Unworldly Secretary, Untamed Greek

The casual question made her stiffen and brought her eyes back to his lean face. How did a man who had not given her the same degree of attention he afforded the office furniture on his visits come to know about the knot of misery lodged like a lead weight in her aching throat?

‘I don’t know what you mean…’

He cut her off with an impatient gesture. ‘You’re in love with my brother.’

Chapter Three

BETH felt the blood drain from her face as she stared at him in horror. ‘That’s totally ridiculous!’

He raised his brows in mock surprise. ‘I did not realise it was meant to be a secret. My apologies.’

It took a massive amount of willpower not to drop her gaze. Tired of pushing her glasses back up her nose, she took them off and placed them on the desk before fixing him with a glare of thinly disguised loathing.

‘You know what you can do with your apologies and your sick sense of humour!’

The transformation was nothing short of incredible. She still wasn’t a raving beauty but if his brother saw her with her cheeks flushed, her small bosom heaving and her eyes glittering with anger he would have noticed her.

‘Andreas has just got engaged to a beautiful woman. You wish to wallow in self-pity and perhaps look at the photo you keep in your wallet.’ The cynicism in his smile deepened as he watched her eyes fly to her handbag. ‘No, it was a lucky guess—I have not been going through your bag.’

‘Is that some sort of joke?’ The joke, she realized, feeling sick, was herself. Did everyone know…? The idea of being the butt of gossip, maybe even pity, made her feel physically sick.

She gathered her dignity around her and lifted her chin, inadvertently winning Theo’s admiration for her gutsy effort, and said coldly, ‘I work for your brother. We do not have a personal relationship…unlike you and…’ She broke off guiltily, her eyes widening in dismay.

She had never kicked anyone when they were down—not that he looked down—but, under his nasty cold exterior, Theo Kyriakis had to have his normal share of emotional vulnerability…Their eyes connected, his glittered with a combination of amused contempt and challenge that made her rapidly rethink her vulnerability theory as antagonism traced a path down her spine—all this man had was an overreaching ego and stone as dark and cold as his eyes where his heart should be!

‘Unlike me and…?’

She shook her head and straightened a pile of already straight papers. ‘I really am very busy.’ She aimed her smile at some point over his left shoulder.

‘You possibly refer to my relationship with the delightful Ariana…?’ He arched a questioning brow.

The dratted man. Why wouldn’t he just let it drop? Beth thought. ‘That was a long time ago.’ Had it been a lucky guess or was she really that obvious? And, if he had guessed, did that mean that Andreas knew as well?

A film of hot mortification washed over her pale skin at the thought. Hot, she slipped the top button of her blouse and then the second because her chest felt tight.

Theo felt his eyes drawn to the bare few inches of flesh at her throat; he could actually see the blue-veined pulse spot on her neck vibrating. ‘The past is frequently relevant to the present.’

Having delivered this seemingly unrelated philosophical observation, he pulled a chair from the wall, dragged it to her desk and straddled it, placing his hands along the back of it before he returned his attention to Beth.

Beth, who no longer wanted an explanation for this conversation, lowered her gaze as far as his hands, curved lightly over the back of the designer chair. He actually had good hands—elegant but strong, with long tapering fingers—and sent up a silent prayer for him to leave.

She needed to think—not a possibility while he was enjoying his cat-and-mouse game with her—the man clearly got some twisted pleasure from seeing her squirm.

‘I suspect that part of Ariana’s attraction for my little brother is our previous relationship; he’s very competitive.’

Beth’s shaking hand knocked down the neat stack of files on the desk as her head came up with a jerk. ‘He’s competitive!’ She scanned the dark features of the man seated opposite with open incredulity. It obviously didn’t even occur to him that she just preferred Andreas to him. My God, this man’s ego was simply unbelievable.

After a slight pause Theo conceded her comment with an amused quirk of his lips, the action drawing Beth’s attention to the overtly sensual curve. The shivery sensation in her tummy intensified.

