a husband, I would never consider someone like you. You’re the sort of man who would expect his pipe and slippers brought to him when he gets home. You don’t want a wife, you want a servant.’
His half-smile was back, making his impossibly black eyes twinkle. ‘I love you too, glykia mou.’
Allegra thinned her gaze to hairpin slits. ‘Read my lips. I am not marrying you. Not to save my father’s business. Not for any reason. No. No. No. No.’
Draco took a leisurely sip of his champagne and put the glass down on the coffee table with exacting precision. ‘Of course, you’ll have to commute between London and my home for work, but you can use my private jet—that is, if I’m not using it myself.’
Allegra clenched her hands into fists. ‘Are you listening to me? I said I am not marrying you.’
He sat on the sofa and leaned back with his hands behind his head, one ankle crossed over the other with indolent grace. ‘You haven’t got a choice. If you don’t marry me then your father will blame you for the collapse of his company. It’s a good company but it’s been badly run of late. That business manager your father appointed a couple of years ago when he had that health scare didn’t do him any favours. I can undo that damage and turn the business around so it’s profitable again. Your father will stay on the board and have a share of the profits I guarantee will be more than he has received in decades.’
Allegra bit down on her lip. It had been a worrying time when her father had had a cancer scare. She had flown back and forth as much as she could to help him through his bout of chemo and radiation. Not that he’d shown any great appreciation, of course. But to marry Draco to save her father from financial ruin? It was as if she had suddenly stepped into the pages of a Regency novel.
But her father needed her. Really needed her. There could have been worse men than Draco to offer for her, she had to admit. The sort of men she faced down in court. Mean men. Dangerous men. Men who had no respect for women and who used their children as weapons and pay-backs. Men who stalked, bullied, threatened and even killed to get their own way.
Draco might be arrogant but he wasn’t mean. Dangerous? Well, maybe to her senses, yes. Her senses went into a dazzled and dizzying frenzy when he came close. Which was a very good reason why she couldn’t marry him.
Wouldn’t marry him.
‘Why me?’ Allegra said. ‘Why would you possibly want me for a wife when you can have any woman you want?’
His eyes did a lazy sweep of her from head to foot and back again, sending a frisson through every cell in her body. ‘I want you.’
Those sexily drawled words should not have made her feminine core do a happy dance. She wasn’t vain but knew she was considered attractive in a classical sort of way. She had her mother’s English peaches-and-cream complexion, her dark blue eyes and slim build, but she had her father’s jet-black hair and drive to achieve.
But Draco dated super-models, starlets and nubile nymphets. Why would he want to shackle himself to a hard-nosed career woman like her, especially when they fought at every chance they got?
Over the years she had done her level best to hide her attraction to him. The Embarrassing Incident when she’d been sixteen was filed away in her mind in the drawer marked ‘Do Not Open’. These days she sneered instead of simpered. She derided instead of drooled. She flayed instead of flirted.
Falling in love with Draco Papandreou would be asking for the sort of trouble she helped other women extricate themselves from on a daily basis. Love did weird things to women. They got blindsided, hoodwinked, charmed into looking at their men through rosy love-tinted glasses that failed to show up their faults until it was too late.
Allegra wasn’t going to be one of those women—a victim of some man’s power game, leaving her as vulnerable as a rain-soaked kitten. ‘Listen, I appreciate the compliment, such as it is, but I’m not in the marriage market. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to—’
‘The offer is for today and today only. After that I start asking for my money back. With interest.’
She sent her tongue over her lips but they felt as dry as the cardboard cover on one of her expert reports. The economic crisis in Greece was serious. So serious that many well-established companies had hit the wall like over-ripe peaches. She might have some issues with her father but not to the point where she wanted to see him ruined and publicly humiliated. Not now he had a wife and young baby to provide for. Allegra liked Elena. She hadn’t expected to, with Elena only being two years older than her, but she did. It some ways Elena reminded her of herself—trying too hard to please everyone in an effort to be loved and accepted.
But if she married Draco to save her father from financial destruction she would be exposing herself to the sort of sensual danger she could well do without. For years she’d kept her distance from him. After that mortifying encounter when she was sixteen, it was her only way of protecting herself. But how would she keep her distance if she were married to him? ‘This marriage you’re...erm...proposing...’ It was lowering to find her voice sounding so scratchy. ‘What do you get out of it?’
His eyes shone with a devilish gleam that made her inner thighs tingle as if he had stroked her intimately. No one else could do that to her. Turn her on with a look. Make her so hungry for him she had trouble keeping her hands off him. She would like nothing more than to run her hands all over that strong male body to see if it was as deliciously hard and virile as it looked. When had she not burned with lust for him? Ever since she’d been a teenager with newly awakened hormones he’d been her go-to fantasy guy. No one else came close. He had all but ruined her for anyone else and he hadn’t so much as touched her, other than incidentally, since that kiss. ‘I get a wife who’s hot for me. What more could a man want?’
Allegra kept her expression under tight control. ‘If you want a trophy wife then why not select one from your crowd of sexy little sycophants?’
‘I want a wife with a brain between her ears.’
‘Any woman with half a brain would steer clear of a man like you.’
Her insult only made his smile tilt further, as if he was enjoying himself at her expense. ‘And if you were to provide me with an heir...’
‘A...what?’ Allegra’s voice came out like a mouse’s squeak. ‘You’re expecting me to have...?’
‘Now that I think about it...’ He rose from the sofa with leonine agility. ‘An heir and a spare might be a good thing, ne?’
Was he teasing or was he serious? It was so hard to tell behind the sardonic screen of his gaze. ‘Aren’t you forgetting something? I don’t want children. I have a career I’m not prepared to sacrifice for a family.’
‘Lots of women say that but in most cases it’s not true. They say it as an insurance policy in case no one asks them to marry them.’
Allegra’s mouth dropped open so far, she thought her toenails would be bruised. ‘Are you for real? What jungle vine did you just swing down from? Women are not breeding machines. Nor are we waiting around with bated breath for some man to stick a ring on our finger and carry us off to be their domestic slave. We have just as much ambition and drive as men, sometimes even more so.’
‘I’m all for your drive.’ His eyes did that glinting thing again. ‘That’s another thing we have in common, ne?’
The
