again and again to sate this burning ache. Somehow instinctively he knew that one night would not be enough, and it made him uncomfortable to acknowledge it.
Nevertheless, as the lift descended the final few floors, a fizz of anticipation ran through Aristotle’s veins and he felt truly alive for the first time in a long time. Even thoughts of the merger were receding into a background place. A dim and distant alarm bell sounded at the back of his mind, but he was too fired up to notice or dwell on it.
The lift juddered softly to a stop and the doors swished open. He stood back and gestured for Lucy to precede him, looking at her carefully as she did so. She was avoiding his eye with all the finesse of a guilty-looking six-year-old caught with her hand in the cookie jar.
She stumbled slightly stepping out of the lift, and Aristotle took her bare silky smooth arm just above the elbow. The frisson of pleasure that went through him nearly made him sway. He could feel the swell of her breast tease his fingers and a primal instinct to possess this woman coursed through him. The fact that she held herself so rigidly at his side didn’t put him off. She was as unmistakably his as—for now—he was hers.
A colleague of Aristotle’s had just walked away. Lucy watched him go with a feeling of mounting terror. She did not want to be alone with her boss.
They were standing side by side under the seductively soft lighting of the main ballroom in the exclusive London hotel when she heard his drawling query, ‘You don’t need your glasses? Or are you wearing contacts?’
She nearly choked on her sparkling water and lowered the drink carefully, realising without even making a reflex gesture to check that she had indeed forgotten her glasses. She could picture them right now, sitting on the vanity cabinet in the dressing room of the office. She flushed guiltily and sent a quick, fleeting look to Aristotle. Standing here in this milieu, with his tall, hard body just inches away, was making her nervous. It made her so nervous, in fact, that she didn’t stop the truth from spilling out.
‘They aren’t prescription glasses.’
She saw him frown from the corner of her eyes. ‘So why do you wear them?’
He sounded aghast, and Lucy had no doubt that he could not understand why any woman would knowingly want to make herself any less attractive than she already was. A sense of extreme vulnerability washed through her.
She shrugged minutely and avoided his eye. ‘I started wearing them when I was looking for work after college.’ She squirmed inwardly. How could she explain to this man that she’d grown sick and tired of prospective bosses ogling her sizeable assets rather than her CV? A memory made her shiver with distaste: her first boss, whispering lasciviously on more than one occasion that he liked big girls.
Ever since then Lucy had made sure to be covered up at all times, hair pulled back and glasses firmly on. Yet, uncomfortably, she had to acknowledge that she’d found working with Aristotle Levakis something of a relief in that she knew there was no way on this earth a man like him would look twice at her. That assertion suddenly seemed shaky.
As if to compound the feeling, from the corner of her eye she could see Aristotle turn subtly, so that he had his back to the room full of people. She even saw one person in the act of approaching falter and turn away, as if he’d sent off some silent signal she couldn’t see. She couldn’t resist sending him another quick look. He had an expression on his face that caught and held her, and she couldn’t look away.
His eyes flicked down to her breasts—in exactly the way she’d seen men do all her life, ever since she’d developed out of all proportion in her early teens. But instead of her usual feeling of disgust and invasion, to her shame and horror she could feel herself respond. Her breasts grew heavy, their tips tight and hard. For a cataclysmic moment she actually felt the novel desire to know what it would feel like to have this man touch them. Shock at the sheer physicality of her reaction made her feel clammy.
Aristotle’s eyes glittered. A whisper of a smile hovered around his mouth and then he said, ‘And did it work?’
Shame and chagrin rushed through Lucy. Was she really so weak? With one look this man was felling all her careful defences like a bowling ball sending skittles flying.
Her voice sounded strangled. ‘I found that, yes, it did work.’
Until now.
Lucy felt like a trapped insect, flat on its back and helpless in the face of a looming predator. Determined to negate her disturbing reaction, she looked away and said crisply, ‘Plenty of people wear glasses for cosmetic reasons. I would have thought that you’d approve.’
His voice was curt. ‘Your CV and your work ethic speak for themselves, Lucy. You don’t need to bolster your image by making it more businesslike.’
Too-tight skirts, yes. Glasses, no. Aristotle swallowed a growl of irritation at his wayward mind.
Lucy looked back. She was more than surprised at his easy commendation of her ability. So far it was only the fact that she hadn’t been let go that had given her any indication of how well she was doing her job. She had to fight the urge to cross her hands defensively over her chest, but that was ridiculous. He wouldn’t be looking at her like that. He’d just been making a point.
She inclined her head and said, ‘Fine. I won’t wear them.’ She bit back the reflex to say sir. The last thing she needed now was for him to repeat his request to call him Aristotle. What she did need was for this evening to be over as soon as possible and to have a whole two days away from this man, to get her head together and clear again. Especially when the prospect of spending three weeks in Athens with him loomed on the horizon like a threatening stormcloud.
A few hours later Lucy breathed a sigh of relief when the car drew to a smooth halt outside her apartment block in south London. She’d tried to insist on taking a cab from the hotel, but Aristotle wouldn’t listen. Then she’d tried to insist that he be dropped home first, but again he’d been adamant.
She reached for the door on her side and looked back to say a crisp goodnight. Her ability to speak left her. Aristotle was lounging in the far corner like a huge, dark avenging angel. A surge of panic gripped her and she felt blindly for the door handle, all but scrambling in her haste to get out and away. But just as she opened the door, extending one leg out of the car, the awful sound of ripping material made her heart stop. An ominously cold breeze whistled across the tops of her thighs.
She looked down and her jaw dropped when she saw a huge rip extending down the side of her dress from mid-thigh to hem. Only peripherally was she aware that it must have snagged on something. Her white thighs gleamed up at her in the gloom.
As all this was impacting on her brain, she heard a coolly sardonic, ‘You don’t seem to have much luck with clothes, do you?’
The sensation of wanting the ground to open up and swallow her whole had never seemed more strong than at that moment. She heard Aristotle say something unintelligible to his driver and then he got out. Lucy couldn’t move. She was terrified that if she did something else would rip and her entire dress might fall off. But then Aristotle was standing there, looking down at her with a mocking smile and extending a hand.
With the utmost reluctance she put her hand in his and felt the world tilt crazily as he pulled her up. With her other hand she scrabbled to hold her dress together. Her face felt as red as a traffic light. Aristotle now had a light grip on her arm, and Lucy noticed that he held her bag in his other hand.
That,
