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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.
He stood away from the door abruptly and curtly informed Lucy to make sure she had all the necessary papers and documents required for the meeting ready. He then went into the dressing room and breathed deep, as if he could inhale some common sense. But instead an evocatively feminine scent teased his nostrils and brought the last few minutes vividly back. Along with his libido.
With a growl of intense irritation Aristotle yanked a clean suit from the well-stocked wardrobe and stripped off to step into the shower, turning it onto cold. It did little to help.
Lucy flinched minutely and scowled at her computer when she heard the phone being slammed down in her boss’s office. He’d just taken a call from his half-brother in Athens, and while he never seemed to welcome those calls he usually acted with more restraint than that. She shook her head. He’d been in a foul humour for two weeks now. Ever since that morning. Heat still crawled over her skin when she thought of the way he’d lounged against the door and looked at her, and mentioned that skirt. He believed she might have worn it like that on purpose.
And yet since then he had proceeded to treat her either as if a) he couldn’t bring himself even to mention her name, or b) as if he might turn to stone if he so much as looked at her for longer than two seconds.
Lucy had to assure herself that nothing had happened, and if anything this was just a normal working relationship. Aristotle was famous for his brusque, no-nonsense approach. What had she expected? Warm and fuzzy? She shifted in her seat uncomfortably, the fact was she did feel inordinately warm—especially when he was around. She also felt constantly on edge, as if a kind of prickly heat lay just under the surface of her skin. She felt achy and jittery, but no symptoms of a flu or a cold had developed, so she couldn’t put it down to that. She was beginning to despair of ever having any sense of equilibrium again. At times like this she longed for the uncomplicated working relationship she’d had with her last boss. Her mouth quirked wryly. But then, he had been nearing seventy, well past retirement age, and had a huge typically Greek family.
Lucy nearly shot out of her chair when she heard a coolly drawled, ‘Something funny on the internet today?’
She quickly pressed a key so that her blank document disappeared, and took a breath before looking up, steeling herself. She had to steel herself a lot around this man. She smiled brightly, but it faded when she saw something dark cross his face.
‘No … I was just … going over the latest mail from the Parnassus Corporation.’
She mentally crossed her fingers and breathed a sigh of relief, because that was exactly what she had been doing—before she’d been looking at a blank document for minutes on end like some moon-eyed idiot.
Aristotle emerged from his office and prowled towards Lucy. Her blood-rate shot up.
‘Liar,’ he said softly.
Her back straightened. ‘Excuse me?’
He came to her desk and rested on his hands over it, looming over her. She fought against shrinking back as his eyes bored into hers. It was making her dizzy after days of only the most cursory eye contact.
He arched one slashing dark brow. ‘If that’s the case, tell me what Parnassus proposes we do in the final stages of sealing the merger?’
Lucy looked up, spellbound. As if from a long way away her more rational and professional self, the one that wasn’t melting into a puddle in her chair, came back. Miraculously, information came into her brain, and she clung onto it like a life-raft.
Unable to break eye contact, and feeling as if her voice had been dipped in rust, Lucy said, ‘He … he suggests that the final stages take place in Athens, as that’s where the two companies originated one hundred years ago. He thinks it should be there that the merger is finally revealed. He wants it to be a triumphant homecoming to the country he and his family fled from when he was young, and for Athens to be the symbolic and actual birthplace of the greatest merger in Greek shipping and industrial history.’
Silence lengthened and tautened between them. Electric awareness quivered in the air until finally Aristotle just said quietly, ‘Good. And I presume you have everything in order for you to travel to Athens for three weeks?’
Lucy just blinked stupidly for a moment as numerous things impacted her brain. Primarily the fact that she hadn’t actually considered the fact that of course she’d be expected to go to Athens too, in little over a week from now.
All she could say was, ‘Yes, I do,’ when in actual fact for some reason—even though it had been talked about for weeks—she’d never considered for a moment that she’d be accompanying Aristotle on such a prestigious engagement.
