by Lynne Graham
‘I got into a real financial mess, that’s all,’ she muttered evasively, protecting her father as she always did, conscious of the derisive distaste such weakness roused in other, stronger men. And, drained by her outbursts and ashamed of them, she found herself settling back down into the chair again.
For the very first time she was genuinely scared of Angelos Petronides. He owned a piece of her, just as Leland once had, but he would be expecting infinitely more than a charade in return. She wasn’t taken in by his reassurances, or by that roughly gentle intonation she had never dreamt he might possess. In the space of ten minutes he had reduced her to a babbling, screeching wreck and, for now, he was merely content to have made his domineering presence felt.
‘Money is not a subject I discuss with women,’ Angelos told her quietly. ‘It is most definitely not a subject I ever wish to discuss with you again.’
Angelos Petronides, billionaire and benevolence personified? Maxie shuddered with disbelief. Did he ever read his own publicity? She had sat in on business meetings chaired by him, truly unforgettable experiences. The King and his terrified minions, who behaved as if at any moment he might snap and shout, ‘Off with their heads!’ Grown men perspired and stammered with nerves in his presence, cowered when he shot down their suggestions, went into cold panic if he frowned. He did not suffer fools gladly.
He had a brilliant mind, but that superior intellect had made him inherently devious and manipulative. He controlled the people around him. In comparison, Leland Coulter had been harmless. Maxie had coped with Leland. And Leland give him his due, had never tried to pose as her only friend in a hostile world. But over her now loomed a six-foot-four-inch giant threat without a conscience.
‘I know where you’re coming from,’ Maxie heard herself admit out loud as she lifted her beautiful head again.
Angelos gazed down at her with steady black eyes. ‘Then why all the histrionics?’
Maxie gulped, disconcerted to feel that awful surge of temper rise again. With that admission she had expected to make him wary, force him to ease back. About the last reaction she had expected was his cool acknowledgement that she was intelligent enough to recognise his tactics for what they were. The iron hand in the velvet glove.
‘Have dinner with me tonight,’ Angelos suggested smoothly. ‘We can talk then. You need some time to think things over.’
‘I need no time whatsoever.’ Maxie stared back up into those astonishingly dark and impenetrable eyes and suffered the oddest light-headed sensation, as if the floor had shifted beneath her. Her lashes fluttered, a slight bemused frown line drawing her fine brows together as she shook her head slightly, long golden hair thick as skein on skein of silk rippling round her shoulders. ‘I will not be your mistress.’
‘I haven’t asked yet.’
A cynical laugh was torn from Maxie as she rose restively to her feet again. ‘You don’t need to be that specific. I certainly didn’t imagine you were planning to offer me anything more respectable. And, no, I do not intend to discuss this any further,’ she asserted tightly, carefully focusing on a point to the left of him, the tip of her tongue stealing out to moisten her dry lower lip in a swift defensive motion. ‘So either you are a good loser or a bad loser, Mr Petronides…I imagined I’ll find out which soon enough—’
‘I do not lose,’ Angelos breathed in a roughened undertone. ‘I am also very persistent. If you make yourself a challenge, I will resent the waste of time demanded by pursuit but, like any red-blooded male, I will undoubtedly want you even more.’
Without even knowing why, Maxie shivered. There was the most curious buzz in the atmosphere, sending tiny little warning pulses of alarm through her tautening length. Her unsettled and bemused eyes swerved involuntarily back to him and locked into the ferocious hold of his compelling scrutiny.
‘I will also become angry with you,’ Angelos forecast, shifting soundlessly closer, his husky drawl thickening and lowering in pitch to a mesmeric level of intimacy. ‘You made Leland jump through no hoops…why should I? And I would treat you so much better than he did. I know what a woman likes. I know what makes a woman of your nature feel secure and appreciated, what makes her happy, content, satisfied…’
Like a child drawn too close to a blazing fire in spite of all warnings, Maxie was transfixed. She could feel her own heartbeat accelerating, the blood surging rich and vibrantly alive through her veins. A kind of craving, an almost terrifying upswell of excitement potently and powerfully new to her gripped her.
