by Penny Jordan
‘To your grandfather,’ Saskia guessed.
‘Amongst others,’ Andreas agreed coolly, without enlightening her as to who such ‘others’ might be.
Unexpectedly there were suddenly dozens of questions she wanted to ask him: about his family, as well as his grandfather, and the island he intended to take her to, and about the woman his grandfather wanted him to marry. She had a vague idea that Greeks were very interested in protecting family interests and according to Emma his cousin was ‘mega wealthy’, as was Andreas himself.
Somehow, without knowing quite how it had happened, she discovered that Andreas had released her hand and that she was walking through the door he had opened for her.
* * *
‘READY, Saskia?’
Saskia felt the embarrassed colour start to seep up under her skin as Andreas approached her desk. Her colleagues were studiously avoiding looking openly at them but Saskia knew perfectly well that they were the cynosure of their attention. How could they not be?
‘Gordon, I’m afraid that Saskia is going to be late back from lunch,’ Andreas was announcing to her bemused boss as he came out from his office.
‘Have you told him our news yet, darling,’ Andreas asked her lovingly.
‘Er...no...’ Saskia couldn’t bring herself to look directly at him.
‘Saskia,’ she could hear her boss saying weakly as he looked on disbelievingly, ‘I don’t understand...’
He would understand even less if she tried to explain to him what was really happening, Saskia acknowledged bleakly. It seemed to her that it was a very unfair thing to do to deceive the man who had been so kind to her but what alternative did she really have.
‘You mustn’t blame Saskia,’ Andreas was saying protectively. ‘I’m afraid I’m the one who’s at fault. I insisted that our relationship should be kept a secret until the outcome of our takeover bid became public. I didn’t want Saskia to be accused of having conflicting loyalties—and I must tell you, Gordon, that she insisted that any kind of discussion about the takeover was off-limits between us... Mind you, talking about work was not exactly my number one priority when we were together,’ Andreas admitted, with a sensual look at Saskia that made her face burn even more hotly and caused more than one audible and envious gasp from her female co-workers.
‘Why did you have to do that?’ Saskia demanded fretfully the moment they were alone and out of earshot.
‘Do what?’ Andreas responded unhelpfully.
‘You know perfectly well what I mean,’ Saskia protested. ‘Why couldn’t we just have met somewhere?’
‘In secret?’ He looked more bored now than amorous, his eyebrows drawing together as he frowned impatiently down at her. He was a good deal taller than her, well over six foot, and it hurt her neck a little, craning to look up at him. She wished he wouldn’t walk so close to her; it made her feel uncomfortable and on edge and somehow aware of herself as a woman in a way that wasn’t familiar to her.
‘Haven’t I already made it plain to you that the whole object of this exercise is to bring our relationship into the public domain? Which is why—’ He smiled grimly at Saskia as he broke off from what he was saying to tell her silkily, ‘I’ve booked a table at the wine bar for lunch. I ate there last night and I have to say that the food was excellent—even if what happened later was less...palatable...’
Suddenly Saskia had had enough.
‘Look, I keep trying to tell you, last night was a mistake. I...’
‘I completely agree with you,’ Andreas assured her. ‘It was a mistake...your mistake...and whilst we’re on the subject, let me warn you, Saskia, if you ever manifest anything similar whilst you are engaged to me, if you ever even look at another man...’ He stopped as he saw the shock widening her eyes.
‘I’m half-Greek, my dear,’ he reminded her softly. ‘And when it comes to my woman, I’m more Greek than I am British...very much more...’
‘I’m not your woman,’ was the only response Saskia found she could make.
‘No,’ he agreed cynically. ‘You belong to any man who can afford you, don’t you, in reality? But...’ He stopped again as he heard the sharp sound of protest she made, her face white and then red as her emotions overwhelmed her self-control.
‘You have no right to speak to me like that,’ Saskia told him thickly.
‘No right? But surely as your fiancée I have every right,’ Andreas taunted her, and then, before she could stop him, he reached out and ran one long finger beneath her lower eyelashes, collecting on it the angry humiliated tears that had just fallen. ‘Tears?’ he mocked her. ‘My dear, you are an even better actress then I thought.’
They had reached the wine bar and Saskia was forced to struggle to control her emotions as he opened the door and drew her inside.
‘I don’t want anything to eat. I’m not hungry,’ she told him flatly once they had been shown to their table.
‘Sulking?’ he asked her succinctly. ‘I can’t force you to eat, but I certainly don’t intend to deny myself the pleasure of enjoying a good meal.’
‘There are things we have to discuss,’ he added in a cool, businesslike voice as he picked up the menu she had ignored and read it. ‘I know most of your personal details from your file, but if we are to convince my family and especially my grandfather that we are lovers, then there are other things I shall need to know...and things you will need to know about me.’
Lovers... Saskia just managed to stop herself from shuddering openly. If she had to accede to his blackmail then she was going to have to learn to play the game by his rules or risk being totally destroyed by him.
‘Lovers.’ She gave him a bleak smile. ‘I thought Greek families didn’t approve of sex before marriage.’
