Greek Mavericks: His Christmas Conquest

‘No, thank you. I’ve just come to tell you that there is going to be a power cut tomorrow. Only for a few hours, but I’m afraid you won’t be able to use your computer. Or anything else, for that matter. Well, anything that relies on current, which is pretty much everything.’ Sophie smiled nervously while he continued to watch her through narrowed eyes. She wanted to edge towards the door but he had stayed put right in front of it. She knew that he wasn’t trying to hem her in. In fact, he seemed perfectly relaxed, almost friendly in a frankly too good-looking kind of way, if that was possible. He had obviously forgotten about the little incident, as she preferred to think of it, and she was immensely relieved about that.

‘You should back your book up,’ she advised.

‘Good idea. Thank you.’ In a minute she would make a bolt for it and Theo wasn’t having that. Now that he had made his mind up, a calm sense of purpose had settled over him. He took a couple of steps towards her and noticed how she flinched, as nervous as a kitten. What did she imagine he was going to do? The answer was as swift in coming as it was obvious. She was wary of him touching her. He wondered what scared her more—the thought of his touch or the prospect of her response.

Without guilt yapping at his heels, Theo felt a spurt of pure adrenaline rush through him as he contemplated the sweet scent of seduction.

If someone had told him a fortnight ago that he would have been looking at another woman like this, enjoying the anticipation of bedding her, he would have floored them for daring to insult the memory of the woman he had so nearly married.

Now his eyes drifted lazily over her face, appreciating the rise of delicate colour to her cheeks.

‘Am I making you nervous?’ he asked.

‘No! Why should you?’

‘Because the last time I saw you the situation between us got a little out of hand…’ He strolled towards her, hands in his pockets. ‘Neither of us meant it to.’ While he spoke, Theo maintained direct eye contact with her. She might be feisty, but she was also as gullible as hell and the combination was intriguing.

‘I’d…really rather not talk about it…’ Sophie stammered. She drew in a sharp breath and tilted her chin up.

‘Well, I’d quite like to…’ Theo said mildly. Now he was standing inches away from her. Yes, the door was clear but could she make a dash for it? No. Circumnavigating him would have been as straightforward as circumnavigating a mountain blindfolded and also, deliberately or not, he had thrown down a gauntlet. Discuss this, he seemed to be saying, or else risk being seen as running away.

‘Why?’ Sophie gulped. Her throat felt dry and she had to look away. His eyes were throwing her into a tizzy.

‘Look, why don’t we have some coffee? You have my word that I won’t lay a finger on you…Unless, of course, you ask…’

Sophie gasped at the softly spoken, intensely sexy offer and then realised that he must be joking. Probably just to gauge her reaction. She already knew that he thought her gauche and inexperienced and mouthy with it, and he would find it funny to wind her up. Come to think of it, there was something of the predator to him and didn’t predators enjoy playing with their victims before they moved in for the kill?

Sophie laughed shakily to herself at the fanciful train of thought.

But, when she met his eyes, she felt her skin begin to prickle in dreadful awareness. ‘Very funny,’ she managed to say in a strangled voice.

‘Come on. Your nervousness is making me nervous.’ His smile was reassuring. ‘Take the coat off. Now that the heating’s working it’s warm enough in here to walk around in shorts and a T-shirt. I didn’t think that old places could store heat that effectively.’ Suddenly it was vitally important that he didn’t frighten her away. This might just be his temporary salvation, just a sliver of normality unexpectedly offered to him, but he wanted it so badly it hurt.

That said, he would seduce but never force. That wasn’t his style and never could be. If she was truly wary enough to keep her distance, then he would accept it.

He contemplated returning to London, the same faces at the same society dos. He wondered whether this strange release he had found here would continue to work once he returned to normal life or whether he would be plunged back into the limbo he had left behind. Here, he thought of Elena but she didn’t haunt him.

He started walking away, not to the kitchen but towards the cosy sitting room, hoping she would follow. She didn’t. When he looked around, she was rooted to the same spot.

