Читать книгу Unworldly Secretary, Untamed Greek - Ким Лоренс, Kim Lawrence - Страница 6

THEO did not break stride as he walked across the room, but the expression on his dark lean features bore signs of lingering disbelief. Was he imagining it or had he just received a reprimand from his brother’s mousey little secretary?

Extraordinary!

He replayed the scene in his head. When she’d deigned to glance up from her computer screen it had only been to dish up a look of supreme contempt before she’d politely explained that he was expected—adding, primly, half an hour ago.

He almost laughed but amusement rapidly tipped over into annoyance. The woman who ran his brother’s professional life had irritated him from day one; there was just something about her. He couldn’t pin it down—it wasn’t just her prim pedantic manner, though that did grate on him, or even her overprotective attitude towards his brother.

Theo did not require the love or approval of those on his payroll, but he couldn’t help but wonder when and how he had ever given her reason to view him as a dark force of evil.

She might privately have cast him as a villain in her own private melodrama—the woman did have a definite repressed Victorian thing going on—but up until today she had always been scrupulously polite in their dealings, even while projecting a level of hostility that was, quite frankly, bizarre.

He didn’t know what her problem was, and he didn’t want to know. He was prepared to cut her some slack because she was competent—actually, competence was the one thing she had in her favour. The same could not be said of many of her predecessors. Andreas’s weakness for a pretty face meant that aptitude and ability frequently came at the bottom of his list of requirements during the interview process.

But Elizabeth Farley’s ability not to go into meltdown when organising his brother’s diary or the fact that she did not need to leave midway through a working morning to have her nails done didn’t change the fact that she would not have been Theo’s own first choice or even his last. But then, unlike his brother, he did not enjoy being the object of slavish adoration.

A flicker of distaste crossed his face as he considered the spaniel-like devotion and dedication she displayed that went way beyond the call of duty, but not, he suspected, as far as she would like it to go, not that anything was ever going to happen unless she ditched the ugly suits, grey in winter, taupe in summer.

His brother had no problem with slavish adoration but the women in Andreas’s life could all have stepped from the pages of a fashion magazine—several had.

Female fashion was not a subject that was high on Theo’s agenda of interesting topics but he appreciated confident women who made the effort to look good. The only effort Elizabeth Farley appeared to make was to hide any sign of her femininity.

The woman clearly had major issues but they were none of his concern. Being treated with an appropriate degree of respect in the workplace was, however, and while Theo did not expect grovelling sycophancy from employees within the building that bore his family name, he did not expect to be admonished by junior members of staff when he visited.

He had rarely—actually, never—been called upon to remind anyone who was boss, but he decided that this young woman needed to have her bubble of self-importance pricked.

When he stopped a few feet short of his brother’s office door it was Theo’s intention to do just that.

He turned and, slipping a button in his immaculately tailored jacket, cleared his throat. The small figure hunched behind the desk lifted her head and Theo’s expression froze in icy put-down mode; behind the hideously unattractive spectacles she wore when doing paperwork, Elizabeth Farley’s eyes were swimming with unshed tears.

Theo knew that some men were melted by female tears; he found such displays, even when they were not faked, irritating. So it was with some surprise that he found himself impelled to offer sympathy.

After a pause, he did so with a stilted reluctance. ‘You are having a bad day?’

It wasn’t just the understanding; it was the source, the suggestion of gentleness in a voice that she had previously only heard sounding hard, callous or sarcastic that loosed the sob locked in Beth’s throat and she was utterly horrified to hear it emerge as something midway between a wail and a whimper.

It was so typical of the wretched man that he’d decided to be nice at totally the wrong moment; why couldn’t he be his usual supercilious superior self?

Struggling to regain control and repeating I will not cry over and over in her head, she blinked furiously and mumbled something incoherent about allergies as she fought to escape the uncomfortably mesmeric eyes that held her own.

There were beads of sweat along her full upper lip when she did manage to tear her gaze clear.

It was utterly bizarre but, from the very first time she had seen him, Theo Kyriakis’s eyes—deep set and fringed by long, lustrous curling lashes so dark they were almost black and shot with silver flecks—had bothered her. Actually, the rest of him made her pretty uneasy too.

