his size he moved with remarkable stealth, Maddie was still more dismayed at the unexpected offer of a lift home. An agonised flush blossomed in a betraying burst of scarlet beneath her fair skin. She could not bear to think that anyone else might have guessed what she had so lately been engaged in.
‘No, thank you,’ she gasped in an agitated undertone, and, as Nemos gazed down at her in frank surprise, she hurriedly slid past him and into the lift before the doors could close again and leave her marooned.
Maddie didn’t breathe again until she had left the building. She knew that she would never willingly set foot in Petrakos Industries again. All the way home on the bus she was tormented by the aftermath of shock—regret and self-loathing.
What on earth had possessed her to behave in such a way? To give her body to a guy who was almost a stranger?
Yet Giannis hadn’t felt like a stranger, and it seemed to her that foolish false sense of familiarity had stifled all her wit and common sense. She had behaved like a starstruck groupie, she thought painfully. Nine years had passed since she first laid wondering eyes on Giannis Petrakos. She had been just fourteen years old when he’d visited her sister Suzy in hospital. At the age of twenty-two, when—ironically—he’d been getting loads of bad press for being a wild and womanising hell-raiser, he had been quietly giving considerable time and cash to the cause of terminally sick children.
Born though Giannis had been, into a world of unimaginable wealth and privilege, he had sat down to chat to Suzy as if it had been the most natural thing in the world. When he’d discovered that Suzy idolised the lead vocalist in a famous boy band, he had brought the singer to the hospice where Suzy had spent her final weeks. He’d made her sister’s wildest dreams come true. Suzy had been so thrilled that she had still been talking about that momentous day right up until a few minutes before she died.
Maddie had never forgotten how happy Giannis Petrakos had made her twin. Now she recognised how she had idealised him and begun imagining that she knew him when she did not. She felt she had been too quick to seize on Annabel’s concerns as an excuse to approach Giannis and talk to him alone. Why hadn’t she immediately backed off when she’d realised that he was only semi-clothed? His apparent interest in her had gone to her head like strong spirits. She had not had the strength of will to withstand temptation. And he had been unutterably, wildly tempting. The dulled throb between her slender thighs lingered to remind her of her weakness and her sense of shame increased. Passion had made her betray her values.
Only as Maddie reached her bedsit did she remember the accident with the contraception, and her skin turned clammy with instinctive fear. She could only hope that Giannis would be proved right in his belief that there would be no repercussions in that field. She was appalled at the idea of conceiving after the equivalent of a one-night stand with a male who would regard the development as a calamity. Any child forced to deal with such wounding knowledge of its beginnings would have a right to be disgusted with her. How the mighty have fallen, she reflected, with painful new self-knowledge.
The days passed for Maddie at a painfully slow pace. She was restless, worried and unhappy. The sense of peace she had taken for granted had been replaced by inner turmoil. Nothing that she was feeling was quite what she felt it ought to be, either. Every time her phone sounded she jumped and snatched it up. Either it was a call from the temping agency or from the supermarket where she did weekend shifts. When she finally grasped the fact that she had been waiting to see if Giannis would phone, she was even angrier with herself. It was already painfully clear: she had been bedded and discarded as if she had no more worth than an old newspaper.
The following Saturday morning, however, someone rapped on her door. Looping her tumbling hair back from her face as she answered it, she stilled in astonishment when she recognised that her caller was Giannis’s security chief.
‘Mr Petrakos wants you to join him for lunch,’ Nemos announced with precision. ‘He’ll pick you up in an hour.’
Her delicate brows pleating, Maddie stared up at the big man. It took her a few seconds to absorb that most unexpected message. Not so much a message as a royal summons, she registered, watching Nemos clatter back down the stairs again without even waiting for her response. Evidently there was a strong assumption that nobody ever said no to an invitation from Giannis Petrakos.
Maddie leant back against the door as she closed it. Her knees felt a little wobbly. A giant wave of incredulity was washing over her. He had ignored her existence for the rest of the week and now he was issuing a last-minute offer of a lunch-date on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Naturally she would be leaving it. For a tiny, tiny fraction of a split second she had felt a leap of joy that he had not totally forgotten her existence, but she swiftly crushed that shameful reaction. Where did he get the nerve to act as if she was some servant at his beck and call?
You gave him the nerve, a little inner voice jibed. He hadn’t even had to ask her out to get her into bed. She had been a push-over—a sure thing. Evidently he expected her to drop everything and run the instant he chose to beckon. And why not? She had set no limits and demanded no respect that day at his office. It hurt her to acknowledge it, but she had behaved like a slut. Now he was treating her with a careless, casual indifference to her feelings that could only wound her even more.
Inwardly cringing at the hard lesson she felt she was being taught, she got changed for her shift at the supermarket. Slowly and surely, however, anger was starting to lace her turbulent feelings.
When a knock sounded on the door again, Maddie was ready for it. Before Nemos could even speak, she said tightly, ‘I’m not coming. I don’t want to see your employer again. It’s up to you how you tell him that.’
Disbelief followed by consternation flickered in the older man’s craggy features before he turned on his heel. The depth of her anger dismayed Maddie, for she had always believed that she had the most placid, even-tempered nature. When yet another rap landed on the door, her backbone stiffened and she flung it wide. It was Giannis, and his appearance right there on her doorstep startled her—because she had assumed that Nemos had arrived merely to chauffeur her to some restaurant. Evidently the Greek tycoon had been waiting in his limousine.
Giannis ran his devouring gaze over her lovely face, his attention lingering on her vivid green eyes and the pillowy fullness of her pink mouth. Her lily-white skin and the long curling streamers of crackling Titian hair falling round her shoulders drew him like a magnet. Every time he had relaxed his mental discipline in the past couple of days she had featured in an erotic daydream, and he was not disappointed now, with the reality of her lush, extravagant femininity. Even without couture trappings she was a total babe.
He took immediate advantage of her distracted backward step to press the door wider with a fluid skim of his fingers and stroll in. But he was taken aback by his first view of the poorly furnished, dingy bedsit in which she lived. It had been a long time since he had had contact with such poverty. The chasm between their respective social positions had never been more obvious. But Giannis was where he wanted to be, and it would take the equivalent of an avalanche to send him off course.
Maddie was transfixed by his arrival. He towered over her like a golden Greek god. The pace of her heartbeat rose to a pounding thud in her eardrums. From the ebony darkness of his hair to the gilded bronze of his eyes, set above the smooth, high jut of his stunning cheekbones, he utterly dazzled her. His slate-grey designer suit was the epitome of perfect grooming. He looked devastatingly handsome. He also made her remember the disturbed nights she had endured and the wicked forbidden dreams that constantly replayed the passion she was desperate to forget. Her mortification at the tenor of her thoughts was intense.
‘Nemos declined to explain your non-appearance,’ he proffered lazily.
The
