It explained so much. His ruthless approach. The rigid control with which he managed his business.
Polly realised that her impression of him was as false as his was of her.
It was as if the pieces of a jigsaw had been thrown in the air and, on landing, had created a different picture.
‘You were left to raise your sister.’
‘She was six.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘I was sixteen years old and the only skill I had was with computers. I was always in trouble at school for hacking, so I decided there had to be a way of turning that to my advantage. I developed a way of analysing data that every company wanted.’ He shrugged. ‘Right place, right time. I was lucky.’
‘But your business isn’t computers now—’
‘Something else I learned—diversify. That way if one part of the business is in trouble, another part may be performing well.’
He’d thought it all through. Done everything he could to provide security for his sister.
Feeling a strange ache behind her ribcage, Polly turned away. She shouldn’t envy someone who had suffered such a tragic loss, but she did. Even without parents, they’d been a family. Everything he’d done, everything he’d achieved, had been driven by his love for Arianna. Protecting her had been his priority from the moment she’d been left in his care.
‘It must have been very hard losing both your parents like that.’
‘Life can be hard. It happens.’ He glanced towards her, his expression unreadable. ‘What happened to your mother? Presumably she was divorce number one?’
The ache behind her ribs didn’t fade. ‘She walked out when I was a toddler. Being a mother didn’t suit her. Or maybe I was just hard work. Whichever—my dad hated being on his own. Whenever a relationship fell apart, he moved onto the next woman.’
Even now, at twenty-four, she found her father’s behaviour still had the power to embarrass her and she hated that. She hated the mixed-up feelings that came with every new relationship he started.
‘The women are always younger?’
Hearing the judgement in his voice, Polly felt her face heat and wanted to fall through the floor. ‘Mostly.’
‘Is that embarrassing?’
‘Hideous.’ In the face of his startling honesty about his own background there didn’t seem any point in lying about her feelings.
He let out a long breath. ‘So you don’t approve of his relationship with Ana?’
‘You didn’t ask me if I approved. You asked me if I found it embarrassing. The answer to that is yes. As for whether or not I approve—’ She broke off, wondering why on earth she was sharing her deepest thoughts with this man whose opinion of her was so low. He couldn’t possibly understand, could he? ‘He’s my dad and I love him. I just want him to be happy. Isn’t that what you want for Arianna?’
‘Yes, which is why I don’t approve of this relationship.’
‘I think all relationships are complicated and I’m not sure age makes any difference to that.’
‘When you see a twenty-four-year old girl with a fifty-four year old man, don’t you ask yourself why they’re together?’
Polly chewed her lip, wondering whether to confess that the entire relationship merry-go-round terrified her. The whole thing seemed designed to wreck lives. ‘This is the twenty-first century. Age of same-sex marriages, the toyboy and the cougar. Relationships don’t always conform to rigid tradition any more. Why does it bother you? You’re too big and tough to care what people think.’ But Damon Doukakis was rigidly traditional. Greek. If she’d learned anything about him over the past twenty-four hours it was that family was the most important thing to him.
‘I don’t care what people think. I do care that Ana will be hurt. Let’s face it, your father doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to commitment.’
Polly made a weak attempt to defend him. ‘You’re not exactly famed for long-term commitment.’
‘That’s different.’
‘You move from one woman to the next. Apart from the obvious—prenuptial agreements, huge payouts to lawyers etc—what’s the difference?’
‘Marriage is a responsibility and I have more than enough responsibilities.’ He took a deep breath as if the mere thought of it was enough to unsettle him. ‘In my relationships there are no broken promises. No one gets hurt.’
‘For a woman not to care when a relationship ends, the man in question has either got to be incredibly boring or a real bastard. What I’m saying is that I’m pretty sure plenty of women get hurt when you dump them. They probably just don’t show it. Pride and all that. And I don’t really see the difference between your serial relationships and my father’s. Not every relationship has to be about marriage.’ But the fact that he felt so strongly about responsibility and commitment made her feel strange inside. It was so different from her father’s approach.
‘If you’re about to say my sister’s relationship with your father is about sex then don’t,’ he advised in a thickened tone. ‘I don’t want to think about that.’
‘That makes two of us. He’s my dad and no one wants to think about their parents having sex. Yuck.’ Polly gave a dramatic shudder. ‘But you have to admit that Arianna is an adult. My father hasn’t kidnapped her against her will. They enjoy each other’s company.’
His brow lifted in a cynical arch. ‘Are you about to use the word “love”?
She didn’t tell him that she didn’t believe in love. She’d seen what happened to people who believed in love and she’d made it her golden rule never to allow herself to be sucked into that particular delusion. ‘They get on well together,’ she said lamely. ‘They laugh all the time. They talk. There’s chemistry between them. Maybe they know it’s crazy but find it impossible to resist.’
‘Chemistry?’ There was an ominous pause and she could see the thought appalled him. His eyes locked on hers and suddenly thoughts of her father and his sister faded into the background. In the distance she heard the insistent cacophony of car horns, the shriek of tyres as Parisians drove their city like a racetrack, but the loudest sound was the insistent thrumming of her pulse.
Suddenly it was hard to keep a grip on the conversation. ‘Chemistry,’ she croaked. ‘I’m just saying that chemistry can be a powerful thing.’ Or so she’d heard. Truthfully she couldn’t imagine a sexual attraction so strong that it overpowered caution but she wasn’t going to admit that to a red-blooded male whose sexual prowess was the subject of hushed rumour. ‘Perhaps it was something they couldn’t walk away from. I don’t know.’
There was a long silence and then his strong hands captured her face and he lowered his mouth to hers. Caught off guard, Polly tumbled headlong into the addictive heat of his kiss, her mouth colliding with his in a fusion of intimacy that was shocking in its intensity. The exploding heat was fierce enough to fuel a nuclear reactor, the hunger so all-consuming it devoured her preconceptions about just how a kiss could feel because this kiss was like