Beth had always tried hard not to judge people on first impressions, but in the case of both Kyriakis brothers she had been unable to follow this rule.

Her gut reaction to both men had been instant and powerful. Beth didn’t dislike many people but Theo Kyriakis wasn’t people; he was the most coldly arrogant, condescending man she had ever met.

He was, in fact, the exact opposite of his brother; the moment Andreas had smiled at her, she had been his willing slave. The memory of that occasion brought a fresh flood of tears to her eyes.

Horrified by this unprofessional display, Beth bit her quivering lip and reached for a tissue from her bag, conscious all the time of the tall disapproving presence of the man everyone knew—no matter what it said in the firm’s last upbeat Christmas letter—was the only boss of Kyriakis Inc looming over her.

Though it could not, she reflected dourly, be the first time he had reduced anyone to tears in the workplace. He did not exactly ooze empathy. As for tolerance! If she had been able, Beth would have laughed at the idea; Theo Kyriakis had definitely not been at the head of the queue when they’d handed out that one, though on other occasions he had obviously been first in line!

She blew her nose loudly and risked a surreptitious look up at his bronzed patrician profile through her damp lashes. Even she had to admit, in her more objective moments, that Theo Kyriakis was not most people’s idea of unhandsome and the overt in-your-face bold sexuality that he exuded, no matter what the occasion, it seemed to her, had probably never done him much harm.

It wasn’t just that people looked at him and thought gorgeous and sexy—not intrinsically bad in itself and you couldn’t blame a man for genetics—it was the fact that he obviously didn’t give a damn what people thought about him that really got under her skin. The man’s assurance and self-confident poise was utterly impregnable.

He walked into a room and conversations stopped, heads turned and eyes followed him, and it wasn’t the immaculate tailoring and stunning good looks they stared at; the man literally oozed animal magnetism from every perfect pore.

Perfection was the problem. Theo Kyriakis put the cool into cool. The wretched man never had a hair out of place. Raised by a grandmother who valued such things, Beth, who had not been a naturally tidy child and still struggled to present a neat appearance, doubted that neat was an adjective that sprang to most people’s minds as they followed his effortlessly elegant progression across a room.

It might make her strange but, to Beth’s way of thinking, a man needed a few flaws, if only to make him halfway human! And he didn’t have any. A take-me-or-leave-me attitude, she reflected with a resentful sniff, was easy when you knew people would always take you!

The underlying vulnerability she sensed in his brother was one of the things that had first attracted her to Andreas—well, maybe second after his extremely cute smile. The thing Andreas had that his brother lacked was empathy.

If he had found her crying, Andreas would have hugged her, then made a teasing remark to make her laugh. He would not have stared at her with those spooky penetrating eyes. The thought of Theo Kyriakis hugging her should have been funny, but it wasn’t. The idea of those muscular arms closing around her, drawing her against a body that was as hard as his eyes were cold made Beth’s stomach muscles quiver with utter horror. Yes, that was definitely horror that she was feeling; what else could it be?

Looking down at the top of her glossy head, Theo winced as she blew her pink-tipped nose again—loudly. For a small nose, it made a lot of noise.

‘Go home; I’ll clear it with Andreas.’ His offer, he told himself, was motivated by practicality, not kindness. It was not good business practice to have clients greeted by a hysterical female.

The casual offer brought Beth’s head up, though her thoughts were still actively involved in creating a scene where she was locked in Theo Kyriakis’s embrace—less fantasy and more waking nightmare.

‘I couldn’t possibly!’ she protested, annoyed by the suggestion, she didn’t work for him, but that didn’t stop him flinging around his orders.

Her glance slid with dislike across his lean autocratic features; he never let anyone forget he was in charge for a second. Watching him undermine Andreas’s authority, Beth had been forced to bite her tongue on more than one occasion but Andreas never complained. He was just too easy-going and nice-natured to complain.

Knowing how much Andreas hated making waves and enemies—his brother was a walking six feet five tidal wave—Beth frequently complained on his behalf, giving her a certain reputation for being what the polite within the building termed overzealous and the less polite called hostile and scary.

Scary did not earn her many friends, but it did grant her a certain amount of grudging respect; grudging respect and unrequited love meant her Friday nights were generally not wild affairs.

