Greek Mavericks: His Christmas Conquest

And confiding in anyone in the village, even some of the people she had grown up with, would have been a huge mistake. She was determined to protect her father’s reputation and not reveal the extent of his financial troubles.

Of course there was Robert. Sophie frowned at the thought of him. Theoretically he presented the perfect shoulder on which to cry, but for some reason she fought shy of confiding in him. To his credit, he didn’t try and force her and a couple of times had even made it clear that he would be there for her, that however great the financial mess, he had savings and would bail her out.

It almost felt treacherous to be staring into Theo’s enigmatic green eyes now, insanely tempted to pour her heart out. Robert would feel utterly betrayed.

But then Robert was too much of a fixture in her life. The advantage with Theo was that he would be gone in a matter of weeks and with him anything she said. There wouldn’t even be a temptation to keep in touch with him because she didn’t particularly care for him. In a sense, that, too, made it easier.

‘You’ve listened to a lot of other people’s problems, have you?’ Sophie asked with a wry smile.

‘It’s not usually something I encourage.’

‘I thought you said that you were a good listener.’

‘I am. Which isn’t to say that I encourage people to pour out their problems to me.’

‘Thank you for telling me that. It’s just the right thing to make me feel at ease.’ Extraordinarily, she did feel stupidly relaxed. ‘Why don’t you like people pouring out their problems to you?’

‘Because most people like advice, they like solutions. They want to be told what their next difficult step might be and no one can advise anyone else on what they should do to sort themselves out. So, to avoid being called upon to do that, I prefer to refrain from putting myself in the firing line, so to speak.’

‘Sometimes it just helps to talk,’ Sophie said slowly.

‘And, as I said, I’m willing to listen.’ He had never talked about Elena. At her funeral, he had been surrounded by sympathetic well-wishers. He had been positively drowning under the torrent of well-meaning compassion. But at no point had he felt inclined to talk to anyone about what he was going through. Not even his mother could penetrate the defence system he’d erected like a steel cordon around his emotions.

His emotions, like everything else in his life, he could take care of by himself.

‘Didn’t you know that your father was in debt? Is that the problem?’

‘Part of it,’ Sophie admitted. ‘Do you mind if I help myself to another glass of wine? I’m not accustomed to discussing my private life with other people.’

Theo felt a strange sense of satisfaction that he had got it right about this aspect of her personality. It seemed to him an almost masculine trait because, in his experience, there wasn’t a woman alive who didn’t enjoy discussing every small facet of whatever happened to be flitting through her mind.

It was reassuring to think of his landlady in those terms. Masculine, brusque, quick to bristle, never mind the stubby girlish plaits or the soft pink of her cheeks as she glanced away from him.

‘There’s nothing less private than a financial mess,’ Theo said dryly.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because it always needs cleaning up and it’s almost impossible to hide the cleaning up tools once you set to work.’

‘Don’t say that!’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I don’t want my father’s reputation to be ruined. I don’t want him to be remembered as the man who left a mess for his daughter to sort out. I don’t want to be an object of pity.’

‘No.’ Theo could certainly understand that one. ‘So how big is the mess?’

‘I honestly don’t know where to begin. Dad was the most disorganised person in the world. He has notes scribbled on pieces of paper in places no one would think of looking. Just yesterday I found a file stuffed at the back of the sofa in the sitting room above the office.’

‘Which your father used…?’

‘Oh, when he was very busy into the night reviewing something or other. Which is another problem. I don’t actually understand a lot of what’s in his files so I don’t know whether to bin them or not. Robert’s been good helping me go through them, but there are just so many!’

‘Tell me about Robert.’

‘Why?’

‘How does he fit into the dynamics?’

‘He worked with my father, off and on, so to speak. He’s a trained pharmacist as well. I think he saw my dad as something of a mentor and, in the absence of a son to carry on the profession, Dad was pleased to have Robert tagging along over the past few years, especially as I’ve been away a lot of the time, going to university and doing my teacher training.’

