by Lynne Graham
LUCY WAS RIVEN with extreme guilt by the time she finally climbed on the bus that would take her down to the marina.
She had had to lie to Iola simply to get out. She had pretended that she was joining a couple of the other waitresses for a few drinks. To weigh down her conscience even more, Iola had been delighted to believe that her stepdaughter was finally going out and about. Her stepmother had hovered helpfully, urging her to put on make-up and wear the pretty white sundress that Iola had bought for her a few weeks earlier. But how could Lucy have admitted that she was heading out to meet Bella’s father? After all, she had already lied on that subject by declaring that she had no way of getting in touch with the man who had fathered her daughter. Kreon and Iola had averted their eyes in dismay and embarrassment at that claim, clearly assuming that she did not know the man’s name.
Indeed, one lie only led to more lies, Lucy conceded shamefacedly, annoyed that she had found it impossible to be more honest. But Kreon would raise the roof if he discovered that Jax was Bella’s father and she didn’t want to put Kreon in the potential firing line of Antonakos displeasure.
And why was she off to meet Jax when she had sworn she would not do so?
Obviously she was thinking about her daughter’s needs, wondering if there was any chance that Jax could have changed his outlook on children and could possibly be willing to embrace the news that he was a parent. It was definitely her duty to check out that possibility and finally tell him that he had a child, she told herself staunchly even while her heart hammered and her breath caught in her throat at the prospect of seeing Jax again.
You’re pathetic, she scolded herself angrily as she marched past crowded bars, ignoring the men who called out to her. He’s a very good-looking guy and of course you still notice that but that’s all, leave it there. You are not a silly impulsive teenager any more, she coached herself, you know what he is and what he’s like and you know better.
Jax lounged outside the bar with Zenas close by, the rest of his security detail settled within hailing distance. He didn’t know why he had come until he saw Lucy, her dress flowing and dancing round her slender knees, the pristine white lighting up below the street lights, her strawberry-blonde ringlets a vivid fall round her narrow shoulders. And then he knew why he had come and he hated that surge of absolute primal lust, raw distaste flaming through him even as his jeans became uncomfortably tight. A wave of male heads slowly turned to check her out as she passed by. Jax gritted his even white teeth at that familiar display.
‘The waitress…really?’ Zenas teased from the shadows.
‘I need to have this conversation in private,’ Jax warned his old school friend quietly, relieved that Zenas had only joined the team the year before and had no idea of his prior acquaintance with Lucy.
Zenas strolled obediently across the street and plonked himself down on a bench. Jax lifted his newspaper, refusing to continue watching Lucy walk towards him, perturbed by the level of his own interest. He would get answers from her, satisfy his curiosity and leave. There would be nothing more personal and absolutely no sex.
Lucy saw Jax outside the bar, arrogant dark head bent, the bold cut of his chiselled profile golden beneath the lights, his black hair still long enough to tousle in the light breeze. And her heart bounced inside her like a rubber ball because she was helplessly reliving the excitement he had always induced in her. There were flutters in her tummy, crazy tingles pinching the tips of her breasts taut and a dangerous hot, liquid awareness pulsing into being between her legs. Just as quickly her entire body felt overheated and she was seriously embarrassed for herself.
As she took a seat Jax glanced up at her from below his ridiculously long lashes, crescents of uncompromising green running assessingly across her flushed face. ‘At least you’re on time for once… I assume you hurried.’
Lucy blinked and bit down on her tongue hard. Her poor timekeeping had always infuriated Jax because he hated being kept waiting and never, ever understood how time could sometimes run away from her. He had always contended that being late was rude and indefensible. But then Jax, who was relentlessly practical and full of ferocious initiative in tough scenarios, had probably never had a weakness for daydreaming.
Daydreaming, however, had always been Lucy’s escape from challenging experiences. When she didn’t fit in at the many different schools she had attended she had floated away on a fluffy cloud inside her own mind. When life was especially difficult, fantasies had become her consolation and she would dream of a world in which she had love and security and happiness.