Theo’s sable brows lifted at the vehemence of her response; he felt his attitude shift rapidly from mild sympathy to irritation.

‘It’s never good to bring personal problems to work.’

If he could maintain this discipline, even on the occasion some years earlier when his engagement had been broken off and his supposed broken heart had been the red-hot topic in numerous websites and his photo had been plastered over the covers of numerous trashy papers and magazines—not the best time in his life—it did not seem unreasonable to him to expect similar restraint from those in his employ.

The icy reproach made her eyes fly wide in indignation. ‘I don’t have a personal life!’

Theo arched a sardonic brow and watched the hot colour wash over her fair skin.

‘You amaze me,’ he murmured. It also amazed him that he was actually prolonging this conversation, but seeing someone as uptight as his brother’s colourless robot secretary show her claws had a strange fascination—but then so did a car wreck for someone with nothing better to do—and he did.

Beth, her eyes glowing with dislike behind the lenses of her slightly misted spectacles, glared at him. Sarcastic rat!

‘I have a great deal of work to do.’

‘Few of us are indispensable, Miss Farley.’

Coded warning, threat…?

For once, Beth knew she would not be going to sleep trying to decipher the dark hidden meaning in one of Theo Kyriakis’s sardonic throwaway comments, which might all be perfectly innocent, though it was hard to tell when he had a dark chocolate, deep accented voice that could make a shopping list sound deliciously sinister and lingered weirdly in your head for hours after a conversation.

Well, no more! In a year’s time she would have forgotten what he sounded like. Yes, upbeat was good.

Yes, and being unemployed was really upbeat, especially with her overdraft situation!

Cutting off the inner dialogue abruptly, Beth lifted her chin. As an ex-employee, she no longer had to pander to this man’s enormous ego, unlike the rest of the world!

‘You can’t sack me because I quit.’

Theo’s brows rose as he looked from the handwritten envelope being held in a shaking hand towards him to the angry antagonistic eyes sparking green levelled at his face.

‘Sack you?’ he wondered, shaking his head in a mystified manner. ‘Did I miss something?’

Aware that she might have overreacted slightly, Beth’s eyes fell from his. ‘You said I wasn’t indispensable,’ she reminded him with a cranky sniff.

‘And you think you are?’

‘Of course not.’

Ignoring the interruption, he spoke across her. ‘So you keep a resignation letter to hand for just such a moment?’

‘Of course not. I—’

He turned his head to scan the envelope. ‘And the name on that envelope does not appear to be mine. You do recall that you do not work for me?’

Beth rolled her eyes.

On paper, Andreas might be the boss in this office and, while he did have a degree of autonomy, Beth had learnt early on that all the major policy decisions were made by Theo Kyriakis. He was Kyriakis Inc, and nobody who knew anything about the company’s meteoric rise under his management could question that.

Where his brother was concerned, Andreas did not do confrontation; he always took the route of least resistance.

‘If you wanted me sacked, I’d be sacked.’

Theo tipped his head in acknowledgement of the challenging comment and drawled, ‘What, and miss the possibility of future delightful discussions?’ He stopped; he could actually hear her teeth grate. ‘Look, I have no idea what has happened to upset you.’

And Theo had actually no idea why he was concerning himself with the question, beyond the fact that the efficiency of this office had a knock-on effect within the company.

And the smooth-running of Kyriakis Inc was always his concern.

‘You happened!’ Beth felt a twinge of guilt. No wonder he looked astonished by the comment; he hadn’t actually done anything to earn her indignation—on this occasion.

Also she was guessing that he had limited experience of people, especially lowly secretaries like her, yelling at him.

She wasn’t totally sure why she had made him the target of all her pent-up anger and frustration; the only thing he had done was notice she was miserable—he was the only person to notice.

It was Beth’s turn to look astonished when, after a long pause, instead of blasting back with one of his legendary icy put-downs, he simply suggested, ‘It might be an idea if you slept on this decision.’

Had his brother slept with her? Theo’s expression froze and he didn’t breathe for a full thirty seconds.

This rather startling explanation for the tears and tantrums fitted. How many times had he told Andreas that mixing romance and the workplace was the perfect recipe for disaster?

