by Lynne Graham
The supervisor, a thin, sour woman, frowned when Ellie signed in. ‘You took off on Monday night without a word to anyone,’ she censured. ‘You didn’t even phone in sick. I had to put in a report to Personnel.’
‘Yes. I expect you did. I’m sorry.’ Ellie added another pound of flesh to Dio’s mounting tally of sins and fumed all the way up to level eight.
Midway through her shift, she went down to the basement restroom for her usual cup of coffee. Meg dropped into the vacant seat beside her. ‘Where on earth did you go on Monday evening?’ she demanded. ‘I was so worried when you didn’t come down for your break. I was scared there’d been a row, because that bloke you told me about—’
‘What bloke?’
‘You know, the one that was annoying you.’ Meg frowned at her. ‘Big blond bloke called Bolton. He walked right up to me the minute I began work on your floor and demanded to know where you were.’
Ellie paled. ‘Sorry.’
‘I had to tell him, love. Did he come upstairs looking for you?’
Ellie stilled. ‘I don’t know…I didn’t see him,’ she muttered, suddenly wondering if it was Ricky Bolton who had overheard Dio’s wretched profiteering plans.
The conversation of two other women nearby attracted her attention.
‘I bet she’s just a secretary or something…’
‘Not the way she was done up, with the hat and all,’ the other argued vehemently. ‘Anyway, why would he take a secretary to his dad’s funeral?’
Ellie cleared her dry throat. ‘Who are they talking about?’
‘The mystery blonde Mr Alexiakis arrived in Athens with. A secretary!’ Meg chuckled. ‘Not in those clothes!’
‘Some secretaries are very highly qualified and earn top salaries,’ Ellie hastened to point out.
One of the other women leant across the gap separating them and said, ‘That blonde piece was a dead ringer for you, Ellie.’ She gave an outrageous wink. ‘And you did go AWOL that night. Anything you’d like to confess?’
‘Me…me?’ Ellie repeated, sharply disconcerted and striving for more convincing vigour.
‘Ellie would be too busy lecturing our Dio about sexism in the workplace to get off with him!’ someone else mocked.
‘I’m rather behind tonight. I’d better get back to work,’ Ellie told Meg breathlessly as the dialogue roamed away from her again, leaving her limp.
She caught the bus home at the end of her shift, feeling both tired and stressed out. As she walked down the street where she lived, she could not help but notice the long silver limousine parked outside the shop. Fierce tension tautened her slim figure and her heart raced so fast it was a challenge to breathe. As she approached, Dio Alexiakis got out of the car, the movement fluid and controlled, without any suggestion of haste.
As usual, he looked spectacular. Charcoal-grey suit, crisp shadow stripe shirt, elegant silk tie in muted shades. Ellie’s heart went from racing to sinking. Dio looked every inch what he was, she acknowledged dully. A very rich and powerful businessman, highly sophisticated and exquisitely well groomed. How she had ever for one second imagined that she could have a relationship with someone like him?
Ellie removed her keys from her bag with an unsteady hand. ‘You’re not playing fair, Dio. I told you I didn’t want this,’ she reminded him.
‘I hurt you and I’m sorry,’ Dio murmured steadily.
Unprepared for a blunt assertion of that ego-battering truth, Ellie twisted her head away. Her strained eyes stung with tears as she fumbled blindly to get the key into the lock and get the shop door safely shut behind her again.
Dio plucked the key from her nerveless grip, opened the door and stood back.
Ellie stepped inside and adjusted the alarm so that it wouldn’t go off. ‘I just don’t want to speak to you…OK?’ she said stiltedly.
‘No. It’s not OK. I want to talk to you.’
Ellie swallowed hard. All he probably wanted to do was explain and go away again. With as much dignity as she could muster, she simply shrugged as if she didn’t really care either way. Dio followed her up the steep narrow staircase behind the counter. She unlocked the door of her bedsit and switched on the lamp by her bed.
It was a spacious room and she was proud of it. She had painted the walls a sunny yellow, put up posters, and covered the armchair with a colourful throw. Tossing her keys on the gate-leg table by the window, she turned back to him with pronounced reluctance.
