“Lakis told me you’ve been doing a heroic job, trying to keep the whole mess—”
He stopped short, and she nearly bumped into him. “Dammit they put me in a cell,” he snarled, “behind bars.”
Alix could only stare wordlessly.
“I may have to go to court to testify that my grandfather is a thieving old bandit, a monster of conniving, stupid dishonesty, who acts in the fine old tradition of Greek shipping. Damn,” he burst out, infuriated. “Socrates actually thought he was a financial genius when he got the idea of using his oil tankers to smuggle arms! But I’m his chief executive officer. He put me in charge of running things. Would you like to testify for me? Tell them I didn’t suspect a thing until about ten months ago?”
“Niko, please.” Alix grabbed his arms with both hands to stop him. Behind them Lakis stopped the Daimler. “I have something to tell you.”
He looked down at her with burning eyes. “Why are you here, Alix? You’re beautiful in my jewels, do you know that? I know you hate them. Why are you wearing them?”
“I don’t hate them.” A flurry of icy flakes blew a strand of red hair across her mouth, and Alix scraped it way. She took a deep breath. “Nicholas, my name is Catherine Alixandria Melton. I inherited the Melton banking interests along with my brother, Robert.”
His long fingers gently brushed the dark sable fur resting against her cheek: “And the coat my grandfather gave you,” he said huskily, “I know you hate that, too. Why do you dislike our gifts? Is it because you are poor, Alix, and you feel that we are trying to corrupt you?”
She gulped. “Nicholas, you didn’t hear what I said!”
His thumb lingered over the soft curve of her lower lip, absently. “At first I thought you were one of them,” he murmured, “a decoy from these people who wish to smuggle their arms and missiles into Iran at any cost—these people who have tried to threaten me, intimidate me, assassinate me, because I stood in their way. I thought they had sent you to make me fall in love with you.” He was so close, his black eyes right in hers, that Alix felt the warm caress of his breath on her mouth. “Because you were so soft, so beautiful, any man would fall in love with you. A virgin, so strangely determined to have sex with me.” He sighed. “I thought that maybe they would even have you try to kill me.”
“You’re not listening to me.” He made everything sound so different. And she was so full of guilt! “You have to understand, I’m not just rich,” she blurted. “Actually, I come from that part of American society that’s so wealthy, it doesn’t know how much money it has.”
He was listening to her now, eyebrows raised.
She rushed on, “I was brought up without a father because he was too busy for me. And without a mother because she’d married a second time and had a new family. But I was a Melton and supposed to grow up to marry well, serve on the board of charitable institutions, and raise dutiful, well-behaved children.” She stared at him a little wildly. Why didn’t he say something?
He stood, oblivious to the snowflakes that were beginning to whiten his dark hair, staring down at her with an unreadable expression.
“I couldn’t do it,” Alix whispered. “I didn’t want to be like my brother Robert. All the years I was in boarding school, Robert was the only one who’d come to visit me. In prep school, at sixteen, he was already an old man.” She paused, helplessly. “When I ran away to Paris to study music, Robert had me followed by hired goons. He had his lawyers call me all hours of the day to harass me, to make me come back. My brother and I are board members of the Melton Banking Trust. They have to have me present to do business.” Alix was despairing. She didn’t have any more to tell him. “I—I have to be there to vote or it ties things up, terribly.”
After a pause, he asked, “How long have you been away?”
It was not what she’d expected, this calm, dispassionate inquiry. She’d been so certain Nicholas would explode and accuse her of lying again. “A year.” She faltered under that cold stare. “No—a year and a half.”
He considered that. “If I were your brother, I’d break your neck.” He pried her hands loose from his wrist. “It’s late. You’ll have to excuse me, I have to find a cab.”
He had only gone a few steps, his feet crunching in the snow, when she said, “You knew.”
He kept walking. “Yes. Tonight, when I came to give you back the earrings, upstairs at the opera. My security people finally traced the identity on your passport.”
She trudged behind him, hardly feeling the snow’s icy cold penetrating her shoes. “Brown is my mother’s first husband’s name, my father’s name. Only by the terms of the trust I have to use Melton, my stepfather’s, legally.”
She saw him shrug. “It doesn’t matter.” He walked on. “It was almost the climax of my wonderful evening. Except that I still had to be arrested, of course.”
