Her quarry stalked on into the building...out of sight, out of reach, and she felt sick with failure, her face drained of colour, her eyes bleak.
A man appeared in front of her then, an older man, and there was something vaguely familiar about his craggy face. ‘Is that letter you’re gripping about your mother?’ he asked bluntly. ‘I work for Mr Ziakis too—’
‘Oh,’ Elvi said, taken aback by his approach. ‘Yes, it’s about Mum—’
‘Then give it to me,’ he urged. ‘I’ll see that it reaches the boss’s desk.’
In a daze Elvi looked up and saw the kindness in his gaze. ‘You’re—?’
‘Dmitri,’ he supplied, twitching the letter out of her loosening grasp. ‘I know your mother. I can’t promise that the boss will read it or anything but I can put it on the desk.’
Elvi blinked. ‘Thank you very much,’ she murmured with warmth.
‘No problem. She’s a lovely lady,’ Dmitri told her, walking off again at speed and vanishing into the building while tucking her letter into a pocket.
And Dmitri, whoever he is, doesn’t think Sally Cartwright’s a thief, Elvi realised as she climbed on a bus to get to work and mulled over that surprising encounter. Just as well, considering that she had frozen like an ice sculpture when she saw Xan Ziakis, not that she thought his bodyguards would have allowed her anywhere near him, because someone had told her to get out of the way. Dmitri? One of the other three men?
It didn’t matter, she decided as she stocked shelves of knitting wool at work. The letter might land on Xan’s desk but, as Dmitri had said, that didn’t mean he would actually bother to read it or even more crucially respond to it.
But in that Elvi was mistaken. Xan was so disconcerted by the unexpected sight of his head of security covertly sliding an envelope onto his desk, when Dmitri clearly thought he was unseen, that nothing would have kept him from opening up that letter out of sheer human curiosity. Xan skimmed down to the signature first: Elvi Cartwright. He knew that name well enough and he also knew he should’ve been prepared for the tactic in such a situation. Instantly he wanted to crumple the letter up and bin it without reading it. That would have been the cautious way to deal.
Even so, although Xan was very cautious with women, he couldn’t bring himself to dump the letter unread. A couple of months ago, he had noticed her, well, really, really noticed her, he acknowledged grimly, and he had instructed Dmitri to find out who she was, assuming that she lived in the same apartment block. He had, however, learned that she was his maid’s daughter, which had naturally concluded his interest. Billionaires did not consort with the daughters of their domestic staff. The gulf was too immense, the risk of a messy affair too great.
And yet, all the same...the letter still unread, Xan drifted momentarily into the past, recalling Elvi Cartwright with intense immediacy. The shining pale-as-milk hair, the wonderful blue eyes, the crazy natural glow of her, not to mention the extraordinary fact that she looked very different from the sort of women he usually slept with and yet, inexplicably, one glance at her turned him on harder and faster than any of them.
She was a bit overweight, he supposed abstractedly; hard to tell when he had only ever seen her in a loose black jacket that swamped her. Very short in stature, not his type, absolutely not his type, he told himself sternly as he shook out the letter, more concerned by Dmitri’s bizarre involvement in its delivery than by what it might say. If he couldn’t trust his head of security, who could he trust? Why had Dmitri got personally involved in so tawdry an incident?
Xan had a scientific approach to everything he read. Elvi’s use of English was far superior to what he would have expected and then he began reading and what he read was most educational
from his point of view even if, by the end of it, he couldn’t think why she expected him as the victim to want to do anything about Sally Cartwright’s self-induced predicament.
Inevitably he studied the situation from his side of the fence, where all the power lay, and the sort of ideas that had never occurred to Xan Ziakis before when it came to a woman began very slowly to blossom. Xan, who never ever allowed himself to succumb to any kind of unwise temptation. Xan, who usually policed his every thought, suppressing any immoral promptings to concentrate more profitably on work. And once he let those bad ideas out of the box they created a positive riot in his imagination, raising the kind of excitement that only a good financial killing usually gave him...and that was it, Xan Ziakis was seduced by erotic possibilities for the first time in his life.
Xan folded the letter with a dark forbidding smile that his opponents would have recognised as a certain sign of danger and threat. He would give his quarry a couple of days to stew and wonder and then he would get in touch...