Читать книгу Married To A Mistress - Линн Грэхем, Lynne Graham - Страница 7
ОглавлениеCHAPTER TWO
MAXIE leapt upright, her beautiful face a flushed mask of fury. ‘Do you think I am a complete fool?’ she shouted at him so loudly her voice cracked.
Unhurriedly, Angelos Petronides shifted his incredibly long legs and fluidly unfolded to his full height again, his complete control mocking her loss of temper. ‘With regard to some of your past decisions in life...how frank am I allowed to be?’
Maxie sucked in oxygen as if she was drowning, clamped a hand to her already opening mouth and spun at speed away from him. She was shattered that he had smashed her self-discipline. As noise filtered through the open window she became dimly aware of the shouts of children playing football somewhere outside, but their voices were like sounds impinging from another world.
‘You don’t need to apologise,’ Angelos drawled in a mocking undertone. ‘I’ve seen your temper many times before. You go pale and you stiffen. Every time Leland put so much as a finger on you in public, I witnessed your struggle not to shrug him off. It must have been fun in the bedroom...’
Maxie’s slender backbone quivered. Her fingernails flexed like claws longing to make contact with human flesh. She wanted to kill him. But she couldn’t even trust herself to speak, and was all the more agitated by the simple fact that she had never felt such rage before and honestly didn’t know how to cope with it.
‘But then, it was always evident to me that Leland’s biggest thrill was trotting you out in public at every possible opportunity. “Look at me, I have a blonde twice as tall as me and a third of my age,”’ Angelos mused with earthy amusement. ‘I suspect he might not have demanded intimate entertainment that often. He wasn’t a young man...’
‘And you are...without doubt...the most offensive, objectionable man I have ever met!’ Maxie launched with her back still rigidly turned to him.
‘I am a taste you will acquire. After all, you need someone like me.’ A pair of strong hands settled without warning on her slim shoulders and exerted sufficient pressure to swivel her back round to face him.
‘I need someone like you like I need a hole in the head!’ Maxie railed back at him rawly as she tore herself free of that controlling hold. ‘And keep your hands off me...I don’t like being pawed!’
‘Why are you so angry? I had to tell you about the loan,’ Angelos pointed out calmly. ‘I was aware that the Coulters’ lawyer had already been in touch. Naturally, I wanted to set your mind at rest.’
The reminder of the debt that had simply been transferred acted like a drenching flood of cold water on Maxie’s overheated emotions. Her angry flush was replaced by waxen pallor. Her body turned cold and weak and shaky and she studied the worn carpet at his feet. ‘You’ve bought yourself a pup. I can’t settle that loan...and right now I haven’t even got enough to make a payment on it,’ she framed sickly.
‘Why do you get yourself so worked up about nothing?’ Angelos released an extravagant sigh. ‘Sit down before you fall down. Haven’t I already given you my assurance that I have no intention of holding that former debt over your head in any way? But, in passing, may I ask what you needed that loan for?’
‘I got into a real financial mess, that’s all,’ she muttered evasively, protecting her father as she always did, conscious of the derisive distaste such weakness roused in other, stronger men. And, drained by her outbursts and ashamed of them, she found herself settling back down into the chair again.
For the very first time she was genuinely scared of Angelos Petronides. He owned a piece of her, just as Leland once had, but he would be expecting infinitely more than a charade in return. She wasn’t taken in by his reassurances, or by that roughly gentle intonation she had never dreamt he might possess. In the space of ten minutes he had reduced her to a babbling, screeching wreck and, for now, he was merely content to have made his domineering presence felt.
‘Money is not a subject I discuss with women,’ Angelos told her quietly. ‘It is most definitely not a subject I ever wish to discuss with you again.’
Angelos Petronides, billionaire and benevolence personified? Maxie shuddered with disbelief. Did he ever read his own publicity? She had sat in on business meetings chaired by him, truly unforgettable experiences. The King and his terrified minions, who behaved as if at any moment he might snap and shout, ‘Off with their heads!’ Grown men perspired and stammered with nerves in his presence, cowered when he shot down their suggestions, went into cold panic if he frowned. He did not suffer fools gladly.
