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'Betsy tried not to smile at the thought of the mayhem that had to be breaking out in the bodyguards' car when the limo was seen to deviate yet again from the agreed route. But she resisted any urge to glance into the back seat and catch another glimpse of her passenger. At twenty-five years of age, she was too old to be daydreaming like a schoolgirl over a guy she knew nothing about.
Her footsteps crunching over the gravel outside the gracious country hotel, she pulled open the passenger door.
'I hate being locked in a car for hours on end,' Cristos imparted in his rich, dark drawl. 'We'll have coffee.'
She forgot her embargo on looking at him and tipped her head back to encounter brilliant dark golden eyes fringed by black spiky lashes. 'Thank you, sir… but I'll stay with the limo.'
His gaze narrowed. 'That wasn't a request…it was an order.'
Off-balanced by that unhesitating contradiction, she stared at him for a split second too long and then hurriedly dropped her head, her colour fluctuating. Maybe he was keen to ensure that his driver remained alert by taking an adequate break. Fair enough. She locked the car and followed in his arrogant wake. His head bodyguard strode towards them. Cristos Stephanides addressed him in what she assumed to be his own language. Just a handful of brief softly spoken words and the security man turned pale and backed off with what might have been a hasty apology.
Indoors engulfed in the ticking-clock silence of the kind of luxury establishment set up to create the atmosphere of a private country house she was hugely uncomfortable. But it made no impression whatsoever on her companion. He addressed the receptionist with the calm expectancy of a male who had been waited on hand and foot from the day of his birth.
'Sit with me’. With a lean brown hand he indicated an armchair beside the magnificent marble fireplace.
Betsy stared fixedly into the burning embers of the welcoming fire. 'It wouldn't be appropriate sir.' 'Allow me to decide what's appropriate.'
'But not what I do with my free time. If this is an official break,' Betsy responded with flat clarity. 'I'm entitled to choose how I spend it.'
'Obviously the whip and chair approach is unwise with a woman of your strength of character,' Cristos Stephanides conceded lazily. 'I ask you in all humility… please join me for coffee.'
Involuntary amusement tugged at Betsy. In all humility? Was he serious? She almost laughed out loud. He had the extreme poise and arrogant assurance of a male who had never known what humility was. Why was he even making the invitation? What was in it for him?
'Why?' she asked baldly tipping her head back eyes as bright as emerald chips gleaming with suspicion.
Theos mou, why was she fighting him? Back at the car park in that very first visual exchange, Cristos had recognised her desire. She had not been able to hide the feverish longing that he had seen on so many female faces since he'd been a teenager. But he could not recall when he had last had to make so much effort. She was not encouraging him. She was making everything difficult. He had got lazy, he acknowledged. His women always did most of the running, but now he was dealing with a female who looked as if she would bolt at the first ill-chosen word or move.
'I feel like company,' he murmured with deliberate casualness, hitching back his powerful personality and swallowing the smarter comments hovering on the tip of his tongue.
Betsy was bemused. A client had never tried to cross the boundaries with her before. She saw no reason why he should be any different. Her uniform was old-fashioned and unflattering. In the course of her working day few men had given her a second glance.
'Are you married?' Cristos asked abruptly, belatedly wondering if there was a reason for her surprising hesitance. 'Living with someone?'
'No… but-'
Cristos curved a confident hand to her spine and urged her down onto the richly upholstered sofa. 'Then join me.'
Unyielding as a stone pillar, she sank down. He took her taut silence in his stride and filled it with the story' of a society wedding he had recently attended at the hotel. He was very amusing. She sat there enthralled, unable to take her eyes from his lean, devastating features. Indeed the excuse to watch him was a conscious pleasure and a release from the deprivation of not being able to look. Everything about him fascinated her.
She drank her coffee without tasting it. At his request she took her cap off and coloured at the intensity of his scrutiny. She answered his few questions. She was twenty-five, single, had worked at Imperial for three years, had always wanted to work with cars. That he was not that interested in her answers was not something she judged him on for she initially assumed he was merely making polite conversation. Slowly, very slowly, for she had always held a very modest opinion of her own looks, she realised that Cristos Stephanides actually appeared to be attracted to her and was seeking a response.