They had reached the corner and the lights of a wider, busier street. Nicholas strode ahead purposefully.
Alix knew it was time to destroy everything and tell him the final truth. She felt as though she were taking a leap from a very high bridge with no hope of surviving.
“Nicholas,” she called out. “Poseidon-Palliades leases more than eighty percent of its ships to Avia Estanque Hermanos, Panama City.”
He started to cross the street.
“Which is owned by Banco Seguros Panama Tercero. The Panama Bank is a wholly owned company of a Delaware corporation, Delmarvco.”
Nicholas Palliades stopped, his back to her.
“Delmarvco, Incorporated,” Alix said in a miserable voice, “is a wholly owned company of Hightower Trust of San Francisco.”
He turned around to face her, one black eyebrow cocked. He looked cold, she thought. And unforgiving.
“The Hightower Trust,” Alix cried, “is a division of Melton Bank of New York.”
The moment dragged on, endlessly, as he considered what she’d just said. “Are you trying to tell me,” he said, frowning, “that Melton Bank owns Poseidon-Palliades?”
It was even worse than Alix had expected.
“But you don’t have to do anything,” she cried, “don’t you see? Melton Bank has batteries of lawyers all over the world. We won’t let you go to jail! We do it for our corporations all the time.” She winced; that didn’t sound too good. “Besides, I know you’re innocent. I really do, I believe in you! We—” She looked away. “We’ll just have to do something about your grandfather.”
His expression was grim. “I don’t want you to do anything about my grandfather. I’m still capable of taking care of Poseidon-Palliades myself. That is, until you people actually lock the doors on us.”
“Nobody’s going to do that!”
“No? ‘We’ won’t let you go to jail?” he mimicked. “I don’t have to do anything? ‘We’ will take care of my grandfather?”
“You’re twisting everything I say,” she cried. “I haven’t got anything to do with these things, I hate them! All I ever wanted was my music, and I couldn’t even have that.” Alix’s voice began to wobble with angry tears. “I had to call my brother tonight in New York to ask him to help you. Do you realize what that cost me? When I ran away, I said I’d die before I’d ask him for anything again!”
He looked unconvinced. “Do you intend to run Poseidon-Palliades yourself? We now control Jackson Storm International. It would be quite an operation.”
“I don’t intend to do anything,” Alix shouted. “I was only trying to help you, but you’re just like all the rest! I hate you. I hate my brother—I hate people like you, I hate, hate being rich!” She gasped for breath. “It ruins everything. I can’t even have anybody to love! Oh, God,” she sobbed, using the sable fur sleeve to wipe her eyes, “I was so much happier when you thought I was poor!”
To her surprise, he took her arm. “Hush, Alix, it doesn’t matter.”
“Don’t tell me it doesn’t matter,” she cried, struggling. “You hate me, too!”
“No, I w
as just waiting for you to spit it all out. The whole story.”
She twisted to look up at that familiar hard face as he pulled her to the curb. “You knew about this?”
“Not this part. But what the hell difference does it make?” She saw him grin, teeth flashing whitely in the street’s semidarkness. “Either my grandfather controls me, or the world’s largest bank does. I don’t see that it changes my life much.” Lakis had drawn the Daimler up alongside them. Nicholas Palliades wrenched open the door with one hand, with the other he pushed Alix toward it.
Alix couldn’t drag her eyes away, trying to gauge the expression on his dark face. “Niko, you don’t understand. My brother and I are the world’s largest bank!”
“All right, you own me.” He gave her a not-so-gentle shove that propelled Alix across the back seat, then he got in, slamming the door. “Move it, Lakis,” he told the man in front.
Alix tried to get up, but he pushed her back against the cushions and held her there. “Nicholas, what are you doing?” She could only see his face in grim profile. “You can’t mean what you said—that it doesn’t make much difference.” She knew he was too proud to accept that.
“Can’t I?” His hands were pulling her out of the silky folds of the sable coat. “I’ve just spent four hours in a jail cell, Alix. I’m filthy, I’m tired. I need to get comfortable. I need,” he said softly, dragging off her soaked shoes, “to get you out of your wet things.”
Alix touched the damp black curls on his forehead with her fingertip. “Did you tell Lakis to follow us? Did you know he was right behind us the whole time?”
