had hurt and hurt much more than she had expected. It had brought back memories she didn’t want. She had loved him and had given her trust to a man for the first time ever. His sudden volte-face had almost destroyed her because she had given him so much she had felt bare to the world without him.
And yet he still wasn’t married. She had thought for sure that he would marry the wealthy heiress his father kept pushing in his direction, the very lovely but very bitchy Kat Valtinos. But then Jax was bone-deep stubborn. You could take a horse to water but you couldn’t make it drink and getting Jax to do anything he didn’t want to do was like trying to push a boulder up a steep hill.
Kat Valtinos had organised the party the night Lucy had met Jax on his father’s enormous yacht. Lucy’s memory wafted her back two years into the past. Back then, Jax had been in Spain setting up a new resort on the coast. When the caterers had mucked up with a double booking, Kat had personally trawled through the local bars seeking waitresses for the event.
‘You two will do,’ she had said to Lucy and Tara, looking them up and down as though they were auditioning as strippers. ‘You’re young and pretty and sexy. Just what men like. You put your make-up on with a trowel,’ she had told Tara critically and to Lucy she had said, ‘You need to show more leg and cleavage.’
If the money hadn’t been so good, Lucy wouldn’t have done it but back then she had lived on a budget where no tips meant stale bread and going hungry. Their boss didn’t feed them for free and they had no cooking facilities in their mean little attic room, which had been hot as hell up under the eaves above the restaurant kitchen. Any extra cash was deeply welcome in those days.
The party had been full of blowhard bellicose men talking themselves up in Antonakos’s company and drinking too much. One of them had cornered Lucy when she was sent to a lower deck to restock the bar from the supplies stored there. She had been trying to fight him off when Jax had intervened. Jax, blue-black glossy hair brushing his shoulders, green eyes glittering like shards of glass, who had dragged the guy off her with punishing hands and hit him hard without hesitation.
‘Are you OK?’ the most gorgeous guy she had ever seen had asked, pulling her off the wall she had slumped against, smoothing down the skirt the creep had been trying to wrench up. ‘Diavolos, you’re so tiny. Did he hurt you?’
‘Only a little,’ she had said shakily, trembling like a leaf and in absolutely no doubt that Jax had saved her from a serious assault because, with the noisy party taking place on the deck above, the lower deck had been deserted and nobody would have heard her crying out.
‘Take a moment to recover,’ Jax had urged, guiding her into an opulent saloon to push her down into a seat where her cotton-wool legs had collapsed under her as if he had flipped a switch. ‘What were you doing down here on this deck?’
He had issued instructions on the phone to a crew member to have the bar supplies refreshed. And the whole time she had just been staring at him like a brainless idiot, utterly intimidated by everything about him from the expensive quality of his lightweight grey suit and hand-stitched shoes to the sheer beauty of his perfect features from his edgy cheekbones to his sculpted mouth. It was the eyes that had got to her the most, the tender concern she’d seen there and then the budding all-male appreciation. He had the most stunning eyes and his rare smile had been like the sun coming out on a dark day.
‘Are you OK?’ he repeated.
Well, no, in fact from that moment she had never been OK again. Something she’d needed to survive had lurched into strange territory and softened to let him in, no matter that it had gone against sense and practicality and her life experience. She had truly never been the same since.
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