Her lack of foresight mocked her; of course it had to be her, no one else had had access to all the vital and top secret information—information so secret that she’d had to sign a contract the day she’d been hired, forbidding her to divulge any information to anyone. If she committed such an offence it could see her being fired on the spot, and certainly ruined for any future employment within these circles …
The full enormity of the size of this merger and the importance of the man in front of her started to sink in very belatedly. Mortifyingly, Lucy knew that a large part of her distraction had to do with finding herself working for someone who had reached into a secret part of her and shaken her up so much that she had to spend an inordinate amount of time just denying it to herself. Even now, as he still loomed over her, she denied it to herself.
She reassured herself desperately that she was just reacting to Aristotle Levakis’ undeniable charisma, like any other red-blooded human being.
With that in mind she took a sheaf of papers that needed filing off her desk and stood up, clutching them to her chest.
It was a blatant attempt to put some distance between them. Aristotle straightened too, and with arms folded surveyed her closely. That treacherous heat pooled within her again, but now she knew what it was she could deflect her own reaction to it.
She hitched up her chin. ‘Was there anything else?’
He shook his head slowly and a lazy smile curved his lips. Lucy felt like clinging onto something.
‘No, that’s all for now.’ He turned to go back to his office, but just when Lucy was about to let out a sigh of relief he turned back. With his forearm resting high on the doorjamb, drawing her eye to his long and hard muscled body, he said, ‘Don’t forget we have that engagement tonight. Be ready to leave at six-thirty. I’ll get dressed in my office; you can use the dressing room.’
He disappeared into his own office then, shutting the door behind him, and Lucy all but sagged onto the floor in a heap. She had forgotten all about the function they were to attend that night. She cursed herself as she sank down heavily into her chair. What was wrong with her? Forgetting the function, not realising she would have to go to Athens … Her brain was turning to mush. And in this job that was not a luxury she could afford.
How could she have forgotten that terse conversation just days ago, when he’d said to her with a grimace on his face, ‘You’re going to have to come to the Black and White Ball with me.’
Lucy’s belly had clenched. She’d expected that she might have to accompany her boss to some functions, but with Aristotle’s extremely healthy social life she hadn’t considered it would become a reality so soon. And did he have to look so reluctant at the prospect?
She’d ignored the ridiculous feeling of hurt and asked hopefully, ‘But surely there must be someone else …’ anyone else ‘… you could call?’
After all, as she’d restrained herself from pointing out, last-minute dates were not something he shied away from. He’d had more than a few since the Honourable Augustine Archer and then the even more Honourable Mirabella Ashton, each one well-documented in the press that gloried in his playboy exploits. And yet the morning after each date he’d appeared taciturn and as irritable as she’d ever seen him.
He’d curtly instructed her to send each night’s delectation a disgustingly expensive bunch of flowers. Lucy had cynically assumed that none of the women were performing well enough to hold his interest and merit a piece of jewellery.
It was then that she’d realised that she hadn’t arranged a date for him in at least a week. The thought had unsettled her more than she’d liked to admit.
He’d looked at her with narrowed eyes. ‘As I am currently partnerless, not that it’s any of your business, I’ve decided that you will accompany me. Do you have a problem with that?’
Feeling sick, Lucy had shaken her head rapidly. She had to stop reacting to this man and provoking him. ‘No. Not at all. I’ll put it in the diary now.’
Lucy came back to the present moment. She was still holding the sheaf of papers clutched to her chest like some kind of shield. She looked at the open diary beside her and there in stark letters was written ‘Black and White Ball, Park Lane Hotel. Seven p.m.’ The thought of spending any more time than was absolutely necessary with this man was causing nothing short of sheer panic inside her.
She put down the papers and picked up the phone to make a call to the home where her mother was resident. She asked them to pass on the message that she wouldn’t be able to visit that evening.
