the expression of total amazement etched on Theo Kyriakis’s lean face, she dropped back into her chair and felt a mortified flush climb to her cheeks. ‘You’d better go in,’ she mumbled, allowing her hair to fall in a concealing curtain around her face.
Conscious of his silent presence, it felt like an age to Beth before he responded. The breath left her body in a sigh of relief as she heard the interconnecting door open.
Theo’s thoughts still very much occupied by the baffling behaviour of Elizabeth Farley, the unexpected passion in her outburst and the sexiness of her quivering lips, it took him a few seconds to fully assimilate the scene he walked into.
His brother in a passionate clinch with the woman he had once been engaged to.
It was a moment of déjà vu—but not quite. On the previous occasion he had walked in on her in another man’s arms, he had not been the intended target audience; it did not seem a big leap to assume that this time he was!
The scene was strikingly similar but there were significant differences—in both the scene and his reaction to it.
Last time had involved naked flesh but, happily, his brother and Ariana were both fully dressed. Last time, his illusions had been shattered. He no longer had illusions, romantic or otherwise, which meant he could view the scene with an objectivity—tinged, admittedly, by distaste—he had not been capable of six years ago.
Six years ago, he’d been romantic and optimistic enough to consider himself the luckiest man in the world; he had met his soulmate—back then, he had firmly believed that such things existed—he had been in love.
And it had not been unpleasant to be the object of his friends’ envy—he had a beautiful bride-to-be.
She was still beautiful and his brother clearly thought so too.
Was it genetic or was making a total fool of yourself with this woman a rite of passage that all Kyriakis men had to experience? If this was indeed so, it was a rite of passage that he had personally passed with flying colours! But no experience, however humiliating, was wasted and he had learnt from it.
In his professional life Theo had always worked on the premise that everyone had an angle, an agenda; now, thanks to Ariana, he had extended this attitude very successfully to his personal life.
He continued to enjoy sex—it was, after all, as much of a basic need as eating—but he no longer expected or wanted any mystical connection. He sometimes wondered how long he would have gone on believing the romantic fantasy he had bought into had not fate in the guise of a cancelled flight stepped in—the same fate that had brought him to the open door of his fiancée’s apartment at the same moment as her much older ex-husband, Carl Franks.
Theo did not anticipate the time would ever come but if, by some cruel twist of fate, or possibly a blow to the head, he ever found himself in a situation where he was tempted to express his carnal appetite with the word love or forever Theo knew that replaying the deeply unpleasant scene etched into his brain would restore him to sanity.
On that previous occasion Theo had turned on his heel and walked away; that, unfortunately, was not on this occasion an option.
Now, his responsibility was clearly to save his brother.
It seemed unlikely that Andreas would appreciate his efforts. Though, on the plus side, Andreas, for all his faults, had never been what anyone would call a romantic and he had never displayed his own embarrassing youthful tendency to put women on pedestals; to recall the idealism of his youth still made Theo wince.
He wondered briefly whether Ariana had been unable to resist the temptation of his brother when an opportunity had presented itself or if she had gone out of her way to entrap Andreas, not that it mattered. He was genuinely astounded that she thought he would sit back and let this happen; maybe, in retrospect, it had sent the wrong message when he had permitted her to enjoy her petty revenge six years ago.
At the time he had calculated that responding to the interview she gave to a women’s magazine would have only prolonged the public interest, even though the story she had shared with the readers had been fiction from start to finish.
I was crazy about Theo but I was shocked when he gave me an ultimatum. Theo made me choose between him and my career. He’s very Greek; he wanted an old-fashioned sort of wife who would live her life through him.
She had phoned him to tell him that the article had been directly responsible for getting her the contract as the face a new perfume ahead of the model who had been tipped for the job.
‘So thanks, Theo,’ she’d said, warning, ‘but you still owe me.’
Presumably this was payback time.
‘Am I interrupting?’
The ironic question caused the couple, who were in a tight embrace, to pull apart. The woman rather ostentatiously adjusted the low gaping neckline of her dress and the man, looking flushed and embarrassed, dragged a hand through his tousled hair and cleared his throat.
‘Theo…I…we…didn’t hear you. We were…’
Theo arched a questioning brow at his clearly embarrassed brother and smiled. Actually, he wanted to throttle him; how could he not know that Ariana was poison, that she was motivated by two things—revenge and greed?
Like you did?
Ariana lifted a beautifully manicured hand to Andreas’s lips and gave a complacent smile as she observed, in a voice that had been likened by more than one smitten man to a purr, ‘Darling, Theo knows what we were doing.’
Andreas kept a wary eye on his brother as she pressed a lingering kiss to his lips. ‘Well, I don’t need to introduce you two, do I…?’ he said, grinning weakly at his own joke.
Tall and universally considered good-looking, Andreas Kyriakis had learnt early in life that the warmth and charm of his smile would tip the balance of most situations in his favour, but on this occasion his smile was wary as he reached for the chilled champagne.
The unease vanished as his attention turned to his beautiful bride-to-be. As he popped the cork he was unable to stifle a smile of triumph.
It was his brother’s turn to be second best.
Ariana had not wanted Theo but she wanted him.
Chapter Two
‘THAT was all a very long time ago. We were children, weren’t we, Theo?’ Ariana took the glass of champagne and looked at the older brother through the mesh of her darkened lashes, experiencing a moment’s uncertainty as she realised that Theo was looking relaxed when he was meant to be denouncing her to Andreas and flinging ultimatums.
‘Infants,’ Theo agreed as his sardonic glance brushed the rock sparkling on Ariana’s finger. ‘At least I was.’
As he smiled and watched the puzzled pout settle on Ariana’s lips he found himself comparing the cosmetically enhanced fullness, which he found not even vaguely inviting, with the softer and much sexier lushness of Elizabeth Farley’s naturally pink lips.
Well, now he had the cause of the tears and tantrums in the outer office;