In the smouldering silence that had now fallen, Lucy forced herself out of her abstraction and registered that Jax was watching her with impatient green eyes as if he had guessed that she had momentarily drifted away with the fairies. In receipt of that aggravated look, she felt her mouth run dry as a bone. In desperation she spun his newspaper round, her attention falling on a recent custody case that had attracted a lot of media coverage. ‘Oh, my goodness…’ she muttered as she slowly traced the headline with a fingertip while she carefully translated it. ‘The father got the kid? How could they take a child away from his mother?’
Jax shrugged an uninterested shoulder as he signalled the waiter. ‘Why not? Life has moved on. Fathers are now equal to mothers—’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Read it and you’ll see why the family court reached that decision,’ Jax said drily.
‘I can’t read Greek well enough yet,’ she admitted grudgingly.
‘The father is willing to work at home to be with the child while the mother would be leaving him in a nursery all day. Why are we talking about this anyway?’ Jax demanded impatiently.
‘It’s an interesting case,’ Lucy proffered stiffly. ‘The mother’s a paramedic who doesn’t have the option of working at home.’
‘While the father wants his child and what’s best for his child, which is as it should be,’ Jax interposed as a bottle of wine and glasses arrived at the table.
A cold skitter of fear pierced Lucy’s tense body as a glass of wine appeared in front of her. ‘Is that how you would feel?’
‘We’re not talking about me. I won’t be fathering any children,’ Jax declared with a cynical twist of his expressive mouth. ‘Don’t need the hassle or the responsibility. But if I did have a child I certainly wouldn’t sit back and allow a woman to take my child away from me…in fact that is the very last thing I would do.’
A quiver of sheer fright rippled down Lucy’s taut spine as she reached for her wine. That risk, that particular fear of losing her child, had never once crossed her mind as a possibility. And why hadn’t it? Jax might not want children but he was a very possessive guy. What was his was very much his, not to be shared or touched or even looked at by anyone else. Once he had treated Lucy like that, enraging her with his determination to own her body and soul and control her every move. Suppose she told him about Bella and he felt the same way about his daughter?
Sobered by that fear, Lucy decided there and then to continue keeping Bella a secret until she had, at least, taken legal advice. In fact maybe the legal route would be the best way to go when it came to breaking that news, she thought cravenly. It would be more impersonal and less likely to lead to confrontation and bad feeling. Just at that moment Lucy could not face telling Jax that he was the father of her child and that because of his behaviour after their breakup she had had no way of telling him that she was pregnant. That was not her fault, she reminded herself. That was unquestionably his fault.
‘When did you move to Athens?’ Jax prompted.
‘Six months ago… I was struggling to make ends meet in London,’ she confided, almost rolling her eyes at that severe understatement before taking several fortifying swallows of wine.
‘When we talked in Spain, you had no plans to track your father down,’ he reminded her with a frown. ‘You thought he had deserted your mother and you said—’
‘I was wrong. When I needed help, my fathe
r came through for me,’ Lucy admitted. ‘Why did you ask me to meet you?’
Jax watched her sip at the wine, one little finger rubbing back and forth over the stem of the glass, her lush mouth rosy and moist. Like a sex-starved adolescent, he remembered the feel of her mouth, the flick of her teasing little tongue and he went rigid.
‘Jax?’ she pressed, setting down the glass.
Lean, dark features taut, Jax topped up the wine. He had tried to teach her about wine once: how to select it, savour it, how to truly taste it, and she was still knocking it back as if it were cheap plonk. That had been another lesson that had inexplicably ended up between the sheets. But then nothing had ever gone to plan with Lucy. His self-discipline had vanished. When he had taken her shopping he had taken her in the changing cubicle up against the wall, stifling her frantic cries with his hand. Yes, she had definitely earned that red dress he had later seen her wearing while she gave her body to another man.
‘Why?’ Lucy prompted in growing frustration at his brooding silence.
