message, Lucy love, but you do know that it won’t make any difference, don’t you?’
Lucy felt very alone all of a sudden. She swallowed back the ever-present guilt, pain and grief, and nodded even though the other woman couldn’t see her. Her voice was thick with emotion. ‘I know…but I’d appreciate it all the same, if you don’t mind.’
Lucy could hear Aristotle moving around in his own office as she changed in the dressing room. This was a formal event, so she had to wear a long dress, and the one she looked at now in the mirror was perfectly respectable—if completely boring. It was black, which meant it was slimming, and it had a high neck which covered her breasts adequately. Anything that did that was fine with her. And anyway, she told herself stoutly, she wasn’t dressing to impress, she was dressing to accompany her boss in a work capacity.
She left her hair up and put on some make-up: mascara and a little blusher. Then, slipping her feet into a pair of plain black high heels, she picked up her weekend bag stuffed with her work clothes and took a deep breath before walking out, feeling ridiculously nervous and hating herself for it.
That breath hitched in her throat and her brain stopped functioning when she saw Aristotle emerge from his own office, resplendent in a traditional tuxedo. The black made him look even darker, and very dangerous. Lucy fought back the wave of awareness, her hands gripping her bag.
He looked up from adjusting his cufflinks then, and the snowy perfection of his shirt made the green of his eyes pop out. He ran quick eyes over Lucy, making her squirm inwardly before quirking a brow and saying mockingly, ‘Well, if you’re trying to fade into the background it’s already working.’
Lucy swallowed past a dry throat. ‘I’m your assistant, not your date.’
More’s the pity, Aristotle surprised himself with thinking as he took her in, just a few feet away. Although not in that dress. It was basically a sack: a black sack covering her from neck to toe. It might as well have been a burkha for all he could see of her body, and he knew with a hunger that had been growing day by day and minute by minute that he very much wanted to see her body showcased in something much more revealing and tight. Like that skirt which had assumed mythic proportions in his fantasies. He beat back an intense surge of desire, in spite of the awful dress, and noted the hectic flush on her cheeks, the wary glitter of her eyes.
She was intriguing him more and more—not only with her luscious curves, but in the way she reacted to him, his spikily quick responses. Every expression was an open book as it crossed her face. She wasn’t afraid of him, and that was heady in itself. That she didn’t approve of him was glaringly obvious, and it was a novel sensation to have that from a woman.
Aristotle was looking at her far too assessingly. Lucy’s belly quivered in response and she told herself sternly that she wasn’t responding to him; she was just responding to the charisma of the man.
But then he strolled towards her nonchalantly and she had to fight the urge to turn tail and run. He walked around her as if inspecting a horse, and she turned around, unable to bear the thought of him looking at her too-large bottom. She cursed her genes again and felt acutely self-conscious. Why couldn’t she be a slim, petite little thing like her mother?
Her voice was high and defensive. ‘Is there something wrong? This dress fits perfectly well. It’s not too tight, if that’s what you’re afraid of.’ She wouldn’t be making that mistake again.
Aristotle’s eyes flicked to hers. They glittered with something dark and indefinable.
‘The dress is fine. For an old lady.’
Lucy sucked in a shocked breath. She’d spent a small fortune from her allowance on this dress. But before she could say anything he was gesturing to her head.
‘It’s too late to do anything about the dress, but leave down your hair. You look like you’re going to work.’
His normally accentless voice had lapsed into something unmistakably Greek, and it resonated within Lucy. Her mind blanked and her hand went up instinctively in a protective gesture. Her hair was part of her armour, she suddenly realised. No way could she take it down. She might as well just strip off the dress and stand in front of him in her underwear. Treacherous heat licked through her again, making a mockery of her attempts to rationalise it. She shook her head dumbly.
His eyes held hers and he just said quietly, ‘Take it down Lucy.’ It was so utterly shocking to be standing in front of her boss and have him speak to her like this, that Lucy found herself obeying him. With extreme reluctance she took out the pins from the back. She could feel her hair loosen and fall with annoying and heavily layered predictability around her shoulders and down her back.
Aristotle fisted his hands in his trouser pockets to stop them reaching out to feel the texture of that heavy silky mass of hair. It was darker than he’d originally thought, and luxuriously unruly, reaching down as far as her shoulderblades. He had an image of her reclining back on a sumptuous divan, tendrils of that glorious hair over her shoulders and trailing over her the tops of her bare—Get a grip, man! With a supreme effort of will Aristotle reined himself in and said gutturally, ‘That’s better. Now you look as if you’re ready for a function. Let’s go.’
With an easy and automatic courtesy which surprised Lucy, and she wasn’t sure why that was, he took her case from her white-knuckle grip and led the way out of the office. She stumbled as she followed his graceful stride down the corridor to his private lift. She had a moment of dithering, stupidly wondering if she should take the staff lift just a few feet further down, but as if reading her mind again Aristotle flicked her an impatient glance and she stepped in.
It was only when they were ensconced in the lift that the memory of the last time she’d shared such a space with him came back in all its glory.
She couldn’t help her reaction flowering. Too much had happened since then. Now she stood there, with her hair down, feeling as exposed as if he’d just run his hands over her naked flesh—especially when she recalled his look from moments ago, a look that had to have been some projection of her own awful, twisted feelings. The tall man beside her oozed with sexual heat. She could smell him and feel him. Suddenly she had the strangest sensation of holding something huge back…Wanton images hovered tantalisingly on the periphery of her mind and threatened to burst through, mocking her for a control that was beginning to feel very shaky.
Lucy gritted her jaw and looked resolutely up at the display as the lift seemed to inch downwards, willing it with every fibre of her being to go faster.
The effort it took to stay apart from Lucy in that lift, amidst a rush of memories of how she had felt pressed against him, which once again stunned him with their vividness, washed away Aristotle’s last resistance where this woman was concerned. He’d never experienced this level of sexual awareness before, and in truth frustration was a novel sensation when he was so used to getting what he wanted, when he wanted. He didn’t stop to question his decision or his motives for a second.
It was quite simple. He had to have this woman in his bed—and as a soon as possible. He would sleep with her. Then she would lose her allure and this bizarre spell she held over him would be broken. In three months he could let her go. Or less, if he got bored. According to her contract he could terminate employment with due notice; she, however, could not walk away unless she wanted to seriously sabotage her career. Because of the top secret nature of the merger she was tied to Levakis Enterprises until the whole thing became public.
Work, which he’d always strictly compartmentalised as separate from pleasure, would become pleasure—his
