“You could have worn…something!” Lucy heard the nervous edge to her voice with dismay and took a few deep, steadying breaths.
“I could have,” he admitted.
“Then why didn’t you?”
Nick propped himself up on his side, resting on an elbow, with the sheets draped haphazardly over his lower body.
“Because I wanted to make love to you,” he replied.
“You…what?” A warm, sweet sensation filled her body.
“Don’t tell me that you haven’t guessed by now that I am attracted to you.”
“But we’re here on business!” She clung to that scrap of truth with tenacity. “And…you’re my boss!”
“That didn’t stop us once before….”
They’re the men who have everything—except a bride…
Wealth, power, charm—what else could a handsome tycoon need? In THE GREEK TYCOONS miniseries you have already been introduced to some gorgeous Greek multimillionaires who are in need of wives.
Now it’s the turn of talented Presents® author Cathy Williams, with her sparkling intense office romance Constantinou’s Mistress.
This tycoon has met his match, and he’s decided he has to have her…whatever that takes!
Look for the next title in this series
The Greek’s Secret Passion
by
Sharon Kendrick
On sale in September, #2345
Only in Harlequin Presents!
Cathy Williams
CONSTANTINOU’S MISTRESS
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ONE
LUCY heard the distant thud of a door slamming shut and her hand stilled over the computer keyboard.
There shouldn’t be anyone in the place. Not at this time of the night, almost ten-thirty, and certainly not on this day of all days. She slowly pushed back the chair, feeling horribly vulnerable in the brightly lit room, the only lit room in the entire building. Anyone could be approaching, looking in at her, and she wouldn’t be able to see a thing.
Imposing as Nick Constantinou’s office was, there was nowhere to hide. No convenient empty cupboards or, for that matter, thick velvet curtains. The windows, on the second floor of the smoked-glass building, were bare of handy thick curtains and somehow trying to slip her frame, slight though it was, behind the pale wooden shutters would have been ludicrous.
In fact, the whole idea of hiding was ludicrous. Lucy Reid was far too sensible a person to entertain thoughts of robbers and muggers.
She cleared her throat and briskly made her way to the thick door that connected Nick Constantinou’s office to her own. Then she tiptoed into the enveloping darkness of her own office and peered tentatively out of the door, not expecting to see anything at all. The high, wintry winds gusting outside had a nasty habit of rattling leaves against window-panes, and when everywhere was wrapped in silence the sound of leaves against a window-pane was like the crash of a boulder through glass.
So her heart leapt to her throat when a dark figure lurched from one of the adjoining offices back out into the corridor and straight in her direction.
‘Yes? May I help you?’ May I help you? At ten-thirty in the evening in an office building which she had made sure to lock behind her when she had come in two hours previously? The inadequacy of her high-pitched question brought a gurgle of sick, nervous laughter to her throat.
‘Who are you?’ Lucy pressed herself back against the wall and wondered how fast her feet would be able to carry her should she need to make a bolt for the staircase. She was only five feet three and the figure bearing down towards her looked at least a foot taller and broad with it.
‘Who do you think I am?’ The figure reached out to bang on a switch on the wall and suddenly the corridor was flooded with light and she released a sigh of shuddering, heartfelt relief. ‘A wild, dangerous bandit out to plunder the very—’ he waved one arm in a sweeping gesture ‘—luxurious offices of Constantinou Enterprises?’ He seemed to find his own rhetorical question insanely funny because he suddenly laughed, flinging his head back and leaning against the wall for support while Lucy watched in consternation.
‘What are you doing here, Nick?’ She walked hesitantly towards the towering figure. ‘Shouldn’t you be…? Are you all right?’
‘Shouldn’t I be…where?’ The laughter had stopped as abruptly as it had begun, and as he stared at her she could see the dark shadows under his eyes and the distinctly bleary look of someone under the influence of alcohol.
It was shocking enough to almost halt her in her tracks. Nick Constantinou didn’t drink. Or at least she had never seen him drink, not at a single one of any of the social occasions which she had attended with him over the past ten months, in her capacity as secretary.
‘You haven’t answered my question!’
‘Question? What question?’ Lucy stammered.
‘Where do you think I should be?’ He strolled towards her very carefully. Even drunk, as he undoubtedly was, Nick Constantinou still emanated a fierce, unstudied masculine power that could take her breath away. The sombreness of his clothing, black trousers, black tie, loosened and revealing a sliver of hard, bronzed chest, big black coat that swayed around him like a dangerous magician’s cloak, only served to emphasise his innate aggression. His dark hair was tousled from the wind outside and he raked his fingers restlessly through it.
‘I thought you might be…well, have stayed behind at your house with all your relatives…’ After all, the funeral of his late wife had taken place earlier in the day.
‘I need to sit down.’ He brushed past her down towards his office and disappeared through the door, leaving her to wage a frantic internal debate as to whether she should follow him or else leave the premises as quickly and quietly as she could.