‘You’re not coming…’ Theo said with a touch of incredulity and Sophie maintained an admirably stony expression.

‘Very observant.’

‘Why not? I told you,’ he continued, trying to fight down the edginess creeping into his voice, ‘I won’t bite.’

‘And I told you that I don’t want to discuss the inappropriate situation that took place. If you can disrespect what I say, then I’m free to ignore what you say.’

Theo stared at her and wondered how the hell he could ever have thought her gullible. Her face was red with embarrassment but, hell, that hadn’t stopped her from speaking her mind.

‘We have to discuss it,’ he grated. She didn’t budge and, red-faced or not, she looked him squarely in the face and refused to back down. Theo was beginning to feel impotent in the face of such outright female lack of co-operation.

‘Why?’ Sophie asked.

‘Because…’he delivered his sentence with heavy-handed, thinly veiled patience ‘…you are my landlady. We’re going to need to meet occasionally and we need to get this out in the open, talk about it so that it doesn’t hang between us the way it’s doing now.’

‘It’s only hanging between us because you brought it up,’ Sophie pointed out. Going through her head was the thought that she had never been so achingly aware of a man in her life before. He oozed sex appeal and it didn’t seem fair. It was bad enough having a routine conversation with him, far less a conversation to do with sex. Just bracketing those two harmless words, Theo and sex, in the same sentence was enough to make her mind do all manner of wild leap-frogging.

‘It’s hanging between us because it happened!’

‘Yes, and I’m prepared to pretend it never did.’

Theo greeted this remark with stunned silence. In his world, at least the world he had once inhabited for years, in his carefree pre-Elena days, he had been able to play women with the finesse of a musician playing his instrument. It had always been a mutually enjoyable experience. The lazy talk of sex, dropped negligently into a conversation while his eyes expanded on the subject and promised pleasures that could only be guessed at.

‘I mean,’ Sophie took up the thread of her conversation, ‘discussing it and having a post mortem isn’t going to change anything. What we have to agree on is that nothing like that will take place again and I would appreciate it if you don’t…don’t…drop any innuendoes into the conversation. You might find it funny, but I don’t.’

Sophie weathered the silence which stretched between them with the tautness of tightly pulled elastic. She was beginning to think that she had misheard his earlier remark and misread the situation. And why, she thought with sudden agonising clarity, had she warned him not to touch her again? As if he couldn’t resist her womanly charms? No wonder he was standing there, lost for words and staring at her as though she had taken leave of her senses! Lord knew, he had probably wanted to give her a little speech about keeping her hands to herself!

She gathered herself together and pursed her lips. ‘Right. So I only came here to tell you about the electricity going. There’s a proper fireplace in the sitting room and also in the bedrooms, so if it gets very cold you are welcome to light them. I haven’t ordered in a huge amount of logs as yet but there are enough stacked by the fire downstairs to tide you over until the current comes back and the heating can go on again.’

‘I’m not likely to be using the bedroom in the morning, am I? So there should be no need for me to light a fire in it, and I think I’ll be able to manage for a few hours without falling into a state of hypothermia.’

Theo, piqued that his attempt at seduction had fallen crushingly flat, was at pains to sound as normal as possible but he was still bemused at the unsavoury and novel sensation of being blown out of the water.

And, now that she had said what she had to say, he could tell that she was itching to be off. And he should be more than happy to see the back of her, he decided. Fate might have ironically chosen to remind him at this point in time that he was still alive and still a healthy red-blooded male, but the woman was not worth pursuit. Least of all to a man who had never had the need to pursue any woman in his life before. Not, he mused, even Elena. She may have captured his heart with her delicate China doll prettiness and her sweetly subservient nature, but their attraction had been immediate and mutual. He frowned at the bristling little figure standing in front of him.

‘And how do you intend to while away the morning, considering all useful activity will grind to a halt while the power is off?’

‘Useful activity doesn’t necessarily mean work,’ Sophie pointed out.

