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‘I don’t belong here. I don’t like being around you—’
‘Correction…you like it too much.’
Katie flinched as though she had been slapped, and half turned her head away. ‘The twins and I do need your help to get somewhere decent to live—’
Alexandros swore under his breath. ‘If the DNA tests confirm what I already expect, do you think that finding you an apartment will be enough to satisfy me?’
‘If you want to see the kids, of course you can visit…whatever…’ Katie muttered, desperate to conclude the conversation. ‘But that’s the only contact we need to have.’
He released her hand with exaggerated immediacy. ‘And that’s what you want?’
‘Yes.’ Even as she spoke she knew she was lying. She wanted him, feared that she would always want him, that there would never be a time that she could look on his lean, dark, devastating face without feeling almost more than she could bear in silence.
Angrier than he had been in a very long time, Alexandros watched her leave. He had always appreciated the fact that she didn’t play female games with him. What she said she always meant; what she promised had always been delivered. He loathed pretence. That she should deny him when he could feel her hunger in every fibre of his being infuriated him. She had to have an ulterior motive for her behaviour, he reflected grimly.
The housekeeper, a trim middle-aged woman, was waiting for Katie at the foot of the magnificent staircase. Katie felt as though she had gone ten rounds with a boxer and had staggered up after being knocked out cold. She knew how narrow her escape had been in the drawing room. Alexandros would not have hesitated to take her on the sofa, and she would never have recovered from letting herself down like that, she thought in an agony of self-reproach.
Glancing up as she climbed the stairs, she focussed on the huge oil painting of a woman on the wall above. It stirred a vague memory of a photo she had seen in Ireland and her blood ran cold. ‘Who’s that?’ she asked abruptly.
‘The late Mrs Christakis, madam.’
A stunningly beautiful ice-blonde, garbed in a magnificent blue evening gown. Mrs Christakis? Late? As in…dead? Alexandros was a widower? Having denied that he was either married or divorced, what else could he be? Her face tight and pale, Katie stared up at the portrait which now exercised the most fatal fascination over her. ‘When did she die?’
‘October, the year before last…a car crash in the South of France. A terrible tragedy,’ her companion replied.
Katie had to literally drag her eyes from the painting and force her paralysed limbs to move her on and up the stairs. As the housekeeper spoke, her heart had sunk to her toes, and her tummy had responded with a sick lurch. Her skin felt clammy, and she realised that she had gone into shock. Perhaps her reaction was not that surprising now that she knew that she had had a passionate affair with a guy who had buried his wife only weeks before he’d met her. And he hadn’t told her. In fact he had deliberately denied her that painful truth.
‘Who’s that?’ she had asked, when she had picked up the tiny photo from the floor in his office.
‘Nobody important,’ he had asserted.
No, just his wife. Whom he had married when he was barely out of his teens, according to the Globe. Of course he hadn’t wanted to talk about her, and when she had looked again later there had been no sign of the photo. She hadn’t thought anything of the fact. Incredibly, innocently happy as she had been with Alexandros that winter, she had not been at all suspicious of anything he said or did.
But in retrospect it was as if she had suddenly been handed the missing piece of a jigsaw that she had somehow previously believed complete when it was not. Alexandros had come to Ireland and locked himself away in that remote and beautiful house because he had been grieving. Hadn’t she seen that brooding sadness and anger in him? She had simply assumed that he was some high-flying business executive suffering from burn-out after working excessive hours. The actual truth was far less welcome.
Toby and Connor’s wails provided only the briefest respite from her unhappy thoughts. The anxious nanny looked on with relief when the babies calmed down as soon as their youthful mother reappeared. Katie sat on the carpet with a twin settled on either thigh and held them close. As she breathed in her sons’warm familiar scent, and kissed first one dark head and then the other, she was hiding the reality that her own face was wet with tears.
Her affair with Alexandros and its abrupt and cruel conclusion now made much more sense to her. She had offered comfort of the most basic variety. He was a very physical, very passionate guy. He hadn’t wanted to tell her about his wife or talk about his loss, and that said so much, didn’t it? That loss would have gone very deep; he had married young and shared his life for a good decade with Ianthe.
