morning in the office.
She felt jittery and stiff all at once, and tried to get her arm back.
‘It must have caught on something. I’ll be fine from here. You must be impatient to get home.’
But Aristotle ignored her and easily steered them towards the path, not letting go for a second. Lucy’s blood was starting to fizzle and hum in her veins. She tried again while keeping a desperate clasp on her ruined dress. ‘Really, Mr Levakis, my door is just here.’
She even dug her heels in, but he called back to the driver, ‘That’s all, Julian. You can go. I’ll get a cab from here.’
‘You’re sure, sir?’ The driver’s surprise was evident in his voice.
‘Yes. Goodnight, Julian.’
And with that, before Lucy could formulate a word or acknowledge the escalation of pure mind-numbing panic in her breast, she was being led to her door and Aristotle was looking down at her with his trademark impatience.
‘Your keys?’
Lucy spluttered. The driver was pulling away from the kerb, making her even more panicked. ‘Mr Levakis, really, you don’t have to do this. Please. Thank you for the lift, but you shouldn’t have let Julian go. You’ll never get a cab from here…’
He looked down at her, those green eyes utterly mesmerising. ‘I thought I told you to call me Aristotle. Now, your keys? Please.’
Much like earlier, when he’d told her to take down her hair, Lucy found herself obeying. She knew on some dim, rational level that it was just shock. She awkwardly dug her keys out of her handbag, while trying not to let the dress gape open, and watched wordlessly when Aristotle took them and opened the door, leading them into the foyer and to the lift. He looked at her again with a quirked brow and Lucy said faintly, ‘Sixth floor.’
As the lift lurched skyward Lucy felt somehow as though she must be dreaming. She’d wake any moment and it would be Monday morning and everything would be back to normal. But then the lift bell pinged loudly and Aristotle, her boss, was looking at her again expectantly. She had no choice but to step out and walk to her door a few feet away.
Her brain was refusing to function coherently. She simply could not start to pose the question, even to herself, as to what he was doing here. She turned at her door with a very strong need to make sure she went through it alone and this man stayed outside.
She held out her hand for her keys, which he still held. She couldn’t look him in the eye. The bright fluorescence of the lighting was too unforgiving and harsh. Although she knew that it wouldn’t dent his appeal.
‘Thank you for seeing me safely in.’
‘You’re not in yet.’
With more panic than genuine irritation Lucy sent him a fulminating glance and grabbed her keys. She opened the door with a hand that was none too steady. She could have wept with relief when the door swung open. She turned back and pasted on a smile.
‘There—see? All safe. Now, if you just take a right when you go out, the main road is about a hundred yards up the street. You should be able to get a cab from there.’
Chapter Three
ARISTOTLE leaned nonchalantly against the wall, hands in the pockets of his trousers. At some stage since they’d left the hotel in town he’d undone his bow tie, and it hung rakishly open along with the top buttons of his shirt. Dark whorls of hair were visible, and Lucy felt weak with shock again at his bizarre behaviour. Belatedly she wondered if he might be drunk and she looked at him suspiciously. But then she recalled that, like her, he’d barely touched alcohol all evening. So if he wasn’t drunk…Her belly fluttered ominously.
‘I thought you said I’d never get a cab from there? Would you let me wander the mean streets of south London alone and defenceless? I can call a cab from your apartment…and I could murder a coffee…’
This man and the word defenceless did not belong in the same sentence. He smiled and her world tipped alarmingly for a second. Lucy had to swallow her retort, along with the stomach-churning realisation that she was being subjected to her boss’s teasing and charming side. She heard the lift jerking into life again. More people arriving home from a night out. Suddenly she was terrified that it might be her very bubbly but very nosy neighbour Miranda. She could just imagine trying to explain this: a gorgeous, lounging six-foot-four Greek tycoon in their mildew stained hallway. Her dress was suddenly the least of her worries.
‘OK, fine. I’ll call you a cab and get you a coffee.’
Lucy walked in and stood back to let Aristotle through. Immediately the air seemed to be sucked out of the room and replaced with his sheer dynamism. Lucy closed her door just as she heard the very drunken-sounding laughter of her neighbour and gave a sigh of relief.
As Aristotle started to prowl around her humble sitting room Lucy spied a lacy bra hanging over the chair nearest the kitchen. She dived for it while he was turned away and hurriedly balled it up. Aristotle turned round and Lucy’s belly spasmed.
‘Coffee,’ she babbled. ‘I’ll get the coffee on.’
She turned and fled into the small kitchen off the sitting room and stuffed the bra into a cupboard, taking out coffee and setting the kettle to boil. She kept looking surreptitiously into the sitting room. Aristotle was still prowling around. Except now he’d taken off his jacket, and she could see the broad line of his back tapering down into an impossibly lean waist. Her gaze followed the line down over taut buttocks and long, long legs…
The shrill, piercing scream of the kettle made her jump, and she winced when drops of boiling water splashed on clumsy hands. She gathered her dress together and walked back into the sitting room, noticing that Aristotle had put on some lights. Their glow of warmth lent an intimacy to the scene that raised her blood pressure. She had the vague thought of going to get changed out of the dress, but couldn’t contemplate the idea of removing a stitch of clothing while he was anywhere near. She noticed then that he was studying a photo in his hand, with a slight frown between those black brows. Lucy was terrified he might recognise the woman in the picture. She handed him the coffee, forcing him to put the picture down and take the cup.
He just gestured with his head. ‘Who is that? You and your mother?’
Lucy looked down at the photo in the frame and fought the urge to snatch it out of sight. It was a favourite one of her and her mum, taken in Paris when Lucy had been about twelve. They were wrapped up against the cold, their faces close together, but even from the picture you could tell that Lucy hadn’t taken after her mother’s delicate red-haired beauty. She’d already been taller than her mother by then.
She nervously adjusted it slightly and replied, ‘Yes,’ clearly not inviting any more questions.
Aristotle looked at Lucy. She was as nervous and skittish as a foal—avoiding his eye, her hand in a white-knuckle grip on that dress. That was what had pushed him over the edge. Seeing those soft pale thighs exposed to his gaze, one long leg already out of the car. It had taken every ounce of restraint not to reach out and run his hand up the soft inner skin of one gloriously lush thigh.
Especially after an evening that had been a form of torture, trying to focus on work while she’d stood beside him. Following her out of the car