He had a brilliant mind, but that superior intellect had made him inherently devious and manipulative. He controlled the people around him. In comparison, Leland Coulter had been harmless. Maxie had coped with Leland. And Leland give him his due, had never tried to pose as her only friend in a hostile world. But over her now loomed a six-foot-four-inch giant threat without a conscience.
‘I know where you’re coming from,’ Maxie heard herself admit out loud as she lifted her beautiful head again.
Angelos gazed down at her with steady black eyes. ‘Then why all the histrionics?’
Maxie gulped, disconcerted to feel that awful surge of temper rise again. With that admission she had expected to make him wary, force him to ease back. About the last reaction she had expected was his cool acknowledgement that she was intelligent enough to recognise his tactics for what they were. The iron hand in the velvet glove.
‘Have dinner with me tonight,’ Angelos suggested smoothly. ‘We can talk then. You need some time to think things over.’
‘I need no time whatsoever.’ Maxie stared back up into those astonishingly dark and impenetrable eyes and suffered the oddest light-headed sensation, as if the floor had shifted beneath her. Her lashes fluttered, a slight bemused frown line drawing her fine brows together as she shook her head slightly, long golden hair thick as skein on skein of silk rippling round her shoulders. ‘I will not be your mistress.’
‘I haven’t asked yet.’
A cynical laugh was torn from Maxie as she rose restively to her feet again. ‘You don’t need to be that specific. I certainly didn’t imagine you were planning to offer me anything more respectable. And, no, I do not intend to discuss this any further,’ she asserted tightly, carefully focusing on a point to the left of him, the tip of her tongue stealing out to moisten her dry lower lip in a swift defensive motion. ‘So either you are a good loser or a bad loser, Mr Petronides...I imagined I’ll find out which soon enough—’
‘I do not lose,’ Angelos breathed in a roughened undertone. ‘I am also very persistent. If you make yourself a challenge, I will resent the waste of time demanded by pursuit but, like any red-blooded male, I will undoubtedly want you even more.’
Without even knowing why, Maxie shivered. There was the most curious buzz in the atmosphere, sending tiny little warning pulses of alarm through her tautening length. Her unsettled and bemused eyes swerved involuntarily back to him and locked into the ferocious hold of his compelling scrutiny.
‘I will also become angry with you,’ Angelos forecast, shifting soundlessly closer, his husky drawl thickening and lowering in pitch to a mesmeric level of intimacy. ‘You made Leland jump through no hoops...why should I? And I would treat you so much better than he did. I know what a woman likes. I know what makes a woman of your nature feel secure and appreciated, what makes her happy, content, satisfied...’
Like a child drawn too close to a blazing fire in spite of all warnings, Maxie was transfixed. She could feel her own heartbeat accelerating, the blood surging rich and vibrantly alive through her veins. A kind of craving, an almost terrifying upswell of excitement potently and powerfully new to her gripped her.
‘A-Angelos...?’ she whispered, feeling dizzy and disorientated.
He reached out and drew her to him without once breaking that spellbinding appraisal. ‘How easily you can say my name...’
And she said it again, like a supplicant eager to please.
Those stunning eyes of his blazed gold as a hot sun with satisfaction. She trembled, legs no longer dependable supports beneath her, and yet in all her life she had never been more shockingly aware of her own body. Her braless breasts were swelling beneath the denim shirt she wore, the tender nipples suddenly tightening to thrust with aching sensitivity against the rough grain of the fabric.
There was a sudden enormous jarring thud on the windowpane behind her. Startled, Maxie almost jumped a foot in the air, and even Angelos flinched.
‘Relax...a football hit the window,’ he groaned in apparent disbelief as he raised his dark, imperious head. ‘It is now being retrieved by two grubby little boys.’