At the point where she could no longer mistake his motives and without any hesitation whatsoever, Betsy lifted her cap, replaced it on her head and rose to her· feet. 'I'm your driver,' she said bluntly. 'I'm not interested in anything else.'
In fierce disconcertion at that sudden bold assurance, Cristos sprang upright, brilliant dark eyes cool as black ice. 'That's a lie.'
Mortified colour stained her fair skin at that direct contradiction but Betsy still lifted her chin. 'I can admire a painting without wanting to buy it-'
'This situation may be unconventional-'
'There isn't a situation and if there were, it would be tacky.' Betsy was infuriated by his attempt to excuse his behaviour. 'This isn't a social occasion and I wouldn't risk my job for you. I drive limos for a living and you do whatever you do to afford to hire people like me… and that's it-'…,
'I'm not a snob-'
'No?' A delicate auburn brow rose, questioning that assertion, green eyes scornful and furious. 'But then you don't need to be. You weren't asking me out on a date, were you? The only invite I was going to get was a sleazy sexual one. Well, no, thank you!'
Cristos wanted to rip the cap off her again and…?
His lean brown hands coiled into savage fists. And then do all the sleazy sexual stuff until she was on her knees with gratitude that he had honoured her with his interest. Her attack on him was out of all proportion to anything he had said or done and he was outraged that she had chosen to spring such a scene on him in a public place where he could not freely respond. Across the room, Dolius and his second-in-command were studiously avoiding looking anywhere near him, which told Cristos that they had not missed a single second of the drama. Seething with injured pride and a fierce sense of injustice, Cristos Stephanides watched Betsy Mitchell stalk out of the hotel.
What a smooth, calculating, utterly ruthless bastard, Betsy thought tempestuously, slamming her way into the driver's
seat of the limo and still shaking with fury. Had he really believed that he could sweet -talk her into going upstairs to a hotel room with him? For when he'd insisted she join him for coffee that had surely been his intent! Did she look stupid enough to make a mistake of that magnitude? Or so cheap and easy he had assumed she would be a pushover? Had he planned to reward her with an extra large tip? Or his magnificent body? When she saw him approaching in the wing mirror, she sat tight.
Hard jaw line at a stubborn angle, Cristos refused to open the door for himself. He stood there challenging her and, had it been necessary, he would have continued to stand there through thunder, lightning and a force-ten gale to make his point. Clumsy with resentful haste, Betsy finally scrambled out and wrenched open the passenger door for him.
'Thank you,' Cristos breathed, smooth as glass. She did not believe that she had ever hated another human being so much as she did him at that instant. She drove for an hour with a fierce concentration that shut out every thought. The limo left the motorway for quiet country roads and speed was no longer possible. With scant warning a tractor pulled out of a lane. As the slow vehicle forced a passage out in front of the bodyguards' car Betsy almost smiled at the thought of the annoyance it would cause.
The partition between driver and passenger buzzed down. 'For the record,' Cristos Stephanides breathed with sardonic bite, 'I'm not into sleazy sex.'
'If you want an argument, come back and see me when I'm no longer working for you and forced to be polite,' Betsy snapped.
'Back at the hotel… that was you being polite?' Cristos stressed in a derisive tone of wonderment that made her want to stop the limo, leap into the back seat and beat him up.
'You were out of line,' Betsy snapped at him furiously. 'What sort of a guy tries to pull his chauffeur?' 'One who has just become a convert to total snobbery,' Cristos spelt out with maddening assurance.
It was at that point that Betsy saw a male figure crouched down by the side of the road just ahead. That was the only warning she had before something that gleamed metallic and grey in the sunlight was thrown at the car. The wheels ran over it. A tyre blew out' and then another, sending the powerful vehicle out of her control into a dangerous swerve. The limo hit the ditch with a thunderous jolt that rattled every bone in her body. Almost simultaneously the door beside her was yanked noisily open.