‘So the two of you go back a long way?’

‘I guess so,’ Sophie said in a guarded voice.

Theo’s curiosity cranked into gear and, with it, his age-old talent for reading members of the opposite sex. He had always been able to sense what the slight change in body posture meant, the barely noticeable shift in tone, the quick glance. It was a talent that had spent the past eighteen months getting rusty.

‘Why do I sense a certain reticence on your part to discuss him? Normally when it comes to women that usually implies a relationship there and more often than not sex is involved. Is it?’

Sophie stared at Theo, stupefied.

‘Just an observation,’ he murmured, looking down at his empty glass and lazily reaching for the bottle of wine which Sophie had thoughtfully placed on the table in front of him. A thread of adrenaline seared through his blood.

The highly charged emotion of winning an important deal or even taking a life or death risk with his life, as he had done on the dangerous black run a few weeks back, faded into insignificance as he looked at her face.

He felt shamefully but guiltily alive. He knew that if circumstances had been different, if he had been in London, he would have resented her for awakening his ability to feel, but down here things seemed different. He had a different persona, just a man caught in a bubble in which reality was not much of an intrusion. He had no demands from the people he knew, no colleagues or clients to inspire, no familiar faces staring at him from the sidelines of his predictable run of social gatherings, most of which he ignored but a few of which he roused himself to attend.

No, here he was a mystery author who had no past and no future. There were no expectations on his shoulders. In a few weeks he would pack his bags, get his driver down and return to his normal life.

In the meantime he could be whoever the hell he wanted to be.

Anonymity had never smelled sweeter.

‘Financial problems usually involve more than one player. Hence my curiosity as to where this Robert character fits in. He probably knows a hell of a lot more than you think about your father’s debts. Are you sure they’re all to do with his work? If he and this boy were close, you might want to consider that he may have been forking out money to him, treating him like a son who might need bailing out now and again…Or maybe this so-called old friend of yours has been taking money out of the till, hence his enthusiasm to help you out now. One way of making sure that he gets his hands on anything that involves him…’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Sophie laughed shortly, allowing herself not to be poleaxed by his provocative suggestions about Robert. It was just good not to be lying in bed worrying and the fact that she didn’t like him much was even better for her because it meant that she could be herself. If he had disliked her attitude so much he would have left the cottage within minutes of being subjected to her first tirade but in some part of her she knew that he would just have written it off as unconventional behaviour and, from what she could see, he looked as though he exhibited quite a bit of that himself.

‘And how do you happen to know about financial players, whatever that means?’

‘I know about a lot of things,’ Theo said smoothly. ‘Certainly enough to be highly suspicious when it comes to anything to do with money.’

Sophie opened her mouth to level something sarcastic at that sweeping piece of self-flattery, but thought better of it. She realised that he probably did know about a lot of things. ‘There are no players,’ she found herself saying, smiling in fact at the thought of her father being some kind of crazed, criminal puppet master with accomplices lurking behind every door. Or, even more comical, good-natured Robert cunningly sneaking money from the till.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘The thought of my father engaged in underhand wheeler-dealing. And Robert isn’t some kind of dastardly accomplice who’s stitched up the books.’ She sighed heavily. ‘No, the truth is much simpler. My father loved experimenting. He was born to live life in a lab. It used to drive my mum mad. He experimented and wrote his notes and ordered his substances and there are records of some and records of others and paperwork that keeps popping up from every nook and cranny. That’s what we’re doing at the office—trying to go through all of it and tie it up into bundles. Problem is, there’s paperwork in this house as well. I know it. And in the flat above the office. And Lord knows where else! And Robert is just trying to help me put it all in order.’

‘How thoughtful of him,’ Theo murmured. The woman must be half blind not to spot the fact that the man was more than halfway to being in love with her.

He looked at her. Really looked at her. The slant of her body as she leaned forward in the chair. The combat trousers, he had to admit, looked a little sexy on her, probably because she was so slender, and under the cream jumper he was very much aware of the soft mounds of her breasts. Suddenly and painfully aware. After such a long haul of self-imposed celibacy, fierce heat slammed through Theo’s body like a sledgehammer. He crossed his legs, doing his best to ensure that his suddenly obvious physical response wasn’t visible.