Dio studied her with an intensity she could feel right through to her bones. She flushed and folded her arms, suddenly horribly conscious of her serviceable rain jacket, faded jeans and sweater. In the act of tilting her chin, she connected with glittering black eyes. She quivered, treacherous heat pooling between her thighs, a strength of craving that appalled her instantly awakened.
‘Come home with me’ Dio demanded thickly.
‘No!’ Ellie gasped, reeling in bemusement from that invitation.
Dark colour scored his hard cheekbones. His dense lashes swept down low over his stunning gaze and he breathed in deep, his tension as strong as her own. ‘You’re right. We have to talk this out first,’ he conceded with gritty reluctance.
First? Ellie spun away on legs that trembled, shattered that he could reduce her to such a level with just one smouldering glance.
‘I went off on a tangent with you on the island,’ Dio admitted without hesitation. ‘When my chief accountant called me with the bad news, I cut him short. I didn’t want to discuss it any further. I’m afraid I just assumed that you had made that phone call from the airport. I was outraged.’
‘Yes,’ Ellie conceded stiffly.
‘But this morning I learnt that you had been telling the truth all along. There was someone else there that night. His arrival and his departure were recorded by the security camera in the corridor,’ Dio revealed ruefully. ‘If I had been in a more focused frame of mind at the time, I would’ve recalled the presence of that camera and I would have been able to check out your story immediately.’
Ellie nodded in silence without looking back at him, her delicate profile taut.
‘I have a hot temper. But I don’t usually rush into making instant judgements on the basis of circumstantial evidence,’ Dio continued.
‘Well, it didn’t look good for me, did it?’ Ellie responded with determined lightness, keen to bring his visit to a speedy conclusion. ‘You didn’t know me, so how could you know that I wouldn’t do something like that?’
‘You’re being very generous, but that’s not an excuse I need to hide behind. We had spent enough time together. I should have known,’ Dio contradicted levelly. ‘I very much regret the way I treated you on Chindos. I was…brutal.’
Ellie didn’t argue that point. She stared at her own feet, eager to focus on anything that helped her to resist the temptation to look at him again. He was making resistance difficult. He hadn’t leapt on the excuse she had offered him, as most men would have done. He wasn’t trying to lessen his own offence. He wasn’t trying to deny that he had cruelly humiliated her.
The silence stretched and stretched. She knew he was waiting for her to say something, but she had nothing to say.
Dio exhaled in a soft hiss. ‘The employee who tipped off one of my competitors was an accounts manager called—’
‘Ricky Bolton?’ Ellie interrupted before she could think better of it.
His dark eyes narrowed. ‘How did you know who it was? I thought you didn’t see the man.’
‘I didn’t, but during my break this evening Meg told me that he’d asked where I was that night, and he is an accounts manager—’
‘Why would Bolton have been asking where you were?’
Ellie grimaced. ‘He was the guy who was always trying to chat me up on level eight.’
At that admission, Dio’s jawline took on an aggressive slant. ‘I was even denied the pleasure of sacking him. He resigned from his job the next day. He exchanged the information he had picked up
for a more senior position in the other company—not that he’ll be there for long.’
‘Why not?’
A grim smile curved Dio’s wide, sensual mouth. ‘He has no company loyalty. How can he be trusted? The first excuse they get, he’ll be fired.’
‘Oh…’ Her shadowed gaze clung to that lean strong face, her mouth running dry, her breath feathering in her throat. ‘You don’t seem as angry as I thought you’d still be.’
‘I put my plans for a buy-out on hold. And before word got out I made a healthy profit selling the stock I held in company A…’ His brilliant dark eyes held hers as he utilised the same terminology he had employed to explain his tactics as they had lain in bed together at the beach house.
Ellie flushed, but she still couldn’t break that enervating visual link.
‘As for company B, my competitors mistakenly assumed that if I was interested, company B must have some wonderful new technology under wraps. They bought a massive amount of their stock,’ Dio continued with a sardonic edge to his deep-pitched drawl. ‘Having now discovered otherwise, when they unload that stock, they are likely to make a loss.’