The choice was removed from her when she heard him bellow from the bowels of his office, ‘Bring me some water, Lucy! Or, better still, a cup of black coffee!’
‘Water would be better.’ She groped her way through the office, which was now in darkness, and switched on the light on his desk. ‘If you’ve drunk a lot, then you’ll be dehydrated. You need to drink as much water as you can.’
‘Always sensible, are you not?’ he mocked, taking the glass from her and propping himself up on the massive sofa that consumed a good part of one wall. ‘Always dependable when it comes to good, sound advice.’
Lucy winced. Yes, good old dependable Lucy, who had climbed up through the ranks of Constantinou’s head office through a combination of hard work, supreme efficiency and an ability not to lose her head, whatever the provocation. Good old Lucy, who couldn’t be in the same room as her boss without feeling a flutter of awareness, whose eyes were fond of lingering on his harsh profile when she knew he wasn’t watching, whose mind ached with images of him, not only forbidden fruit because he was married, but also utterly beyond the reach of someone as ordinary as she was.
‘So you think I should be safely back at my own home, do you?’ Nick lay back on the sofa with his arm slung over his eyes and his hand resting lightly around the glass on his flat, hard stomach.
Yes, he thought to himself, he should be back at the house, grieving in his widower’s garb and allowing relatives, some of whom he had never laid eyes on, to pour their heartfelt sympathy on his head.
The thought of it brought a wave of nausea rushing up his throat.
‘Does anyone know where you are? Perhaps I should c
all…’
‘No!’ He whipped his arm away and looked at her with brilliant black eyes. ‘I do not need to be rescued like an invalid who is no longer in charge of his own behaviour!’
‘They might be worried,’ Lucy persisted, hovering indecisively over him.
‘Sit. My neck is beginning to ache looking up at you.’
She moved to pull one of the chairs across and he said irritably, ‘Just perch on the edge of the sofa. You will be perfectly safe, I assure you.’
‘Well…if you want to be alone, you know, perhaps the best thing would be for me to go…’
‘What are you doing here anyway?’ Nick asked, ignoring her suggestion. ‘Skulking in an office at eleven in the night? Have you nowhere else to go?’
‘Of course I do!’ Lucy’s temper snapped and she glared at him from under her lashes. ‘I just felt a little…restless, if you want to know. Funerals…’ the single word dropped into the silence between them like a stone, and she cleared her throat awkwardly before continuing ‘…depress and unsettle me. I thought I might be able to lose myself if I came here and caught up on some work. I know it seems a little odd, but…’ Her hands fidgeted on her lap and she was holding herself so rigid that she could feel every muscle in her slender body aching from the tension.
‘Funerals are depressing,’ Nick said in a flat, expressionless voice.
‘Nick, I know I said this to you today, but I really am…very, very sorry. I don’t know…would it help to talk about what happened?’
‘What happened was a car crash.’ He pressed his thumbs over his eyes and felt another sharp stab of guilt that the emotion most expected of him—sorrow—was so patently absent.
Gina had, outwardly, been everything a man could ever want, beautiful, sexy and exotically enticing, with a habit of flicking her long black hair and narrowing her eyes that could make a man do the unforgivable.
And for a very short while he had been as enamoured of her as any other man would have been, enamoured enough to walk up the aisle, confident that what he felt would last for eternity.
But it hadn’t lasted. He could truthfully say that his two years of marriage could be reduced to four months of happiness and then a long process of facing the inevitable.
‘How much have you had to drink?’
‘Enough to try and forget.’
‘She was very beautiful,’ Lucy said gently. ‘I can’t imagine what a nightmare these past two weeks must have been for you…’
‘Then I suggest you do not bother to try,’ Nick told her abruptly. His body was beginning to feel like a dead weight and his thoughts were blurred. Her voice was like a soothing flow of water around him. For one wild moment he actually hovered on the brink of telling her the truth, that the nightmare of grief she imagined him to be going through was a different sort of nightmare.
It was a nightmare of remembering the months of witnessing his wife’s unruly behaviour, her vicious accusations that he wasn’t man enough to satisfy her, that the only true lover in his life was his work. Every accusation had removed him further and further away from any lingering affection he might have felt towards her, and when her evenings out had begun to stretch into the odd night away he had reached a point of indifference.
But still he had held on, powerless to take the final step to terminate their marriage. When the call had come from her father in Greece that she had been involved in a car crash, speeding along one of the narrow, perilous roads that wound their way out of the city towards the family retreat in the hills, he had gone immediately, braced for some sort of remorse that if he had just paid her a bit more attention then she might not have stormed out of their London flat to have a bit of fun somewhere else.
The remorse had never come. The car crash had told its own sordid story of adultery, with her lover’s body in the passenger seat next to her, holding her in a final, mortal embrace.
He blearily wondered what his reliable, efficient secretary would say to such revelations and gave a wry, bitter grimace. Lucy was not a woman of the world. He opened his eyes and looked at her in frank appraisal, until he noticed her pale skin beginning to redden under the inspection.
