her hand with his, successfully imprisoning her fingers within his cool grasp. And, although she made a futile attempt to free herself, she knew she had no real chance of competing with his strength.
‘Think about it. Please,’ he begged softly, and Paige was overwhelmed by the sensual appeal in his voice.
Dear God, she thought, dragging her eyes away from his to gaze unsteadily at the powerful fist encasing hers. A fiery warmth was spreading up her arm and invading every quivering pore of her slender frame, and no matter how she tried to rationalise her reaction she knew her body hadn’t forgotten anything about this man. It remembered; her skin remembered; and that was something she had never expected.
Eventually, he was obliged to let her draw her hand away and she cradled it in her lap, as if it had been abused. That was what it felt like, she thought shakily, the vibration his touch had evoked still rippling through her veins. She just prayed he wasn’t aware of her upheaval.
Somehow she got through the next few minutes. Although she didn’t want it, she agreed to coffee in lieu of a pudding, and endeavoured to come to terms with the fact that she had more than one reason for refusing his offer. Even if it was the only offer that came her way, she couldn’t work for him. Apart from anything else, she didn’t want to be hurt again, and Nikolas Petronides would have no qualms about recovering what he saw as his pound of flesh…
PAIGE caught the Underground back to Islington. At this time of the afternoon, the trains weren’t busy, and after finding herself a seat she reflected how quickly she’d adapted to using the Tube instead of taking taxis everywhere.
All the same, it had been raining when she’d left the restaurant, and she’d had to resist Nikolas’s offer to get a taxi for her. Although it was June, the weather was still unseasonably cold, and the pretty cream Chanel suit she’d worn to impress Martin was now dotted with damp patches.
She just hoped it didn’t pick up any dirt on the way home. She and Sophie were having to conserve what clothes they had, and it had been quite a drain on their meagre resources outfitting her sister with clothes for her new school.
She sighed. If only their father were still alive, she thought wistfully, but Parker Tennant had died as he’d lived: without making any provision for the future. He’d left his daughters with a mountain of debt besides, and the unhappy task of having to salvage what little they could from his possessions. Not that there had been much. The beautiful home they’d had in Surrey had been mortgaged twice over, and even their mother’s jewels had had to be sold to satisfy their creditors.
Paige thought it was just as well their mother hadn’t lived to see it. Annabel Tennant had died of an obscure form of cancer when Paige was seventeen and Sophie only ten, and she’d sometimes wondered whether that was when her father had started taking such enormous risks with his clients’ money. It was as if his wife’s death had persuaded him that there was no point in planning for a future that might never happen, and there was no doubt that losing her mother had affected him badly.
It was why Paige had left school without finishing her education; why she’d appointed herself his protector. She’d been there when he needed her, taking care of him when he didn’t, and somehow getting him through those first awful months after Annabel died.
It had taken a toll on her, too, but she’d never considered herself. She’d been happy making him happy, and until she’d been introduced to Nikolas Petronides she’d cared little for the fact that the only men she’d dated had been men her father had had dealings with.
Of course, he’d approved of Nikolas, too—at least to begin with. It was only when he’d discovered that the Greek had had no intention of investing money with him that he’d turned against him. And Paige had had no doubts where her loyalties lay…
Which was why there was no way she could accept Nikolas’s offer now. Apart from the fact that they had once known one another too well, she wanted nothing from him. In his own way, he was like Martin: he was using her situation to humiliate her, and however attractive the prospect of a summer in Greece might be—not to mention the generous salary he’d tried to bribe her with—she needed a real job with someone who wasn’t out for revenge.
But she didn’t want to think about that now. It was four years since her relationship with Nikolas had foundered and since then she’d insisted on taking charge of her own life. She sighed. Not that she’d been any more successful, she conceded wryly. Her association with Martin Price had hardly been a success. But then, she hadn’t been aware that the handsome young accountant had been more interested in furthering his own career, and in paying court to Parker Tennant’s daughter he had envisaged a partnership in her father’s investment brokerage firm as his reward. Of course, when Parker Tennant died in such inauspicious circumstances, he’d quickly amended his plans. In a very short time, Paige had found her engagement had only been as secure as her father’s bank balance, and although Martin had made some excuse about finding someone else she’d known exactly what he really meant.
She stared dully out of the window. That was why she’d felt so mortified when she’d learned that Martin had arranged for her to see Nikolas Petronides. It was galling to think that his prime concern was to put some distance between them, and she half wished she could tell him exactly what she and Nikolas had once been to one another. Would he be jealous? She doubted it. Of Nikolas’s wealth, perhaps, but nothing else.
The train pulled into her station and, leaving her seat, she discovered to her relief that it had stopped raining. Which was just as well, as she had a ten-minute walk to Claremont Avenue, and no umbrella.
Aunt Ingrid’s cottage was about halfway down the avenue, and Paige approached the house with some relief. It had been quite a day, one way and another, and she was looking forward to changing into shorts and a T-shirt and spending some time weeding her aunt’s pocket-sized garden. It was what she needed, she thought: mindless physical exercise, with nothing more momentous to think about than what the soil was doing to her nails.
She heard her aunt’s and her sister’s voices before she’d even opened the front gate. The windows of the cottage were open and their raised tones rang with unpleasantly familiar resonance on the still air. Several of her aunt’s neighbours were taking advantage of the break in the weather to catch up on outdoor jobs, and they could hear them, too, and Paige offered the elderly couple next door an apologetic smile as she hurried up the path.
What now? she wondered wearily. She glanced at her watch. It was barely three o’clock. Sophie shouldn’t even be home from school yet. For heaven’s sake, didn’t she have enough to worry about as it was?
‘You’re a selfish, stupid girl,’ Aunt Ingrid was saying angrily as Paige let herself into the house.
‘And you’re a harried old bag,’ retorted Sophie, before there was the ominous sound of flesh meeting flesh. There was a howl from her sister before she apparently responded in kind, and Paige slammed the door and charged across the tiny hall and into the over-furnished parlour just as her aunt was collapsing into a Regency-striped love-seat, her hand pressed disbelievingly to her cheek.
‘For goodness’ sake!’ Paige stared at them incredulously. ‘What on earth is going on? I could hear you when I turned into the avenue.’
That was an exaggeration, but they were not to know that, and it had the effect of bringing a groan of anguish from her aunt. The thought that someone else might have been a party to her disgrace was too much, and Paige, who had been