‘You mean you won’t be cooped up in your office sifting through paperwork?’

‘Someone’s got to do it! You make it sound as though I actually enjoy sitting there, staring at piles of paper and wondering which bundle to go through first!’

‘Well, what would you rather do?’

‘Anything! Go for a walk on the beach! Get to see a movie for the first time in six months! Eat out at a fancy restaurant, which is something I haven’t done since forever! Sorry.’ She shrugged lightly, inviting him to laugh at her overblown response, but he didn’t. His eyes narrowed and he stared at her in silence.

‘Why are you sorry?’ he asked eventually. It seemed strange to be having a conversation with the width of the hallway separating them.

Sophie, wondering how it was that she was managing to have a conversation with the man when she had been literally on the way out, took a few steps towards the door. ‘Because I really should leave you to get on with your work,’ she said, constrained to be polite after her outburst earlier on. ‘I guess you might have to resort to longhand if you work tomorrow! Isn’t that always such a shock to the system when we’ve all become so accustomed to computers?’

She could feel the energy pulsing out of him as she neared him and finally arrived at the safe haven of the door handle. Sophie grasped it and turned round to glance at Theo over her shoulder.

‘They’re usually pretty reliable at predicting the hours of the power cuts, but let me know…’

‘…if I want anything. Yes, I think I’ve got that message by now…’

The problem was, he thought, as she vanished into the darkness, leaving him acutely aware of his very palpable frustration, the one thing he did want, she did not seem obliged to give him.

Chapter Five

WHEN Theo thought about Elena, he thought about everything that was delicate and feminine. The minute he had laid eyes on her, he had been drawn by her soft girlish beauty and her quiet charm. For the first time in his life his motives had been free of lust and the driving urge to get a woman into bed. Yes, he had been physically attracted to her, but bigger and more overwhelming than that attraction had been his urge to take care of her.

Elena, coming at a time in his life when he had been subconsciously thinking of settling down, had fulfilled every fantasy he had ever nurtured about the perfect woman.

She had been almost excessively pretty—blonde hair, blue eyes and none of the raunchy glamour associated with the mixture. Raunchy had always been fine for Theo when it came to women he slept with, but when it came to a prospective wife there was no way that that look was going to do. Despite his savvy, Theo had a very defined traditionalist streak. What was acceptable to wine and dine and eventually disengage from, was not acceptable when it came to sharing his life.

Elena, with her angelic good looks, had been eminently suitable wife material.

And she’d been deferential without being characterless. Of course, he had never been attracted to the argumentative type, but Elena had been deferential in the most charmingly attractive way. He could remember sitting across from her at the dinner table in one of those wildly expensive restaurants which he usually avoided but which seemed appropriate given his desire to impress her, could remember the way she had gazed at him with a soft smile on her lips, the way she had listened with her head cocked to one side and her eyes shining with appreciation. He had known from the very beginning that she would never criticise. She would be the soothing balm and, for Theo, that was a compelling aspect of her personality.

Throw into the mixture the fact that he would have been making a desirable match as far as both families were concerned, and the pedestal on which he had placed her became unassailable.

Theo wondered whether he would have continued mourning her disappearance from his life forever if he had remained in London. He knew now and had known for a while that he had allowed, indeed encouraged, his emotions to go into deep freeze. To start with, it had been a protective mechanism but then he had become accustomed to the freeze. In the end, it had felt good not to feel.

Lying in bed now, with a half-read business manual next to him and the prospect of a morning without the use of his computer, Theo contemplated the vagary of fate that had brought him to this pass.

He folded his hands behind his head and stared up at the ceiling.

What was it about this woman that had managed to get under his skin?

She was disagreeable and prickly a lot of the time. He doubted that she had a sweetly submissive bone in her body. Theo, used to viewing all problems in life as soluble, could not for the hell of him work out why he was bothering with a woman who rattled him when, without too much effort, he could easily find one who didn’t. Considering things logically, why would he voluntarily put himself into a situation that had the potential to give him a headache? Women, he firmly believed, should never give men headaches. They were the gentle sex and their duty was to calm.

