moment the heavens opened from a slate-grey sky and Lucy yelped as torrential rain poured down, comprehensively drenching her in seconds. No! She ran across the road towards the refuge of the huge gleaming Levakis building, her mind filled with the fact that they had an important meeting to attend in less than an hour on the other side of London.
Aristotle strode through the reception area, raking a hand through rain-wet hair, and mentally cursed the inclement English weather which had momentarily darkened the enormous glass atrium. He stepped into his own private lift—no possibility of a lush, curvaceous body colliding with his today—and stabbed at the button to whisk him all the way to the top of the building, irritated beyond belief to be thinking of that again. Was he actually hoping for it? he asked himself derisively.
His starkly handsome face was reflected back to him in the steel surface of the door, but he didn’t see that as the lift zoomed skyward. No, what he saw and what he relived was the fact that last night he’d taken a beautiful available woman on a date and she had done nothing for him. His mouth twisted. It hadn’t been for lack of trying on her part, or even on his, which had been a novel sensation.
In a bid not to be dictated to by his malfunctioning hormones, he’d escorted Arabella—or had it been Mirabella?—up to her apartment, but had realised with sickening inevitability that nothing would be happening. With her, anyway. He’d been rendered impotent from the waist down. She’d become petulant and increasingly desperate, seeing correctly that she hadn’t managed to snare Aristotle’s interest, and he’d had to extricate himself with more diplomacy than a head of state during peace negotiations.
So now, as he strode out of his lift and towards his main office, he was thoroughly disgruntled. Ignoring the assistants sitting meekly at their desks in the ante-room that preceded his and Lucy’s offices, he opened the door and took a breath, preparing to fire a series of commands at the woman who had been the singular cause of his unsatisfying night.
But the office was empty.
He had the most curious sensation of his belly hollowing out before he heard movement coming from the door which led into the bathroom just off their offices. While he had a private bathroom too, this more communal bathroom had a shower and a dressing room, which Aristotle availed himself of whenever he was required to go straight to a function from work.
Closing the main door quietly behind him, without really being aware of what he was doing, he walked silently into the office. He heard a muffled curse and then something drop.
Feeling like a voyeur, and not liking it, he halted by the door which lay slightly ajar. Through the crack he saw Lucy, and when his eyes registered what he was seeing his whole body locked, every muscle taut. Unable to move, all he could do was take in the sight with widening eyes. Lucy’s wet hair hung in long dark tendrils over luminously pale shoulders. She was bending over to pull trousers up over long, surprisingly slender legs. Her legs led upwards to those shapely thighs, which curved out to a lushly rounded bottom encased in some kind of black lace and silk concoction.
She wriggled her bottom and her hips as she pulled the trousers up fully, and then twisted towards Aristotle to tie the fastening at the side. Heat engulfed him. His blood hummed and his heart picked up an unsteady beat. Facing him as she did, both hands to one side, her perfectly formed breasts were enticingly pushed together and towards him with unknowing and unbelievably erotic appeal. Her bra looked hardly adequate to contain the generous mounds of alabaster flesh—he wondered dimly if any of her clothes fitted properly. And who would have known that she’d have such exotic tastes in undergarments underneath that prim exterior? Arousal soared.
Another muffled curse came as an even longer tendril of dark hair swung over her shoulder and clung wetly to the slope of one unashamedly voluptuous breast. Aristotle’s gaze moved up with supreme difficulty, and he saw that gap in her front teeth as she bit her lip, a hectic flush across her cheeks.
As if entranced by a siren song, he couldn’t move. His gaze slid down again and took in that small waist, which he’d only noted yesterday, and her belly, which was sucked in to help with the obstinate fastening. It was soft but gently contoured, as if she fought some kind of battle to keep her body in check but it was determined to thwart her efforts and retain its inherently seductive softness. Her hips flared out generously from that waist with such hourglass perfection Aristotle felt momentarily dizzy.
Abruptly she moved, having at last managed to fasten her trousers, and straightened. Her belly was still sucked in, pushing her breasts out even more as she reached for something else which Aristotle could see was a shirt.
His brain wouldn’t function. He couldn’t move. All he could see was Lucy and her half-naked body, that long dark hair clinging provocatively to her skin like wet skeins of silk.
That thing that he called awareness had just exploded into full-on lust.
Lucy yanked the tag off her new shirt and pulled it on impatiently, all fingers and thumbs on the buttons of the slippery grey silk material. She’d never have gone for something like this normally, but after being hauled over the coals the day before she’d known that she had no choice but to buy the kind of uniform that someone like Aristotle Levakis would expect—and that meant expense, and things like silk as opposed to cotton. She breathed out thankfully. At least she’d had that change of clothes. No way could she have faced him this morning looking like the drowned rat she’d been just moments before.
With the shirt finally closed she tucked it in hurriedly and desperately listened out for a heavy footfall or the door opening. She knew he was due in any minute—he was more punctual than any boss she’d ever known. That had to be the reason her heart was thumping so hard: the fear of being caught like this. She raked a brush through her hair, wincing as it caught on the still-damp strands, and quickly twisted it up into a chignon of sorts. It would have to do.
Slipping her feet into flat shoes, she stuck her glasses back on, gathered up her wet things, looked up—and stopped breathing. In the crack of the open door her boss was just standing there, looking at her.
CHAPTER TWO
How long had he been standing there? The words barely impinged on Lucy’s consciousness. She was too full of raging heat, embarrassment, and something more disturbing.
On some self-protective level she refused to believe he had seen her yanking her clothes on with all the grace of a baby elephant. He wasn’t moving. He looked slightly shell-shocked, and mortification rushed through Lucy. She managed to move and opened the door fully, gabbling something she hoped was coherent to fill the awful silence.
‘I got caught in the rain shower. I was just changing.’
She stepped out and past Aristotle, who turned to follow her with his eyes as she retreated to the safe zone behind her desk, not even sure why she needed to feel safe.
When she could bring herself to look at him, she registered that his hair was damp, his suit slightly wet. She met his eyes, and in that instant something passed between them, something electric and elemental, and Lucy knew that he had seen her dressing—even though stubbornly she still refused to believe it. She recoiled from the uncomfortable awareness deep within her. It scared the life out of her.
Still babbling, she said, ‘Looks like you got caught too. Do you want to change before we go? I’ve instructed Julian to have the car downstairs in fifteen minutes, and I can have your suit sent out to be cleaned.’
Aristotle, seemingly completely unconcerned about the meeting or changing his clothes, lounged back against the doorjamb and crossed his arms. His gaze swept down