But Maxie wasn’t listening. She had been plunged into sudden appalled confusion by the discovery that Angelos Petronides had both arms loosely linked round her and had come within treacherous inches of kissing her. Even worse, she realised, every fibre of her yearning body had been longing desperately for that kiss.
Jerking back abruptly from the proximity of his lean, muscular frame, Maxie pressed shaking hands against her hot, flushed cheeks. ‘Get out of here and don’t ever come back!’
Angelos grated something guttural in Greek, stood his ground and dealt her a hard, challenging look. ‘What’s the matter with you?’
And what remained of Maxie’s self-respect drained away as she recognised his genuine bewilderment. Dear heaven, she had encouraged him. She had been straining up to him, mindlessly eager for his lovemaking, paralysed to the spot with excitement and longing, and he knew it too. And did his body feel as hers did now? Deprived, aching... As she registered such unfamiliar, intimate thoughts, Maxie realised just how out of control she was.
‘I don’t have to explain myself to you,’ she gabbled in near panic as she rushed past him out into the hall to pull open the front door. ‘I want you to leave and I don’t want you to come back. In fact I’ll put the dog on you if you ever come here again!’
In a demonstration of disturbing volatility, Angelos vented a sudden appreciative laugh, the sound rich and deep and earthy. His quality of dark implacability vanished under the onslaught of that amusement. Maxie stared. The sheer charisma of that wolfish grin took her by surprise.
‘The dog’s more likely to lick me to death...and you?’ An ebullient ebony brow elevated as he watched the hot colour climb in her perplexed face.
‘Leave!’ The word erupted from Maxie, so desperate was she to silence him.
‘And you?’ Angelos repeated with steady emphasis. ‘For some strange reason, what just happened between us, which on my level was nothing at all, unnerved you, scared you...embarrassed you...’
As he listed his impressions Maxie watched him with a sick, sinking sensation in her stomach, for never before had she been so easily read, and never before had a man made her feel like a specimen on a slide under a microscope.
‘Now why should honest hunger provoke shame?’ Angelos asked softly. ‘Why not pleasure?’
‘Pleasure?’
‘I do not presume to know your every thought...as yet,’ Angelos qualified with precision. His brilliant eyes intent, he strolled indolently back into the fresh air. ‘But surely when ambition and desire unite, you should be pleased?’
He left her with that offensive suggestion, striding down the path and out to the pavement where a uniformed chauffeur waited beside a long, dark limousine. The two wide-eyed and decidedly grubby little boys, one of whom was clutching the football, were trying without success to talk to the po-faced chauffeur. She watched as Angelos paused to exchange a laughing word with them, bending to their level with disconcerting ease. Disturbed by her own fascination, she slammed shut the door on her view.
He would be back; she knew that. She couldn’t explain how but she knew it as surely as she knew that dawn came around every morning. Feeling curiously like someone suffering from concussion, she wandered aimlessly back down into the kitchen and was surprised to find Liz sitting there, her kindly face anxious.
‘Bounce started whining behind the studio door. He must’ve heard you shouting. I came back into the house but naturally I didn’t intrude when I realised it was just an argument,’ Liz confided ruefully. ‘Unfortunately, before I retreated again, I heard rather more than I felt comfortable hearing. You’re a wretched dog, Bounce...your grovelling greeting to Angelos Petronides affected my judgement!’
‘So you realised who my visitor was—?’
‘Not initially, but my goodness I should’ve done!’ Liz exclaimed feelingly. ‘You’ve talked about Angelos Petronides so often—
‘Have I?’ Maxie breathed with shaken unease, her cheeks burning.
Liz smiled. ‘All the time you were criticising him and complaining about his behaviour, I could sense how attracted you were to him...’
A hoarse laugh erupted from Maxie’s dry throat ‘I wish you’d warned me. It hit me smack in the face when I wasn’t prepared for it. Stupid, wretched chemistry, and I never even realised... I feel such an idiot now!’ Eyes prickling with tears of reaction, she studied the table, struggling to reinstate her usual control. ‘And I’ve got the most banging headache s-starting up...’