He was aware that she was telling him about her father, about his habits. She obviously hadn’t heard his sarcastic rejoinder about Robert and, for the time being, Theo was more than happy to listen to her talk, anything to give his body an opportunity to get back to normal.

He tried to conjure up Elena’s face. No luck. The urgency of his response was too powerful. He placed one hand flat on his thigh and fidgeted uncomfortably.

‘Are you all right?’ Sophie asked, concerned. ‘Am I boring you?’

‘Not at all,’ Theo muttered. His eyes strayed down to her thighs. She was sitting on her hands and when she leaned forward like that…He just knew that she wasn’t wearing a bra.

He just managed to control the groan that threatened to escape.

‘I could go…’

‘No!’ He waved her down, even though she hadn’t stood up. ‘No. Look, why don’t you stay and have some dinner with me? There’s stuff in the fridge. Catherine has been very diligent about…making sure that I don’t go hungry. At any point.’

‘I don’t know…’ She thought of the meal for one waiting back at the flat for her. Robert had invited her out to dinner, but she had refused the offer on the grounds of exhaustion. And she really had been exhausted an hour ago. Where it had gone was a mystery.

‘Okay,’ she said, making her mind up. ‘But I won’t stay for very long. It’s been a tiring week.’ She stood up, expecting him to follow suit.

‘You…go ahead…I’ll join you in the kitchen in a short while. I’m just going to…have a quick shower…’

‘Now?’

‘Seize the moment,’ Theo said. He waited until she had left the room before heading to his bedroom, taking the stairs and exhaling a long sigh of relief when he was safely ensconced in the bedroom.

He hadn’t felt this horny since he was a teenager and he was far from proud of himself. The cool water took a while to take effect but at least he felt in control once again when he strolled downstairs to find her in the kitchen and the table set.

Sophie looked up at him and her heart skipped a beat. His hair was still damp and he had changed into some beige trousers and a baggy white T-shirt that brought out the drama of his colouring.

‘You haven’t let me forget that this is your cottage,’ Theo said, fetching another bottle of wine from the fridge and pouring them both fresh glasses, ‘but it still seems strange to walk into the kitchen and find the table set.’ He wished to God that he hadn’t asked her to stay. Now that he was back in control of himself, he could feel a bitter resentment simmering inside him at the way his body had betrayed him. And the whole domestic scene laid out before him, while it was hardly her fault, only made matters worse.

What was he doing? His body was responding like a dog on heat to a woman whose personality left him cold.

‘It would seem odd to me not to set it,’ Sophie replied. She turned away hurriedly and began prodding the chicken, which she had transferred from a casserole dish to a frying pan. ‘I apologise for making myself at home…’

‘In your own home?’ Theo laughed shortly, watching how her slim shoulders stiffened.

‘While there’s a tenant in the cottage, it’s no longer my home. It’s just bricks and mortar to look after so that no problems arise with the fabric of the house.’ She reluctantly turned around and leaned against the counter top, arms folded. ‘Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea,’ she continued awkwardly. ‘You should have eaten your chicken on your own and I should have gone out to dinner with Robert.’

Theo afforded her a swift look but she wasn’t looking at him. She was frowning and staring into the distance. He had an insane impulse to drag her back to the here and now, which was dinner with him. ‘You should be careful of that man,’ Theo murmured and at first he wasn’t sure if she had even taken in what he had said but, sure enough, after a few seconds Sophie looked at him in open astonishment.

The familiar anger flooded into her and she had never been happier to feel an unpleasant emotion. Earlier on there had been moments of breathless confusion that had had her floundering and uncertain. She glared at him.

‘Do I need to ask why or will you tell me anyway?’

‘Okay, he may not be a crook, but I’ve met men like him before…’

‘Oh. And would that be in the fascinating world of literature?’

