by Pippa Roscoe
He levelled her with a gaze so considered she wanted to turn away, fearful that he might somehow divine her thoughts. Finally, as if deciding something, he took her by the shoulders and guided her to a velvet ring display on top of the counter. The old man stood behind it with an exhilarated look across his features. She was distracted by that for a moment, before looking down at the single ring held by the dark velvet folds.
‘Oh.’ She couldn’t have prevented the small sound of shock falling from her lips. It was beautiful; a thin gold band, set with bright green sapphires in a half eternity pattern. It was everything that she would have ever wanted for her engagement ring. And it was altogether too much.
The man behind the counter gently prised the ring from where it lay and gave it to Loukis, gesturing for him to present it to his fiancée.
‘I’m sure it won’t...’
She trailed off as Loukis took her hand in his, his thumb unfurling her ring finger, smoothing away the slight tremors she felt across her skin, and slid the exquisite piece down to where it fitted, perfectly at the base of her finger.
She looked up at him then. She shouldn’t have, but she couldn’t resist. The look in his eyes, the dark promise, the undercurrent of something more than just an agreed upon fake relationship, shocking them both.
CHAPTER SEVEN
AS LOUKIS EXITED the shop, he tried to ignore the residual feelings that had been brought on the moment he slipped the engagement ring onto Célia’s finger. For a man who had been determined to avoid such a thing ever happening, he put it down to the fact he was going against his very nature. Rather than the fact that for a moment, in the shop, Célia had seemed utterly vulnerable. Without artifice or defence, her expressive amber eyes had contained too much. Had communicated too much.
He grasped her hand and placed his arm around her shoulders, persevering through the flinch he had expected, and settled her into his side, careless of the other pedestrians trying to rush around them in their haste.
He felt her head scan to one side, then the next, as much as he saw it from his peripheral vision, given that she barely reached his shoulder.
‘What are you looking for?’ he asked, curious.
‘The press. Surely you wouldn’t want them to miss this moment.’ The bitterness on her tongue was harsh, but just.
‘No press. Not today.’
‘Giving me the day off?’
‘I think you’ve deserved it,’ he said, trying to keep his voice light. ‘What would you like to do now?’
‘I get a say in the matter, do I?’
He was beginning to get more than a little frustrated, so he drew her around to face him.
‘Célia.’
‘I know. I’m sorry, it’s just all a bit too much.’
‘Which is why I wanted today to be fun.’
She huffed out a laugh. ‘Fun?’
‘Yes, you do remember fun, don’t you?’ Although looking at her reaction, perhaps she didn’t. ‘How long have you been working on Chariton?’
She inhaled, the action tempting his gaze to her breasts, but he resisted. Barely.
‘Three years, give or take. Ella and I were talking about it long before, when we were still at university.’
‘When was the last time you had a holiday? Or just took a break?’
That she avoided both his gaze and his question told him enough. He sneaked an arm around her waist and guided her back up the street.
‘Where are we going?’
‘First we are going to Monastiraki, which has a flea market perfect for our purposes of simply enjoying the morning. Then we have lunch.’
Loukis had decided not to tell Célia about the lunch meeting he had arranged for her. He’d not missed the way that, if given too much time to think, Célia would over prepare, over question and over doubt. When she met the first prospective client he had arranged, as agreed upon as part of the fake fiancée deal, Loukis wanted her to be as natural as possible.
She dragged her heels for a while, but soon relaxed, guided by his arm around her shoulder, Loukis telling himself the touch was necessary for them both. Aversion therapy, he had said the night before. The problem was that Loukis was not in the least averse to touching her.
The smell of strong coffee and sweet treats filled the air, his mouth watering at expectation of the honey and pistachio of a baklava. As if Célia was having the same thoughts, her footsteps slowed, and he smiled.
‘Coffee? Baklava?’
She nodded, smiling, and they took a seat at one of the free tables out in the street. Dappled light picked out shadows on the white tablecloth as it filtered through the leaves above. The warmth of early summer comforting. He loved Athens at this time of year. A little too early for the massive influx of tourists that would usually drive him and Annabelle from their estate out to the island. It had been the first property he’d ever bought. Somewhere that his mother hadn’t tainted, his father’s devastation hadn’t touched, and where he initially and then, later, Annabelle had both found a peace...no. More than that. They had—for a while—found happiness. Suddenly, without warning, the looming custody battle set his heartbeat racing as he vainly tried to struggle with the fear, shocking and terrible, that he might lose Annabelle.
The waiter came with menus, but Loukis waved them away, simply ordering baklava, an espresso for himself and frappe metrio for Célia. He thought she would like the sweet iced coffee. As the waiter disappeared back into the restaurant, his attention was drawn by a father and son on the nearby table. The son was angrily wiping at his eye with one hand, as if trying to disguise his tears, and holding what looked like a small black electronic plane in the other.
He heard the father’s reassurances, and almost felt the man’s helpless anger as he tried to explain to the boy that there must be something wrong with it. That they just had to wait until they could go back to the shop. Though judging from the look on the father’s face, he either didn’t hold out much hope for a solution or feared the money it would cost. Loukis empathised with the man, clearly struggling with his child’s hurt and pain. Since Annabelle had come into his life, he’d felt that constantly.
