him of what he would prefer to forget. The answer of what to do next came to him and his cautious streak fired up. He would be breaking a habit, decimating his usual routine, but slavishly following that routine and indulging those habits had subjected him to several far from commendable discoveries about his own nature.
‘Tomorrow, I am leaving early in the morning for Greece,’ he murmured flatly. ‘There is a wedding in my family and I must attend. I would like you to accompany me.’
Elvi was sharply disconcerted and a piece of chicken almost went down the wrong way because her throat tightened like all the rest of her in surprise. ‘Me?’ she queried uncertainly.
‘You see anyone else sitting here?’ Xan said drily.
Elvi flushed and went back to eating.
‘You have a passport?’ he checked.
Elvi nodded. Her mother had spent her last bonus on equipping the three of them with passports. They had had a dream of travelling abroad for a few days, something cut price and last-minute and cheap. Of course, that prospect had died with Sally’s dismissal, along with everything else. Like life as she had known it, Elvi conceded ruefully. Only a couple of days had passed since she had worked in the craft shop, going home each evening to her family. Xan had taken everything, she thought unhappily.
Xan had never been with such a quiet woman and it unsettled him. He had expected a modest amount of enthusiasm to greet the kind of invitation he had never given a woman before. Of course, she probably didn’t appreciate that reality. But she had mentioned wanting to get to know him, hadn’t she? What better opportunity could he offer her? It crossed his mind that possibly she no longer wanted to get to know him better, but he brushed off the suspicion with all the instinctive disdain of a man accustomed to being the number one, highly desirable target of every young woman in his radius.
‘I’ll send a car to pick you up at nine this evening,’ Xan announced, rising lithely upright. ‘It will be more convenient if you spend the night before we travel at my apartment.’
Elvi rose to follow him to the door, although she didn’t know why she was offering him that courtesy when he had his own key to the apartment. He was already on his mobile phone, uttering what sounded like instructions to someone in another language. Greek? She had no idea, having only studied French at school.
For a split second, Xan hovered on the threshold and looked back at her, feeling weirdly uneasy about abandoning her when it was obvious that she was missing her family so much. Her glow wasn’t back, he noted, thinking grimly that he had successfully killed that. An air of nervous uncertainty lay in her small restive movements. He hadn’t discussed the pregnancy risk. It wasn’t the moment, he told himself squarely, because she hadn’t noticed that contraceptive mishap. Why worry her about something so unlikely? What were the chances after one encounter? Slim, to none, he reasoned, and he offered up his first inner prayer since childhood in support of that hope. Wasn’t he already feeling guilty enough? Surely that ultimate axe would not also fall on him?
Elvi met Xan’s dazzling amber eyes and it was as though a mental ping of recognition sounded somewhere deep within her own brain. He was upset about something. She didn’t know how she knew that but somehow she did, belatedly recognising that nobody could be quite as detached from the rest of humanity as he liked to appear. And such beautiful eyes he had, lushly enclosed between black velvet lashes, such an amazing colour and surprisingly eloquent. Her body reacted with shocking intensity, her breasts tightening while a sensation of awareness purred between her thighs.
‘H-how long will we be in Greece?’ she asked abruptly, battling that awareness with fierce discomfiture.
‘Five days,’ Xan said in a roughened undertone, wondering how the hell he was going to keep his hands off her when she could turn him on so fast she made him feel like an animal.
Not that that was so very far from the truth concerning their single encounter, Xan reminded himself with gritted teeth as he strode into the lift, refusing to allow himself to linger, thoroughly distrusting, indeed loathing, the powerful sexual urges pulling at him. He had already fallen on Elvi once with all the refinement of a sex-starved teenager, so out of himself that he had forgotten protection and had failed to note that he had hurt her. Scarcely a stellar show of sophistication or skill. No way was he about to repeat that idiocy.
Determined to get every change made instantly, Xan contacted the concierge company to organise the removal of Elvi’s possessions from the apartment and the sale of it. He was still issuing instructions when he climbed into the limousine and was absently aware of Dmitri’s frowning face. What the hell was up with his head of security? Dmitri Pallas had been with Xan for years. A former inspector in the Greek police force, he was very efficient in his field. But of recent, crucially the placing of Elvi’s letter in the cause of Sally Cartwright, Dmitri’s behaviour had been strange.
Already feeling unusually hassled, Xan shelved the acknowledgement as something else to deal with at a more opportune time. Maybe Dmitri had family problems or something. Maybe he knew more about that theft business than he had been willing to share. Whatever, Xan was in no mood to delve into anything that could verge on the personal. It was a direction he never went in with his staff because he valued his own privacy too highly. And the day when he blew his own cherished privacy sky-high was not a day when he felt prompted to break down barriers with others.
A woman in his apartment, even if it was only for one night, was a major departure from the norm for him. Should he have put her in a hotel? No, that would’ve been shabby, he decided, and his behaviour had been shabby enough for one day, hadn’t it?
While Xan was contemplating the challenge of sharing his space for even one night, Elvi was on the way home for a visit, unable to sit alone in the empty apartment even though she knew she would either have to lie or evade the truth as the price of that family visit. The knowledge made her sad but the dropping of the theft charge was, in her opinion, a worthwhile return, regardless of the dishonesty it had involved her in.
She was startled when she got home to find her mother actually turning out cupboards and packing the contents into boxes.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ she asked her mother from the kitchen doorway.
Sally smiled up at her daughter from her position on her knees on the floor.
‘We’re moving to Oxford in a few days...’
Elvi’s brow furrowed, her eyes uncomprehending. ‘I don’t understand—’
Sally picked herself up. ‘I’ll make us a cup of tea and explain,’ she said, visibly in a far better state of mind than she had been the last time Elvi actually saw her, with something of her usual bustling energy back in her step and voice.
‘Dmitri Pallas...the head of Mr Ziakis’s security team...is a good friend of mine,’ Sally advanced with a slight deepening of colour. ‘He’s come to our rescue...’
Her brow furrowing, Elvi sank down at the table while her mother brewed the tea. ‘You’ve never mentioned him before,’ she pointed out uncomfortably.
‘Didn’t see the need because I used to see him every day at work,’ Sally Cartwright told her wryly. ‘And no, there’s no romance there, nothing but friendship, and I don’t know if there ever could be but I do like him very much.’
‘Nothing wrong with that,’ Elvi said gently, disconcerted by her mother’s fluctuating colour and embarrassment. No romance, yeah, as if she was going