‘All right, we—it’s a brother thing,’ he revealed casually.

Beth dragged her oddly reluctant eyes from his mouth. Even when he had ignored her totally she had felt uncomfortable being in the same room as Theo Kyriakis; now he wasn’t ignoring her, now he was having what in his twisted mind probably passed for a conversation the feeling had intensified to a point where all she wanted to do was run from the room.

Get a grip, Beth. ‘It may be your thing but it’s not Andreas’s.’

Frustrated by her inability to place the shadow of an emotion that moved at the back of his eyes, Beth found herself unfavourably comparing his cold, sardonic temperament with Andreas’s open, approachable, sunny character.

It was a struggle to believe they were even related. Andreas was a sunny day and this vile man was night, dark, impenetrable and full of hidden dangers.

‘I bow to your superior knowledge of my brother.’ He dipped his dark head towards her and continued in the same sarcastic manner that had a nail scraping on blackboard effect on Beth’s nerve endings. ‘You are clearly an expert on the subject.’ Perhaps his brother had dropped a casual kiss on her cheek once and she had been fantasising about it ever since—or had they gone further?

Irritated by the returning theme, Theo rejected the idea before his mind supplied the accompanying images which, for some irrational reason, he found more disturbing than the very real image of his brother kissing his own ex-lover.

Elizabeth Farley might look a lot better minus the awful clothes but Andreas was not the type to look beyond the surface or even be curious.

Yet Ariana did have the insight he lacked. She clearly felt this pale, spiky girl was a potential threat so maybe his brother was attracted and didn’t even realise it?

Beth gritted her teeth and felt the colour flame in her cheeks; she had never wanted to wipe the smug smirk off a blackboard!

‘No…no, I didn’t mean that I…you get to know someone when you work for them; we’re close.’ Her cheeks flamed at the belated realisation of the sordid interpretation this hateful man might put on this comment and she added quickly, ‘Not obviously close like—’

He halted her mumbling, embarrassed retraction with a languid motion of one hand. ‘You think that my brother is above such petty things as sibling rivalry, you think he is noble and—’

His sarcasm brought a flush to her cheeks. ‘I think he is in love.’ Being selfless, she decided, was not all it was cracked up to be.

‘And you think you know all about love?’

She stared at him, sitting there looking what nine out of ten women—and these odds were granting her own sex more sense than they probably had—would call perfect and she felt the leaden lump of misery that had lain in her throat all day melt as a wave of incandescent rage swept over her.

He didn’t have a clue what it was like to be her! She jumped to her feet, sending her chair hurtling into the wall behind her. ‘I know a damn sight more about it than you do!’ she yelled, recoiling slightly as the volume of her own voice hit her.

He did not look offended by her accusation.

‘So you accept the situation and walk away. Don’t you want to fight for him?’

‘And how do you suggest I do that?’ Her response made him realise just how far past sensible she had allowed the conversation to go. ‘Look, you might have nothing to do but I think this joke has gone far enough…’ Silently willing him to take the hint, Beth thought her prayers had been answered when Theo rose to his feet.

Her relief was short-lived. He made no move to leave. Instead, he dragged a hand through his hair and allowed his gaze to travel from the soles of her sensible shoes to the top of her glossy head. ‘One obvious suggestion springs to mind. You could dress like a woman and not like a middle-aged librarian.’

An angry flush of mortification mounted her cheeks. ‘I’m not about to pretend I’m someone I’m not.’

‘An admirable sentiment, but do you suppose that Ariana gets to look the way she does without a hell of a lot of effort? And I’m not talking about the Botox. Ever heard the comment no pain, no gain? Well, in Ariana’s case it’s no food, no gain.’

‘She’s naturally slim!’ Beth protested.

He let out a deep growl of laughter. ‘You really are naive.’

Beth clenched her teeth. ‘If I was in love with your brother—which I am not—I’d be happy he has found someone to make him happy,’ she retorted piously.

