‘You know quite a lot about me,’ she observed.
‘You’re angry that I hired a detective?’
She shrugged, because the truth was that she had almost forgotten about that. ‘Maybe if I had your degree of power and influence, I might have done the same. What I was trying to say is that the balance of knowledge between us isn’t very equal. You know stacks about me, while I don’t know much about you.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Only what Nat has told you, presumably.’
‘He gave me the bare bones.’
‘Such as?’
She picked up a heavy silver fork to toy with the Caesar salad which the waiter had placed before her. ‘He told me about your privileged childhood.’
‘Privileged?’ He gave a short laugh. Was that how Nat had portrayed it? ‘That’s one way of describing it, I suppose. And did he tell you about the woman who came to work for my family as a nanny?’
She heard the raw anger which had entered his voice and, cautiously, she nodded. ‘He mentioned something about your parents’ marriage ending and your father remarrying.’
Bitterly, Zak thought how easy it was for history to be precised into a few simple statements. How innocuous you could make the past sound if only you picked the right words. And it wasn’t innocuous at all, was it? It was as dark and as twisted as all relationships.
‘Did he tell you that the woman was much younger? All luscious curves and long blond hair.’ There was a heartbeat of a pause. ‘A bit like you.’
He saw her flinch and remembered the first time he’d seen her—thinking that he had been programmed to dislike women like her. And how wrong he had been. He’d been wrong about Emma in a lot of ways, he realised.
‘No, he didn’t tell me that.’
‘She was barely twenty years old,’ he continued, and he wondered if it was because he’d bottled up these words for so long that they now came spilling out. Or whether it had anything to do with the soft understanding in Emma Geary’s green eyes. ‘And my father was well into his fifties by then, so of course he was immensely flattered.’
For a moment, he faltered. ‘Perhaps I wouldn’t have blamed him for sleeping with her—I imagine that few men could have resisted the sight of that body wearing those tiny little bikinis around the pool. I know that my friends found plenty of reasons to come swimming that summer.’
He had been eaten up with shame and guilt that his friends—all on the heady brink of adolescence—should have so blatantly desired the woman who had helped to break his mother’s heart.
‘What happened?’ Emma whispered as she saw the ravaged look on his face.
He felt an acrid taste in his mouth. ‘What happens rather frequently nowadays, but which was rarer back then—especially in the circles in which we moved. My father announced that he was in love, that he wanted a divorce and that he intended to marry the girl. My mother never got over it.’ And now Zak realised that he was doing that thing himself. Of painting the past with a few brushstrokes which conveyed nothing but the barest facts. Because wasn’t it disloyal to his mother’s memory to recount the painful way she had crumbled? To recall how she’d wasted away, refusing to eat—as if that would bring back her errant husband.
It hadn’t, of course. Her errant husband had been too busy indulging his new love to ever consider going back to the old one. He’d been too blown away by all that new sex to realise that his young bride was working her way through his fortune with an efficiency which might have been almost admirable, had it not been so destructive.
‘The crazy thing was that nobody was happy,’ he said slowly. ‘My father slowly realised he’d made the biggest mistake of his life. That what he had experienced was lust, not love. He married a woman who spoke a different language—who was from an entirely different culture. Her values were not his values. I was estranged from him for years and could only watch helplessly from the sidelines as my mother’s health deteriorated and his fortune was bled away by my …’
‘Stepmother?’ she prompted softly.
‘No, not that!’ His grey eyes blazing fire, his words were bitten out with ruthless precision. ‘I would never call that woman mother—for she made a mockery of the word!’
‘What … what happened?’ asked Emma tentatively as she saw his face grow dark and stormy with memory.
He shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. As if it had been nothing to him when, in fact, it had been everything. ‘I cared for Nat during our mother’s illness and after her death—and I cared for my father when that bitch left him without a penny to his name. And then, slowly, I built up the Constantinides fortune all over again.’
Emma was silent for a moment as much of his behaviour now became clear. How helpless he must have felt as he’d watched the deterioration of his previously safe world. The divorce, the death and then the loss of money and status. To a proud man like Zak, it must have been almost unendurable.
Yet didn’t those events explain his need to control and to stamp his influence on everything around him? He had been left to care for his little brother and his protectiveness for Nat suddenly became understandable. And so too did his overwhelming drive to succeed. She’d thought that he had inherited the Constantinides fortune—she hadn’t realised that he’d built it up from scratch.
She sat looking into the darkened pain of his grey eyes wondering why he’d opened up and told her all this, when his next words made it clear.
‘Does that answer your question about why I’ve never settled down and married?’
There was a pause. ‘I don’t remember asking you that question, Zak.’
‘No. But you were thinking it.’ His grey eyes bored into her. ‘If not now—then some time in the past.’
She thought how easy it would be to adopt an air of outrage—to accuse him of having an unspeakably large ego. But Emma thought about what he’d just told her and suddenly she found that she didn’t want to retaliate, no matter what the provocation. He’d been hurt, she realised. Badly hurt. Couldn’t she show him a little thoughtfulness without wanting anything in return? Couldn’t she tell him the truth?