‘Of course you have,’ Liz murmured soothingly. ‘I’ve never heard you yelling at the top of your voice before.’
‘But then I have never hated anyone so much in my life as I hate Angelos Petronides,’ Maxie confessed shakily. ‘I wanted to kill him, Liz...I really wanted to kill him! Now I’m in debt to him instead of Leland—’
‘I did hear him say that you didn’t have to worry about that.’
Maxie’s eyes flashed. ‘If it takes me until I’m ninety, I’ll pay him back every penny!’
‘He may have hurt your pride, Maxie...but he was most emphatic about not wanting repayment. He sounded sincere to me, and surely you have to give him some credit for his generosity whether you choose to regard it as a debt or otherwise?’ Liz reasoned with an air of frowning confusion. ‘The man has to be seriously interested in you to make such a big gesture on your behalf—’
‘Liz—’ Maxie broke in with a pained half-smile.
‘Do you think he might turn out to be the marrying kind?’ the older woman continued with a sudden teasing smile.
That outrageous question made Maxie’s jaw drop. ‘Liz, for heaven’s sake...are you nuts?’ she gasped. ‘What put that in your mind?’
‘Your godmother’s will—’
‘Oh, that...forget that, Liz. That’s yesterday’s news. Believe me when I say that Angelos Petronides was not thinking along the lines of anything as...well, anything as lasting as marriage.’ Mindful of her audience, Maxie chose her words carefully and suppressed a sigh over the older woman’s romantic imagination. ‘He is not romantically interested in me. He is not that sort of man. He’s hard, he’s icy cold—’
‘He didn’t sound cold on my doorstep...he sounded downright keen! You’d be surprised how much I can pick up from the nuances in a voice.’
Liz was rather innocent in some ways. Maxie really didn’t want to get down to basics and spell out just how a big, powerful tycoon like Angelos Petronides regarded her. As a social inferior, a beautiful body, a target object to acquire for his sexual enjoyment, a live toy. Maxie shrank with revulsion and hated him all over again. ‘Liz...he would be offended by the very suggestion that he would even consider a normal relationship with a woman who’s been another man’s mistress—’
‘But you haven’t been another man’s mistress!’
Maxie ignored that point After the horrendous publicity she had enjoyed, nobody would ever believe that now. ‘To be blunt, Liz...all Angelos wants is to get me into bed!’
‘Oh...’ Liz breathed, and blushed until all her freckles merged. ‘Oh, dear, no...you don’t want to get mixed up with a man like that.’
Maxie lay in bed that night, listening to the distant sound of the traffic. She couldn’t forgive herself for being attracted to a male like Angelos Petronides. It was impossible that she could like anything about him. ‘A woman of your nature,’ he had said. His one little slip. Wanton, available, already accustomed to trading her body in return for a luxurious lifestyle. That was what he had meant. Her heart ached and she felt as if she was bleeding inside. How had she ever sunk to the level where she had a reputation like that?
When Maxie had first been chosen as the image to launch a new range of haircare products, she had been a complete unknown and only eighteen years old. Although she had never had the slightest desire to be a model, she had let her father persuade her to give it a try and had swiftly found herself earning what had then seemed like enormous amounts of money.
However, once the novelty had worn off, she had loathed the backbiting pressure and superficiality of the modelling circuit. She had saved like mad and had planned to find another way to make a living.
But all the time, in the background of her life, her father had continued to gamble. Relying on her income as a safety net, he had, without her knowledge, begun playing for higher and higher stakes. To be fair, Leland’s casino manager had cut off Russ Kendall’s credit line the minute he’d suspected the older man was in over his head. Maxie had met Leland Coulter for the first time the day she settled her father’s outstanding tab at his casino.
‘You won’t change the man, Maxie,’ he had told her then. ‘If he was starving, he would risk his last fiver on a bet. He has to be the one who wants to change.’