Had he felt guilty about sleeping with Katie within weeks of that tragedy? No doubt that was why Alexandros had been so keen to eradicate her from his life again. She had been the living, breathing adult equivalent of a hot water bottle or a soothing teddy bear. Just a source of physical relief. Acknowledging that hurt Katie a great deal, and made her all the more aware that living in the radius of Alexandros Christakis was very bad for her self-esteem.
When she had started working for him in Ireland she had found him impossible to please. From the first day he had made her feel as though her very presence below the same roof during the hours of daylight was an irritant. At first he had barely spoken, but his impatience, exacting standards and exasperation had soon cleared that barrier. Everything she’d done had seemed to annoy him. He had requested dishes she didn’t know how to cook and had rejected her best efforts. By the end of the first week he had rebuked her for being too talkative, for being late, noisy and disorganised, and had also contrived to imply that she was guilty of chatting up the delivery men. She had gone from fancying the socks off Alexandros and standing breathless in his presence to hating him with such roaring virulence that she had positively boiled with her sense of injustice
‘What an achievement…That tastes even more poisonous than it looks,’ he had commented silkily on the sixth day, thrusting away the meal she had presented him with.
And as Katie had loaded the rejected dish back onto the tray and turned away, she’d suddenly totally lost the rag with him and had spun back to pitch the entire tray down at his feet. ‘You are the most obnoxious guy I’ve ever met!’ she’d launched at him. ‘Nothing I do is good enough for you!’
‘So you try to assault me?’
‘If I assaulted you, you’d know about it!’
Alexandros had surveyed her with icy dark affront and censure, and told her that she was sacked.
She had stalked out of the house, and as she’d cycled down that endless lane, dismounting to get through every successive gate, her anger had soon ebbed, to be replaced by growing dismay and regret. After all, the job she’d sacrificed was actually her mother’s, and it was her mother’s reputation and references that would suffer, not her own. Appalled that she had let anger overpower all judgement, she had returned to the house.
‘No…’ Alexandros had delivered, the instant she’d attempted to apologise. ‘You have no discipline, and you’re not up to the duties involved.’
‘I could learn—’
‘You’ve got the wrong attitude.’
‘I’m willing to grovel.’
A level dark brow had elevated. ‘I will not tolerate or forgive impertinence or incompetence.’
‘Please don’t report this to the agency.’ Seeing no poi
nt in continuing the pretence that she was her mother, Katie had made a full confession on that score and had had to admit that her only previous experience lay in an office environment.
‘You amaze me…you confess to barefaced lying and expect to be re-employed?’
‘I’ll change my attitude and cook stuff you like…any time you like,’ Katie had proffered in desperation, green eyes connecting with burnished gold, her heart starting to race without any warning. ‘Give me another chance and I’ll do whatever you ask me.’
‘Bring me breakfast in bed? Wear skirts instead of jeans?’
Her eyes had opened very wide in surprise.
‘I didn’t say that,’ Alexandros had asserted in hasty retraction, his stunning gaze narrowed, very bright and almost defensive. ‘But certain offers are open to misinterpretation.’
And that was when it had finally dawned on her that the aggression in the air between her and the aloof Greek might well stem from an attraction that they were both determined to suppress.
‘I should not have said that.’
‘But you did…’ Suddenly maddeningly aware of the way his intent gaze was welded to hers, Katie had laughed, feeling dizzy with a wanton sense of achievement that was new to her.
‘Don’t flirt with me,’ Alexandros had told her.
Compressing her lips, she’d nodded, bowed her head and regarded him from below her lashes.
‘Even the way you look at me is provocative.’
Face flaming, Katie had closed her eyes tight.
‘Try to act normally,’ Alexandros had urged gently.
Eyes opening a chink, she’d nodded vigorously.
The helicopter, which made regular deliveries, had come the next day, and, solemn as a judge, Alexandros had presented her with a Greek recipe book. She’d had to ask him to translate the recipe she chose. He’d stayed to watch her cook, and had invited her to eat with him. Barrier after barrier had come down at breathtaking speed. He’d no longer ignored her. He’d begun to smile and respond a tad stiffly to her conversational sallies. Within forty-eight hours she’d been walking on air and had abandoned all caution. It was that same week that a male childhood friend of her mother’s had flown in from New Zealand for a long vacation. Blossoming beneath daily visits that had soon evolved into a determined courtship, Maura Fletcher had been too preoccupied to notice the increasing irregularity of her daughter’s working hours.