‘A-Angelos…?’ she whispered, feeling dizzy and disorientated.
He reached out and drew her to him without once breaking that spellbinding appraisal. ‘How easily you can say my name…’
And she said it again, like a supplicant eager to please.
Those stunning eyes of his blazed gold as a hot sun with satisfaction. She trembled, legs no longer dependable supports beneath her, and yet in all her life she had never been more shockingly aware of her own body. Her braless breasts were swelling beneath the denim shirt she wore, the tender nipples suddenly tightening to thrust with aching sensitivity against the rough grain of the fabric.
There was a sudden enormous jarring thud on the windowpane behind her. Startled, Maxie almost jumped a foot in the air, and even Angelos flinched.
‘Relax…a football hit the window,’ he groaned in apparent disbelief as he raised his dark, imperious head. ‘It is now being retrieved by two grubby little boys.’
But Maxie wasn’t listening. She had been plunged into sudden appalled confusion by the discovery that Angelos Petronides had both arms loosely linked round her and had come within treacherous inches of kissing her. Even worse, she realised, every fibre of her yearning body had been longing desperately for that kiss.
Jerking back abruptly from the proximity of his lean, muscular frame, Maxie pressed shaking hands against her hot, flushed cheeks. ‘Get out of here and don’t ever come back!’
Angelos grated something guttural in Greek, stood his ground and dealt her a hard, challenging look. ‘What’s the matter with you?’
And what remained of Maxie’s self-respect drained away as she recognised his genuine bewilderment. Dear heaven, she had encouraged him. She had been straining up to him, mindlessly eager for his lovemaking, paralysed to the spot with excitement and longing, and he knew it too. And did his body feel as hers did now? Deprived, aching… As she registered such unfamiliar, intimate thoughts, Maxie realised just how out of control she was.
‘I don’t have to explain myself to you,’ she gabbled in near panic as she rushed past him out into the hall to pull open the front door. ‘I want you to leave and I don’t want you to come back. In fact I’ll put the dog on you if you ever come here again!’
In a demonstration of disturbing volatility, Angelos vented a sudden appreciative laugh, the sound rich and deep and earthy. His quality of dark implacability vanished under the onslaught of that amusement. Maxie stared. The sheer charisma of that wolfish grin took her by surprise.
‘The dog’s more likely to lick me to death…and you?’ An ebullient ebony brow elevated as he watched the hot colour climb in her perplexed face.
‘Leave!’ The word erupted from Maxie, so desperate was she to silence him.
‘And you?’ Angelos repeated with steady emphasis. ‘For some strange reason, what just happened between us, which on my level was nothing at all, unnerved you, scared you…embarrassed you…’
As he listed his impressions Maxie watched him with a sick, sinking sensation in her stomach, for never before had she been so easily read, and never before had a man made her feel like a specimen on a slide under a microscope.
‘Now why should honest hunger provoke shame?’ Angelos asked softly. ‘Why not pleasure?’
‘Pleasure?’
‘I do not presume to know your every thought…as yet,’ Angelos qualified with precision. His brilliant eyes intent, he strolled indolently back into the fresh air. ‘But surely whe
n ambition and desire unite, you should be pleased?’
He left her with that offensive suggestion, striding down the path and out to the pavement where a uniformed chauffeur waited beside a long, dark limousine. The two wide-eyed and decidedly grubby little boys, one of whom was clutching the football, were trying without success to talk to the po-faced chauffeur. She watched as Angelos paused to exchange a laughing word with them, bending to their level with disconcerting ease. Disturbed by her own fascination, she slammed shut the door on her view.
He would be back; she knew that. She couldn’t explain how but she knew it as surely as she knew that dawn came around every morning. Feeling curiously like someone suffering from concussion, she wandered aimlessly back down into the kitchen and was surprised to find Liz sitting there, her kindly face anxious.
‘Bounce started whining behind the studio door. He must’ve heard you shouting. I came back into the house but naturally I didn’t intrude when I realised it was just an argument,’ Liz confided ruefully. ‘Unfortunately, before I retreated again, I heard rather more than I felt comfortable hearing. You’re a wretched dog, Bounce…your grovelling greeting to Angelos Petronides affected my judgement!’