Jax inclined his head to Zenas and spoke to him soft and low when he approached. ‘We’ll go somewhere more private—’
Lucy collided with smouldering green eyes like highly polished emeralds and stiffened in instant rejection of that idea. ‘No.’
‘I don’t know what I was thinking of. This is not the place to talk.’ Or fight, Jax reflected, in no doubt that angry words were likely to be exchanged when he challenged her.
Lucy gulped down more wine in an effort to steady herself and think carefully before she spoke. ‘I don’t want to go anywhere else with you,’ she argued.
‘Don’t lie,’ Jax advised in the driest of tones. ‘I could have you on your back in five minutes if that’s what I wanted…but it’s not.’
A tide of outraged colour slowly dappled Lucy’s creamy skin as she gazed back at him, aghast at his crudity. ‘I can’t believe you said that.’
Jax shrugged again, a knowing look in his stunning eyes. ‘It’s only what we’re both thinking about.’
Lucy bristled like a cat stroked the wrong way and threw her shoulders back. ‘No, it’s not. Speak for yourself.’
‘I fell for the virgin ploy once. Don’t push your luck, koukla mou,’ Jax advised as he thrust back his chair and began to rise. ‘Born-again virgins push the wrong buttons with me.’
‘Don’t call me that… I’m not anyone’s doll!’ Lucy protested, aware of the meaning of those words because her father used them around Bella.
‘Don’t push your luck, Tinker Bell,’ Jax stabbed instead.
And the sound of that once familiar pet name hurt like the unexpected swipe of a knife across tender skin. It turned her pale because it took her back to a place she didn’t want to go, to a period when she had fondly believed herself to be loved and safe and cherished. But it had all been a lie and a seriously cruel lie at that. It hurt even more that she had adored that lie and longed for it to last for ever and ever, just like in the fairy tales.
‘You still haven’t told me what this is about,’ Lucy argued as she drank down her wine with desperate little swallows that pained her throat. ‘I’m staying here.’
A long silver limousine purred along the kerb. They were in a pedestrian zone and the car shouldn’t have been there but the two police officers lounging across the street did nothing to interfere with its progress.
‘Get in the car or I’ll throw you in it!’ Jax bit out in a driven undertone, what little patience he had taxed by her obstinacy.
He had made a mistake, he thought furiously, turning his head and unexpectedly encountering Zenas’s shocked appraisal, registering that the other man had heard that threat.
Incredulous, Lucy giggled. ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ she told him.
And he did. He picked her up off the chair and shoved her into the back seat of the limo as if she were a lost parcel he was retrieving, aware throughout that his bodyguards were watching him as if he had gone insane. But it was entirely Lucy’s fault. She would never ever do as she was told. She would never ever accept that he knew best. And the whole situation was going to hell in a hand basket fast and he could blame himself for that because he should never have arranged to meet her in the first place. Why the hell did what had happened two years ago even matter to him?
So, she had lied to engage his sympathy and ensnare him, pretending to be younger and more innocent than she actually was. He already knew why she had done it. She had lied to impress him because he was rich and there was nothing more complex behind her behaviour back then than greed and a desire to rise in the world. He had been cunningly targeted and chased by hundreds of other women for the same reasons. Why was her deception still raw?
As he swung into the car, radiating blazing tension, his dazzling eyes splintered like green lightning with anger and Lucy stared at him.
‘You still have a terrible temper,’ she complained. ‘And you just kidnapped me and the police did nothing—’
‘Maybe you should’ve tried a little screaming and struggling to demonstrate fear,’ Jax mocked, convinced that she was secretly delighted to be in his limo again and probably already planning a lucrative rehash of their Spanish fling.
No way, he swore to himself, black lashes almost hitting his cheekbones as he glanced studiously away from her, sitting there as she was watching him like a little spider planning an intricate web in which to capture him. On the other hand, he could play her the way she had once played him, he conceded grimly. And while he was doing that he could do whatever he wanted to do with her. That thought, that very idea took him aback because he didn’t usually play games with women. But there was no denying that the concept of playing games with Lucy hugely turned him on.
