Lucy’s face flamed. Yes, she did. She had him wrapped up, parcelled and boxed as being exactly like the men she’d seen court her mother, and no matter how she’d seen him treat women, the inherently unfair judgement of that made her feel unaccountably guilty all of a sudden.
It goaded her into saying, ‘All right. Fine. I don’t think it was particularly professional of you to ask me to send a parting gift to your mistress. It’s not my business, it made me uncomfortable, and I felt that it crossed the boundaries.’ Not to mention that it made me feel angry and disappointed too. But Lucy held her tongue. She couldn’t go that far, and those revelations made her feel far too vulnerable.
She felt as prim as a mother superior, and couldn’t look Aristotle in the eye, sure he had to be laughing his head off at her.
‘You’re right. I won’t ask you to do that again.’
She looked at him in shock. His face wasn’t creased in hilarity, it was stone cold sober.
‘To be honest, Lucy, I did it to get a reaction out of you…and you gave it to me.’
She frowned and shook her head minutely. ‘But why?’
He shrugged one broad shoulder nonchalantly, not at all put out to be discussing this, his gaze on hers not wavering for a second. ‘Because I sensed something about you, under the surface…’ His gaze dropped to where she could feel her breasts rising and falling with her breath. He looked back up and her heart stopped. ‘And I suddenly realised that you were causing me an inordinate amount of…frustration.’ His mouth tightened. ‘I blamed you for the fact that it had become necessary to say goodbye to a perfectly good mistress.’
His words caused little short of an explosion of reaction within Lucy. She tried desperately to block it out—the realisation that even then—Her brain froze at that implication. Her hands clenched tight on the table and she hid them on her lap.
‘Look, Aristotle…’ She knew she was all but begging. ‘I’ve already told you, I’m not interested in anything…like that. Really, I’m not. If I’ve given you that impression I’m really sorry.’
His eyes flashed and he leaned forward, hands on the table, starkly brown against the surface. ‘Don’t patronise me. You give me that impress
ion every time you look at me. It’s there right now. You’re desperately aware of where my leg is—how close it is to yours under this table—’
‘Stop it,’ Lucy all but cried out. ‘Don’t do that words thing again.’ She wouldn’t be able to handle it.
Triumph lit Aristotle’s eyes. ‘See? You want me, Lucy. I can smell it from here. But don’t worry. I’m not some lecherous boss who is going to force you into some compromising position. You’ll come to me. It’s just a matter of time before we see how long you can hold out against it.’
Between Lucy’s thighs she felt indecently damp. She coloured even more hotly. Could he really smell that? Did desire have a smell? And since when had she admitted it was desire and not just sheer banal human reaction? The thought made her squirm, but also made her feel weak and achy. She scrambled out of her seat. She had to get away.
As she pushed past his chair he snaked out a hand and caught her wrist. She looked down, and he was looking right up at her, trapping her. She watched as he took her wrist and brought it to his mouth. He pressed his lips against the sensitive skin on the underside. And then she felt his tongue flick out to taste her there, right against her pulse. With a strangled cry that spoke more of desire than disgust, she yanked her hand away and ran, aiming for the toilet at the back, his mocking chuckle following her all the way. Any complacency she’d felt in the past week was blown sky-high to smithereens. He’d just been biding his time.
She locked herself in with shaking hands and looked at herself in the small, unforgiving mirror. She had to fatally and finally accept the knowledge that she desired this man. It wasn’t just his indisputable charisma, it was him. And his effect on her. She wanted him with a hunger that she’d always intellectualised as something she’d never experience. Except now she was. And it was ten million times worse than anything she could have ever imagined.
This was nothing short of catastrophic when she’d happily devoted herself to a life that had promised to offer up only the sort of passion she could handle. Safe, staid, unexciting. She hadn’t committed herself to being celibate—she did hope to one day meet someone and settle down, perhaps even have children—but at no point had she ever hoped for the kind of fulfilment that was a deep throbbing ache within her right now.
She’d unconsciously left her hair loose, and now she bundled it up again, tight, digging out some hairpins from her pocket to hold it in place. Then she searched for and found the comforting frames of her glasses. She’d kept them close by but hadn’t worn them all week, as she’d been genuinely afraid of what Aristotle might do, but now she needed to send him a message once and for all. Lucy Proctor was not available and not interested. And never would be. If she told herself that enough, she might actually believe it.
Even though Aristotle might be laughing at Lucy’s reaction, his body most certainly wasn’t laughing. His body had never felt so serious and intent on one thing: carnal satisfaction, and with that woman. He burned from head to toe with it. The past week had been pure torture. They’d worked in such close proximity that it had taken all of his strength and will-power not to sweep aside the paperwork, throw her across his desk and take her there and then.
The only thing holding him back—apart from the very real need to prepare for the merger, and it irked him that that hadn’t been enough—had been Lucy’s own reaction. Any other woman, knowing that he desired her would have happily laid herself bare for his delectation. But not Lucy. She’d avoided his eye—she’d avoided him at all costs. She’d scurried out every night and been there quietly, studiously working every morning. Buttoned up and covered up to within an inch of her life in shapeless boxy suits.
It inflamed him and perplexed him. He’d genuinely never had to deal with this before. But what it was doing was raising the stakes, and raising his blood pressure. He was too proud to force her, even though he knew she wasn’t far from tipping over the edge, but damned if he’d do it.
No, she would come to him, just as he’d declared. When she was weak with longing and stir crazy with desire she’d come to him, and this build-up would finally explode in a blaze of mutual satisfaction. He heard the bathroom door click open behind him and shifted in his seat to ease the constriction of his trousers. He picked up some work papers resignedly and it chafed—because he was not a man used to resigning himself to things.
For now, though, he’d use work to drown out his clamouring pulse. He would not let her see the roiling waves of frustration that gripped him and tossed him like a tiny boat in a thundering storm. When she came and sat down opposite him, and that sensual womanly smell that was so at odds with her prim appearance teased his nostrils and made his arousal even more acute, he almost groaned.
He looked up for a second. Predictably, she was looking down, immersed in papers. He saw what she’d done to her hair and the firmly reinstated glasses. He felt a surge of adrenalin and thought to himself, Fine, if that’s the way you want it.
He pulled out his laptop and fired off a curt but informative e-mail to his assistant in Athens, instructing her to have everything ready by the time they landed in two hours. For someone with his wealth and resources, what he’d just asked for shouldn’t be hard to pull off, and as he sat back he realised with a jolt that once again he felt more alive than he’d done in months.
The fact that the merger was once again relegated to second place raised just the dimmest clanging bell in his consciousness.
Chapter Five
A FEW hours later, Lucy sat on the bed of a palatial suite in one of the most expensive hotels in Athens. She’d never seen such opulence and luxury in her life. Everyone here seemed to talk in hushed tones. She’d even found herself almost whispering thank you to the concierge who’d shown her to her room.
Her mouth quirked dryly. Needless to say, the manager himself had shown Aristotle to his room. She’d seen that they were more or less next door to each other, he in the Royal Suite and she in a smaller adjoining one, although she had no intention of using the interconnecting door that had been pointed out to her. She was already far too close to her boss for comfort.