keeping people on for a reason, not out of kindness. When it suited him to let them go, he’d let them go. Unless she could persuade him that the staff were worth keeping.
All morning she’d multitasked, talking to clients via her wireless headset while packing up boxes and masterminding the move. Somewhere in the middle of the chaos she’d stripped off her pink tights and replaced them with black leggings. It was her one and only concession to the strict Doukakis dress code.
Now, she wondered if she should have avoided conflict altogether and worn a suit. Trying to summon sufficient energy to get through the rest of the day, she slapped her cheeks to produce some colour and ignored the hideous squirming in her stomach.
First days, she thought grimly. She hated first days. It was like being back at school. Whispers behind her back. Is that her? The humiliation of her father driving her to school in a flashy car with his latest embarrassingly young wife installed in the front seat. Giggles heard across the length of a playground. Mysterious collisions in the corridor that sent her books flying and her self-esteem plummeting. Standing alone in the lunch queue and then finding an empty table and trying to look as though eating alone was a choice, not a sentence.
Polly glared at her reflection in the mirror. If those days had taught her anything it was how to survive. No matter what happened, she was not going to let Damon Doukakis close down the company. Not without a fight.
Somehow, she had to impress him.
Wondering how on earth you impressed a man like Damon Doukakis, she pressed the button for the executive floor and the doors of the elevator slid closed. But at the last minute a gloved male hand clamped itself around the door and they opened again.
Her hope for two minutes peace dashed, Polly squashed herself back against the far corner as a man dressed in motorbike leathers strode into the lift. She caught a glimpse of wide, powerful shoulders and realised that it was Damon Doukakis himself.
Their eyes clashed and she had a sudden urge to bolt from the lift and use the stairs.
The temperature in the tiny capsule suddenly shot up.
He didn’t even have to open his mouth, she thought desperately. Even the way he stood was intimidating. Irritated by the fact that he looked as good in leather as he did in fine wool, Polly raised an eyebrow.
‘I thought we were supposed to wear suits?’
‘I had a meeting across town. I used the motorbike.’ He wore his masculinity like a banner, overt and unapologetic, and Polly was horrified to feel her insides liquefy.
‘So you don’t change into leather just to beat your staff.’
The glance he sent in her direction was both a threat and a warning. ‘When I start beating my staff,’ he said silkily, ‘you’ll be the first to know because you’ll be right at the top of my list. Perhaps if you’d had some discipline at fourteen you wouldn’t have turned out to be such a disaster. Evidently your father didn’t ever learn to say no to you.’
Polly didn’t tell him that her father had abdicated parental responsibility right from the beginning. ‘He had trouble handling me.’
‘Well, I won’t have trouble.’ His tone lethally soft, he took in her appearance in a single glance. ‘I’ll give you marks for being on time and for changing out of those fluorescent tights.’
For some reason she couldn’t fathom, his derision brought a lump to her throat. She had blisters on her hands from carrying boxes that were too heavy, her feet ached, her back ached, and she hadn’t slept in her bed for four nights. And just to add to her frustration her phone had stopped ringing. All morning clients had called her, but now, when she was desperate for a senior client to ring her for advice so that she could sound impressive and prove to Damon just how good she was at her job, it remained silent.
And there was no point in telling him, was there? He’d made up his mind about her based on that episode in her teens and the state of her father’s company.
The whole situation was made a thousand times worse by the fact that a small part of her knew she was deserving of his contempt. It was because of her that Arianna had been excluded from school. It didn’t surprise her that he had such a low opinion of her. What surprised her was how much she cared. It shouldn’t matter what he thought of her. All that mattered now were the jobs of the innocent people who worked for her father.
‘The headlines on the one o’clock news were pretty brutal. They’re calling you the hatchet man.’
‘Good. Perhaps it will bring your father out of hiding.’ His sensuous mouth curved into a grim smile as he hit a button on the panel and sent the lift gliding upwards.
Transfixed by his mouth, Polly felt her stomach drop. His features were boldly masculine, from the hard lines of his bone structure to the subtle shadow that darkened his jaw. Desperate, she looked for evidence of weakness but found none. ‘My father isn’t hiding.’
‘Miss Prince—’ his voice was a soft, dangerous purr ‘—unless you want to experience first-hand experience of the impact of my temper in an enclosed space, I suggest you don’t force me to think about what your father might currently be doing.’
Polly instinctively retreated against the glass. ‘I’m just saying he isn’t hiding, that’s all. My father isn’t a coward.’ London slowly grew smaller and smaller until it lay beneath them like a miniature toy town. By contrast, the tension in the capsule rocketed.
‘He’s allowed his business to decline rather than make the difficult decisions that should have been made. He needed to make serious cuts but he chose not to do it. If that isn’t cowardice, I don’t know what is.’
‘You shouldn’t make judgements on something you know nothing about.’
‘I run a multinational corporation. I make difficult decisions every day of my life.’ His innate superiority infuriated her almost as much as the fact that he was right. Her father should have made some difficult decisions. But the fact that it was Damon Doukakis who was now pointing that out somehow made it more difficult to hear.
‘I’m sure it gives you a real feeling of power to fire people.’
It happened so fast she didn’t see him move, but one moment she was standing with an aerial view of London and the next she was staring at wide shoulders and a pair of fiercely angry eyes. ‘Never before have I had to restrain myself around a woman, but with you—’ He drew in a shaky breath, clearly struggling with the intensity of his own emotions. ‘You are enough to provoke a saint. Trust me when I say you do not want a demonstration of my power.’
Polly stared at him in appalled fascination, wondering why everyone thought he was Mr Cool. He was the most volatile man she’d met. He simmered like a pan of water kept permanently on the boil. And he smelt incredible … ‘I was just making the point that you really work this whole I’m-the-boss-and-you’re-going-to-do-it-my-way routine.’ Please let him step away from her before she gave into the temptation to bury her face in his neck and just breathe. ‘We’re used to a more relaxed approach when we work. Frankly I’m not sure how well we’ll do under a reign of terror.’
Outrage rippled across his shoulders and his jaw clenched. ‘That relaxed approach has sent your company plunging towards bankruptcy. If any redundancies come from this disaster then you and your father will be