The matron on the other end said gently, ‘I’ll pass on the message, Lucy love, but you do know that it won’t make any difference, don’t you?’
Lucy felt very alone all of a sudden. She swallowed back the ever-present guilt, pain and grief, and nodded even though the other woman couldn’t see her. Her voice was thick with emotion. ‘I know … but I’d appreciate it all the same, if you don’t mind.’
Lucy could hear Aristotle moving around in his own office as she changed in the dressing room. This was a formal event, so she had to wear a long dress, and the one she looked at now in the mirror was perfectly respectable—if completely boring. It was black, which meant it was slimming, and it had a high neck which covered her breasts adequately. Anything that did that was fine with her. And anyway, she told herself stoutly, she wasn’t dressing to impress, she was dressing to accompany her boss in a work capacity.
She left her hair up and put on some make-up: mascara and a little blusher. Then, slipping her feet into a pair of plain black high heels, she picked up her weekend bag stuffed with her work clothes and took a deep breath before walking out, feeling ridiculously nervous and hating herself for it.
That breath hitched in her throat and her brain stopped functioning when she saw Aristotle emerge from his own office, resplendent in a traditional tuxedo. The black made him look even darker, and very dangerous. Lucy fought back the wave of awareness, her hands gripping her bag.
He looked up from adjusting his cufflinks then, and the snowy perfection of his shirt made the green of his eyes pop out. He ran quick eyes over Lucy, making her squirm inwardly before quirking a brow and saying mockingly, ‘Well, if you’re trying to fade into the background it’s already working.’
Lucy swallowed past a dry throat. ‘I’m your assistant, not your date.’
More’s the pity, Aristotle surprised himself with thinking as he took her in, just a few feet away. Although not in that dress. It was basically a sack: a black sack covering her from neck to toe. It might as well have been a burkha for all he could see of her body, and he knew with a hunger that had been growing day by day and minute by minute that he very much wanted to see her body showcased in something much more revealing and tight. Like that skirt which had assumed mythic proportions in his fantasies. He beat back an intense surge of desire, in spite of the awful dress, and noted the hectic flush on her cheeks, the wary glitter of her eyes.
She was intriguing him more and more—not only with her luscious curves, but in the way she reacted to him, his spikily quick responses. Every expression was an open book as it crossed her face. She wasn’t afraid of him, and that was heady in itself. That she didn’t approve of him was glaringly obvious, and it was a novel sensation to have that from a woman.
Aristotle was looking at her far too assessingly. Lucy’s belly quivered in response and she told herself sternly that she wasn’t responding to him; she was just responding to the charisma of the man.
But then he strolled towards her nonchalantly and she had to fight the urge to turn tail and run. He walked around her as if inspecting a horse, and she turned around, unable to bear the thought of him looking at her too-large bottom. She cursed her genes again and felt acutely self-conscious. Why couldn’t she be a slim, petite little thing like her mother?
Her voice was high and defensive. ‘Is there something wrong? This dress fits perfectly well. It’s not too tight, if that’s what you’re afraid of.’ She wouldn’t be making that mistake again.
Aristotle’s eyes flicked to hers. They glittered with something dark and indefinable.
‘The dress is fine. For an old lady.’
Lucy sucked in a shocked breath. She’d spent a small fortune from her allowance on this dress. But before she could say anything he was gesturing to her head.
‘It’s too late to do anything about the dress, but leave down your hair. You look like you’re going to work.’
His normally accentless voice had lapsed into something unmistakably Greek, and it resonated within Lucy. Her mind blanked and her hand went up instinctively in a protective gesture. Her hair was part of her armour, she suddenly realised. No way could she take it down. She might as well just strip off the dress and stand in front of him in her underwear. Treacherous heat licked through her again, making a mockery of her attempts to rationalise it. She shook her head dumbly.
