by Lynne Graham
Trembling, Maxie stared at him, sapphire eyes dark with shaken arousal. Cold fear snaked through her. He was playing with her just as he might have played with a toy. Using his carnal expertise he was taunting her, winding her up, demonstrating his sexual mastery.
‘Don’t touch me!’ Her hand whipped up and caught him across one hard cheekbone, and then she froze in dismay at what she had done.
With striking speed Angelos closed his fingers round that offending hand, and slowly he smiled again. ‘Frustration should make you angry.’
Beneath her strained and bemused gaze, he bent his glossy dark head and pressed his lips hotly to the centre of her stinging palm. It was electrifying. It was as if every tiny bit of her body was suddenly programmed to overreact. And then, while she was still struggling to comprehend the incredible strength of his power over her, he caught her to him with indolent assurance and simply, finally, kissed her.
Only there was nothing simple about that long-awaited kiss. It blew Maxie away with excitement. It was like no kiss she had ever received. That hard, sensual mouth connected with hers and instantly she needed to be closer to him than his own skin. Pulses pounding at an insane rate, she clutched at him with frantic hands, reacting to the violent need climbing inside her, craving more with every passing second.
And then it was over. Angelos studied her with burnished eyes of appreciation, all virile male strength and supremacy as he absorbed the passion-glazed blankness of her hectically flushed and beautiful face.
‘Come on,’ he urged her thickly.
She hadn’t even realised the limousine had stopped. Now he was closing his jacket round her again with immense care, practically lifting her back out into the rain and the sharp fresh air which she drank in great thirsty gulps. She felt wildly disorientated. For timeless minutes the world beyond the limousine just hadn’t existed for her. In confusion, she curved herself into the support of the powerful arm welded to her narrow back and bowed her head.
Without warning, Angelos tensed and vented a crushing oath, suddenly thrusting her behind him. Maxie looked up just in time to see a photographer running away from them. Simultaneously two powerfully built men sprinted from the car behind the limo and grabbed him before he could make it across to the other side of the street.
Angelos untensed again, straightening big shoulders. ‘My security men will expose his film. That photo of us will never see the light of day.’
In a daze, Maxie watched that promise carried out. As a demonstration of ruthlessness it took her breath away. She had often wished that she could avoid the intrusive cameras of the paparazzi, but she had never seen in action the kind of brute power which Angelos exercised to protect his privacy.
And it was his privacy that he had been concerned about, she sensed. Certainly not hers. Why was it that she suspected that Angelos would go to great lengths to avoid being captured in newsprint by her side? Why was it that she now had the strongest feeling that Angelos was determined not to be seen in public with her?
Shivering with reaction at that lowering suspicion, she emerged from her tangled thoughts to find herself standing in a stark stainless steel lift. ‘Where are we?’ she muttered then, with a frown of bewilderment.
The doors sped soundlessly back on a vast expanse of marble flooring.
‘My apartment… where else?’
Maxie flinched in dismay, her brain cranking back into sudden activity. If that paparazzo had escaped, he would’ve had a highly embarrassing and profitable picture of her entering Angelos Petronides’s apartment wrapped intimately in his jacket. No prizes for guessing what people would’ve assumed. She just could not believe how stupid she had been.
‘I thought you were taking me back to Liz’s,’ she admitted rather unsteadily.
Angelos angled up a mocking brow. ‘I never said I was…and, after our encounter in the car, I confess that I prefer to make love in my own bed.’
Maxie could feel her teeth starting to chatter, her legs shaking. Like a whore, that was how she would’ve looked in that photo, and that was exactly how he was treating her.
‘Maxie…’ Angelos purred, reading her retreat and switching channel to high-powered sensual persuasion as he strolled with animal grace towards her, strong, hard-boned face amused. ‘You think I’m likely to respect you more if you suggest that we should wait another week, another month? I have no time for outdated attitudes like that—’
‘Obviously not.’ Agreement fell like dropped stones from Maxie’s tremulously compressed lips.