He muttered an oath under his breath, snatched up the manual and attempted to get his brain round the concepts of global business protocol.

Sophie Scott was not calming. She had also rejected his advances. Theo scowled and snapped shut the business book. The laptop computer was right there, next to him, ready and waiting for him to bring it to life, but the thought of reading through yet more urgent emails bored him.

He switched off the light and let his thoughts roam freely over selected snippets of the conversation they had had earlier, dwelling on the way she had firmly but politely warned him off making a pass at her. Obviously she had never been told that to warn a man off something was to wave a red flag under his nose. Or at least that was the way it worked with Theo.

What was the point of a challenge if you didn’t rise to it? Theo always rose to a challenge. He savoured the prospect of having her, of overwhelming her prudish concerns, of releasing the fire he knew was there inside her.

He woke up the following morning with an uncomfortable sensation of coldness and realised that there was no heating in the cottage. The fact that he slept without pyjamas didn’t help matters. His mind was racing, though, and the cold was almost a welcome spur to the well-spring of energy he could feel inside him. He had a very quick and very cold shower and by nine-thirty he was on the way to her office.

Sitting on the floor and wrapped up in various layers of thick clothing because there was no way that Sophie was going to sit around in her coat, she was barely aware of Theo pushing open the office door.

In fact, she was not at all aware of his presence until he was looming over her; then his shadow alerted her to the fact that she was no longer alone.

With a little yelp of shock, she stumbled to her feet, sending various sheets of paper shooting off her lap on to the ground.

‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded, dusting herself down and glaring at him.

‘Where’s the rest of your motley crew?’

‘You haven’t answered my question.’ She had pretty much given up trying to remember that she was his landlady and obliged to display good manners, even though she might not feel like it. She had been sitting on that wretched floor for the best part of an hour, simply because it had seemed easier to get down to the level of the boxes rather than continually drag them up to her level. Her jeans were dusty, her hands were dusty, her hair was probably dusty too and her clothes were a shambolic assortment of things that should really have been binned years ago but had somehow managed to slip through the net. She felt a mess and she looked a mess and there he stood, outrageously sexy in a pair of cords, a thick cream sweater and a battered leather jacket that screamed casual style.

‘I thought I would drop in, maybe give you a hand with some of this paperwork, seeing that I can’t do any work myself because of the power cut.’

‘You can still write without a computer,’ Sophie felt constrained to point out. She hoped that it wasn’t part of his game plan to spend the morning under her feet just because his computer was out of action for a few hours. ‘I mean, aren’t you writers supposed to be inventive?’

‘I think you’re thinking of people like your father.’

‘I said inventive not inventors.’

‘Show me what you’ve done already and how your filing system works.’

‘You don’t have to sit and help me with this.’

‘In other words, you’d rather I didn’t.’

‘I’d work a lot faster if I don’t have to stop to explain stuff to you.’

‘I’m a very quick learner. You would be surprised.’

‘You should use this opportunity to see something around here,’ Sophie suggested desperately. ‘I mean, if you really think that you can’t write a chapter or two of your book without a computer.’

‘Why don’t you just accept my offer of help in the manner in which it was intended?’ Theo said with mounting impatience. ‘Especially as there is no one around at the moment to help out anyway. Where is the gang of three? Christmas shopping?’

Sophie guiltily thought of Robert. True to his word, he had not shown up but she had spent the morning half expecting him to telephone her and was relieved that he hadn’t. His proposal, coming out of nowhere as it had, had shaken her to the core. He had been a friend and a helping hand to her when she had needed one but was that any reason to consider developing a relationship with him? On the other hand, she wasn’t getting any younger and they did get along, at least on a superficial level, which was the only level they had previously enjoyed.

What was the harm in just seeing whether there was something there that could be developed further?