His eyes held hers and he just said quietly, ‘Take it down Lucy.’ It was so utterly shocking to be standing in front of her boss and have him speak to her like this, that Lucy found herself obeying him. With extreme reluctance she took out the pins from the back. She could feel her hair loosen and fall with annoying and heavily layered predictability around her shoulders and down her back.
Aristotle fisted his hands in his trouser pockets to stop them reaching out to feel the texture of that heavy silky mass of hair. It was darker than he’d originally thought, and luxuriously unruly, reaching down as far as her shoulderblades. He had an image of her reclining back on a sumptuous divan, tendrils of that glorious hair over her shoulders and trailing over her the tops of her bare—Get a grip, man! With a supreme effort of will Aristotle reined himself in and said gutturally, ‘That’s better. Now you look as if you’re ready for a function. Let’s go.’
With an easy and automatic courtesy which surprised Lucy, and she wasn’t sure why that was, he took her case from her white-knuckle grip and led the way out of the office. She stumbled as she followed his graceful stride down the corridor to his private lift. She had a moment of dithering, stupidly wondering if she should take the staff lift just a few feet further down, but as if reading her mind again Aristotle flicked her an impatient glance and she stepped in.
It was only when they were ensconced in the lift that the memory of the last time she’d shared such a space with him came back in all its glory.
She couldn’t help her reaction flowering. Too much had happened since then. Now she stood there, with her hair down, feeling as exposed as if he’d just run his hands over her naked flesh—especially when she recalled his look from moments ago, a look that had to have been some projection of her own awful, twisted feelings. The tall man beside her oozed with sexual heat. She could smell him and feel him. Suddenly she had the strangest sensation of holding something huge back … Wanton images hovered tantalisingly on the periphery of her mind and threatened to burst through, mocking her for a control that was beginning to feel very shaky.
Lucy gritted her jaw and looked resolutely up at the display as the lift seemed to inch downwards, willing it with every fibre of her being to go faster.
The effort it took to stay apart from Lucy in that lift, amidst a rush of memories of how she had felt pressed against him, which once again stunned him with their vividness, washed away Aristotle’s last resistance where this woman was concerned. He’d never experienced this level of sexual awareness before, and in truth frustration was a novel sensation when he was so used to getting what he wanted, when he wanted. He didn’t stop to question his decision or his motives for a second.
It was quite simple. He had to have this woman in his bed—and as a soon as possible. He would sleep with her. Then she would lose her allure and this bizarre spell she held over him would be broken. In three months he could let her go. Or less, if he got bored. According to her contract he could terminate employment with due notice; she, however, could not walk away unless she wanted to seriously sabotage her career. Because of the top secret nature of the merger she was tied to Levakis Enterprises until the whole thing became public.
Work, which he’d always strictly compartmentalised as separate from pleasure, would become pleasure—his pleasure. And Lucy’s too. He wanted her with him every inch of the way as he took her again and again to sate this burning ache. Somehow instinctively he knew that one night would not be enough, and it made him uncomfortable to acknowledge it.
Nevertheless, as the lift descended the final few floors, a fizz of anticipation ran through Aristotle’s veins and he felt truly alive for the first time in a long time. Even thoughts of the merger were receding into a background place. A dim and distant alarm bell sounded at the back of his mind, but he was too fired up to notice or dwell on it.
The lift juddered softly to a stop and the doors swished open. He stood back and gestured for Lucy to precede him, looking at her carefully as she did so. She was avoiding his eye with all the finesse of a guilty-looking six-year-old caught with her hand in the cookie jar.
She stumbled slightly stepping out of the lift, and Aristotle took her bare silky smooth arm just above the elbow. The frisson of pleasure that went through him nearly made him sway. He could feel the swell of her breast tease his fingers and a primal instinct to possess this woman coursed through him. The fact that she held herself so rigidly at his side didn’t put him off. She was as unmistakably his as—for now—he was hers.
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.