After that humiliating episode her father had made her so many promises. He had sworn blind that he would never gamble again but inevitably he had broken his word. And, barred from the reputable casinos, he had gone dangerously down-market to play high-rolling poker games in smoky back rooms with the kind of tough men who would happily break his fingers if he didn’t pay his dues on time. That was when Maxie’s life had come completely unstuck...
Having got himself into serious debt, and learning to his dismay that his daughter had no savings left after his previous demands, Russ had been very badly beaten up. He had lost a kidney. In his hospital bed, he had sobbed with shame and terror in her arms. He had been warned that if he didn’t come up with the money he owed, he would be crippled the next time.
Distraught, Maxie had gone to Leland Coulter for advice. And Leland had offered her an arrangement. He would pay off her father’s gambling debts and allow her to repay him at her leisure on condition that she moved in with him. He had been very honest about what he wanted. Not sex, he had insisted. No, what Leland had craved most had been the ego-boosting pleasure of being seen to possess a beautiful young woman, who would preside over his dinner table, act as his hostess, entertain his friends and always be available to accompany him wherever he went.
It hadn’t seemed so much to ask. Nobody else had been prepared to loan her that amount of money. And she had been so agonisingly grateful that her father was safe from further harm. She hadn’t seen the trap she was walking into. She hadn’t even been aware that Leland was a married man until the headlines had hit the tabloids and taken her reputation away overnight. She had borne the blame for the breakup of his marriage.
‘Jennifer and I split up because she had an affair,’ Leland had admitted grudgingly when Maxie had roundly objected to the anomalous situation he had put her in. ‘But this way, with you by my side, I don’t feel like a fool...all right?’
And she had felt sorry for him then, right through the protracted and very public battle he and his wife had had over alimony and property. Jennifer and Leland had fought each other every inch of their slow path to the divorce court, yet a week before the hearing, when Leland had had a heart attack, the only woman he had been able to think about when he was convinced that he was at his last gasp had, most tellingly, been his estranged wife. ‘Go away, leave me alone... I need Jennifer here... I don’t want her seeing you with me now!’ he had cried in pathetic masculine panic.
And that had hurt. In a crazy way she had grown rather fond of Leland, even of his silly showing-off and quirky little vanities. Not a bad man, just a selfish one, like all the men she had ever known, and she hoped he was happy now that he was back with his Jennifer. But he had used her not only to soothe his wounded vanity but also, and less forgivably, she recognised now, as a weapon with which to punish his unfaithful wife. And Maxie could not forget that, or forgive herself for the blind naivety that had allowed it to happen in the first place. Never, ever again, she swore, would she be used...
Early the next morning, Maxie helped Liz pack. Her friend was heading off to stay with friends in Devon. The fact that her house wouldn’t be left empty during her absence was a source of great relief to Liz. The previous year her home had been burgled and her studio vandalised while she was away.
As soon as she had seen the older woman off, Maxie spent an hour slapping on make-up like war-paint and dressing up in style. Angelos Petronides needed a lesson and Maxie was determined to give it to him.
Mid-morning, she pawned the one piece of valuable jewellery she owned. She had been eleven when she’d found the Victorian bracelet buried in a box of cheap costume beads which had belonged to her mother. She had cried, guessing why the bracelet had been so well concealed. Even in the three short years of her marriage, her poor mother had doubtless learnt the hard way that when her husband was short of money he would sell anything he could get his hands on. Afterwards, Russ would be terribly sorry and ashamed, but by then it would be too late and the treasured possession would be gone. So Maxie had kept the bracelet hidden too.
And now it hurt so much to surrender that bracelet. It felt like a betrayal of the mother she could barely remember. But she desperately needed the cash and she had nothing else to offer. Angelos Petronides had to be shown that he hadn’t bought her or any rights over her by settling Leland’s loan. The sacrifice of her mother’s bracelet, temporarily or otherwise, simply hardened Maxie’s angry, bitter resolve.
Half an hour later, she strolled out of the lift on to the top floor of the skyscraper that housed the London headquarters of the vast Petronides organisation. She spared the receptionist barely a glance. She knew how to get attention.