‘Don’t tell me the boyfriend has deserted the sinking ship?’ Theo slid open the drawer of one of the metal filing cabinets and began looking at the files.

‘You need a computer,’ he said, as the level of paperwork became ever clearer. ‘It’s the only way you’ll be able to keep track of everything here and, aside from that, it’s a bloody fire hazard.’

‘I’ve got a computer,’ Sophie told him airily.

‘Where is it?’

‘Upstairs. I just haven’t got around to…logging some of this stuff in…It takes time, you know…All that computer work, et cetera…I mean, it’s all right for you. You just have to sit there telling stories and typing away.’

It occurred to Theo that the whole figment of his occupation was becoming a burden, but he quickly reminded himself how much more satisfying it was to be incognito, at least for a short while. Hadn’t he lived his entire life with the weight of expectation on his shoulders? Without any siblings to share the responsibility, he had had little option but to fulfil his duty as son and heir to a shipping empire. Just as well he had found it to his liking. All the same, it was good to be suddenly in this make-believe role, with only himself to please and absolutely no one else.

‘I know a thing or two about computers. I could have a look at what you’ve done so far, see whether it mightn’t require some updating.’

‘You know about computers? How do you know about computers? No! Let me guess! The way you seem to know about everything. Information just wafts into you, through osmosis! Lucky you.’

‘You haven’t logged any of this on to a computer, have you?’

Sophie wanted to ask him how he had the nerve to waltz into her office and begin making assumptions about her approach to the workload. Did he think that it was a walk in the park trying to come to terms with your father’s death and sort out the chaos he had left behind without you ever suspecting a thing at the same time? However, there he was, sitting there and looking as though he knew what he was doing, which, of course, he didn’t, and she just wanted to dump the lot on to him and ask him to deal with it while she went to her bed and slept for a few weeks till it was all cleared up.

‘I’ve been meaning to…’ Sophie admitted sulkily and Theo tut-tutted under his breath.

‘Well, we can’t do anything at the moment but, as soon as the power is back, I suggest we install a simple program so that we can collate all the information scattered in these boxes.’

‘We…?’ Sophie felt obliged to reveal the extent of her ignorance of all things technical. ‘Computers and I have never had much of a friendship.’

‘That being the case, I’m surprised what’s-his-name couldn’t have helped you out there.’

‘I think we were just so busy trying to get the stuff together that…that…’

‘That it never occurred to you that there might be a far quicker way to do it…?’ He grabbed a stack of files and strolled over to her desk, where he proceeded to drag the nearest chair to hers so that he could position himself next to her. ‘Okay. Look at these.’ He pointed to some symbols and picked out various key words, which meant frankly nothing to Sophie’s untrained eyes. ‘We could install a program that would automatically collate information that belongs under the same banner. So, for example, experiments based on certain solutions, where your father was in contact with the same person at roughly the same time, could automatically reach the same file at the click of a button.’

‘You could do that?’ Sophie asked, seriously impressed. She desperately wished that she had paid a bit more attention in IT at school. ‘How?’ she demanded. ‘Did you do a computer course at college?’

Computer course? College?

‘I dabbled in it at university,’ Theo conceded.

‘Oh, right.’

‘Surprised?’ He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his thighs.

‘Oh, no. Not at all. Well, not that you went to university…I’m just surprised that you took an interest in something like computing. Was it part of your creative writing course?’

‘Whoever said anything about creative writing?’ That little white lie by Gloria, delivered for all the right reasons, to protect him because as a high profile name in business he might have attracted unwanted attention, was now beginning to haunt Theo. He refused to enlarge upon it by fabricating a mystery past.

Sophie frowned. ‘Well, what did you do at university?’ she asked.

‘Economics and law.’

‘You’re kidding, right?’

‘Why should I be kidding?’ Theo asked dryly.

‘Because…’ Sophie spluttered, predicting that this would lead right back to his conviction that she had stereotyped him. ‘So…yes, I can see that you might be interested in computers if you liked law and economics…’