“Lakis knows what to do.” His hands moved up her stockings, caught the garter tops, and pulled them down. When she shivered, his eyes glowed with black desire. “Are you pregnant, beautiful Alix?” he whispered against her ear. “I’ve thought of it often since that night.”
She looked up at him uncertainly. “I—I don’t think so.”
“Would you like me to make you pregnant?” he purred. He had pulled the front of her dress open and his mouth nuzzled her breast through the silk of her bra. “I want to make you pregnant, my angel, who has known only me. You are so precious to me, I can’t wait to start a Greek-American dynasty with our beautiful babies.” He stroked her hair with a gentle hand, looking down into her violet eyes. “Darling Alix, my only love, would you like that?”
“Nicholas, you—you aren’t angry?” Alix said warily. She tried to push him away, but he only tightened his arms around her. “Will you make sense?”
“I am making sense. I’ve loved you from the moment I saw you in Rudi Mortessier’s showroom, looking like an empress, but with a lost look—” His eyes were soft as he looked down at her. “A distant fear in your eyes.”
Alix gazed up at him. How could she ever have thought he was treating her like something he could buy? “Well, yes, I’ve always loved children,” she said tentatively. “But I don’t know about a dynasty.”
He kissed her gently. “And I will send you to music school even when you are so big your stomach sticks out so much you can’t reach the keys.” His fingers slid inside her brassiere. “I’ll buy you a piano for all the rooms in our houses.”
His warm, expert touch distracted her. “Nicholas, I can’t get pregnant and play the piano in all the rooms of your houses! What are we talking about?”
“First you have to stop lying to me.” His fingers gently teased the hard bud of her nipple. “And always do what I tell you. Within reason,” he added hastily, seeing her expression. “After all, we are getting married.”
“Nicholas, I didn’t lie to you, I just didn’t tell you all of the truth!” She stopped, realizing what he had said. “Are we really going to get married? You really don’t mind,” she said quickly, “about the interlocking companies and Melton Bank?”
“What do you think?” His hand was feeling for the zipper at the back of her dress.
“I think it matters a great deal to you; you’re not the kind of man who’ll let somebody own you.” She gasped. “Oh my goodness, Nicholas! We can’t do this in the car!”
He stopped what he was doing, reached over, picked up the silver phone, and said into it, “Park somewhere and get lost, Lakis.”
Then he hung it back up.
“Niko,” Alix said rapidly. She’d just had a wonderful idea. “I can resign from the Melton Trust if my husband takes my place on the board and my brother approves. Oh, that would be so wonderful! I’m sure Robert would go along with it, considering all the trouble he’s had with me.”
She was realizing that this man sprawled over her, his desirous body pressing her down into the gray velvet cushions of the Daimler, was the only one, probably, that Robert Melton would have a hard time dominating. It would be war! It was wonderful.
“Don’t be fooled, sweetheart.” His tongue found the hollow of her throat. “Your brother will think I’m a sleazy, barbaric Greek upstart.”
Alix jolted with surprise.
He looked down at her, a half-smile on his lips. “Do we have a few things to talk about, Alix, love?”
Alix stared at Nicholas in horror.
The world had fallen apart again. When he found out she had chosen him as the most undesirable lover in Paris and the best way to enrage her brother...
The Daimler had stopped.
“Nicholas, darling, I really do love you!” She couldn’t lose him, not now! “I’m not too good at this—remember, you’re the only man I ever had.” She clutched him, realizing he was working his way out of the formal vest, sliding down the suspenders of his trousers.
“Just let me have another chance at my music,” Alix cried. “I know I can get my masters this time, and you can have—oh! Um—anything you want! Take the Melton Bank and all the one-hundred and forty-one companies that go with it. Mmmm,” she shuddered as his hands moved over her caressingly. “As long as you don’t bother me with any of it.”
She threw her arms around him as he moved over her, his body warm and aroused. “I’ll telephone my brother right away,” she told him, “when we get back to—”
“Alix, my darling, shut up,” the new member of the board of Melton Trust told her. “And let me make love to you. Like this.” He lowered his dark head to kiss her. “Forever.”
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1990 by Maggie Davis
Cover design by Open Road Integrated Media
ISBN 978-1-4976-1368-3
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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