tight with disdain, thought she wasn’t fit for a palatial place like this, what was it to her? Zilch. Just as Yiorgos Coustakis was nothing to her—nothing except the price of some small, modest reparation to the woman he had treated like dirt…
Her eyes hardened. Nikos saw their expression change, saw the derisive smile, the insolent tilt of the woman’s chin. Clearly the female was shameless about her trade! The distaste he felt about Old Man Coustakis keeping a mistress at his age filtered into distaste for the woman herself. It checked the stirring of his own body, busy responding the way nature liked it to do when in the presence of a sexually alluring female.
So when the woman strolled towards him, the smile on her face unable to compensate for the hardness in her eyes, he responded in kind.
Andrea saw the withdrawal in his eyes, and suddenly, like a cloud passing in front of the sun, she felt a chill emanate from him. Suddenly he wasn’t just a breath-catchingly, heart-stoppingly handsome man, looking a million dollars, tall and lean—he was an icily formidable, hard-eyed, patrician-born captain of industry who looked on the rest of humanity as his inferior minions…
Well, tough! She tilted her head, almost coquettishly, letting her glorious hair riot over her shoulders. An intense desire to annoy him came over her.
‘Hi,’ she breathed huskily. ‘We haven’t met, have we? I’d remember, I know!’ She let a gleam of appreciation enter her glowing eyes. That would annoy him even more; she instinctively knew.
She held her hand out. It was looking beautiful—Linda had given her a manicure the night before, smoothing the work-roughened skin and putting on nail extensions and a rich nail-varnish whose colour matched her hair.
Nikos ignored the hand. A revulsion against touching flesh that had caressed, for money, a rich old man, filled him. It didn’t matter that half his body was registering renewed arousal at the sound of that breathy voice, the heady fragrance of her body as she approached him. He subdued it ruthlessly.
Besides, it had just registered with him that the woman was English. That would account for the auburn colouring. Presumably, he found himself thinking, for a woman of her profession hair that colour would command a premium in lands where dark hair was the norm.
The man’s rejection of her outstretched hand made Andrea falter. She let her hand fall to her side. But still, despite the shut-out, she refused to be intimidated. After all, if she failed at the first test—being sneered at by a complete stranger for being the bastard Coustakis granddaughter—then she would be doomed to fail in her mission. Intimidation was, she knew from the painfully extracted reminiscences of her mother’s abrupt expulsion from Greece twenty-four years ago, the forte of the man who had summoned her here like a servant. She must not, above all, be intimidated by Yiorgos Coustakis as her mother had been. She must stand up to him—give him as good as she got. Tony’s words echoed in her mind—if he had summoned her here, he wanted something. And that made her position powerful.
She had to remember that. Must remember that.
She was in enemy territory. Confidence was everything.
So now, in the face of the obvious disdain of this stunning stranger, she refused to be cowed. Instead, she gave that derisive little smile again, deliberately tossed her head and, shooting him a mocking glance, strolled right past him to take in the view over the grounds. She leant her palms on the stone balustrade, taking some of the weight off her legs. They were aching slightly, probably tension more than anything, because she’d been sitting down most of the day—first in the luxurious airline seat and then in the luxurious chauffeur-driven car. Still, she must do her exercises tonight—right after she’d phoned Tony, as they’d arranged.
Her mind raced, thinking about all the safety nets that she and Tony had planned out. The man behind her was totally forgotten. However good-looking he was—however scornful of the Coustakis bastard granddaughter—he was not important. What was important was going through, for the thousandth time, everything she and Tony had done to make sure that her grandfather could not outmanoeuvre her. Had they left any holes? Left anything uncovered?
Working on the premise that Yiorgos Coustakis was totally ruthless in getting what he wanted, she and Tony had planned elaborate measures to make sure that Andrea always had an escape route if she needed one. The first was to ensure that every evening of her stay in Greece she would phone Tony on the mobile he had lent her. If he did not hear from her by eleven p.m., he was to alert the British consul in Athens and tell them a British citizen was being forcibly held against her will. And if that did not do the trick—her mouth tightened—then Tony’s second phone call would be to a popular British tabloid, spilling the whole story of how the granddaughter of one of the richest men in Europe came to be living on a council estate. Yiorgos Coustakis might be immune to bad publicity, but she wondered whether his shareholders would be as sanguine about the stink she could raise if she wanted…
And then, if her grandfather still didn’t want to let her go, she had left her passport, together with seven hundred euros, plus her return ticket, in a secure locker at Athens airport—the key to which was in her make-up bag. She had also, not trusting her grandfather an inch, purchased a second, open-dated ticket to London while she was still at Heathrow, which she had not yet collected from the airline. She had paid for that one herself.
Andrea smiled grimly as she stared out over the ornate, fussily designed gardens. Though she hadn’t been able to afford to buy the full-price ticket from her own meagre funds, she had come up with a brilliant idea for how to pay for it. The day that she and Tony and Linda had gone into the West End to buy her outfit, they had also visited the store’s jewellery department. The balance from the five thousand pounds after buying the trouser suit and accessories had purchased a very nice pearl necklace—so nice that they had immediately taken it to another jewellery shop and sold it for cash. With the money they had bought the airline ticket, a wad of traveller’s cheques, and split the rest into a combination of sterling, US dollars and euros. That, surely, she thought, her eyes quite unseeing of the view in front of her, should be enough to ensure that she could simply leave whenever she wanted.
Behind her, Nikos Vassilis had stiffened. The woman had simply walked past him as if he were no one! And that derisive little smile and mocking look of hers sent a shaft of anger through him! No woman did that to him! Certainly not one who stooped to earn her living in such a way. He stared after her, eyes narrowing.
Then a discreet cough a little way to his side caught his attention, as it was designed to do. The manservant was back, murmuring politely that Mr Coustakis would see him now, if he would care to come this way.
With a last, ireful glance at the woman now leaning carelessly on the balustrade, totally ignoring him, her hair a glorious sunset cloud around her shoulders, Nikos stalked off into the house.
CHAPTER THREE
AN HOUR later, as she was shown into the dim, shaded room, Andrea straightened her shoulders, ready for battle. At first it seemed the room was empty. Then a voice startled her.
‘Come here.’
The voice was harsh, speaking in English. Clearly issuing an order.
She walked forward. She seemed to be in a sort of library, judging from the shelves of books layering every wall. Her heels sounded loud on the parquet flooring. She could see, now, that a large desk was positioned at the far end of the room, and behind it a man was sitting.
It seemed to take a long time to reach him. One part of her brain realised why—it was a deliberate ploy to put anyone entering the room at a disadvantage to the man already sitting at the desk.
