lift doors closed before he got there. Cursing through his clenched teeth, Leo turned and headed for the stairs. One flight down and the single lift up to the top floor became three lifts, which fed the whole building. Glancing up to note that Natasha was going down to the basement just before he strode inside another lift, he hit the button that would take him to the same place.
His insides were shaking. All of him was pumped up and pulsing because—Theos, sex did that to you. Even when what you’d seen sickened and disgusted, it still had a nasty way of playing its song in your blood.
Striding out of the lift, Leo paused to look around the basement car park. Natasha’s Mini stood out like a shiny red stain in a murky world of fashionable silver and black. He saw her then. She was leaning heavily on the car and her shoulders were heaving. He thought she was weeping but as he approached her he realised that she was being violently sick.
‘It’s OK….’ he muttered for some stupid reason because nothing could be less OK, and he placed his hands on her shoulders.
‘Don’t touch me!’ She jerked away from him.
Offence hit Leo full on his chiselled chin. ‘I am not Rico!’ he raked back in sheer reaction. ‘Just as you are not your slut of a sister—!’
She turned and slapped him hard on the face.
The stinging slap rang around the basement as Leo rocked back on his heels in surprise. Natasha was quivering all over, nothing going on inside her burning brain but the remains of that searing surge of violence that had made her turn and lash out. She had never done anything like it before, not in her entire life!
Then she was suddenly having to reel away and double up to retch again, while sobbing and shaking and clutching at the car’s bodywork with fingernails that scraped the shiny red paint.
Rico with Cindy—how could he?
How could she?
A pair of long fingered hands dared to take hold of her shoulders again. She didn’t pull away, but just sagged like a quivering sack into his grasp as the final dregs of her stomach contents landed only inches away from her low-heeled black shoes. By the time it was over she could barely stand upright.
Grim lips pressed together, Leo continued to hold her while she found a tissue in her jacket pocket and used it to wipe her mouth. Beneath the grip of his fingers he could feel her trembling. Her head was bowed, exposing the long, slender whiteness of her nape. That hot sensation flicked at his insides again and he looked away from her, flashing an angry look around the car park like a man being hunted by an invisible quarry and wondering what the hell he was going to do next.
She was not his problem, one part of his brain tried telling him. He had a meeting to chair and a serious financial discrepancy to deal with, plus a dozen or so other points of business to get through before he flew back to Athens this evening and…
A man suddenly appeared from the lurking shadows where the security offices were situated in a corner of the basement. It was Rasmus, his security chief, eyeing them curiously. Leo dismissed him with a frowning shake of his dark head that sent the other man melting back into the shadows again.
His next thought was to coax Natasha back into the lift and take her up to his own office suite to recover. But he could not guarantee that he could get her in there without someone—Rico or her sister—seeing them and starting up another ugly scene.
‘OK now?’ he dared to question once her trembling started to ease a little.
She managed a single nod. ‘Yes. Thank you,’ she whispered.
‘This is not a moment for polite manners, Natasha,’ he responded impatiently.
Natasha jerked away from him, hating him like poison for being here and witnessing her complete downfall like this. Receiving picture evidence that Rico was cheating on her was one thing, but to actually see him doing it with her own sister was absolutely something else.
Just thinking about it had fresh nausea trying to take a grip on her stomach. Working desperately to control it, Natasha fumbled in her bag for her car keys, then turned to unlock the Mini so she could reach inside it for the bottle of water she always kept in there. She wanted to dive into the car and just drive away from it all, but she knew she didn’t have it in her yet to drive herself anywhere. She was still too shaken up, too sick and dizzy with horror and shock.
As she straightened up again she had to step around the mess she had ejected onto the ground. He didn’t move a single inch so she brushed against him in an effort to gain herself some space. It was like brushing against barbed wire, she likened as a hot-rod prickle scraped down through her body and forced her to wilt backwards with a tremor of flayed senses against the side of the car.
Keeping her eyes lowered and away from Leo, she twisted the cap off the bottle of water and put it to her unsteady lips so she could take a couple of careful sips. Her heart was pounding in her head and her throat felt so thick it struggled to swallow. And he continued to stand there like some looming dark shadow, killing her ability to think and making her feel the insignificance of her own diminutive five feet six inches next to his overpowering height.
But that was the great and gloriously important Leo Christakis, she mused dismally—a big, tough, overpowering entity with a repertoire in sardonic looks and blunt comments that could shrivel a lesser person to pulp, and a brain that functioned for only one thing—making money. Even as she stood here refusing to look at him she could feel him fighting the urge to glance at his watch, because he must have more important things to do with his time than to stand here wasting it on her.
‘I’ll be all r-right in a minute,’ she managed. ‘You can go back to work now.’
She’d said that as if she believed work was the only thing he lived for, Leo picked up. His chiselled chin jutted. Natasha Moyles always had a unique way of antagonising him with her polite, withdrawn manner or her swift, cool glances that dismissed him as if he were nothing worthy of her regard. She’d been doing it to him from the first time they were introduced at his stepbrother’s London apartment.
Leo thrust his clenched hands into his trouser pockets, pushing back the flaps of his dark pinstripe jacket to reveal the pristine white front to his handmade shirt. She shifted jerkily as if the action threatened her somehow and he was suddenly made acutely aware of his own long, muscled torso and taut, bronzed skin. Even the layer of hair that covered his chest prickled.
‘Take some more sips at the water and stop trying to outguess what I might be thinking,’ he advised coolly, not liking these sensations that kept on attacking him.
‘I wasn’t trying to—’
‘You were,’ he interrupted, adding curtly, ‘You might dislike me intensely, Natasha, but allow me a bit more sensitivity than to desert you here after what you have just witnessed.’
But he did not possess quite enough sensitivity to hold back from reminding her of it! Natasha noted as the whole sickening horror of what she had seen sucked her right back in. Her inner world began to sway dizzily, the groan she must have uttered bringing his fingers back up to clasp her arms. She wanted to shrug him off, but she found that she couldn’t. She needed his support because she had a horrible feeling that without it she was going to sink into a great dark hole in the ground.
An eerie-sounding beep suddenly echoed through the car park. It was the executive lift being called back up the building