‘Not for their own daughters,’ he agreed blandly. ‘But since you are not Greek, and since I am half-British I am sure that my grandfather will be more...tolerant...’
‘But he wouldn’t be tolerant if you were engaged to your cousin?’ Saskia pressed, not sure why she was doing so and even less sure just why the thought of his cousin should arouse such a sensation of pain and hostility within her.
‘Athena, my cousin, is a widow, a previously married woman, and naturally my grandfather...’ He paused and then told her dryly, ‘Besides, Athena herself would never accept my grandfather’s interference in any aspect of her life. She is a very formidable woman.’
‘She’s a widow?’ For some reason Saskia had assumed that this cousin was a young girl. It had never occurred to her that she might already have been married.
‘A widow,’ Andreas confirmed. ‘With two teenage children.’
‘Teenage!’
‘She married at twenty-two,’ Andreas told her with a shrug. ‘That was almost twenty years ago.’
Saskia’s eyes widened as she did her sums. Athena was obviously older than Andreas. A lonely and no doubt vulnerable woman who was being pressurised into a second marriage she perhaps did not want, Saskia decided sympathetically.
‘However, you need not concern yourself too much with Athena, since it is doubtful that you will meet her. She lives a very peripatetic existence. She has homes in Athens, New York and Paris and spends much of her time travelling between them, as well as running the shipping line she inherited.’
A shipping line and a hotel chain. No wonder Andreas’s grandfather was so anxious for them to marry. It amazed Saskia that Andreas was not equally keen on the match, especially knowing the hard bargain he had driven over the takeover.
As though he had guessed what she was thinking, he leaned towards her and told her grittily, ‘Unlike you, I am not prepared to sell myself.’
‘I was not selling myself,’ Saskia denied hotly, and then frowned as the waiter approached their table carrying two plates of delicious-looking food.
‘I didn’
t order a meal,’ she began as he set one of them down in front of her and the other in front of Andreas.
‘No. I ordered it for you,’ Andreas told her. ‘I don’t like to see my women looking like skinny semi-starved rabbits. A Greek man may be permitted to beat his wife, but he would never stoop to starving her.’
‘Beat...’ Saskia began rising to the bait and then stopped as she saw the glint in his eyes and realised that he was teasing her.
‘I suspect you are the kind of woman, Saskia, who would drive a saint, never mind a mere mortal man, to be driven to subdue you, to master you and then to wish that he had had the strength to master himself instead.’
Saskia shivered as the raw sensuality of what he was saying hit her like a jolt of powerful electricity. What was it about him that made her so acutely aware of him, so nervously on edge?
More to distract herself than anything else she started to eat, unaware of the ruefully amused look Andreas gave her as she did so. If he didn’t know better he would have said that she was as inexperienced as a virgin. The merest allusion to anything sexual was enough to have her trembling with reaction, unable to meet his gaze. It was just as well that he knew it was all an act, otherwise... Otherwise what? Otherwise he might be savagely tempted to put his words into actions, to see if she trembled as deliciously when he touched her as she did when he spoke to her.
To counter what he was feeling he began to speak to her in a crisp, businesslike voice.
‘There are certain things you will need to know about my family background if you are going to convince my grandfather that we are in love.’
He proceeded to give her a breakdown of his immediate family, adding a few cautionary comments about his grandfather’s health.
‘Which does not mean that he is not one hundred and fifty per cent on the ball. If anything, the fact that he is now prevented from working so much means that he is even more ferociously determined to interfere in my life than he was before. He tells my mother that he is afraid he will die before I give him any great-grandchildren. If that is not blackmail I don’t know what is,’ Andreas growled.
‘It’s obviously a family vice,’ Saskia told him mock sweetly, earning herself a look that she refused to allow to make her quake in her shoes.
‘Ultimately, of course, our engagement will have to be broken,’ Andreas told her unnecessarily. ‘No doubt our sojourn on the island will reveal certain aspects of our characters that we shall find mutually unappealing, and on our return to England we shall bring our engagement to an end. But at least I shall have bought myself some time...and hopefully Athena will have decided to accept one of the many suitors my grandfather says are only too willing to become her second husband.’
‘And if she doesn’t?’ Saskia felt impelled to ask.
‘If she doesn’t, we shall just have to delay ending our engagement until either she does or I find an alternative way of convincing my grandfather that one of my sisters can provide him with his great-grandchildren.’
‘You don’t ever want to marry?’ Saskia was startled into asking.
‘Well, let’s just say that since I have reached the age of thirty-five without meeting a woman who has made me feel my life is unliveable without her by my side, I somehow doubt that I am likely to do so now. Falling in love is a young man’s extravagance. In a man past thirty it is more of a vain folly.’
‘My father fell in love with my mother when he was seventeen,’ Saskia couldn’t stop herself from telling him. ‘They ran away together...’ Her eyes clouded. ‘It was a mistake. They fell out of love with one another before I was born. An older man would at least have had some sense of responsibility towards the life he had helped to create. My father was still a child himself.’
‘He abandoned you?’ Andreas asked her, frowning.
‘They both did,’ Saskia told him tersely. ‘If it hadn’t been for my grandmother I would have ended up in a children’s home.’