An expletive was an expletive in any language and Beth, who had never seen anything make a dint in this ultra-controlled man’s composure, dropped her jaw as Theo swore, twitched the letter from her fingers and, after ripping it in half, tossed it in a waste paper basket.

‘While you are not indispensable—’ His sardonic smile flashed, the muscles in his jaw relaxing as he realised there was no way that Andreas would sleep with a woman who did not wear lipstick.

And Elizabeth Farley did not.

As Theo studied the surprisingly lush outline of her generous lips, he decided this was not a bad thing. Had she decided to highlight this particular natural asset, she might have proved a distraction for his easily distracted sibling, who might even have started wondering—this would have been a natural direction for any man’s thoughts to take—what other assets she might be hiding beneath her buttoned collars and frumpy A-line skirts.

‘—I think you are good at what you do,’ he observed, continuing to study her lips.

For the second time in minutes Beth was stunned into silence; she had not imagined he had noticed her any more than he noticed the office furniture and now he was expressing a grudging appreciation—or was he?

She still wasn’t sure.

Reluctantly, she met his eyes. ‘You do?’

‘Am I wrong?’

Normally self-deprecating, Beth responded to the challenge glittering in his dark, heavy-lidded stare. ‘I am good at what I do.’

So good that, from what he had observed, this office would fall apart without her in it. What, he wondered with a fresh surge of irritation, had Andreas done or not done to bring this about?

Taking sex out of the equation, as he now felt sure he safely could, he wasn’t sure what was left.

A deep furrow formed between his brows as a possible answer occurred to him. ‘Have you had a better offer?’

Beth’s confused gaze lifted from the waste paper bin containing the remains of the letter she had redrafted three times already; fortunately, all she had to do was print out another. ‘Offer?’

‘Do not be coy,’ he advised, a shade of impatience creeping into his abrupt manner. ‘Has someone approached you?’

‘For a job, you mean?’ Her eyes widened at the startling suggestion. Did he really think she’d been headhunted?

He angled a questioning brow and Beth shook her head. ‘No, I haven’t.’

His eyes narrowed speculatively as his dark glance swept across her face. ‘If challenge is a problem?’ She was obviously intelligent, though the blank way she was looking at him at the moment suggested otherwise. ‘If you are not feeling stretched with the work here?’

Theo, who thrived on challenge himself, understood this frustration of boredom and recognised it in others. Many people enjoyed being in a job that they could do on autopilot, but it was possible this woman was not one of those.

‘Do you not think it more sensible to discuss the situation with Andreas before you make any rash decisions?’

The casual way he tossed the suggestion brought a mutinous sparkle to Beth’s eyes as she got to her feet, her chest heaving with indignation.

Did the man actually think she had made this decision without a great deal of soul-searching? She was in no position to walk away from any job, let alone one this well paid but the alternative was even less palatable.

It was one thing to fall for the boss; it was another entirely to find yourself expected to help him pick the engagement ring for his girlfriend. After finding herself in that situation the previous week, Beth knew that she did not have the masochistic leaning required for this situation, or this job, any longer.

It probably made her weak, stupid or both but it wasn’t as if she hadn’t tried to fall out of love with him!

‘I can’t do it!’ she yelled. ‘If I have to watch him—’

Encountering the expression of total amazement etched on Theo Kyriakis’s lean face, she dropped back into her chair and felt a mortified flush climb to her cheeks. ‘You’d better go in,’ she mumbled, allowing her hair to fall in a concealing curtain around her face.

Conscious of his silent presence, it felt like an age to Beth before he responded. The breath left her body in a sigh of relief as she heard the interconnecting door open.

Theo’s thoughts still very much occupied by the baffling behaviour of Elizabeth Farley, the unexpected passion in her outburst and the sexiness of her quivering lips, it took him a few seconds to fully assimilate the scene he walked into.

His brother in a passionate clinch with the woman he had once been engaged to.

It was a moment of déjà vu—but not quite. On the previous occasion he had walked in on her in another man’s arms, he had not been the intended target audience; it did not seem a big leap to assume that this time he was!

The scene was strikingly similar but there were significant differences—in both the scene and his reaction to it.

