sighed heavily. ‘Would you rather I had left you completely at the mercy of that woman’s vindictiveness?’
‘Once again, I would rather you had asked first,’ she said pointedly.
He raised dark brows. ‘And if I had done so?’
‘I would have assured you that it wasn’t necessary.’ She waved an elegant hand. ‘You were the reason Angela went off the deep end in the first place, and with you out of the picture…’
Drakon gave a humourless smile. ‘Unless it has escaped your notice, I have returned.’
As if any woman could be unaware of the presence of Drakon Lyonedes! The man only had to enter a room in order to dominate it. A point that was ably demonstrated only seconds later, when Benito came to take their order and completely deferred to Drakon throughout the entire conversation.
‘What?’ he prompted when he saw Gemini frowning across the width of the table at him once they were alone again.
She shook her head. ‘You totally ruined my usual couple of minutes of flirting outrageously with Benito when he comes to take my order.’
Drakon’s brows rose. ‘You flirt with the waiter?’
‘I flirt outrageously,’ she corrected. ‘And Benito is the owner of the restaurant, not the waiter.’
He glanced across to where the dark-haired, handsome young man was passing their order to a shorter, portly man to take to the kitchen, before resuming his place behind the desk at the entrance to the restaurant. ‘You come to this restaurant because you like to flirt with the owner?’ His gaze was hard and glittering when he turned it back to Gemini.
‘No, I come here because the food is excellent—and I like to flirt with the owner,’ Gemini added with a teasing smile.
Drakon failed to see anything in the least amusing about her obvious attraction to Benito. ‘Your usual male companions must find that very…unflattering.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ she asked.
Drakon scowled. ‘The men you usually bring here on a date.’
She sat back on the seat, her brows mockingly high. ‘I wasn’t aware this was a date.’
It wasn’t. At least it hadn’t been Drakon’s intention that it should become one when he had decided he and Gemini must meet again this evening. And yet the two of them were sitting together in a cosy Italian restaurant. At a secluded table for two. With a lit candle in its centre. And an evening of possibilities stretching before them. Yes, it certainly had all of the ingredients of a date, he recognised heavily.
He shrugged. ‘For the sake of appearances let us say that it is.’
For the sake of Gemini’s sense of self-preservation she would rather say that it wasn’t! Admittedly she had been the one to instigate this evening’s meeting taking place at a restaurant rather than her apartment, as he had stipulated through his assistant.
But that was the whole point, wasn’t it? She had made her own arrangements for the evening because she had resented Drakon’s arrogance in issuing that instruction through a third party!
Except she didn’t seem to have thought it through as thoroughly as she ought to have done. Hadn’t even considered that the two of them sitting here, talking and eating a meal together, would take on all the appearance of a date. Which was a bit late in the day when you considered she’d already allowed him to make love to her. Twice!
‘I do hope you intend to give poor Max a couple of hours off, at least, while we eat dinner?’ she said sweetly.
Drakon instantly recognised her deliberate attempt to remind him exactly why she would never consider their having dinner together as being a date—his arrogant high-handedness in having her watched over by his security team.
‘Poor Max?’ he queried.
She nodded once their first course had been delivered to the table and the waiter had departed. ‘I’m sure you pay him and the rest of your security team well, but even so it must still have been very boring for them to just sit outside my apartment for the past three days and nights.’
Yes, Drakon had read Max’s daily reports with interest, noting that Gemini spent her days in her shop and her evenings and nights alone in her apartment. ‘You are correct. I do pay them very well,’ he said. ‘And I believe you very kindly offered Max some variation in your routine when you closed the shop yesterday afternoon.’
She gave a mischievous grin. ‘He told you about that?’
Even in reading Max’s e-mailed report Drakon had been able to pick up on the older man’s discomfort at having to follow Gemini into a large beauty salon, where she had proceeded to have her hair styled, then a manicure and a pedicure, before disappearing into a private room in order to have various parts of her delectable body waxed.
‘He may never recover from the experience,’ Drakon commented.
Gemini had actually come to like and respect Max Stanford during the past few days—had even invited him into the shop a couple of times for coffee when she’d thought he might be in need of a drink. She just hadn’t been able to resist teasing him a little when it came to the usual relaxing way she spent her Thursday afternoons off. Besides which, she had been fully aware of the fact that, as with everything else she had done the past three days, he would report her movements to his employer.
She eyed Drakon quizzically. ‘And not you?’
He shrugged those broad shoulders. ‘My mother usually spends her Saturday afternoons in the same way, I believe.’
His widowed mother, Gemini knew, had lived alone in Athens since the death of her husband ten years ago. In fact, she knew quite a lot more about Drakon now than she had three days ago; the internet was a marvelous although potentially dangerous thing, offering any amount of information on someone as famous as him.
Such as the extent of his business interests around the world, as well as his extreme wealth. He owned homes in New York, London, Hong Kong, Toronto and Paris, as well as a private island in the Greek Aegean—although how he ever found the time to live in most of those homes was a mystery to her when he obviously worked so hard adding to the Lyonedes millions.
She also knew that he was thirty-six years old. And single. With not so much as a hint of an engagement in his past…
She eyed him curiously now. ‘Are you and your mother close?’
‘Very,’ he said economically.
‘And you and Markos are close too?’
‘Like brothers,’ he confirmed.
‘I noticed that.’
Drakon raised dark brows. ‘You find it strange that I not only feel affection for my family but also engender a return of that affection?’
‘Not in the least,’ she dismissed lightly. ‘Why would I? I’m sure you’re a very attentive son, and the closeness between you and Markos was all too obvious
