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But his laser gaze had sharpened. ‘How?’
‘I grew up in an orphanage. I know exactly what it feels like to be unwanted.’
Enlightenment glinted in his eyes. ‘Hope House,’ he surmised, his voice low and deep.
The combination of his touch, her jangling emotions and the fact that she’d divulged a huge part of her life that drew pity from most people made her pull away.
He held on, his eyes narrowing on her face for a long contemplative moment before he set her free.
But stepping away did nothing to ease the quaking inside. She felt as if a layer of her skin had been stripped away, allowing him a glimpse of something she’d rather have kept cloaked.
‘Did you need anything else?’
He shoved his hand into his pocket, the motion stretching the material of his shirt across his torso and lighting even more confounding flames inside her.
‘I came to tell you we might have to make a detour to Athens tomorrow if the team come up against any resistance.’ His eyes narrowed on her face. ‘I’m assuming you’re still on board with accompanying me to Drakonisos?’
‘Do I have a choice?’ she asked, striving for a briskness that failed miserably.
He frowned. ‘Not if you don’t want to fall foul of the spirit of our agreement. Do you?’
Alexis swallowed, knowing she was caught. ‘No.’
He nodded briskly. ‘I’ll pick you up in the morning.’
* * *
Christos hung up the phone and suppressed another curse. To say this was proving to be the week from hell was an understatement.
While Monday’s loss had been a direct hit to his pride, the thought that he’d left the field open for Demitri’s son to become a pawn was more visceral. It struck much too close to home for his liking.
This was why he didn’t usually deal with such cases. Why the institution of marriage had been anathema to him since dragging himself from the harrowing battlefield of his parents’ divorce.
But regardless of how he’d felt about his friend’s too-good-to-be-true love proclamations and his subsequent rush into marriage, Christos had witnessed the genuine adoration in Demitri’s face seven years ago when he’d talked about his future with the woman of his dreams. Even more astounding was that Demitri was a man who’d been previously cynical and jaded about the state of matrimony second only to Christos himself.
But even then, Christos had kept his scepticism to himself, choosing to give his friend his blessing along with the benefit of his silent doubt.
It didn’t please him at all to be proven right that, beyond the first few weeks of a new liaison, all that remained were pathetic illusions waiting to turn to bitterness and acrimony.
And even then, as he was discovering lately, the initial spark of interest didn’t have to progress to the bedroom for its looming demis
e to become patently clear.
Now the same pattern that had shattered Christos’s childhood was being replayed in his best friend’s marriage.
Christos swivelled his desk chair in his private jet’s conference room around, but the view that met his gaze, like yesterday, remained abysmal to the point of depressing. They’d only just taken off, and while England had its charms, the weather wasn’t one of them.
He didn’t know whether it was talking to Kyrios that had triggered it but suddenly he yearned for the warmth and vibrancy of Drakonisos, the only place he’d truly called home. The place his greedy cousin was attempting to steal from him.
His harsh exhalation was punctuated by Alexis’s entry. A different type of disturbance took hold of his chest that had nothing to do with the plane’s mild turbulence, intensifying his unsettled mood. He wasn’t sure exactly what had happened on Monday night in his penthouse suite. To be honest, whatever it was had started in the conference room with the tiniest display of evidence that his able and talented assistant wasn’t superhuman after all.
For some absurd reason, seeing her less than perfectly put together, he’d wanted to explore that flaw. To dishevel her even more, pull her shirt tails from her tight, prim skirt, fully let down her slipping hair and mar her fading lipstick with his mouth.
The urge to push her buttons had been unstoppable. At the end of the night, once he’d put two doors between them and stood beneath a lukewarm shower, he’d relegated the aberration to the events of the day. Now, as he watched her walking across the carpet towards him, Christos wasn’t so sure.
To his recollection, his assistant had never worn a trouser suit to work or any work-related function. She favoured skirt suits or classy dresses with matching jackets.
Now she looked completely different.
