Holding Holly’s hand tightly, Stavros led her through the gilded door into the luxurious lobby, which had at its center an enormous gold Christmas tree decorated with red stars stretching two stories high. All around them, glamorous guests walked, some briskly and others strolling, many trailing assistants and bodyguards and holding little pampered dogs. But Holly only looked at the dark, powerful man beside her.
“That must have been some Christmas gift.”
“It was just money,” he said shortly, leading her through the lobby.
“The doorman—did he do a big favor for you or something?”
As he led her to the elevator, he gave an awkward shrug that made him look almost embarrassed. “Rob holds the door for me. Always smiles and says hello. Sometimes arranges for a car.”
“And for that, you bought him and his wife a house?”
Pushing the elevator button, Stavros said again, “It was nothing. Really.”
“Nothing to you,” she said softly as the door slid open with a ding. “But everything to them.”
Wordlessly, he walked into the elevator. She followed him.
“Why did you do it?”
“Because I could.”
The same reason he offered me a job as his secretary, she thought. “Stavros,” she said, “is it possible that, deep down, you’re actually a good guy?”
She saw a flash of something bleak in his dark eyes, quickly veiled. He turned his face toward the sensor then pressed the button for the penthouse. “I’m a selfish bastard. Everyone knows that.”
But there was something vulnerable in the tone of his voice. “I’m finding it hard to believe that. Unless there’s something else,” she said slowly. “Something you’re not telling me. Is there—”
Her voice cut off as Stavros pressed her against the elevator wall, and hungrily lowered his mouth to hers.
He kissed her with such hot demand that the questions starting to form in her mind disappeared as if they had never been. All that was left was heat. She felt molten with desire.
With a ding, the elevator door slid open.
Gripping her hand, he pulled her forward. Knees still weak, she followed, looking around her.
The enormous, starkly decorated penthouse was dark except for the white lights glittering from a ten-foot fresh-cut Christmas tree, which stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the sparkling lights of the city below.
Still shivering from the intensity of his kiss, she looked at him. “Nice tree.?
??
Stavros glanced at it as if he hadn’t noticed it ’til now. “The hotel staff arranged that.”
She looked around the apartment. There were no photographs on the walls. Nothing personal at all. The white-and-black decor looked like something out of a magazine, curated by a museum. “Did you just move in?”
“I bought this place five years ago.”
She looked at him, startled. “Five years?”
“So?”
Holly thought of her own shabby walk-up apartment, filled with photos of family and friends, her comfortable, beat-up old furniture, her grandma’s old quilt, the tangled-up yarn from her hopeless efforts to learn how to knit. “It seems unlived in.”
“I hired the top designer in the city.” He sounded a little disgruntled. “It’s a look.”
“Um.” She bit her lip, then turned with a bright smile. “It’s nice.”
He pulled her into his arms. “You don’t really think that.”