‘And I cannot credit that you should feel any differently. We will still be together six months from now,’ Angelos forecast reflectively. ‘Possibly even longer. I burn for you in a way I haven’t burned for a woman in a very long time.’
‘Try a cold shower.’ Ice-cool as her own shrinking flesh, Maxie stood there, chin tilting as high as she could hold it even though she felt as if she was falling apart behind her façade. She shrugged back her shoulders so that his jacket slid off and fell in a rejected heap on the floor. ‘I’m not some bimbo you can bed before you even date me—’
‘The original idea was only to offer you lunch…’ A dark rise of blood accentuated the tautening slant of his bold, hard cheekbones as he made that admission.
‘But why waste time feeding me?’ Maxie completed for him, her distaste unconcealed. ‘In my time I have met some fast movers, but you have to qualify as supersonic. A kiss in the limo and that was consent to the whole menu?’
Angelos flung his arrogant dark head back, black eyes thudding like steel arrows into a target. ‘The desire between us was honest and mutual and very strong. Do you expect me to apologise for a hunger you answered with a passion as powerful as my own?’
Maxie flinched. ‘No…I don’t think you make a habit of apologising.’
‘I’m very straight…what you see is what you get. You put out conflicting signals and then back off. You have the problem,’ Angelos informed her in cool condemnation. ‘Don’t put it on me. When I became an adult, I put childish games behind me.’
Although every strained muscle in her taut length ached, Maxie remained as outwardly poised as a queen surveying a less than satisfactory subject. But violent loathing powered her now. It took its strength from her shame that she had allowed him to touch her at all.
‘I won’t say it’s been nice getting to know you over the past twenty-four hours, Angelos…it’s been lousy,’ Maxie stated, and turned in the direction of the lift.
‘Goddamn you…don’t you dare walk away from me!’ Angelos slashed across the distance that separated them. ‘Who are you, Maxie Kendall, to speak to me like that?’
‘No more…I don’t want to hear it,’ Maxie muttered shakily.
‘This time you will listen to me,’ Angelos raked at her in wrathful forewarning. In one powerful stride he imposed his intimidating size between her and the lift. His lean, strong face hard as steel, bold black eyes hurled a ferocious challenge. ‘Do you think I don’t know you moved in with Leland between one day and the next? You hardly knew him. You came out of nowhere into his life. Do you think I didn’t notice that you weren’t remotely attracted to him?’
Quite unprepared for that angle of attack, Maxie stammered, ‘I…I—’
‘In fact, Leland bored you to death and you couldn’t hide it. You could hardly bear him to touch you but you stuck it for three years all the same. Does that strike you as the behaviour of a sensitive woman with principles? You sold yourself for a wardrobe of designer clothes—’
‘No, I didn’t!’ Maxie gasped strickenly.
‘At no stage did you wake up and say to yourself, “I could do better than this. I’m worth more than this. This isn’t the way I should be living!” ’ Angelos roared at her in a rage of shockingly raw derision. ‘So don’t tell me I got the wrong impression. I trust the evidence of my own eyes and senses. You felt nothing for him. But you put yourself on the market and he was still able to buy!’
Na
usea stirring in her stomach, Maxie was retreating deeper into the penthouse apartment, her hands coming up in a fluttering movement in front of her as if she could somehow ward him off. ‘No…no,’ she mumbled sickly.
‘And I was the bloody fool who, even knowing all that, still wanted you!’ Angelos slung, spreading his arms in an extravagant gesture of outrage at her, at himself. ‘I didn’t want to buy you…or maybe I wanted the cosy pretence that it didn’t have to be like that between us…that because you lusted after me too I could gloss over the knowledge that my immense wealth might have anything to do with your presence in my life!’
Maxie was like a statue, terrified to risk a step in case she cracked and broke into shattered pieces. He had forced her into cruel confrontation with the image he had of her. Like an explosion of glass, countless shards pierced her cringing flesh as every painful word drew blood.
‘I’ll never forgive you for this,’ she whispered, more to herself than to him. ‘But Leland was never my lover. We had an agreement. It was a charade we played—’
Angelos spat something guttural in Greek. ‘Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid!’