Theo ignored the interruption. ‘They’re insecure, hesitant, desperate for a bit of love. They’re the ones who marry the first woman they meet so that they can retire from the headache of the chase. Basically, they’re losers.’

‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard in my life! Robert isn’t a loser.’

‘Sadly, men like that,’ Theo mused, disregarding her heated objections, ‘usually go for a strong-willed woman, much like yourself…’

‘I’m not even going to pretend to be listening.’ She turned and stuck the rice into the microwave, pushing the numbers hard to drown out the sound of his voice. Not that he was saying anything. At the moment. He was looking at her. She could feel his eyes boring through her top and the sensation was like having her breasts touched by him, a feathery soft caress that made her redden.

For some reason she wished she had worn a bra, but then she hadn’t expected to be staying on for dinner—just fixing the heating and clearing off—and it was comfortable not having her breasts constrained. Although she was slight in build, she was not flat chested. The opposite, in fact. She now felt the weight of her generous breasts bouncing under the loose jumper, swaying as she dished out the food.

‘Dinner,’ she said flatly, nodding to his plate and sitting down at the kitchen table opposite him.

‘And the end of our conversation, I take it?’

Sophie watched him, hunkered over his plate, eating the chicken with his fork, every inch the kind of alpha male who could walk into a room and have the ladies swooning. She would have to be as thick as a plank of wood not to realise that the man’s massive ego and staggering self-assurance would have come from the power he probably exerted over the opposite sex. Did he think that his extraordinary looks somehow qualified him to be a judge of what made other people tick? Whatever he said, she couldn’t believe that his contact with the rest of the world was particularly huge, never mind how many books he had had published in the past. Writing was a solitary profession. Yes, if he wrote real adventures about real people, then he would have to interview them, but after that he would be on his own, transcribing. Transcribing at a desk somewhere in London certainly didn’t qualify him to offer advice on one of her closest male friends.

She wondered whether he assumed that she must be completely ignorant of the opposite sex, living in this backwater as she did.

Suddenly, Sophie felt an unusual protective urge towards Robert. She thought of his little kindnesses recently and bitterly resented Theo’s sweeping assumption that he could insult the man without compunction.

‘You can say what you like about Robert, but he’s gentle and kind and considerate. In fact…’ she allowed a few seconds of silence to stress the importance of what she was going to say ‘…he’s even offered to help bail me out of this financial mess…’

‘Really,’ Theo drawled.

‘Really.’ Sophie shot him a smug little smile, which he greeted by raising his eyebrows in apparent amusement.

‘Maybe he just wants to get you into bed and buttering you up with an offer he knows you’ll probably refuse seems the quickest way.’

Sophie recovered quickly. ‘Maybe that’s it. Although maybe I wouldn’t need buttering up to get into bed with him…’ She gave a shrug which she hoped displayed the wealth of worldly wisdom which was definitely not at her disposal. Whether it was the wine or a combination of the wine and the dangerously intrusive conversation, she was beginning to feel heady. She was twenty-six years old and she couldn’t remember ever having a conversation like this before. The boys in her circle, most of whom were doing post grad courses, would never have dreamt of challenging her in this way. She didn’t know whether she liked it or not. And she didn’t know whether she liked the excitement that was fizzing in her veins as she met his stare. If someone had asked her what she was eating, she would have had to think about it, even though she had been the one to dish it up.

‘Somehow he strikes me as a bit too tame for a woman like you. Unless, of course, you like the role of dominatrix,’ Theo mused aloud, finishing his chicken and shoving the plate away from him. He leaned back into his chair and looked at her steadily. There was a little drop of sauce from the chicken on her chin, by her mouth, and he allowed himself the rogue thought of wondering what she would do if he covered the three steps towards her, bent down and licked it off.

Guilt followed hard on the heels of the wayward image, but there was none of that savage longing he had had in the past to hold on to the image of Elena. The steady drumming of rain outside, the bursts of wind clawing against the window panes, was like a lullaby, easing his tortured conscience, leaving him free to indulge himself in the sight of her playing with the food on her plate.