‘So in the end you’ll probably pick up that company for a song…’
Silence fell and lingered. Dio studied her with dark, deep, intent eyes. Ellie tensed like a mouse sensing a cat. She was unbearably aware of his potent masculinity. Indeed, beneath that slumbrous appraisal her breasts stirred and ached, their sensitive peaks straining to wanton tautness. Hot pink embellished her cheekbones.
In one fluid movement, Dio closed the distance between them. ‘I won’t hurt you like that again, Ellie.’
The colour in her face receded. ‘I think you should leave now, Dio.’
His winged ebony brows pleated, his surprise unconcealed. ‘Why?’
And with that one word, which revealed just how easily Dio had expected to win her forgiveness, Ellie was armoured against him. All weakness put back under safe lock and key. ‘Surely that’s obvious?’ she murmured drily. ‘What happened on the island isn’t ever going to happen again. We’ve got nothing more to say to each other.’
‘I won’t let you go,’ Dio declared in a silken tone of steel.
Her green eyes flared bright with resentment. ‘Who the heck do you think you are to say that to me?’
‘Your lover,’ Dio responded softly.
Ellie paled at that retaliation.
‘I told you I wasn’t into one-night stands,’ he reminded her steadily. ‘You’re still angry with me, Ellie. I understand that, but it’s hardly an insurmountable problem.’
‘Whether I’m angry or not is irrelevant,’ Ellie protested tautly. ‘On the island…us…well, it was more like a fantasy, a dream.’
Dio dealt her a sizzling smile. ‘Thanks.’
Ellie stiffened, annoyed that he wasn’t taking her seriously. ‘But now we’re back in the real world, Dio.’
‘Even on Chindos, I was not aware that we had left it—’
‘Well, I certainly had,’ Ellie countered vehemently. ‘It was my natural environment. Idyllic moonlit beach, handsome foreigner saying all the right things…and pow, suddenly we’re in bed!’
Dio frowned. ‘What are you trying to say?’
‘We let ourselves forget who we both are,’ Ellie stated curtly.
‘And what are we but two people who desire each other?’ Dio demanded forcefully.
‘I’m an ordinary working girl and you’re a super-rich Greek tycoon! Stop trying to duck the issue,’ Ellie told him in exasperation. ‘I could have been the cleaner on the top floor all my life and you’d never have noticed that I was even alive!’
‘I would have noticed you—’
‘No, you wouldn’t have!’ Ellie was determined to drive her point home. ‘Because someone like you doesn’t really ever look at someone like me—’
‘But now that I have looked, I’m not backing off,’ Dio interrupted with stubborn assurance. ‘As for you being an ordinary working girl, that’s a problem I would be happy to deal with.’
‘A problem?’ Ellie gave him a bemused look. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I want to keep the fantasy going. Fantasy I understand,’ Dio confessed as he calmly linked his arms round her small but taut figure. ‘I think you’re adorable, yineka mou.’
‘A-adorable…’ Ellie echoed weakly, feeling like a woman trying to stem a damburst with a piece of paper.
‘There’s no need for you to work,’ Dio murmured with a husky intimacy that sent a flick of fire dancing over her entire skin surface. ‘I’ll buy you an apartment—’
‘An a-apartment?’ Ellie stammered in total bewilderment.
Dio ran a long brown forefinger in a silken caress along her sensitive jawbone and tipped up her chin to gaze hungrily down into her widening eyes. ‘I’m Greek. I want to take care of you in every way. You look stunned. Why? I told you on Chindos that I had plans for you.’
In serious shock, Ellie parted her lips, but no sound came out the first time. Her vocal cords had seized up. The second time, a thready version of her usual brisk voice emerged. ‘Let me get this straight…you are asking me to be your mistress?’
‘I am asking you to be my woman,’ Dio countered with megawatt cool.
‘Your little toy…’ Ellie squeezed out, since her lungs felt as if they were on the brink of collapse. Oh, what a bitter irony that he should make such a suggestion! She didn’t know whether to laugh or scream.