Maxie looked through him then, and despised herself for even attempting self-defence. It suggested a weakness inside her, a need for this arrogant Greek’s good opinion that her savaged pride could not allow. ‘You stay away from me from now on—’
‘You made your choices in life long before you met me. What is it that you want now?’ Angelos demanded contemptuously.
A semi-hysterical laugh erupted from Maxie and she choked it off, twisting her head away defensively before he could see the burning tears in her eyes. ‘Just the usual things.’ Then she whipped her golden head back, shimmering eyes as unwittingly bright as stars. ‘And some day, when all this is behind me, I’ll have them. I wouldn’t have you as a gift, Angelos. I wouldn’t make love with you unless you tied me to the bed and held me down and forced me…is that clear enough? What you want you will never have!’
Angelos stared at her as if he couldn’t take his eyes off her and hated her for it.
Maxie stared back with a stab of malicious satisfaction new to her experience. ‘Bad news, eh? I’ll be the one who got away,’ she breathed tautly, frighteningly aware of the thunderous charge of violence in the atmosphere but unable to silence her own tongue and her helpless need to taunt him. ‘But then why should that bother you? It’s not like you have a shred of real emotion in you—’
‘What do you want from me?’ Angelos ripped back at her with suppressed savagery. ‘I will not and could not love a woman like you!’
‘Oh, that honesty…hits me right where it hurts,’ Maxie trilled, a knife-like pain scything through her. She was shaking like a leaf without even being aware of it. ‘But for all that you still want me, don’t you? Do you know something, Angelos? I like knowing that.’
A muscle jerked at the corner of his wide, sensual mouth, his strong jawline clenching. Those stunning black eyes burned with rage and seething pride.
‘Thanks, you’ve just done wonders for my low self-esteem, ’ Maxie informed him with a jagged catch in her voice.
‘What a bitch you can be…I never saw that in you before.’ His accent was so thick she could have sliced it up, but that contemptuous intonation would still have flamed over her like acid, hurting wherever it touched. ‘So, quote me a price for one night in your bed. What do you think you would be worth?’
The derisive suggestion coiled like a whip around her and scarred her worse than a beating. Her backbone went rigid. Hatred fired her embittered gaze. ‘You couldn’t even make the bidding,’ Maxie asserted, looking him up and down as if he had crawled out from under a stone. ‘I’d want a whole lot more than a wardrobe of designer clothes. You see, I learn from my mistakes, Angelos. The next man I live with will be my husband…’
Shock turned Angelos satisfying pale. ‘If you think for one insane second that I—’
‘Of course you wouldn’t,’ Maxie slotted in, each word clipped and tight with self-control. ‘But you must see now why I’m not available for lunch, in bed or out of it. A woman can’t be too careful. Being associated with a randy Greek billionaire could be very harmful to my new image.’
‘I will work this entire dialogue out of your wretched hide every day you are with me!’ Angelos snarled at her with primal force, all cool abandoned.
‘You are just so slow on the uptake. I am not ever going to be with you, Angelos,’ Maxie pointed out, and with that last word she strolled past him, holding herself taut and proud to the last, and walked into the lift.
Outside in the street again, she discovered that she was trembling so violently it was an effort to put one leg in front of the other. For once disregarding her straitened circumstances, she chose to hail a cab. Her mind was working like a runaway express train, disconnected images bombarding her…
How could two people who scarcely knew each other spend so long tearing each other apart? How could she have been that bitchy? How could she have actually enjoyed striking back at him and watching him react with impotent black fury? And yet now she felt sick at the memory, and astonishingly empty, like someone who had learned to thrive on electric tension and pain…and who now could not see a future worth living without them.
Angelos Petronides had devastated her but he wouldn’t bother her again now, she told herself in an effort at consolation. Even the toughest male wouldn’t put himself in line for more of the same. And Angelos least of all. He had expected her to fall into his bed with the eagerness of an avaricious bimbo, scarcely able to believe her good fortune. Instead she had hit that boundless ego of his, watched him shudder in sheer shock from the experience…and yet inside herself she felt the most awful bewildering sense of loss.
