Unworldly Secretary, Untamed Greek. KIM LAWRENCE
had not seen the joke. ‘I would suggest there is no choice. When your grandmother gave you Power of Attorney it was a situation like this that she had in mind.’
Beth had thanked him for his advice because she knew he meant well but she had remained adamant she would not sell up or contemplate the possibility of her gran not coming home.
She knew that Gran loved the place as much as she did. The sprawling Victorian house had, in estate agent speak, a wealth of original features but very little in the way of modern conveniences. Beth had lived there since her parents’ death in a train crash when she was seven.
‘You want me to leave so that you can weep in privacy?’
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,