years after Dimitri and after their three sisters. He had idolised his brother. Everyone had admired the Gionakis heir. Dimitri was handsome, athletic and clever and had been groomed from boyhood to take over running the family business. Alekos was the spare heir should the unthinkable happen to Dimitri.
But the unthinkable had happened. Dimitri had died and Alekos had suddenly become the future of the company—a fact that his father had never allowed him to forget.
Had Kostas believed that his youngest son would make as good a chairman of GE as his firstborn son? Alekos doubted it. He had felt that he was second best in his father’s eyes. He knew that was still the opinion of some of the board members who disapproved of his playboy lifestyle.
But he would prove those who doubted his abilities wrong. In the two years that he had been chairman the company’s profits had increased and they were expanding into new markets around the globe. Perhaps his father would have been proud of him. Alekos would never know. But what he knew for sure was that he could not allow himself to be distracted by his PA simply because her sexy new look had stirred his desire.
Turning away from the window, he opened a document on his laptop and resolutely focused on work. He had inherited the company by default. He owed it to Dimitri’s memory to ensure that Gionakis Enterprises continued to be as successful as it had been when his father was chairman, and as Alekos was sure it would have been under his brother’s leadership.
* * *
Sara ignored a stab of guilt as she passed her desk, piled with paperwork that required her attention, and hurried into the bathroom. The mirror above the sink confirmed her fears. Her flushed cheeks and dilated pupils betrayed her reaction to Alekos that she had been unable to control.
She felt as though she had been holding her breath the entire time she had been in his office. Why was it that she’d managed to hide her awareness of him for two years but when she had set eyes on him this morning after she hadn’t seen him for a month her pulse-rate had rocketed and her mouth had felt dry?
The sensation of her heart slamming against her ribcage whenever she was in close proximity to Alekos wasn’t new, but she had perfected the art of hiding her emotions behind a cool smile, aware that her job depended on it. When Alekos had elevated her to the role of his PA over several other suitably qualified candidates for the job, he had bluntly told her that he never mixed business with pleasure and there was no chance of a sexual relationship developing between them. His arrogance had irritated Sara and she’d almost told him that she had no intention of copying her mother’s mistake by having an affair with her boss.
During the eighteen months that she had worked in the accounts department before her promotion, she’d heard that the company’s board members disapproved of Alekos’s playboy lifestyle, which attracted the wrong type of press interest, and she understood why he was determined to keep his relationship with his staff on a strictly professional footing. What Alekos wanted from his PA was efficiency, dedication and the ability to blend into the background—and plain, conservatively dressed Sara had fitted the bill perfectly.
In truth she would have worn a nun’s habit to the office if Alekos had required her to because she was so keen to secure the job. Her promotion to personal assistant of the chairman of Gionakis Enterprises had finally won her mother’s praise. For the first time in her life she had felt that she wasn’t a disappointment to Joan Lovejoy. The surname was a misnomer if ever there was one because, as far as Sara could tell, there had been no love or joy in her mother’s life.
She’d wondered if her mother had loved the man who’d abandoned her after he had made her pregnant. But Joan had refused to reveal Sara’s father’s identity and only ever made a few oblique references to him, notably that he had once been an Oxford don and it was a pity that Sara hadn’t inherited his academic brilliance.
Sara had spent most of her life comparing herself to a nameless, faceless man who had helped to create her but she had never met—until six weeks ago. Now she knew that she had inherited her green eyes from her father. He was no longer faceless, or nameless. His name was Lionel Kingsley and he was a well-known politician. She’d been stunned when he had phoned her and revealed that there was a possibility she might be his daughter. She had agreed to a DNA test to see if he was really her father but she had been sure of the result before the test had proved it. When she looked into a mirror she saw her father’s eyes looking back at her.
For the first time in her life she felt she was a whole person, and so many things about herself suddenly made sense, like her love of art and her creativity that she’d always suppressed because her mother had pushed her to concentrate on academic subjects.
Lionel was a widower and had two grown-up children. Her half-siblings! Sara felt excited and nervous at the thought of meeting her half-brother and half-sister. She understood Lionel’s concern that his son and daughter from his marriage might be upset to learn that he had an illegitimate daughter, and she had told herself to be patient and wait until he was ready to acknowledge publicly that he was her father. Finally it was going to happen. Lionel had invited her to his home at the weekend so that he could introduce her to Freddie and Charlotte Kingsley.
Sara had seen pictures of them and discovered that she bore a striking resemblance to her half-siblings. But the physical similarities between her and her half-sister did not apply to their very different dress styles. Photographs of Charlotte wearing stylish, figure-hugging clothes had made Sara realise how frumpy she looked in comparison. The smart suits she wore to the office reflected the importance of her role as PA to the chairman of the company and she had reminded herself that if Alekos had wanted a decorative bimbo to be his PA he wouldn’t have chosen her.
The new clothes she had bought while she had been on holiday did not make her look like a bimbo, Sara reassured herself. The skirt and blouse she was wearing were perfectly respectable for the office. Shopping in the chic boutiques on the French Riviera where her father owned a holiday villa had been a revelation. Remembering the photos she’d seen of her stylish half-sister had prompted Sara to try on colourful summery outfits. She had dropped a dress size from plenty of swimming and playing tennis and she loved being able to fit into skirts and dresses that showed off her more toned figure.
She ran her fingers through her new layered hairstyle. She still wasn’t used to her hair swishing around her shoulders when she turned her head. It made her feel more feminine and, well...sexy. She’d had a few blonde highlights put through the front sections of her hair to complement the natural lighter streaks from where she had spent a month in the French sunshine.
Maybe it was true that blondes did have more fun. But the truth was that meeting her father had given her a new sense of self-confidence. The part of her that had been missing was now complete, and Sara didn’t want to fade into the background any more. Travelling to work on the Tube this morning, she’d wondered if Alekos would notice her changed appearance.
She stared at her flushed face in the mirror and grimaced. All right, she had hoped he would notice her, instead of treating her like a piece of office furniture: functional, necessary but utterly uninteresting.
Well, she had got her wish. Alekos had stopped dead in his tracks when he’d seen her and his shocked expression had changed to a speculative gleam as his eyes had roamed over her. Heat had swept through her body when his gaze lingered on her breasts. She felt embarrassed thinking he might have noticed that her nipples had hardened in a telltale sign that he excited her more than any man had ever done.
Her decision to revamp her appearance suddenly seemed like a bad idea. When she’d dressed in dowdy clothes she hadn’t had to worry that Alekos might catch her glancing at him a dozen times a day, because he rarely seemed to notice that she was a human being and not a robot. Remembering the hot, hard gleam