Reluctant to dwell on reactions that struck her as peculiar, Maxie chose instead to look back on their brief acquaintance with self-loathing. She squirmed over her own foolishness. Like an adolescent fighting a first powerful crush, she had overreacted every step of the way.
She had fancied him like mad but, blind and naive as a headstrong teenager, she hadn’t even admitted that to herself until it was too late to save face. ‘I have not been unaware of your interest in me.’ She shuddered with shame. Had she surrendered to that physical attraction, it would’ve been a one-way ticket to disaster. She knew she couldn’t afford to make any more wrong choices. She hadn’t needed him to tell her that. Dear heaven, as if becoming his mistress would’ve been any kind of improvement on the humiliating charade Leland had forced her to live for so long!
Angelos hadn’t believed her about Leland, of course he hadn’t—hadn’t even paused to catch his breath and listen. And in pushing the issue she would’ve made an ass of herself, for nothing short of medical proof of her virginity, if there was such a thing, would’ve convinced him otherwise. In any case the level of her experience wouldn’t count with a male like Angelos Petronides. He viewed her the same way people viewed a takeaway snack. As something quick and cheap to devour, not savour. Her stomach lurched sickly. Even had she been tempted, which she hadn’t been, had he thought for one moment that she would’ve believed she was likely to hold his interest as long as six months?
‘A man will tell a girl who looks like you anything to get her into the bedroom,’ her father had once warned her grimly. ‘The one who is prepared to wait, the one who is more interested in how you feel, is the one who cares.’
That blunt advice had embarrassed her at a time when she was already struggling to cope with the downside of the spectacular looks she had been born with. Girlfriends threatened by the male attention she attracted had dumped her. Grown men had leered at her and tried to touch her and date her. Even teenage boys who, alone with her, had been totally intimidated by her, had told crude lies about her sexual availability behind her back. Eight years on, Maxie was still waiting without much hope to meet a man who wasn’t determined to put the cart before the proverbial horse.
An hour after she
got back to Liz’s house, the phone rang. It was Catriona Ferguson, who ran the Star modelling agency which had first signed Maxie up at eighteen.
‘I’ve got no good news for you, Maxie,’ she shared in her usual brisk manner. ‘The PR people over at LFT Haircare have decided against using you for another series of ads.’
‘We were expecting that,’ Maxie reminded the older woman with a rueful sigh of acceptance.
‘I’m afraid there’s nothing else in the pipeline for you. Hardly surprising, really,’ Catriona told her. ‘You’re too strongly associated with one brand name. I did warn you about that risk and, to be blunt, your recent coverage in the tabloids has done you no favours.’
It had been a month since Maxie had moved out of Leland’s townhouse. She hadn’t worked since then and now it looked as if she was going to have to find some other means of keeping herself. Her bank account was almost empty. She couldn’t afford to sit waiting for work that might never come, nor could she blame Catriona for her lack of sympathy. Time and time again the older woman had urged Maxie to branch out into fashion modelling, but Leland’s frantic social life and the demands he had made on her time had made that impossible.
Hours later, Maxie hunched over both bars of the electric fire in Liz’s lounge as she tried to keep warm while she brooded. Angelos was gone. That was good, she told herself, that was one major problem solved. She scratched an itchy place on her arm and then gazed down in surprise at the little rash of spots there.
What had she eaten that had disagreed with her? she wondered, but she couldn’t recall eating anything more than half a sandwich since breakfast time. She just couldn’t work up an appetite. She fell asleep on the settee and at some timeless stage of the night wakened to feel her way down to the guest-room and undress on the spot before sinking wearily into bed.
When she woke up late the next morning, she wasn’t feeling too good. As she cleaned her teeth she caught a glimpse of her face in the tiny mirror Liz had on the wall for visitors and she froze. There was another little rash of spots on her forehead. It looked remarkably like… chickenpox. And she itched, didn’t she? But only children got that, didn’t they? And then she remembered one of Liz’s neighbours calling in a couple of weeks back with a child in tow who had borne similiar spots.