‘So you realised who my visitor was—?’
‘Not initially, but my goodness I should’ve done!’ Liz exclaimed feelingly. ‘You’ve talked about Angelos Petronides so often—
‘Have I?’ Maxie breathed with shaken unease, her cheeks burning.
Liz smiled. ‘All the time you were criticising him and complaining about his behaviour, I could sense how attracted you were to him…’
A hoarse laugh erupted from Maxie’s dry throat ‘I wish you’d warned me. It hit me smack in the face when I wasn’t prepared for it. Stupid, wretched chemistry, and I never even realised… I feel such an idiot now!’ Eyes prickling with tears of reaction, she studied the table, struggling to reinstate her usual control. ‘And I’ve got the most banging headache s-starting up…’
‘Of course you have,’ Liz murmured soothingly. ‘I’ve never heard you yelling at the top of your voice before.’
‘But then I have never hated anyone so much in my life as I hate Angelos Petronides,’ Maxie confessed shakily. ‘I wanted to kill him, Liz…I really wanted to kill him! Now I’m in debt to him instead of Leland—’
‘I did hear him say that you didn’t have to worry about that.’
Maxie’s eyes flashed. ‘If it takes me until I’m ninety, I’ll pay him back every penny!’
‘He may have hurt your pride, Maxie…but he was most emphatic about not wanting repayment. He sounded sincere to me, and surely you have to give him some credit for his generosity whether you choose to regard it as a debt or otherwise?’ Liz reasoned with an air of frowning confusion. ‘The man has to be seriously interested in you to make such a big gesture on your behalf—’
‘Liz—’ Maxie broke in with a pained half-smile.
‘Do you think he might turn out to be the marrying kind?’ the older woman continued with a sudden teasing smile.
That outrageous question made Maxie’s jaw drop. ‘Liz, for heaven’s sake…are you nuts?’ she gasped. ‘What put that in your mind?’
‘Your godmother’s will—’
‘Oh, that…forget that, Liz. That’s yesterday’s news. Believe me when I say that Angelos Petronides was not thinking along the lines of anything as…well, anything as lasting as marriage.’ Mindful of her audience, Maxie chose her words carefully and suppressed a sigh over the older woman’s romantic imagination. ‘He is not romantically interested in me. He is not that sort of man. He’s hard, he’s icy cold—’
‘He didn’t sound cold on my doorstep…he sounded downright keen! You’d be surprised how much I can pick up from the nuances in a voice.’
Liz was rather innocent in some ways. Maxie really didn’t want to get down to basics and spell out just how a big, powerful tycoon like Angelos Petronides regarded her. As a social inferior, a beautiful body, a target object to acquire for his sexual enjoyment, a live toy. Maxie shrank with revulsion and hated him all over again. ‘Liz…he would be offended by the very suggestion that he would even consider a normal relationship with a woman who’s been another man’s mistress—’
‘But you haven’t been another man’s mistress!’
Maxie ignored that point After the horrendous publicity she had enjoyed, nobody would ever believe that now. ‘To be blunt, Liz…all Angelos wants is to get me into bed!’
‘Oh…’ Liz breathed, and blushed until all her freckles merged. ‘Oh, dear, no…you don’t want to get mixed up with a man like that.’
Maxie lay in bed that night, listening to the distant sound of the traffic. She couldn’t forgive herself for being attracted to a male like Angelos Petronides. It was impossible that she could like anything about him. ‘A woman of your nature,’ he had said. His one little slip. Wanton, available, already accustomed to trading her body in return for a luxurious lifestyle. That was what he had meant. Her heart ached and she felt as if she was bleeding inside. How had she ever sunk to the level where she had a reputation like that?
When Maxie had first been chosen as the image to launch a new range of haircare products, she had been a complete unknown and only eighteen years old. Although she had never had the slightest desire to be a model, she had let her father persuade her to give it a try and had swiftly found herself earning what had then seemed like enormous amounts of money.
However, once the novelty had worn off, she had loathed the backbiting pressure and superficiality of the modelling circuit. She had saved like mad and had planned to find another way to make a living.
