had ever heard.
Annis shivered and told herself that no one sounded sexy at six o’clock in the morning or whatever it was.
‘I still am asleep,’ she said firmly
It was not true. At this early hour the central heating had not yet clicked on. She was coming more and more awake with every chilly second. Annis shivered again.
He dropped his voice deliberately. It was just like the restaurant last night, intimate, sexy and utterly deceptive. ‘Wish I was with you.’
‘You are,’ she said, before she had time to think.
And only realised the implications of that when he gave a soft laugh. Her nerves resonated to the husky sound. She could still feel last night’s kiss. Not just the imprint of his mouth on hers, the whole earth tremor.
‘One day,’ he murmured. ‘One day…’
The floor started to rock again.
‘Stop it,’ she said between her teeth, as much to herself as to him.
He heard, of course. ‘Hey, you’re awake,’ he said in self-congratulatory tones.
As if, thought Annis, that was the sole reason that he had murmured that suggestive stuff down the telephone at her.
But she knew it wasn’t. She might be thoroughly unsettled. She might not be a practised flirt like Isabella. But she knew when a man was enjoying himself.
She gritted her teeth and took control.
‘Right. I’m awake and ready to take notes. What do you want?’
There was a crackling pause.
Then he said with an edge to his voice, ‘I thought I’d reassure you.’
Reassure! Huh! He wanted to wind her up and Annis knew it only too well.
She did not say so. Instead she said sweetly, ‘Reassure me about what?’
‘That I’ll be back in three days.’
‘Back?’
And then she remembered. He was going to New York.
‘But I thought you didn’t know how long…’
‘I’ve put a limit on my stay,’ he said blandly. ‘I’ve told them I’m out on Saturday. So you won’t have to carry on without me for long.’
Annis forgot she had taken control. ‘Carry on without
you?’ she echoed, furious. ‘You think that one kiss and I need you?’
‘That wasn’t quite—’
‘Wake up, sunshine. It takes more than a kiss out of a tango lesson.’
There was another of those pauses.
‘Tango lesson?’ Kosta was outraged.
When she’d first answered the telephone she had sounded slurred and drowsy. He could almost see her, warm and rumpled among her pillows. The urge to tease her had been irresistible. He should have realised that she would fight back as soon as she was awake. She always fought back when he teased her.
Now he turned his shoulder, talking quietly into his mobile phone. In his secluded corner of the business class lounge he was almost private. ‘What are you talking about, a tango lesson?’
‘That performance last night.’ Annis retorted. ‘Five-star dramatics. But a little short on sincerity.’
Kosta was entertained. He saw that his flight had turned orange on the overhead monitor light, indicating that he should go to the embarkation gate. He ignored it.
‘How do you make that out?’
‘A man who meant it,’ said Annis largely, ‘would have waited for me to kiss him back.’
He gave a soft laugh. ‘Are you saying you didn’t?’
He heard her shocked intake of breath. It was extraordinarily potent. He could almost see her wide, unguarded eyes. Her mouth…His body responded to the image as if she were standing in front of him. He found himself wondering what she wore in bed.
Kosta shook himself. Six-thirty in the morning when he was on the point of putting the Atlantic between them was no time to get thoughts like these.
To suppress them, he said at random, ‘We’ll talk when I get back.’
‘Not about kissing,’ said Annis firmly.
Well, she meant it to be firm, he was sure. Kosta could hear the way her voice was jumping all over the place. He smiled tenderly. He must have really shaken her up last night. He found it gave him a real sense of achievement. He did not ask whether he had shaken himself too.
The monitor went red. Flight now boarding. Blast. He could not let her go now.
‘No, I agree. Kissing is better put into practice than talked about,’ he said, and waited pleasurably for her to explode.
But Annis was fully awake now. Her voice had lost its early-morning huskiness and she was thinking on her feet.
The Millionaire's Daughter (The Carew Stepsisters Book 1) Page 7