Célia turned to look behind her, her gaze seeming to snag on the same tableaux as his had done.
‘What’s wrong?’
Loukis shook his head, shrugging. ‘Something wrong with the machine apparently.’
He watched as she cocked her head to one side as if trying to get a closer look at the machine, rather than the boy and his father, which struck him as a little odd. She shifted her chair a little, so she could better see, which drew the attention of the upset little boy and his father.
‘Can you ask him what’s wrong with it?’ she said to Loukis.
Frowning, he relayed the question and the father’s answer, all three of them looking rather bemused by Célia’s interest.
She nodded, and held her hand out for the toy.
The boy looked to his father for permission and, once granted, passed the machine over to Célia.
It felt strange having a drone in her hands again. Strange, exciting, sad...a heady combination as she placed the lightweight black body on her lap and scrolled through the controller to switch the language from Greek to French. She was familiar with the cheap mass-produced brand—a family favourite that entertained children and adults alike. Checking that the drone was powered up, she scrolled to the status bar to find the compass setting. She had already checked the aircraft battery was above eighty per cent, so she was pretty sure that recalibrating the compass should be all that was needed. Looking for the solid clear light at the back of the drone, she put the controller aside, and picked up the body of the machine, turning it in her hands three hundred and sixty degrees until the light ran green. Pointing the nose downwards, she turned the machine again until the green light started flashing. Which was just as it shoul
d be.
She looked up at the boy, smiling, and passed him back the drone and controller after switching the language back to Greek.
The boy took it from her gingerly, placed it on the ground and experimentally started the drone up. It jerked upwards, startling some passers-by, and the boy let out a cry of joy, before guiding it up and into the air, running a short way after it.
For a moment, she indulged. Indulged in her own childhood memories. The hours she had spent playing with similar toys, and then later, the years she had spent studying, working towards more and more complex designs, GPS systems, loving the way that binary numbers combined with computer chips and the smell of a soldering iron. As her interest in the mechanical had turned into the way that signals could be sent and received to identify locations, the possibilities that could be achieved with such information had set her brain alight with wonder and excitement. The thrill of having an idea and of making it—
‘What was wrong with it?’
Loukis’s question cut through her thoughts, drawing her attention back to the present, back to him.
‘The father wants to know, in case it happens again.’
‘The compass needed to be recalibrated. It’s a fairly common problem for that particular brand. He can look it up easily enough.’
It was only when she looked up at Loukis that she realised her mistake. Because how on earth would she explain how she had known that? His eyes didn’t leave hers as he translated what she had said to the father. They didn’t leave hers as the father proclaimed effusive thanks, tried to pay for their coffees—an offer that was dismissed by Loukis with a wave of his hand—and ran off after his happy son. No, it was Célia that broke the connection, unable to bear the scrutiny.
Over the past five years, only Ella had known about her drastic career change. She had been the only person to stick with her after her life had changed. Faces and so-called friends ran through her mind from that time ‘before’. Hopes and dreams of trying to be seen by her father, be considered valuable, or even worthy in his eyes. But then he had taken her plans for agricultural drone technology for use in drought-affected areas of Africa and warped it, changed her good intentions in the most horrible way. Took them from her and used them for his true love: his own company.
She had spent the summer interning and impressing the research and development department in Paquet Industries as a way to try to be closer to her father. To impress him somehow. She’d inherited her father’s genius, they’d all said. At the time she’d been pleased, so, so pleased. Only Ella had grumbled about being a genius in her own right. But Célia hadn’t cared. Finally pleasing her father had been her only focus. Until someone had seen the technical specs she’d been working on as part of her degree over lunch one day. Closer and closer they had looked and once they’d realised what she’d done, they’d whisked her up to see her father. Her drawings, her ideas, had been pored over and over. At first by the manager, then by her father, then by other advisers and ultimately by lawyers.
God, she’d been so naïve. At first she’d been thrilled, excited, hopeful even. But then suddenly everything went quiet. People stopped talking about the project, behaving as if it had never happened. Her father became too busy to see her, to answer her calls even.
She’d wondered if perhaps they’d found something wrong with her designs and that had scoured her insides, devastating her in what she’d hoped to be ‘the final’ way, the ‘only’ way her father might find use or value, or even love. Three weeks after the internship had finished and she had returned to university, returned to Ella, who had comforted Célia in her bewilderment, she discovered what had happened. In the newspaper. The article had revealed a major deal between her father’s company, Paquet Industries, and one of France’s leading firearms manufacturers, proclaiming the revolutionising of drone technology as its key motivation.
What she was working on—designs to help agriculture in drought-affected areas, to allow better crop production, rapid identification of pest and fungal infestations, information on irrigation and so much more—had been used instead for murder. Justifications like war on terror and border defence and the little-known discipline of Measurement and Signature Intelligence had done nothing to assuage her guilt.