‘You blush like a teenager,’ he said thickly. ‘I must have scared the hell out of you when you saw me in the corridor.’ His mind cleared a bit to accommodate that thought and he actually grinned with genuine amusement. ‘I am surprised you did not lock yourself in the office and call the police.’
‘It did occur to me,’ Lucy admitted with a reluctant smile. ‘You were the last person I was expecting to see.’
‘The atmosphere in the house was getting to me. The funeral was…bad enough, but being surrounded by two Greek communities, both sides wondering why she was being buried over here…tearful, sympathetic smiles barely hiding their thoughts that, as a Greek, she should have been buried over there…too much…had to get away…’
It was more than he would ever have confessed had he been sober. In fact, he wondered whether he would have confessed as much to anyone else. Probably not. But Lucy sat there, looking at him with such soft compassion that he found himself unable to resist the urge to confide at least some of what was going through his head. Madness.
‘Why did you choose to have her…you know…buried over here?’
‘This is where she lived and it is where I live. It was appropriate.’ His mouth twisted in a mimicry of a smile. ‘After all, should I not have a memory close by me of my beloved wife?’ A constant reminder, he thought bitterly, of the emptiness of the institution of marriage and the treachery of the female sex.
Lucy nodded and lapsed into silence.
Eventually, she cleared her throat. ‘I think it’s time I left now. Will you be all right here on your own? Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to call someone to come and be here with you? At times like this…you might find company helpful…’
‘I have company already.’
The dark, heavy-lidded eyes broodingly roamed over her face until she could feel every nerve-ending in her body tingle.
This was a first, to have his eyes settle on her and know that what he was seeing wasn’t his highly capable and utterly sexless secretary, and she could hear the clang of alarm bells ringing in her head.
The man had had too much to drink, was in the throes of a grief her mind could only begin to comprehend, and as such was in control of nothing, not even his thoughts. She had no idea what he was seeing when he looked at her the way he was looking at her now, with unblinkered concentration. It certainly wasn’t her. Maybe he was seeing the face of his wife, although how that could be was beyond her. Physically she was as different from Gina as chalk from cheese. Petite, boyishly slim with pale skin and short fair hair as opposed to voluptuously sexy, dark-eyed, olive-skinned with long black hair.
But she had dreamt of him for so long, had conjured up so many feverish images of being touched by him, that it was wickedly, pathetically, disturbingly exciting to have his attention focused on her.
‘It’s getting late, Nick; I really should be going…’
‘Or else what?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Or else what? Is anyone expecting you back at your house?’
‘Well…’
‘Your parents?’
‘I don’t live with my parents! My parents live in Cornwall!’ How old did he think she was? Twelve?
‘My unreserved apologies.’ He gave her a slow, lazy smile that sent the blood rushing through her body. ‘You look horrified that I could imply such a thing.’ There was something else in his expression now, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on; she just knew that, whatever it was, it was wreaking havoc with her already frazzled sense of composure. ‘You’re still in your funeral garb,’ he pointed out. ‘How long have you been here? Beavering away?’
‘I…I didn’t go back to your house after the service. I’m sorry. I couldn’t face…’
‘Hordes of sympathisers? Seems almost obscene to have
so many people gathered together at such a time, does it not? Chatting, catching up on old times with relatives they have not laid eyes on for years, making sure to keep their expressions suitably mournful.’
The cynicism in his voice made her flinch and she reminded herself that grief worked in different ways. Not everyone wore their feelings on their sleeve and Nick Constantinou would never be one of those who bared their soul and wept in front of an audience. That didn’t mean that his grief was any less profound.
‘It’s a difficult time,’ Lucy said evasively. ‘Look…’
‘Don’t go.’ He reached out and captured her wrist in his hand and a searing heat flooded her body. ‘Not yet.’
‘Would you like another glass of water?’ she said desperately. Her hand lay passively in his grip but she was acutely and painfully aware of the pressure of his palm against her flesh. ‘You should drink as much water as you can,’ she babbled on helplessly while her eyes fluttered with nervous fascination across his dark, shadowed face.
‘Stay. Talk to me. Tell me what you did after you left the church. Where did you go?’
‘I…well, I went to the supermarket. I meant to get back home but the supermarket was packed and it took me much longer than I thought to get around it. Almost an hour and a half! This is so dreary, so dull…’
‘I find your voice soothing.’
‘Right…’ Now he was absent-mindedly stroking the inside of her wrist with his thumb and sending hundreds of electric currents running up and down her arm. She could feel her brain struggling to impose order on what was happening but his black eyes were mesmerising. ‘Well…’ She gave a high-pitched, unsteady little laugh. ‘If you really want to know, I left the supermarket, dropped the stuff off at my flat and then decided that I couldn’t face staying there, so I drove to a restaurant and had something to eat…’
‘On your own?’
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