But all the time, in the background of her life, her father had continued to gamble. Relying on her income as a safety net, he had, without her knowledge, begun playing for higher and higher stakes. To be fair, Leland’s casino manager had cut off Russ Kendall’s credit line the minute he’d suspected the older man was in over his head. Maxie had met Leland Coulter for the first time the day she settled her father’s outstanding tab at his casino.
‘You won’t change the man, Maxie,’ he had told her then. ‘If he was starving, he would risk his last fiver on a bet. He has to be the one who wants to change.’
After that humiliating episode her father had made her so many promises. He had sworn blind that he would never gamble again but inevitably he had broken his word. And, barred from the reputable casinos, he had gone dangerously down-market to play high-rolling poker games in smoky back rooms with the kind of tough men who would happily break his fingers if he didn’t pay his dues on time. That was when Maxie’s life had come completely unstuck…
Having got himself into serious debt, and learning to his dismay that his daughter had no savings left after his previous demands, Russ had been very badly beaten up. He had lost a kidney. In his hospital bed, he had sobbed with shame and terror in her arms. He had been warned that if he didn’t come up with the money he owed, he would be crippled the next time.
Distraught, Maxie had gone to Leland Coulter for advice. And Leland had offered her an arrangement. He would pay off her father’s gambling debts and allow her to repay him at her leisure on condition that she moved in with him. He had been very honest about what he wanted. Not sex, he had insisted. No, what Leland had craved most had been the ego-boosting pleasure of being seen to possess a beautiful young woman, who would preside over his dinner table, act as his hostess, entertain his friends and always be available to accompany him wherever he went.
It hadn’t seemed so much to ask. Nobody else had been prepared to loan her that amount of money. And she had been so agonisingly grateful that her father was safe from further harm. She hadn’t seen the trap she was walking into. She hadn’t even been aware that Leland was a married man until the headlines had hit the tabloids and taken her reputation away overnight. She had borne the blame for the breakup of his marriage.
‘Jennifer and I split up because she had an affair,’ Leland had admit
ted grudgingly when Maxie had roundly objected to the anomalous situation he had put her in. ‘But this way, with you by my side, I don’t feel like a fool…all right?’
And she had felt sorry for him then, right through the protracted and very public battle he and his wife had had over alimony and property. Jennifer and Leland had fought each other every inch of their slow path to the divorce court, yet a week before the hearing, when Leland had had a heart attack, the only woman he had been able to think about when he was convinced that he was at his last gasp had, most tellingly, been his estranged wife. ‘Go away, leave me alone… I need Jennifer here… I don’t want her seeing you with me now!’ he had cried in pathetic masculine panic.
And that had hurt. In a crazy way she had grown rather fond of Leland, even of his silly showing-off and quirky little vanities. Not a bad man, just a selfish one, like all the men she had ever known, and she hoped he was happy now that he was back with his Jennifer. But he had used her not only to soothe his wounded vanity but also, and less forgivably, she recognised now, as a weapon with which to punish his unfaithful wife. And Maxie could not forget that, or forgive herself for the blind naivety that had allowed it to happen in the first place. Never, ever again, she swore, would she be used…
Early the next morning, Maxie helped Liz pack. Her friend was heading off to stay with friends in Devon. The fact that her house wouldn’t be left empty during her absence was a source of great relief to Liz. The previous year her home had been burgled and her studio vandalised while she was away.
As soon as she had seen the older woman off, Maxie spent an hour slapping on make-up like war-paint and dressing up in style. Angelos Petronides needed a lesson and Maxie was determined to give it to him.
Mid-morning, she pawned the one piece of valuable jewellery she owned. She had been eleven when she’d found the Victorian bracelet buried in a box of cheap costume beads which had belonged to her mother. She had cried, guessing why the bracelet had been so well concealed. Even in the three short years of her marriage, her poor mother had doubtless learnt the hard way that when her husband was short of money he would sell anything he could get his hands on. Afterwards, Russ would be terribly sorry and ashamed, but by then it would be too late and the treasured possession would be gone. So Maxie had kept the bracelet hidden too.