Soberly Andreas watched her. Was that why she went trawling bars for men? Was she searching for the male love she felt she had been denied by her father? His desire to exonerate her from her behaviour irritated him. Why was he trying to make excuses for her? Surely he hadn’t actually been taken in by those tears earlier.
‘It’s time for us to leave,’ he told her brusquely.
CHAPTER FOUR
IF SOMEONE had told her two weeks ago that she would be leaving behind her everything that was familiar to fly to an unknown Greek island in the company of an equally unknown man to whom she was supposed to be engaged, Saskia would have shaken her head in denial and amusement—which just went to show!
Which just went to show what a combination of male arrogance, self-belief and determination could do, especially when it was allied to the kind of control that one particular male had over her, Saskia fretted darkly.
In less than fifteen minutes’ time Andreas would be picking her up in his Mercedes for the first leg of their journey to Aphrodite, the island Andreas’s grandfather had bought for his wife and named after the goddess of love.
‘Theirs was a love match but one that had the approval of both families,’ Andreas had told Saskia when he had been briefing her about his background.
A love match...unlike their bogus engagement. Just being a party to that kind of deceit, even though it was against her will, made Saskia feel uncomfortable, but nowhere near as uncomfortable as she had felt when she had had to telephone her grandmother and lie to her, saying that she was going away on business.
Andreas had tried to insist that she inform her grandmother of their engagement, but Saskia had refused.
‘You may be happy to lie to your family about our supposed “relationship”,’ she had told him with a look of smoky-eyed despair. ‘But I can’t lie to my grandmother about something so...’ She hadn’t been able to go on, unwilling to betray herself by admitting to Andreas that her grandmother would never believe that Saskia had committed herself and her future to a man without loving him.
Once the fall-out from the news of her ‘engagement’ had subsided at work, her colleagues had treated her with both wary caution and distance. She was now the boss’s fiancée and as such no longer really ‘one of them’.
All in all Saskia had spent the week feeling increasingly isolated and frightened, but she was too proud to say anything to anyone—a hang-up, she suspected, from the days of her childhood, when the fact that her parents’ story was so widely known, coupled with the way she had been dumped on her grandmother, had made her feel different, distanced from her schoolmates, who had all seemed to have proper mummies and daddies.
Not that anyone could have loved her more than her grandmother had done, as Saskia was the first to acknowledge now. Her home background had in reality been just as loving and stable, if not more so, than that of the majority of her peers.
She gave a small surreptitious look at her watch. Less than five minutes to go. Her heart thumped heavily. Her packed suitcase was ready and waiting in the hall. She had agonised over what she ought to take and in the end had compromised with a mixture of the summer holiday clothes she had bought three years previously, when she and Megan had gone to Portugal together, plus some of her lightweight office outfits.
She hadn’t seen Andreas since he had taken her out for lunch—not that she had minded that! No indeed! He had been attending a gruelling schedule of business meetings—dealing, if the trickles of gossip that had filtered through the grapevine were anything to go by, heroically with the problems posed by the challenging situation the hotels had fallen into prior to the takeover.
‘He’s visited every single one of our hotels,’ Saskia had heard from one admiring source. ‘And he’s been through every single aspect of the way they’re being run—and guess what?’
Saskia, who had been on the edge of the group who’d been listening
eagerly to this story, had swallowed uncomfortably, expecting to hear that Andreas had instituted a programme of mass sackings in order to halt the flood of unprofitable expenses, but to her astonishment instead she had heard, ‘He’s told everyone that their job is safe, provided they can meet the targets he’s going to be setting. Everywhere he’s been he’s given the staff a pep talk, told them how much he values the acquisition his group has made and how he personally is going to be held responsible by the board of directors if he can’t turn it into a profit-making asset.’
The gossip was that Andreas had a way with him that had his new employees not only swearing allegiance, but apparently praising him to the skies as well.
Well, they obviously hadn’t witnessed the side to his character she had done, was all that Saskia had been able to think as she listened a little bitterly to everyone’s almost euphoric praise of him.
It was ten-thirty now, and he wasn’t... Saskia tensed as she suddenly saw the large Mercedes pulling up outside her grandmother’s house. Right on time! But of course Andreas would not waste a precious second of his time unless he had to, especially not on her!
By the time he had reached the front door she had opened it and was standing waiting for him, her suitcase in one hand and her door key in the other.
‘What’s that?’
She could see the way he was frowning as he looked down at her inexpensive case and immediately pride flared through her sharpening her own voice as she answered him with a curt, ‘My suitcase.’
‘Give it to me,’ he instructed her briefly.
‘I can carry it myself,’ Saskia informed him grittily.
‘I’m sure you can,’ Andreas agreed, equally grimly. ‘But...’
‘But what?’ Saskia challenged him angrily. ‘But Greek men do not allow women to carry their own luggage nor to be independent from them in any way?’
Saskia could see from the way Andreas’s mouth tightened that he did not like what she had said. For some perverse reason she felt driven to challenge him, even though a part of her shrank from the storm signals she could see flashing in his eyes.