Lucy breathed in slow and deep to calm herself. She focussed on the strong male thigh next to her own, the fine fabric of his trousers pulled taut across his powerful muscles and across his crotch. Her attention lingered there a split second longer and then hurriedly shifted because it was obvious that he was aroused. Why? Did he ever think of anything but sex? Colour warmed her cheeks because once they had had a very physical relationship. It had lasted six weeks, with them only becoming intimate in the last two, but during it she had realised that sex was unbelievably important to Jax and an unapologetic drive he made no attempt to restrain. Bella, after all, had been conceived in a brazen episode in a changing-room cubicle, she recalled in serious mortification. She had tried to say no but she had never been very good at denying Jax when her own body burned for his like a fire that couldn’t be doused.
‘I hate you,’ she told him truthfully, still thinking about that changing-room cubicle in which the use of precautions hadn’t figured.
‘Because I found you out?’ Jax drawled in a tone of boredom. ‘Or because I dumped you?’
Lucy’s nails bit crescents into the soft skin of her palms. She had told him the truth: she did hate him. In fact the idea of wreaking revenge on Jax energised her. He was so unbearably confident, sure of his every move in a way she had never been. He was clever, successful and rich. He was also worshipped like the Greek god he resembled by women more akin to groupies than anything else.
‘Where are you taking me?’ she demanded curtly. ‘Why do you even want to talk to me? It’s a bit late in the day, isn’t it?’
‘Is it?’ Jax traded unfathomably, leaning forward to press a button that opened a gleaming bar.
‘I don’t understand you!’ Lucy bit out in frustration.
‘Why would you?’
Jax thrust a foaming glass of champagne into her hand, thoroughly disconcerting her. Big blue eyes skimmed up to his in confusion and she looked so lost and bewildered that a momentary pang of conscience pierced his tough hide. Of course it wasn’t real, he recognised angrily.
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
He knew he could trust Lucy to put in an award-winning performance. He would get what he wanted. He would get answers and doubtless tears, self-
justification and grovelling into the bargain. He positively warmed to an image of Lucy grovelling and a smile flashed across his forbidding mouth. Lucy on her knees poised to please…just what the doctor would order for a bored billionaire.
That was what lay at the root of his bizarre behaviour, he reasoned broodingly. He was bored. Bored with the flattery of too many far too eager to please women. Well, Lucy had never been into the art of hanging off his every word and complimenting him on his brilliance. Lucy had fought him and criticised him and driven him crazy on many occasions. Yet he had only been with her six short weeks interspersed with the business trips that had parted them. Six weeks. That was a sobering acknowledgement. Why did he remember so much about her when generally he was challenged to recall the name of a woman he had shared a bed with only a week ago?
She had hurt his pride. That was why. That was the only reason he still remembered her, Jax decided. Well, that and the supercharged, highly satisfying sex…
Lucy sipped the champagne, bubbles bursting under her nose and tickling, tiny beads of moisture cooling her too hot face. She felt out of control and she didn’t like it. She was in Jax’s car and she didn’t know where he was taking her or why he would want to talk to her after so long. She crossed her legs, then re-crossed them, looking everywhere but at him.
‘I want to go home,’ she said abruptly.
‘No, you don’t.’
‘I don’t trust you. I don’t want to be anywhere alone with you,’ she told him sharply.
‘My housekeeper lives in,’ Jax murmured flatly.
‘Like that’s going to change my mind!’ Lucy scoffed. ‘Nobody you employ will go up against you. Do you think I’m stupid?’
‘A little hysterical,’ Jax confided. ‘And it’s undeserved. I’ve never harmed you in any way.’
‘But your employees will if you tell them to. I was dragged off of Sea Queen two years ago and I got hurt,’ Lucy told him reluctantly.
Jax turned his head to frown at her as the limousine coasted to a halt. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ he demanded.