shook her head, drowning in heat now. ‘No—look, I’m sorry, I’m not being very articulate. I’ll do as you ask and make sure that the accompanying note is appropriate.’ She added hurriedly, ‘I can show it to you before I send it …?’
He shook his head and his face became impassive, hard. Lucy stood there for another moment, not sure what to do and then he bit out, ‘That’ll be all.’
Stung, and more than mortified, Lucy mumbled something incoherent and fled, shutting the door behind her. Amidst the embarrassment, anger surged—why was she surprised or, worse, disappointed? She’d seen this kind of behaviour from men all her life.
But still, what an absolute—She halted her racing thoughts as she sat behind her desk and fought to steady her breathing and hammering heart. The last five minutes was the closest she’d come to a personal discussion with her new boss. She should have just bowed her head and walked out. She cursed her expressive face. Her mother had always told her it would get her into trouble. And hadn’t it just? Her inherent distaste for his coldly generous dismissive treatment of his ex-mistress hadn’t been well hidden enough. But the truth was it had tapped into a deeply buried pain, a very familiar pain. She’d witnessed the other side of someone on the receiving end of that treatment. Over and over again.
Lucy shuddered inwardly when she woke her computer from sleep and struggled to concentrate on work. Aristotle’s cynical view of how Ms Archer would receive his gift was no doubt spot-on; hadn’t she witnessed her own mother reduced to that level after years of similar treatment? Although Augustine Archer didn’t strike her as the kind of woman who had to survive on hand-outs. No, this was a different league. Lucy’s soft mouth tightened as bile rose from her belly. That kind of so-called main prize would have been just the kind of thing her mother would have used to pay for Lucy’s school uniform for another year—the sort of thing that had financed their lives.
Lucy forced her anger down. She had to think of her boss purely in professional terms. What he did or how he acted personally was none of her business. She didn’t have to like him; she just had to work for him.
Thank goodness she’d forged a different path. She would never be beholden to any man or, worse, held in his sexual or financial thrall. She’d worked too hard and her mother had sacrificed too much to make sure she avoided exactly that scenario. Just as her computer screen came back to life and she saw her bespectacled face momentarily reflected on the dark surface she felt unmitigated relief that she need never fear the kind of attention her mother and women like Augustine Archer courted. She was safe from all of that.
Aristotle watched the closed door for an inordinate amount of time. Heat still coursed through his body—heat that confounded him and every effort he made to try and dampen it. All he could see in his mind’s eye was the sway of that well-rounded bottom as she’d stopped by the door, and how he’d blurted out the first thing that had come into his head, as if he’d had to stop her, not let her leave.
He flung himself back in his seat and raked a hand through unruly hair, unusually diverted from work. He cursed the fact again that he’d had to let Augustine go at this point in negotiations. He briefly considered wooing her back, but his fists clenched in rejection of that idea. He would never debase himself by grovelling to a woman—not for anything.
He considered the request he’d just made of Lucy; he’d always made the call to a jewellers himself before, and would instruct them to compose a suitably impersonal note. Usually it wasn’t even a note—just his name. A clear indication that whatever he and the particular woman had shared was over and she shouldn’t come calling again. And invariably they knew not to. Few were as impertinent as Augustine Archer, confronting him directly. His mouth twisted in recognition of the fact that as he got older and remained single he represented some kind of irresistible challenge to those women.
He diverted his thoughts from an area he didn’t want to investigate: that of having to contemplate giving up his freedom, which he knew would be inevitable at some stage. The future was unavoidable. He would have to find a suitable wife and produce an heir, purely to protect all that he was now putting in place from the greedy clutches of others.
The prospect evoked no more emotion in him than mild un-interest and irritation. He’d long ago learnt the lesson of what marriage really meant—at the age of five, when his father had introduced Helen Savakis as his new stepmother and she’d quickly shown him the cold hatred she had for a son who wasn’t her own. Whatever dim and distant memories Ari might have had of his mother, who’d died when he was four, and a halcyon time that might never have existed except in some childish fanciful memory bank, had long been quashed and buried.
The fact that those nebulous memories rose to haunt him in dreams so vivid that he sometimes woke in tears was a shameful weakness he’d always been determined to ignore. It was one reason he’d never spent a full night with a woman.
As if drawn by a magnet his thoughts again went to his assistant, who was fast assuming a place in his imagination that he did not welcome. Why had he felt goaded into saying all he just had? And then been surprised by the blatant look of distaste on her face—annoyed by it? And he had not left it at that but engaged her in a dialogue about it. As if he even cared what her opinion of him was! He was aware of a niggling desire that he’d wanted to see her somehow … rattled. Since she’d been working for him she’d always seemed to fade into the background, barely noticeable.
But he was noticing her and she had just reacted, her cheeks flushing prettily. He frowned at that. Since when had he started thinking of her as pretty? And since when had he been interested in pretty?
And, not only that, what on earth had compelled him to tell her to call him Aristotle when he’d always preferred his PAs to call him Mr Levakis? It was something in the way she’d looked up at him and said sir.
In a bid to restore some order to his life, which seemed to be morphing out of all recognition, he rang through to Lucy and gave her the name and number of the latest English socialite who had been chasing him, instructing her to set up a date for that evening. He ignored the way even her voice seemed to send a frisson of reaction straight to his groin. With that done he felt some semblance of calm wash over him. Life would return to normal. He would forget all about this bizarre obsession with his secretary’s far too provocatively well-built body and concentrate on the merger.
The following morning, when Lucy was walking the short distance from her bus stop to work, she still burned with mortification. In her hand she carried a small overnight bag which held a change of clothes and some evening wear. She’d taken a call from the head of Human Resources the day before and been informed stoutly that she needed to think a little more thoroughly about the way she dressed, and that it might be a good idea to have a change of clothes in the office at all times to cover for emergencies. Like too-tight skirts, she thought churlishly. The fact that Levakis had gone over her head and asked someone to speak to her made her skin crawl with humiliation—not to mention the fact that he’d obviously noticed her bursting out of that skirt.
With getting her mother settled in her new home she simply hadn’t had time since she’d started working for him to kit herself out with a new wardrobe, despite being given a generous allowance to do so. It had been full-on from day one.
Luckily last night had been late-night shopping, and Levakis had left relatively early for the date Lucy had set up for him. Her belly clenched at the thought of that. The woman she’d rung hadn’t been in the slightest bit fazed that Aristotle himself hadn’t bothered to call, and of course she’d been free at a moment’s notice. A wave of disgust washed through Lucy and she pushed it down along with bitter memories. She didn’t care what he did or who he did it with. A voice mocked her inwardly: who was she to judge anyway?