‘You’ve got some sauce on your chin.’

‘Oh!’ Sophie wiped it off and licked her finger. For some strange reason, Theo found the innocent gesture intensely erotic. The erection he had put to rest earlier on was once more reminding him that he was still a man and one with very real physical needs.

‘Mind you, if you don’t really know whether the man actually wants you or not, then his technique can’t be very persuasive…’ Theo murmured, returning to the conversation and enjoying the faint flush of colour that spread along her cheekbones. There was nothing masculine about that reaction, he thought. In fact, it was very, very feminine.

Before his body decided to do something of its own volition, he stood up and began clearing away the plates, insisting she stay put while he tidied.

‘I’m a twenty-first century man,’ he said, which was enough to make him grin. Dinosaur was one of the labels an ex-girlfriend from years back had once told him and certainly, however much he was in favour of equality of the sexes in the workplace, he still saw almost every chore to do with the house as something firmly planted in a woman’s domain. In fact, if he thought about it, he really couldn’t remember the last time he had ever done what he was now in the process of doing, namely clearing the dishes from a table after he had shared a meal with a woman.

In fact, thinking even harder on the matter, he realised that sharing a meal with a woman anywhere other than a restaurant or, at a push, her place, was not something that had ever been on his agenda. Women fussing in his kitchen had always made him feel slightly uneasy. Until Elena. Although…

Had she ever cooked for him? No—not enough time to enjoy the pleasures of domesticity before tragedy had taken her away. Their relationship had been frozen in the courtship stage.

Before he could travel down the usual inexorable path, he realised that Sophie was saying something about his twenty-first century man observation and in a particularly acerbic tone of voice, he realised.

‘What am I doing?’ he demanded, temporarily distracted. He brandished one plate in his hand and looked meaningfully at the sink.

‘You’re putting your dirty plate into the sink and you’ve been polite enough to take mine as well. I wouldn’t,’ she added with scathing sarcasm, ‘be too hasty to enter any Man of the Year competitions based on that…’

Before she could continue, Theo had swept round to face her and leant over her, bracing himself on the arms of her chair. He was so close to her, in fact, that she could see the golden specks in his eyes, was horribly aware of the thickness and length of his eyelashes, acutely conscious of the sexy contours of his mouth.

She was also very very conscious of her own body and the way it was shrieking in response. Her nipples, grazing the thick cotton of her jumper, had tightened into buds and every part of her seemed to be melting.

She could breathe him in. His uniquely clean male scent filled her nostrils and she blinked away the temptation to sigh and close her eyes.

‘And, in your opinion, what would qualify me to enter that Man of the Year competition…?’ Theo drawled. His eyes dropped to her heaving breasts and he hurriedly fastened them safely back on her face.

‘Not an ability to move a dish from one part of the kitchen to another…’

Theo grinned and then laughed softly under his breath. ‘What, then?’

Their eyes met and Sophie was sickeningly transfixed. Her heart was beating like a drum inside her, reverberating in her head and making her pulse race. In a minute she half expected to lose the power of speech completely.

If he would only give her a little more breathing room, she might be able to gather herself into the coherent, fairly unflappable young woman she had always considered herself to be. As it was, she could feel her face getting hotter and hotter and probably redder and redder as well.

He must have read her mind because, to her intense relief, he pushed himself away and fetched two mugs down from the cupboard. In her flurry of nerves, Sophie could hardly focus on resenting him for knowing his way around her house as well as she did.

Instead, clearing her throat, she told him that she had to be getting along.

‘I apologise if I made you feel awkward by stepping on your toes about your boyfriend…’

‘Robert is not my boyfriend! And, anyway, you didn’t make me feel awkward. I’m not completely green when it comes to men, you know.’

‘No?’

‘No,’ Sophie said firmly, before he decided to question her on the subject. She wouldn’t put it past him. His lines between interested and downright rude seemed to be very blurry.