Last time had involved naked flesh but, happily, his brother and Ariana were both fully dressed. Last time, his illusions had been shattered. He no longer had illusions, romantic or otherwise, which meant he could view the scene with an objectivity—tinged, admittedly, by distaste—he had not been capable of six years ago.

Six years ago, he’d been romantic and optimistic enough to consider himself the luckiest man in the world; he had met his soulmate—back then, he had firmly believed that such things existed—he had been in love.

And it had not been unpleasant to be the object of his friends’ envy—he had a beautiful bride-to-be.

She was still beautiful and his brother clearly thought so too.

Was it genetic or was making a total fool of yourself with this woman a rite of passage that all Kyriakis men had to experience? If this was indeed so, it was a rite of passage that he had personally passed with flying colours! But no experience, however humiliating, was wasted and he had learnt from it.

In his professional life Theo had always worked on the premise that everyone had an angle, an agenda; now, thanks to Ariana, he had extended this attitude very successfully to his personal life.

He continued to enjoy sex—it was, after all, as much of a basic need as eating—but he no longer expected or wanted any mystical connection. He sometimes wondered how long he would have gone on believing the romantic fantasy he had bought into had not fate in the guise of a cancelled flight stepped in—the same fate that had brought him to the open door of his fiancée’s apartment at the same moment as her much older ex-husband, Carl Franks.

Theo did not anticipate the time would ever come but if, by some cruel twist of fate, or possibly a blow to the head, he ever found himself in a situation where he was tempted to express his carnal appetite with the word love or forever Theo knew that replaying the deeply unpleasant scene etched into his brain would restore him to sanity.

On that previous occasion Theo had turned on his heel and walked away; that, unfortunately, was not on this occasion an option.

Now, his responsibility was clearly to save his brother.

It seemed unlikely that Andreas would appreciate his efforts. Though, on the plus side, Andreas, for all his faults, had never been what anyone would call a romantic and he had never displayed his own embarrassing youthful tendency to put women on pedestals; to recall the idealism of his youth still made Theo wince.

He wondered briefly whether Ariana had been unable to resist the temptation of his brother when an opportunity had presented itself or if she had gone out of her way to entrap Andreas, not that it mattered. He was genuinely astounded that she thought he would sit back and let this happen; maybe, in retrospect, it had sent the wrong message when he had permitted her to enjoy her petty revenge six years ago.

At the time he had calculated that responding to the interview she gave to a women’s magazine would have only prolonged the public interest, even though the story she had shared with the readers had been fiction from start to finish.

I was crazy about Theo but I was shocked when he gave me an ultimatum. Theo made me choose between him and my career. He’s very Greek; he wanted an old-fashioned sort of wife who would live her life through him.

She had phoned him to tell him that the article had been directly responsible for getting her the contract as the face a new perfume ahead of the model who had been tipped for the job.

‘So thanks, Theo,’ she’d said, warning, ‘but you still owe me.’

Presumably this was payback time.

‘Am I interrupting?’

The ironic question caused the couple, who were in a tight embrace, to pull apart. The woman rather ostentatiously adjusted the low gaping neckline of her dress and the man, looking flushed and embarrassed, dragged a hand through his tousled hair and cleared his throat.

‘Theo…I…we…didn’t hear you. We were…’

Theo arched a questioning brow at his clearly embarrassed brother and smiled. Actually, he wanted to throttle him; how could he not know that Ariana was poison, that she was motivated by two things—revenge and greed?

Like you did?

Ariana lifted a beautifully manicured hand to Andreas’s lips and gave a complacent smile as she observed, in a voice that had been likened by more than one smitten man to a purr, ‘Darling, Theo knows what we were doing.’

Andreas kept a wary eye on his brother as she pressed a lingering kiss to his lips. ‘Well, I don’t need to introduce you two, do I…?’ he said, grinning weakly at his own joke.

Tall and universally considered good-looking, Andreas Kyriakis had learnt early in life that the warmth and charm of his smile would tip the balance of most situations in his favour, but on this occasion his smile was wary as he reached for the chilled champagne.

The unease vanished as his attention turned to his beautiful bride-to-be. As he popped the cork he was unable to stifle a smile of triumph.

It was his brother’s turn to be second best.

Ariana had not wanted Theo but she wanted him.