Dio studied her with a reproachful light in his dark gaze. ‘That is not how it would be between us.’
‘Would you ask a woman from your own background to be your mistress?’ Ellie could not resist demanding.
Dio flung back his arrogant dark head, black eyes glittering with stars. ‘You are the only woman I have ever asked.’
‘Sorry, I’m not available,’ Ellie told him without a single shade of regret.
Dio slid lean brown fingers into the fall of her silvery hair, holding her imprisoned. Scorching eyes roamed over her flushed and angry face. ‘You’re hooked. You just won’t admit it yet. You want me as much as I want you—’
‘Right now, I could give you freezer burn!’ Ellie warned him.
‘Let’s see…shall we?’
‘Dio, no—’
But Dio crushed her soft mouth under his. And then he sent his tongue delving with carnal expertise into the tender interior of her mouth. Plunging and withdrawing, he set fire to her every skin cell in a charged and erotic reminder of how he had once invaded her quivering and eager body. Her thighs trembled. Helpless in the grip of that excitement, she pushed into the lean, hard heat and muscularity of his powerful frame. Recognising the bold thrust of his erection against her, she melted into hot liquid honey inside herself.
With a shuddering groan, Dio cupped two big hands round her face and stared down at her with raw sexual hunger. ‘Why shouldn’t I offer you financial support? It would be as much for my own convenience as yours. I want you to travel with me. I want you to be there for me…’
The fevered heat in Ellie’s bloodstream drained away, axed by his physical withdrawal of passion but even more by his candour. ‘What you want is a sex slave on tap…’
‘I’d be bored rigid with a sex slave,’ Dio retorted with unblemished cool.
A ragged and involuntary laugh escaped Ellie. But, raising her hands, she firmly detached herself from him and stepped back. ‘You are so smooth, Dio. And this ridiculous conversation is totally pointless. You’re wasting your time.’
His dark, deep-set eyes rested on her, his strong bone structure clenching. ‘You belong with me—’
‘No, I definitely don’t.’ Ellie tossed back her head as she challenged that contention. ‘Nor do I have the slightest desire to be kept by anyone. The hours I work, I haven’t even got room for a man in my life. I should be furious with you for asking me to be your mistress. But you did remind me that you are Greek. I suppose I have to make allowances for cultural differences
…’
A dark rise of blood now marked Dio’s spectacular cheekbones. ‘I think you want me to chase you—’
‘That’s your ego talking. What I want is to forget we ever met,’ Ellie contradicted with fierce conviction, her fingernails biting into her palms. ‘But you’re so used to being top of every woman’s wish list that when I say no you can’t accept that I mean no!’
Black eyes burned into hers in ferocious challenge. ‘If I walk away now, it’s over.’
At that warning, and in spite of all she had said, Ellie’s breath snarled up in her throat. She felt hollow in the taut, waiting silence which followed.
Without another word, Dio strode to the door. And then he was gone.
Ellie waited for a few minutes, and then went downstairs to lock up after him. When she came back up, the room felt empty and cold. It was as if Dio had taken all the light and energy with him. She dismissed that fanciful impression and strove without success to appreciate the irony of the proposition he had laid before her. After all, no persuasion known to mankind would have persuaded Ellie to even consider such a lifestyle…
Her mother had been her father’s mistress for sixteen years, a covert relationship full of lies and endless pretences. From the day she was old enough to finally understand why her mother had no friends in the small coastal town where they had lived, Ellie had been bitterly ashamed of her parentage. Leigh Morgan had decided that she could not live without the married father of her child, and in so doing, she had wrecked her own life.
Ellie suppressed her memories of her less than idyllic childhood and grimaced. No, she would never be guilty of repeating her mother’s mistakes. In a couple of weeks Dio probably wouldn’t even remember her name. Unfortunately, she suspected that she was going to be remembering him for a very long time…
Slicing through her defences, Dio had sent her flying high into the realms of romantic fantasy. He had taken her to paradise in bed. But within hours he had mercifully brought her back down to earth with a jarring crash. He had hurt her more than she had known she could be hurt. She had learnt that she was far more naive than she would ever have been prepared to admit.