‘Which makes you either incredibly virtuous and totally boring or a liar.’ He watched a fresh wave of warm colour wash over her skin and realised that she wore no make-up at all, but then he conceded that a woman with skin that smooth and flawless did not need to. ‘You do realise,’ he drawled, ‘that most men find the doormat mentality a real turn-off?’

Beth levelled a glare of seething dislike at his lean sardonic face. ‘I don’t claim to be selfless, though that would be preferable to being totally selfish,’ she flung back, too angry to reconsider the wisdom of insulting this man.

He had a well earned reputation for being utterly ruthless, and she knew he would not lose any sleep about sacking a humble secretary. Andreas might try to prevent it, but she had seen him cave in under pressure from Theo far too often to have any illusions that he would stand up to his brother and save her.

He arched a brow and observed, with an amused look, ‘The saint has claws.’ And, now that he thought about it, Theo realized, rather spectacular eyes he was able to see properly now that she had removed the glasses.

On anyone else, he would have suspected that the colour—deep green shot with flecks of amber—of those almond-shaped eyes had been achieved with the assistance of contact lenses, but with this woman, who appeared to go out of her way to blend into the background, he seriously doubted it!

Finding herself the focus of the prolonged scrutiny of his heavy-lidded stare made her want to crawl out of her skin. Resisting the temptation to retreat behind the heavy curtain of hair that hung around her small face, she slid her fingers into the thick skein and tucked it behind her ears. Gran always said she had beautiful hair, but Beth would have happily exchanged her impossibly thick mop of mousey-brown wayward waves for smooth blonde or exciting red hair.

‘He does not see you as a woman; he sees you as a piece of office furniture.’

Beth’s breath caught as though someone had just landed a blow, which in a way they had; Theo used the truth with the ruthless surgical precision of a blade. Was he born this vicious? she wondered.

She opened her mouth to automatically refute his cruel assertion and then her innate honesty kicked in; he was probably right, she thought dully.

Theo hadn’t finished. ‘Do you think he even knows the colour of your eyes? You are useful to him; he knows that you will go the extra mile for him.’ He stopped, satisfied he had made his point.

Make it any more clearly and she’d be stretched out in a dead faint at his feet; she was looking at him like a child who had just been told there was no Santa Claus.

Aware that he was breathing too hard, Theo made a conscious effort to slow his inhalations. It was a long time since he had allowed anyone to get under his skin enough to make him feel guilty about his actions in any way. And why should he feel guilty?

It was totally irrational. All he’d done was tell her the truth, though possibly, he conceded, he might have done so less brutally.

It was just the way she idolised Andreas which made him want to shake some sense into her head; the woman was wasting her life mooning like some heroine in a romantic novel over a man who did not know she was alive.

‘You’re right.’

The sudden admission drew his alert gaze to her face. She looked pale but composed as she elaborated, ‘I am in love with Andreas and, yes, he doesn’t know I’m alive, not in that way, but I’m leaving.’ Her slender shoulders lifted in a shrug. ‘So the problem goes away.’

The admission had clearly cost her. Theo felt a fresh stirring of admiration—whatever else she was, the woman had guts.

‘Excellent—now we are on the same page.’

Beth sank back down into her chair, her wary gaze trained on his lean face. Once again, Theo had surprised her. She had fully expected he would be unable to resist the opportunity to rub her nose in it but, instead, he had allowed her admission to pass, almost without comment, and had turned all enigmatic.

She didn’t want to ask but she couldn’t help herself. ‘What page would that be?’ That they would share anything, even a page, seemed extremely unlikely to Beth.

‘We each, for our own reasons, think it would be a mistake for Andreas to marry Ariana.’ He dipped his head and waited for her response.

‘That really has nothing to do…’ The sardonic expression in his expressive eyes stopped her mid-sentence. ‘All right,’ she conceded crankily. ‘I don’t think that Ariana is good enough for Andreas.’ Now, she thought, this was where he pointed out that she was hardly what anyone would call objective.

