and surely there’s a space somewhere in the office or the factory where your father could still make himself useful?’
Lilah resisted the urge to remark that Bastien was more likely to tie a concrete block to her father’s leg and sink him. After all, the Greek billionaire had offered to buy Moore Components two years earlier and his offer had been refused. Her father should’ve sold up and got out then, she thought regretfully. But the business had been doing well and, although tempted by the offer, the older man had ultimately decided that he couldn’t face stepping down.
It was no consolation to Lilah that Bastien himself had forecast disaster once he’d realised that the firm’s prosperity depended on the retention of one very important contract. Within weeks of losing that contract Moore Components had been struggling to survive.
‘I’d better get to work,’ Lilah remarked in a brittle voice, bending down to pet the miniature dachshund pushing affectionately against her legs in the hope of getting some attention.
Since her family had moved in Skippy had been a little neglected, she conceded guiltily. When had she last taken him for anything other than the shortest of walks?
Thoroughly unsettled, however, by her stepmother’s sanguine reference to Bastien Zikos as a possible saviour, Lilah abandoned Skippy to pull on her raincoat, knotting the belt at her narrow waist.
She was a small, slender woman, with long black hair and bright blue eyes. She was also one of the very few workers still actively employed at Moore Components now it had gone bust. The Official Receivers had come in, taken over and laid off most of the staff. Only the services of the human resources team had been retained, to deal with all the admin involved in closing down the business. Engaged to work just two more days there, Lilah knew that she too would soon be unemployed.
Vickie was already zipping Ben into his jacket, because Lilah left the little boy at nursery school on her way into work.
It was a brisk spring day, with a breeze, and constantly forced to claw her hair out of her eyes, Lilah regretted not having taken the time to put her hair up long before she dropped her little brother off at the school. Unfortunately she had been suffering sleepless nights and scrambling out of bed every morning heavy-eyed, running late.
Ever since she had learned that Bastien Zikos had bought her father’s failed business she had been struggling to hide her apprehension. In that less-than-welcoming attitude to the new owner, however, Lilah stood very much alone. The Receivers had been ecstatic to find a buyer, while her father and various resident worthies had expressed the hope that the new owner would re-employ some of the people who had lost their jobs when Moore Components closed.
Only Lilah, who had once received a disturbing glimpse of the cold diamond-cutting strength of Bastien’s ruthlessness, was full of pessimism and thought the prospect of Bastien arriving to break good news to the local community unlikely.
In fact, if ever a man could have been said to have scared Lilah, it was Bastien Zikos. Everything about the tall, amazingly handsome Greek had unnerved her. The way he looked, the way he talked, the domineering way he behaved. His whole attitude had been anathema to her and she had backed off fast—only to discover, to her dismay, that that kind of treatment only put Bastien into pursuit mode.
Although Lilah was only twenty-three she had distrusted self-assured, slick and handsome men all her life, fully convinced that most of them were lying, cheating players. After all, even her own father had once been like that—a serial adulterer whose affairs had caused her late mother great unhappiness.
Lilah didn’t like to dwell on those traumatic years, when she had begun to hate her father, because it had seemed then that he could not be trusted with any woman—not her mother’s friends, not even his office staff. Mercifully all that behaviour had stopped once her father met Vickie, and since then Lilah had contrived to forge a new and much closer relationship with her surviving parent. Only now Robert Moore had settled down was his daughter able to respect him again and forgive him for the past.
Bastien, on the other hand, was not the family-man type, and he had always enjoyed his bad reputation as a womaniser. He was an unashamed sexual predator, accustomed to reaching out and just taking any woman who took his fancy. He was rich, astute and incredibly good-looking. Women fell like ninepins around him, running to him the instant he crooked an inviting finger. But Lilah had run in the opposite direction, determined not to have her heart broken and her pride trampled by a man who only wanted her for her body.
She was worth more than that, she reminded herself staunchly, as she had done two years earlier—much more. She wanted a man who loved and cared about her and who would stick by her no matter what came their way.
Being powerfully attracted to a man like Bastien Zikos had been a living nightmare for Lilah, and she had refused to acknowledge her reaction to him or surrender to the temptation he provided. Yet even now, two years on, Lilah could still remember her first sight of him across a crowded auction room. Bastien...tall, dark and devastating, with his glorious black-lashed tawny eyes.
She had been there to view a pendant that had once belonged to her mother and which Vickie, unaware of Lilah’s attachment to the piece, had put up for sale. Lilah had planned to buy it back quietly at auction, preferring that option to the challenge of telling Vickie that she had actually been pretty upset when her father had so thoughtlessly given all her late mother’s jewellery to his then live-in girlfriend.
And the first person Lilah had seen that day had been Bastien, black hair falling over his brow, his bold bronzed profile taut as he examined something in his hand while an auction assistant in overalls stood by an open display cabinet. When she had been directed to that same cabinet she had been hugely taken aback to see that Bastien had had her mother’s very ordinary silver sea horse pendant clasped in his lean brown hand.
‘What are you doing with that?’ she’d asked possessively.
‘What’s it to you?’ Bastien had asked bluntly, glancing up and transfixing her with breathtaking dark brown eyes enhanced by lush, curling black lashes.
In that split second he had travelled in her estimation from merely handsome to utterly gorgeous, and her breath had tripped in her throat and her heart had started hammering—as if she stood on the edge of a dangerous precipice.
‘It belonged to my mother.’
‘Where did she get it from?’ Bastien had shot at her, thoroughly disconcerting her.
‘I was with her when she bought it at a car boot sale almost twenty years ago,’ Lilah had confided. although she’d been startled by his question, not to mention the intensity of his appraisal.
‘My mother lost it in London some time around then,’ Bastien had mused in a dark, deep accented drawl that had sent odd little quivers travelling down her spine. He had turned over the pendant to display the engraving on the back, composed of two letter As enclosed in a heart shape. ‘My father Anatole gave it to my mother Athene. What an extraordinary coincidence that it should have belonged to both our mothers.’
‘Extraordinary...’ Lilah had agreed jerkily. as disturbed by his proximity as by his explanation. He’d been close enough that she’d been able to see the dark stubble shadowing his strong jawline and smell the citrus-sharp tenor of his cologne. Her nostrils had flared as she’d taken a hasty step backwards and cannoned into someone behind her.
Bastien had shot out a hand to steady her before she could stumble, long brown fingers closing round her narrow shoulder like a metal vice to keep her upright.
