and that she was too valuable a member of staff to lose?
Smoothing her hands over her hair, she ran along the corridor and opened the front door—her heart clenching with an emotion she was too dazed to analyse when she saw who was standing there. She blinked as if she’d somehow managed to conjure up the brooding figure from her fevered imagination. She must have done—because why else would Alek Sarantos be outside her home?
A few giant droplets of rain had splashed onto the blackness of his hair and his bronze skin gleamed as if someone had spent the morning polishing it. She’d forgotten how startlingly blue his eyes looked, but now she could see something faintly unsettling glinting from their sapphire depths.
And even in the midst of her confusion—why was he here?—she could feel her body’s instinctive response to him. Her skin prickled with a powerful recognition and her breasts began to ache, as if realising that here was the man who was capable of giving her so much pleasure when he touched them. She could feel colour rushing into her cheeks.
‘Mr Sarantos,’ she said, more out of habit than anything else—but the cynical twist of his lips told her that he found her words not only inappropriate, but somehow insulting.
‘Oh, please,’ he said softly. ‘I think we know each other well enough for you to call me Alek, don’t you?’
The suggestion of intimacy unnerved her even more than his presence and her fingers curled nervelessly around the door handle she was clutching for support. Now the rumble of thunder was closer and never had a sound seemed more fitting. ‘What...what are you doing here?’
‘No ideas?’ he questioned silkily.
‘To rub in the fact that you’ve lost me my job?’
‘Oh, but I haven’t,’ he contradicted softly. ‘You managed to do that all by yourself. Now, are you going to let me in?’
Ellie told herself she didn’t have to. She could slam the door in his face and that would be that. She doubted he would batter the door down—even though he looked perfectly capable of doing it. But she was curious about what had brought him here and the rest of the day stretched in front of her like an empty void. She was going to have to start looking for a new job—she knew that. But not today.
‘If you insist,’ she said, turning her back on him and retracing her steps down the corridor. She could hear him closing the front door and following her. But it wasn’t until he was standing in her room that she began to wonder why she had been daft enough to let him invade her space.
Because he looked all wrong here. With his towering physique and jewelled eyes, he dominated the small space like some living, breathing treasure. He seemed larger than life and twice as intimidating—like the most outrageously alpha man she had ever set eyes on. And that was making her feel uncomfortable in all kinds of ways. There was that honeyed ache deep down in her belly again and a crazy desire to kiss him. Her body’s reaction was making her thoughts go haywire and her lips felt like parchment instead of flesh. She licked them, but that only made the aching worse.
The kettle was reaching its usual ear-splitting crescendo just before reaching boiling point and the great belches of steam meant that the room now resembled a sauna. Ellie could feel a trickle of sweat running down her back. Her shirt was sticking to her skin and her jeans were clinging to her thighs and once again she became horribly aware of her own body.
She cleared her throat. ‘What do you want?’ she said.
Alek didn’t answer. Not immediately. His anger—a slow, simmering concoction of an emotion—had been momentarily eclipsed by finding himself in the kind of environment he hadn’t seen in a long time.
He looked around. The room was small and clean and she had the requisite plant growing on the windowsill, but there was a whiff of institutionalisation about the place which the cheap posters couldn’t quite disguise. The bed was narrower than any he’d seen in years and an unwilling flicker of desire was his reward for having allowed his concentration to focus on that. But he had once lived in a room like this, hadn’t he? When he’d started out—much younger than she was now—he’d been given all kinds of dark and inhospitable places to sleep. He’d worked long hours for very little money in order to earn money and get a roof over his head.
He lifted his eyes to her face, remembering the powerful way his body had reacted to her the other night and trying to tell himself that it had been a momentary aberration. Because she was plain. Ordinary. If he’d passed her in the street, he wouldn’t have given her a second glance. Her jeans weren’t particularly flattering and neither was her shirt. But her eyes looked like silver and wavy strands of pale hair were escaping from her ponytail and the ends were curling, so that in the harshness of the artificial light she looked as if she were surrounded by a faint blonde halo.
A halo. His mouth twisted. He couldn’t think of a less likely candidate for angelic status.
‘You sold your story,’ he accused.
‘I didn’t sell anything,’ she contradicted. ‘No money exchanged hands.’
‘So the journalist is clairvoyant, is that what you’re saying? She just guessed we were making out?’
She shook her head. ‘That’s not what I’m saying at all. She saw us. She was standing behind a tree having a cigarette and saw us kissing.’
‘You mean it was a set-up?’ he questioned, his tone flat.
‘Of course it wasn’t a set-up!’ She glared at him. ‘You think I deliberately arranged to get myself the sack? Rather a convoluted way to go about it, don’t you think? I think being caught dipping your fingers in the till is the more traditional way to go.’
He raised his eyebrows in disbelief. ‘So she just happened to be there—’
‘Yes!’ she interrupted angrily. ‘She did. She was a guest, staying at the hotel. And the next day she cornered me in the restaurant while I was serving her and there was no way I could have avoided talking to her.’
‘You still could have just said no comment when she started quizzing you,’ he accused. ‘You didn’t have to gush and call me a pussycat—to damage my business reputation and any credibility I’ve managed to build up. You didn’t have to disclose what you’d overheard when you’d clearly been listening in to my telephone conversation.’
‘How could I help but listen in, when you broke off to take a call in front of me?’
He glared at her. ‘What right did you have to repeat any of it?’
‘And what right do you have to come here, hurling all these accusations at me?’
‘You’re skirting round the issue. I asked you a question, Ellie. Are you going to answer it?’
There was an odd kind of silence before eventually she spoke.
‘She told me you had a girlfriend,’ she said.
He raised his eyebrows. ‘So you felt that gave you the right to gossip about me, knowing it might find its way into the press?’
‘How could I, when I didn’t know what her job was?’
‘You mean you’re
