Now what did she do?
She stared at the posters she’d hung on the walls—giant photos of Paris and New York and Athens. All those places she’d planned to visit when she was a hotshot hotelier, which was probably never going to happen now. She should have asked about a reference. She wondered if the hotel would still give her one. One which emphasised her best qualities—or would they make her sound like some kind of desperado who spent her time trying it on with wealthy guests?
Her doorbell shrilled and she gave a start, but the sense that none of this was really happening gave her renewed hope. Was it inconceivable to think that the big boss of the hotel might have overridden his HR boss’s decision? Realised that it had been nothing but a foolish one-off and that she was too valuable a member of staff to lose?
Smoothing her hands over her hair, she ran along the corridor and opened the front door—her heart clenching with an emotion she was too dazed to analyse when she saw who was standing there. She blinked as if she’d somehow managed to conjure up the brooding figure from her fevered imagination. She must have done—because why else would Alek Sarantos be outside her home?
A few giant droplets of rain had splashed onto the blackness of his hair and his bronze skin gleamed as if someone had spent the morning polishing it. She’d forgotten how startlingly blue his eyes looked, but now she could see something faintly unsettling glinting from their sapphire depths.
And even in the midst of her confusion—why was he here?—she could feel her body’s instinctive response to him. Her skin prickled with a powerful recognition and her breasts began to ache, as if realising that here was the man who was capable of giving her so much pleasure when he touched them. She could feel colour rushing into her cheeks.
‘Mr Sarantos,’ she said, more out of habit than anything else—but the cynical twist of his lips told her that he found her words not only inappropriate, but somehow insulting.
‘Oh, please,’ he said softly. ‘I think we know each other well enough for you to call me Alek, don’t you?’
The suggestion of intimacy unnerved her even more than his presence and her fingers curled nervelessly around the door handle she was clutching for support. Now the rumble of thunder was closer and never had a sound seemed more fitting. ‘What...what are you doing here?’
‘No ideas?’ he questioned silkily.
‘To rub in the fact that you’ve lost me my job?’
‘Oh, but I haven’t,’ he contradicted softly. ‘You managed to do that all by yourself. Now, are you going to let me in?’
Ellie told herself she didn’t have to. She could slam the door in his face and that would be that. She doubted he would batter the door down—even though he looked perfectly capable of doing it. But she was curious about what had brought him here and the rest of the day stretched in front of her like an empty void. She was going to have to start looking for a new job—she knew that. But not today.
‘If you insist,’ she said, turning her back on him and retracing her steps down the corridor. She could hear him closing the front door and following her. But it wasn’t until he was standing in her room that she began to wonder why she had been daft enough to let him invade her space.
Because he looked all wrong here. With his towering physique and jewelled eyes, he dominated the small space like some living, breathing treasure. He seemed larger than life and twice as intimidating—like the most outrageously alpha man she had ever set eyes on. And that was making her feel uncomfortable in all kinds of ways. There was that honeyed ache deep down in her belly again and a crazy desire to kiss him. Her body’s reaction was making her thoughts go haywire and her lips felt like parchment instead of flesh. She licked them, but that only made the aching worse.
The kettle was reaching its usual ear-splitting crescendo just before reaching boiling point and the great belches of steam meant that the room now resembled a sauna. Ellie could feel a trickle of sweat running down her back. Her shirt was sticking to her skin and her jeans were clinging to her thighs and once again she became horribly aware of her own body.
She cleared her throat. ‘What do you want?’ she said.
Alek didn’t answer. Not immediately. His anger—a slow, simmering concoction of an emotion—had been momentarily eclipsed by finding himself in the kind of environment he hadn’t seen in a long time.
He looked around. The room was small and clean and she had the requisite plant growing on the windowsill, but there was a whiff of institutionalisation about the place which the cheap posters couldn’t quite disguise. The bed was narrower than any he’d seen in years and an unwilling flicker of desire was his reward for having allowed his concentration to focus on that. But he had once lived in a room like this, hadn’t he? When he’d started out—much younger than she was now—he’d been given all kinds of dark and inhospitable places to sleep. He’d worked long hours for very little money in order to earn money and get a roof over his head.