‘Yes, I was,’ she admitted. ‘And I’m probably not the only woman to wonder why a man who seems to have it all—should be so unremittingly single.’
Zak was taken aback by her candour and even more surprised by another urge to elaborate. He picked up his glass and drank some claret. ‘You talked about equality earlier—well, in my experience there is no true equality in relationships between the sexes. One person always loves too much and the other not enough.’
‘Is that what happened with Leda?’ she ventured boldly, remembering the woman with the short dark hair she’d seen in London. The woman who had persuaded him to turn a room of his New York hotel over to weddings.
Remembered, too, Nat’s words to his brother … that everyone had thought they would marry one day.
‘Leda was the closest thing I ever got to what most people settle for, yes,’ he said roughly. ‘But I liked her too much to ever want to hurt her—and I couldn’t guarantee that I wouldn’t do that.’ He raised his glass in silent toast. ‘Anyway, she’s marrying someone else now—so it’s all worked out for the best.’
Emma wondered if she was imagining the regret in his voice—but she suspected he had told her as much as he was going to. It had been a brutally honest assessment but she guessed it was also a warning to her. Don’t get too close to me, he seemed to be saying. Because nothing will ever come of it.
‘So now you know all about my past … does it shock you?’ His eyes lanced her a question and when she didn’t answer, he continued, ‘Some people don’t do long-term relationships, Emma, and I’m one of those people. It frustrates the hell out of women and they spend a lot of time trying to change my mind—but they never do. Which leaves me wondering whether you still want to spend the night with me?’
It was, as they said, the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.
Emma met the pewter gleam
of his eyes. He was promising nothing—he couldn’t have made that clearer if he’d tried. But knowing that didn’t change a thing because the answer was that she didn’t really have a choice.
Hadn’t she waited all her life for a man to make her feel the way that Zak did? And even if it was doomed not to last—was she really willing to turn her back on it now that she’d found it?
‘Actually, I do,’ she said, in as light a tone as possible. ‘And this time I’ll stay all night.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
FOR the first time in her life, Emma felt like somebody’s girlfriend. Like one of those women for whom life was ‘normal.’ Just an ordinary woman who was seeing a man, while deciding how much they liked each other. And she’d never had that before.
With Louis, everything had been so hush-hush and hidden away. His management had worried that another marriage might dent his latest reinvention as rock’s sexy bad boy and, consequently, she’d been kept out of view as much as possible—at least until the wedding had taken place. Then she’d been brought out at every opportunity—her youth a testimony to her husband’s supposed virility. But she’d only ever had a fraction of her husband’s attention. The women who eagerly pressed their phone numbers into his hand were often greeted with a smile rather than a rejection.
With Zak it was different. She’d thought he might tire of her after one or two dates. Or that he’d try to see her as little as possible—and then mainly for sex. But he had surprised her. His chivalry, she’d realised, had not been a one-off.
He’d taken her to some amazing restaurants and galleries and once to a concert at Carnegie Hall. He’d managed to get tickets for Broadway’s hottest show and she had found herself laughing at the corniest musical she had ever seen until tears had run down her cheeks. And then she’d looked up to find Zak watching her, shaking his head in slight bemusement as he’d pulled a perfectly laundered white handkerchief from his pocket and solemnly handed it to her.
There’d been no sense of him hiding her away. And just because he’d introduced her as his interior designer, on secondment from his London hotel—well, she wasn’t really in a position to be disappointed by his not-quite-accurate assessment of their relationship, was she? If sometimes she felt as if she were holding a handful of sand which was slowly slipping through her fingers—well, there wasn’t a lot she could do about it. Emma knew that none of this was supposed to last—she was just trying to enjoy it while it did.
But the clock was inexorably ticking away and she felt as Cinderella must have done as the hands edged towards midnight. The opening of the wedding room was scheduled for the end of the week and her ticket home was booked. She would be flying out of JFK and leaving Zak behind. And she didn’t dare confront what that might feel like.
On the night before the opening, he took her to a fabulous skyscraper restaurant, where outside the sky was like a black velvet canopy, filled with stars. A fingernail moon gleamed through the windows and the dazzle of crystal and flicker of candles all contributed to a heady overload of her senses.
‘I ought to be working,’ she said weakly as she ran her finger around the edge of her champagne glass.
‘You’ve been working all day.’
‘I know. But it’s—’
‘It’s going to be perfect. Of that, I have no doubt, chrisi mou.’
Her hand not quite steady, Emma put her glass down because she couldn’t help thrilling when he spoke to her in Greek. Usually, it was something profound or muffled at the height of his orgasm—but he never usually used endearments in the public arena of a restaurant. ‘What does that mean?’
‘It means my “golden one”.’
‘That’s … nice.’
‘Mmm.’ He heard the unmistakable note of hope in her voice and knew that she wanted more, because that was what women were programmed to want. But he could not give her more—other than the very obvious. His hooded eyes flicked to her plate. ‘You’re not eating very much.’
‘Neither are you.’