That her designs, her hopes and dreams had been so vilely abused had shocked her to her very core. Only Ella knew of the devastating guilt that had torn through Célia. That had seen her nearly drop out of college altogether. That had given her nightmares for months and months.
Her father had simply refused to speak of it, as if pretending it hadn’t happened. Her mother had stood by him and, in Célia’s mind, chosen his side. She hadn’t spoken to her father in five years, her mother in three. And it still ached and twisted in her chest.
‘Célia?’
Once again she had become so lost in her thoughts she had missed what Loukis had said. She brushed the hair that had fallen in front of her eyes aside, noticing how the green sapphires glinted in the sunlight, bringing her back to reality with a bump.
‘Are you okay?’ Loukis asked, a frown marring the near perfect features looking up at her.
‘Yes. Sorry, what were you saying?’
‘That we probably need to leave if we’re going to make lunch.’
‘Lunch?’
‘Yes, you have an appointment.’
‘An appointment?’
He nodded. ‘One that would probably benefit from something more than you repeating my every word.’
Loukis stood from the table, but Célia remained on the chair.
‘Is this a kind of sit-in?’ he demanded, half amused.
‘Yes. Until you tell me what’s going on I’m not moving.’
‘You sound like a child,’ he said, now openly smiling, enjoying the slightly petulant bent to her tone. It had been much better than the series of emotions that he’d seen play upon her features after she had fixed the drone. Something that he had not forgotten and would most definitely be exploring at a later date. It was just that it didn’t seem to fit. Not with Célia and who she was. And that made him uncomfortable. But he didn’t have time right now for that.
‘Lunch is where you are going to meet your next client,’ he stated.
A look of horror passed over her features, new and different from before. ‘But I’m not prepared. I don’t know who they are or...anything. Loukis.’ She used his name as both a question and punctuation. It was adorable.
‘You are perfectly well prepared. You know your company inside out, you’ve got plenty of examples to draw from to illustrate any kind of point you need to make. And your soon-to-be new client has a low tolerance for unnecessary pomp, and a great deal of respect for straight talking. The two of you will get on wonderfully.’
Loukis gestured for Célia to go ahead before him, following behind a black-suited head waiter towards the table where Yalena Adeyemi and her husband sat, laughing quietly at something secret.
The moment Yalena caught sight of them, she stood from the table and greeted them both with a wide smile and excitement glinting in her espresso rich gaze.
‘Loukis. It’s been far too long,’ she gently reprimanded. ‘I’d be horrified that business has brought you finally back to socialising, if I wasn’t so curious about the opportunity you’ve presented.’ Without missing a beat, she turned to Célia. ‘It’s lovely to meet you, and not just because you’re the “business opportunity,”’ Yalena said with genuine happiness.
Célia, who had been silent since he’d told her of their intended destination, came to life as if a switch had been flipped.
‘Likewise. If I’m honest, I’m trying hard not to fan-girl at the moment. Your company has such a fantastic reputation and has achieved some really incredible things.’
Célia hadn’t lied at all. She’d known of Yalena Adeyemi by reputation. As founder and CEO of one of the quic
kest growing peer-to-peer lending platforms, Yalena had been an inspiration for both Célia and Ella when starting up their own company.
‘As does yours. Chariton Enterprises is steadily gaining quite a bit of notoriety, and,’ she said, clearly noticing Célia’s glance towards Loukis, ‘not because of your recent exciting news. May I offer my congratulations on your engagement?’
Yalena gestured for them to sit, and Loukis made the introductions between Iannis, Yalena’s husband, and Célia. Drinks were ordered, and small talk was made until they arrived.
‘Iannis, why don’t we leave the ladies to their business and go to the bar and gossip like the old miserable men that we are?’ Loukis announced. Giving his wife a kiss on the cheek, Iannis followed Loukis away from the table and towards the bar as promised.
Célia was thankful for it. For some reason having Loukis there had put her on the back foot. As if embarrassed or worried about what he might think if he saw her in client mode. Which was doubly strange because he was a client himself. She looked across at Yalena. Her close-cropped hair highlighted incredible cheekbones, gorgeous wide eyes and a ready smile. But for all of that, Célia knew that her mind was razor-sharp and her focus fierce.
‘I was not just paying lip service, Célia. I am impressed with what you’ve done with your company, especially such a young one.’
‘Thank you. It means a great deal to Ella, my business partner, and myself.’
She nodded. ‘May I ask why?’
‘Of course.’
Over the next hour Célia and Yalena discussed everything from why they had started their own businesses, what they had wanted from them and where they would like to go in the future. Each had been struck by how closely their motivations and desires had aligned and celebrated the successes and understood the challenges faced by the other. They were both in the business of matching like-minded clients, for their mutual benefit, and had faced many similar obstacles. This might have been why Yalena had probed deeper and more thoughtfully than most of Chariton’s existing clients and, instead of dismissing outright the charity areas that Célia believed were the best fit for her peer-to-peer company, allowed her to explain her reasoning and interacted happily with Célia’s initial thoughts on what kind of events would benefit them.