‘I want to see Angelos,’ she announced.
‘Miss...Miss Kendall?’ The brunette was already on her feet, eyes opened wide in recognition: in a bold scarlet dress that caressed every curve, her spectacular hair rippling in a sheet of gold to her waist, and heels that elevated her to well over six feet, Maxie was extremely noticeable.
‘I know where his office is.’ Maxie breezed on down the corridor, the brunette darting after her with an incoherent gasp of dismay.
She flung wide his office door when she got there. Infuriatingly, it was empty. She headed for the boardroom, indifferent to the squawking receptionist, whose frantic pursuit had attracted the attention of another two secretarial staff.
Bingo! Maxie strolled through the boardroom’s double doors. An entire room full of men in business suits swivelled at her abrupt entry and then gaped. Maxie wasn’t looking at them. Her entire attention was for Angelos Petronides, already rising from his chair at the head of the long polished table, his expression of outrage shimmering in an instant into shocking impassivity. But she took strength from the stunned quality that had briefly lit those fierce black eyes of his.
‘I want to see you now,’ Maxie told him, sapphire-blue eyes firing a challenge.
‘You could wait in Mr Petronides’s office, just through here, Miss Kendall.’ The quiet female intervention came from the slim older woman who had already rushed to cast invitingly wide the door which connected with her employer’s office.
‘Sorry, I don’t want to wait,’ Maxie delivered.
A blazing look of dark, simmering fury betrayed Angelos. It was the reaction of a male who had never before been subjected to a public scene. Maxie smiled sweetly. He couldn’t touch her because she had nothing to lose. No money, no current employment, nothing but her pride and her wits. He should’ve thought of that angle. And, no matter what it took, she intended to make Angelos pay for the state he had put her in the day before.
In one wrathful stride, Angelos reached her side and closed a forceful hand round her narrow wrist. Maxie let out a squeal as if he had hurt her. Startled, he dropped her wrist again. In receipt of a derisive, unimpressed glance that would’ve made a lesser woman cringe, Maxie noted without surprise that Angelos was a quick study.
‘Thank you,’ she said, and meant it, and she strolled through to his big, luxurious office like a little lamb because now she knew he was coming too.
‘Unexpected visitors with unpredictable behaviour are so enervating...don’t you think?’ Maxie trilled as she fell still by the side of his impressive desk.
Angelos swore in Greek, studying her with seething black eyes full of intimidation. ‘You crazy—’ His wide mouth hardened as he bit back the rest of that verbal assault with the greatest of visible difficulty. ‘What the hell are you playing at?’ he growled like a grizzly bear instead.
‘I’m not playing, I’m paying!’ With a flourish, Maxie opened her fingers above his desk and let drop the crushed banknotes in her hand. ‘Something on account towards the loan. I can’t be bought like a tin of beans off a supermarket shelf!’
‘How dare you interrupt a business meeting?’ Angelos launched at her full throttle. ‘How dare you make a scene like that in my boardroom?’
Maxie tensed. She had never heard a man that angry. She had never seen a male with so dark a complexion look that pale. Nor had she ever faced a pair of eyes that slashed like bloodthirsty razors into her.
‘You asked for it,’ she informed him grittily. ‘You embarrassed me yesterday. You made me feel this big...’ With her thumb and her forefinger she gave him a literal demonstration. ‘You made me feel powerless and this is payback time. You picked on the wrong woman!’
‘Is this really the Ice Queen I’m dealing with?’ Angelos responded very, very drily.
‘You’d burn the ice off the North Pole!’ Maxie sizzled back at him, wondering why he had now gone so still, why his naturally vibrant skin tone was recovering colour, indeed why he didn’t appear to be in a rage any more.
‘Do you suffer from a split personality?’
‘Did you really think you knew me just because you were in the same room with me a handful of times?’ Maxie flung her head back and was dumbstruck by the manner in which his narrowed gaze instantly clung to her cascading mane of hair, and then roved on down the rest of her with unconcealed appreciation. It struck her that Angelos Petronides was so convinced that he was an innately superior being and so oversexed that he couldn’t take a woman seriously for five minutes.