‘Maybe that’s because I’m wondering why we’re spending our last night here, when we could be doing something much more enjoyable back at the hotel.’
‘But you’ve just ordered a bottle of champagne which cost as much as I take home in a week.’
‘Who cares about that?’ he questioned roughly. ‘Let’s get the check.’
They left the restaurant and kissed like a couple of teenagers in the back of a cab—hailed because he’d told his driver to return at eleven. Emma felt an unstoppable sense of suppressed excitement until the moment when they were alone in his suite and she began to tug impatiently at his jacket.
‘Shouldn’t I have taught you a little more finesse?’ He laughed as he shrugged it from his shoulders and dextrously tossed it onto one of the sofas.
‘Is it finesse you want?’ she breathed, her fingers moving to the buckle of his belt and sliding down his aroused length.
‘God, no. No. Just keep doing what you’re doing.’
It was fast and it was passionate—and afterwards they went to bed and did it again. And again. So that by the time Emma stirred, it was against a heavy tide of sleepiness and the sense that the space on the bed beside her was empty. In the murky dimness of the morning light, she could just make out Zak’s tall silhouette moving quietly around the suite. ‘What time is it?’
‘Ten after six.’
She stifled a yawn. ‘That’s early.’
‘Mmm.’
‘You’ve got meetings?’ she questioned as she leaned over to switch on the bedside lamp.
Zak watched as the soft apricot light transformed her pale and curvy body into that of a golden goddess. How could she look so damned good in the morning? he wondered. And how come she always felt so good in the night, too? And tonight would be the very last night, he realised. Tomorrow she would fly back to England and the distance between them would inevitably rupture their relationship. ‘I’m afraid I do,’ he murmured. ‘Wall-to-wall meetings all day long.’
‘Oh.’
‘There’s no point pouting, Emma.’
‘Was I pouting?’
‘Yes, you were.’ He walked towards the bed and bent down to drop a kiss on her sleep-ruffled hair, inhaling the scent of roses and shampoo. ‘Being provocative without even realising it. Anyway, you have far too much to do than to mess around in bed with me. Tonight’s your big night, isn’t it?’
Emma’s smile didn’t slip. Yes, tonight was her big night—the opening of the wedding room, with all the accompanying fanfare. For her, it was the moment of job completion and, hopefully, one of triumph, too. Her work would be laid bare for others to judge and how it was seen tonight would largely determine its popularity.
Caterers and florists would be arriving throughout the day and later the room would be put on show to New York’s finest. There would be prospective clients and party animals, as well as journalists who would be recording the event and garnering publicity for Zak’s latest venture.
And afterwards? When the dried-up canapés and half-drunk glasses of champagne had been cleared away—what then? She bit her lip, unable to stop the sudden sinking of her heart. Her work would be completed. She would be free to go back to London … leaving Zak behind.
She tried to shake off her feeling of impatience—as much at her own stupidity as anything else. Because she’d realised the danger of becoming the lover of Zak Constantinides all along. She had realised it and chosen to ignore it, with an arrogance fuelled by her own passionate desire. Forgetting that if you flew too close to the sun, you tended to get burned, when she, of all people, should have known that.
‘It certainly is,’ she said brightly. ‘The biggest night of all.’
His lips moved to her bare shoulders. ‘So you don’t want me wearing you out with sex beforehand, now, do you?’
She couldn’t help herself. Her hands reached up to his neck, her fingers caressing the thick waves of hair which grew there. ‘Don’t I?’ she whispered,
her mouth brushing against the newly shaved smoothness of his jaw. ‘Are you quite sure about that?’
It was the most innocent of touches and yet Zak felt the jackknifing of desire shafting through him, his hand automatically slipping down to cup the heavy weight of her breast. How in tune their bodies were, he thought. He’d never known such instant compatibility—not from women with years more experience than Emma. Was that because he’d taught her pretty much everything she knew, or because he’d opened up to her with uncharacteristic frankness? Sometimes he felt as if she’d stripped away the protective layers with which he shielded himself—and glimpsed the person he kept hidden from the world. He felt as if Emma knew him better than anyone else—and didn’t that scare him a little?
And now she was looking at him with those shining green eyes, her lips soft with promise and her body even softer as her thighs parted instinctively beneath the white swathing of the linen sheet.
For a moment he wavered—tempted to strip off his carefully pressed suit and drop it to the ground. To pull back the covers and lose himself in her molten sweetness. Briefly, he closed his eyes as he imagined that first delicious thrust before reminding himself that he didn’t have time. More importantly, he didn’t have the inclination to demonstrate just how persuasive he found her. Because wasn’t it high time to build some immunity against her seductive hold on him—to prepare them both for her imminent departure?
Abruptly, he stepped away from the bed, raking his fingers back through his hair. She was leaving tomorrow—and he had better get used to that.
‘Quite sure,’ he growled. ‘Just as I don’t think it’s a great idea having breakfast with the CEO of a major bank if I can still taste you on my lips and on my fingers. You need to be fresh and rested before you face a very critical New York audience. So go back to sleep and I’ll see you later at the opening. Okay?’
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