Louisa slid her hands down the sides of her short blue cotton sundress before she could bring herself to open the door.
At first glance everything looked exactly the same as it always had whenever she’d come in here. The stylishly designed functional room, which was really the central control room for the Markonos men to wield their power when they were here on Aristos, was lined by a multitude of hi-tech equipment with printers and fax machines and photocopiers cloaked by cedar cabinets. A long row of computer screens flickered away busily, each showing lists from different stock markets across the globe. Everything looked so comfortingly normal in a money-orientated, power-spinning kind of way and seeing that made some of her tension ease away.
Andreas was standing with his hips resting against the huge cedar desk loaded down with its usual stacks of files and paperwork. He was on the phone rolling out instructions in Greek. Her Greek had used to be pretty fluent but he was speaking so fast and intensely she didn’t have a hope of understanding what he was saying.
And anyway she wasn’t listening, she was looking. Even dressed casually in pale chinos and a plain white shirt, he exuded all the heady dynamics of a hard, polished tycoon. He was staring at his shoes, frowning, his cropped hair shining blue-black in the sunlight coming at him from the window behind him and casting deliciously brooding dark shadows across his face.
Alpha man relaxing at home, she drily observed. If you put him on the front page of Vogue looking like that the shops would sell out within minutes of the copies hitting the shelves. He was gorgeous—sexy; her tummy muscles flipped over and that hot, telling sting hit her abdomen to remind her that this was the only man ever to make her feel like this.
He glanced up and saw her then and surprise froze him, cutting off his voice as if someone had severed his tongue from his throat.
‘Hi,’ she smiled at him, ‘I’m sorry to disturb you here but—'
‘You are very welcome to disturb me,’ he declared as he shot bolt-upright. The phone rattled as it landed on its rest. As he strode quickly towards her everything about him was jerky and tense. The way he came to stop directly in front of her filled her with the strangest impression that he was deliberately blocking her off from the desk.
It spooked her enough to send her heart on a sinking dive to her stomach. When he reached out to take hold of her to kiss her, she took a wary step back. Something was wrong here.
‘No, don’t touch me yet,’ she jerked out. ‘I need to ask you something first …'
His dark eyes narrowed on her sudden tension. As he lowered his hands to his sides, Louisa watched them ball into two tense fists. When she looked up again it was as though a shutter had been slammed down across his face.
‘Ask me what?’ he prompted.
And then she knew. It was right there in his body language, in the clenched fists and his shuttered expression and his tense, blocking stance. It had nothing to do with his family—it was him.
She took another step back from him, feeling very cold suddenly, shivering, pins and needles chasing up her legs from the oddly unstable pads of her feet. Her heart began to thump. Eyelashes flickering as she looked away from him, she took a sideways step then just walked around him to go over to the desk.
A tense, dragging silence followed as she stood there moving her stark blue eyes from one stack of papers to the next stack, each one clearly labelled with the name of one of Max’s companies. Her name—her other name, Louisa Jonson—jumped out at her from a closed folder on the far side of the desk.
The phone started ringing—ringing and ringing, while Andreas held his stillness and the air slowly thickened with that insistent sound slicing through it as if it were trying to slice through her.
Then the phone stopped. Louisa drew in a breath. ‘I thought it was your father,’ she pushed out unevenly. ‘I refused to believe that you would …’ Pale as death, she spun around. ‘Why?’ she choked out.
His shrug was so insolent it almost hurt her more than all the rest put together. ‘Landreau is your lover.'
Louisa stared at him and couldn’t push out a single word in denial because he looked so calm, sounded so casual about the accusation that she actually found herself waiting for him to offer another one of those horrible shrugs.
‘Nothing to say?’ He offered a quick condemning smile instead. ‘Very wise,’ he added as he strode back to the desk, all lean, lithe, smooth-moving male in complete control of himself.
He reached across the desk to flip open the file with her name on it. ‘To give you your due, yineka mou,’ he continued, ‘at least you used your unmarried name while you spent the last four years travelling Europe, passing yourself off as Landreau’s assistant.’ The last word bit from between his teeth. ‘If, however, I can gather this much intimate information about your affair with him so quickly, then how much more could an experienced reporter dig up if he was curious enough?'
‘You’ve been coming here—each day—to investigate me?’ Despite all the evidence laid out in front of her, Louisa was still struggling to believe any of this. ‘For what purpose, for goodness’ sake?'
‘For the purpose of being prepared for the enterprising person who decides to drag my name through the mud if or when it comes to light that Max Landreau’s long-term live-in mistress is also my wife.’
As if he’d slapped her face, Louisa drew in a sharp breath. ‘I am not Max’s mistress.'
‘His long-term live-in—what, then?’
‘Assistant,’ she insisted. ‘His personal assistant. My duties deal with the personal and social side of his life but I don’t sleep with him.'
‘Intriguing,’ he drawled, turning to settle his lean hips against the desk again with that same long, relaxed sprawl of his legs. ‘You live in his house—'
‘I do not!’ she denied. ‘I rent the flat above his garages!’
‘You live in his house,’ he repeated. ‘It is your permanent address. You have a permanent stateroom on his yacht! Wherever he goes you go as if joined to him at the hip!'
His voice had hardened and thickened with each declaration he’d tossed at her. Reaching round, he snatched up the folder and in a shocking display of uncharacteristic carelessness sent a spill of papers sliding onto the desk as he flipped through them with long fingers to filter out several computer-generated photographs.
‘You,’ he said, ‘in a hot-pink bikini, leaning against him at a lunch party on his yacht.’ He showed her. ‘You,’ he continued, ‘wearing the slinkiest red dress I have ever seen, pinned to his side by the diamonds you wear around your beautiful throat at a charity ball at his house! Then we have the beach party in the south of France, where you use him as a pillow while he shades your face from the sun with his hat. You are laughing!’ he accused, as if laughing was a very big sin in his eyes. ‘You are wearing a white bikini! He wears nothing!'
‘Sh-shorts,’ Louisa stammered, face going pinker with each revealing photograph. ‘Max has sh-shorts on.'
‘He does not wear his shorts up as high as that muscle bronzed chest you are so comfortable with!'
She gasped as he flung the images at her.