Brilliant black eyes swooped up to meet hers again. ‘No way did you ever behave like this around Leland—’
‘My relationship with him is none of your business,’ Maxie asserted with spirit. ‘But, believe me, nobody has ever insulted me as much as you did yesterday.’
‘I find that very hard to believe.’
Involuntarily, Maxie flinched.
Immensely tall and powerful in his superbly tailored silver-grey suit, Angelos watched her, not an informative glimmer of any emotion showing now on that lean, strong, hard-boned face. ‘Since when has it been an insult for a man to admit that he wants a woman?’ he demanded with derision.
‘You frightened the life out of me telling me you’d paid off that loan...you put me under pressure, then you tried to move in for the kill like the cold, calculating womaniser you are!’ Maxie bit out not quite levelly, and, spinning on her heel, she started towards the door.
‘All exits are locked. You’re trapped for the moment,’ Angelos delivered softly.
Maxie didn’t believe him until she had tried and failed to open the door. Then she hissed furiously, ‘Open this door!’
‘Why should I?’ Angelos enquired, choosing that exact same moment to lounge indolently back against the edge of his desk, so cool, calm and confident that Maxie wanted to rip him to pieces. ‘Presumably you came here to entertain me...and, although I have no tolerance for tantrums, you do look magnificent in that dress, and naturally I would like to know why I’m receiving this melodramatic response to my proposition.’
In one flying motion, Maxie spun back. ‘So you admit that that’s what it was?’
‘I want you. It’s only a matter of time until I get what I want,’ Angelos imparted very quietly in the deadly stillness.
Maxie shivered. ‘When the soft soap doesn’t work, weigh in with the threats—’
‘That wasn’t a threat. I don’t threaten women,’ Angelos growled with a feral flash of white teeth. ‘No woman has ever come to my bed under threat!’
Nobody could feign that much outrage. He was an Alpha male and not one modestly given to underestimating his own attractions. But then, he had it all, she conceded bitterly. Incredible looks and sex appeal, more money than he could spend in a lifetime and a level of intelligence that scorched and challenged.
Maxie shot him a look of violent loathing. ‘You think you’re so special, don’t you? You thought I’d be flattered, ready to snatch at whatever you felt like offering...but you’re no different from any of the other men who have lusted after me,’ she countered with harsh clarity. ‘And I’ve had plenty of practice dealing with your sort. I’ve looked like this since I was fourteen—’
‘I’m grateful you grew up before our paths crossed,’ Angelos breathed with deflating amusement.
At that outrageous comment, something inside Maxie just cracked wide open, and she rounded on him like a tigress. ‘I shouldn’t have had to cope with harassment at that age. Do you think I don’t know that I’m no more real to a guy like you than a blow-up sex doll?’ she condemned with raw, stinging contempt. ‘Well, I’ve got news for you, Mr Petronides...I am not available to be any man’s live toy. You want a toy, you go to a store and buy yourself a railway set!’
‘I thought you’d respect the upfront approach,’ Angelos confided thoughtfully. ‘But then I could never have guessed that behind the front you put on in public you suffer from such low self-esteem...’
Utterly thrown by that response, and with a horrendous suspicion that this confrontation was going badly wrong shrilling through her, Maxie suddenly felt foolish.
‘Don’t be ridiculous...of course I don’t,’ she argued with ragged stress. ‘But, whatever mistakes I’ve made, I have no intention of repeating them. Now, I’ve told you how I feel, so open that blasted door and let me out of here!’
Angelos surveyed her with burning intensity, dense lashes low on penetrating black eyes. ‘If only it were that easy...’
But this time when Maxie’s perspiring fingers closed round the handle the door sprang open, and she didn’t stalk like a prowling queen of the jungle on her exit, she simply fled, every nerve in her too hot body jangling with aftershock.