‘She is poison.’

Beth was unable to display a similar restraint in her response. ‘You didn’t always think that.’ She encountered his wry stare and blushed. ‘Well, you were going to marry her yourself,’ she added defensively. Everyone knew that name-calling was a classic response of the dumped lover.

‘Any woman I find attractive is immediately of interest to Andreas. If we were lovers, he would find you irresistible.’

An image of his sleek, bronzed, powerful male body appeared in her head—an uneducated guess, but enough to send embarrassed colour flying to her cheeks. So it wasn’t the first time she had wondered what he looked like naked, and where was the harm in that?

Her defiant gaze slid from his as she scoffed, ‘And back to planet earth.’ If offered the opportunity to find out for real, she would have run for the hills.

‘Would it not be pleasant for you to have Andreas notice you are a woman?’ His dark eyes skimmed her body, his glance disturbingly intimate as it lingered on the suggestion of curves.

Beth, her mind still spinning from the moments she had allowed herself to imagine him without his clothes, was thrown into total confusion at the thought that he might be doing the same about her.

‘I…’ Beth swallowed to alleviate the dryness in her throat. In her chest, her heart was pounding like a piston.

‘I have a proposal. Are you willing to hear me out?’

Beth regarded him warily. ‘Would it matter if I said no?’

Her ironic response drew a laugh. ‘But you won’t. We both have reasons for wanting this engagement to end.’

While he did not elaborate on his own reasons, it did not, Beth thought, take a genius to figure them out. Theo Kyriakis still carried a torch for his old love. Seeing her again had resurrected all those old feelings and he was determined that his brother would not have her.

Maybe equally determined that he would win her back.

Well, good luck to him. In Beth’s mind, the pair were well suited; they deserved one another!

‘If we pool out resources,’ he continued, ‘I think we might be able to pull it off.’

There was no might in his voice, just cast iron certainty, but that was Theo Kyriakis—a man who was pretty much a stranger to self-doubt. As for resources, Beth was using all hers just to stay upright.

‘You will need suitable clothes, hair and so forth but yes…’ he narrowed his eyes, as though visualising the changes he spoke of ‘…I think it will work.’

‘Suitable for what?’ It cost nothing to humour him and she was actually curious to know where he was going with this.

‘The celebration meal tonight, we will go together as a couple and test the waters.’

She waited for the punchline but none came. Her jaw dropped. ‘You’re serious…my God, you’re insane.’

Theo looked totally unperturbed by her response. ‘One man’s insanity is another man’s inspiration.’

This smooth retort drew a choked laugh from Beth—he really was unbelievable.

‘Inspired!’ She shook her head. ‘You’re not inspired; you’re stark raving mad! No one is going to believe we’re a couple.’

‘They will; just trust me on this, Elizabeth.’ She looked at him, so smooth and persuasive, and thought sure, like she’d trust a politician during election year. ‘When we were kids, Andreas always wanted the flavour of ice cream I got.’

‘I’m not an ice cream.’ As if she could become part of some romantic triangle! Or was it quadrangle? Absurd did not do the suggestion justice.

‘But you are—or could be—an attractive woman.’

It was a clinical assessment and one that was made with no hint of sexual suggestion. Despite this, or maybe because of it, under her dismissive expression Beth experienced a swell of tentative excitement.

Could she really be beautiful?

She shook her head and adopted a scornful expression but, underneath, the tempting possibilities continued to slide through her mind. What would it be like to have Andreas look at her as though she were an attractive woman?

‘What have you got to lose?’

‘I’m assuming you’re talking about something beyond sanity and self-respect?’

‘You want Andreas.’ The blunt pronouncement made Beth shift uncomfortably. ‘Will you ever forgive yourself if you don’t try?’

Theo watched the expressions flit across her face and gave a nod of satisfaction. He had sold enough deals to know when he had clinched it; she might not be happy about it and it might take a few more minutes of fairly pointless protest but Elizabeth Farley would play the game.

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