Читать книгу The Greek's Blackmailed Mistress - Линн Грэхем, LYNNE GRAHAM - Страница 8

CHAPTER ONE

‘I’M TOO BEAUTIFUL to be dumped,’ Fabiana told Xan in all seriousness, her perfect face a mask of disbelief. ‘It’s my poor English, isn’t it? I’m picking you up wrong—’

‘No,’ Xan contradicted with gravity, smoothly switching to her native Spanish. ‘The movers will be here in an hour to help you pack. We’ve been together two months. I did tell you that this arrangement wouldn’t last any longer than that—’

‘But you can’t not want me any more—’ Giving her reflection an appreciative appraisal in the nearest mirror, Fabiana fluffed up her fall of tumbling dark curls.

‘I don’t want you any more,’ Xan countered, losing patience, beginning to wonder how the hell he had enjoyed even one encounter with the brunette, infused as she was with astronomical vanity.

‘Where am I supposed to go?’ Fabiana demanded abruptly, studying him in frustration, silently recognising that she was unlikely to ever have a better-looking man in her bed. Six foot three and beautifully built, his black hair cropped short over a lean, devastatingly handsome face, the Greek financial guru, Xan Ziakis, would be a very hard act to follow and without him she would lose access to the exclusive events she had so much enjoyed.

‘Your possessions will be stored and a hotel room has been engaged for you,’ Xan clarified, on firmer ground now because he had been changing mistresses every couple of months for years. There was nothing new about the status quo and Fabiana had benefitted richly from their association even though his visits had been few.

Reflecting on that last surprising truth, Xan questioned his libido. He was only thirty years old. Obviously he was bored with Fabiana, he told himself impatiently. Yet, in truth, work and the pursuit of profit had always won out over the thrill of sex for Xan. Some day he would heed his mother’s endless pleas and start dating with a view to taking a wife but that day was many years off. His father, Helios, had married five times over, gifting Xan with a costly and troublesome flock of half-siblings, and he was determined not to repeat his father’s mistakes. Helios had married too young while Xan intended to wait until he was in his forties, at the very least, and had sown every last wild oat available to him.

Not that Fabiana and her faceless, virtually indistinguishable predecessors had much in common with wild oats, he conceded with wry self-mockery. All his bed partners had been models or minor actresses, the sort of women who understood that he paid generously for everything they wanted in return for their bodies. Framed in those words, it sounded crude, he acknowledged without shame, but that very basic format worked well for him and the one time he had tried another approach, when he had been both young and idealistic, it had gone badly wrong for him.

Xan believed love was a dangerous risk. His father had fallen in love repeatedly with demonstrably unsuitable women. Xan had had his heart broken when he was only twenty-one and nothing would’ve persuaded him to revisit that learning experience.

A financial genius, who had become a billionaire by the age of twenty-five, Xan was the acclaimed mastermind behind City coups worth billions. He had quickly repaired the giant hole in the Ziakis family fortunes left by his imprudent father, and had simply chosen to organise his sex life much as he organised everything else around him because disorder of any kind put him in a bad mood. He liked his life smooth; he preferred a routine he virtually never deviated from. He would not risk the upheaval of marriage breakdowns and hugely expensive divorces that had decimated his father’s wealth. He was stronger than that and infinitely cleverer, indeed smarter than most of the people around him, and the only risks he took were in the financial field where he trusted his gut and aggressive instincts.

His phone vibrated, instantly freeing him from all awareness of Fabiana’s presence. He dug it out, immediately wondering why Dmitri, the head of his security team, would be contacting him. A moment later, he found out and he was enraged. Someone had dared to steal something very precious from him, and he stalked out of the apartment his mistresses used without another word to the brunette. His penthouse apartment was his sanctuary where he entertained neither women nor anyone else. The idea that any person could violate his London home in spite of all the security he had put in place sent his hot temper nuclear.

‘The maid?’ he breathed with audible distaste.

‘Or her son. She let him into the apartment even though it’s against the rules,’ Dmitri filled in stiffly. ‘I could pursue this discreetly or call the police—’

‘You call the police and provide them with the evidence,’ Xan cut in fiercely. ‘You punish them with the full weight of the law!’

Xan collected imperial jade that cost him shocking sums and he had placed that little brush pot in the hall for his own enjoyment because it was a remarkably tactile piece and had once belonged to a Chinese emperor. In his penal frame of mind, whipping was too light a punishment for thieves.

* * *

The following day, Elvi’s teenaged brother flung himself into her arms and sobbed, ‘I’m so sorry...this whole nightmare is my fault!’

‘Let’s calm down,’ Elvi suggested gently, framing her little brother’s face with both small hands, recognising from the anguish in his green eyes that he had been crying alone in his room for some time. ‘I’ll make some tea—’

‘I don’t want tea!’ Daniel protested. ‘I want to go down to the police station and admit it was me and not Mum!’

‘No, we’re going to talk about this first,’ Elvi overruled. ‘Mum protected you for a reason—’

‘Bloody medical school! It doesn’t matter—’

Of course it mattered, Elvi thought ruefully, that Daniel wanted to be a doctor like their late father. It was all he had ever wanted to be since he was a little boy and a conviction for theft would totally destroy that ambition. Furthermore, Daniel had already been awarded a place at Oxford to study because his academic results were the very best. She knew exactly why her mother had lied and taken the blame for her son, but what she could not understand or credit was that Daniel would ever have stolen anything.

‘I need to know what happened,’ she persisted quietly, seating herself on the bed where her dark-haired brother had flopped down to hang his head. He was getting so tall and lanky at just past eighteen that he was fast growing out of all his clothes, his jeans barely reaching his ankles and his enormous feet. She and Daniel bore not an ounce of resemblance to each other because, although they had had the same father, they had had different mothers. Elvi’s mother had died when she was a baby, and her father’s second wife had adopted her and brought her up as her own. She was the short, plump one of the family, Elvi conceded ruefully, bright blue eyes troubled, pushing back the white-blonde hair sticking to her perspiring brow because she had run all the way home from work as soon as Daniel had phoned her.

‘Yesterday, I called to pick up Mum for her AA meeting but I was a bit early,’ Daniel confided.

Elvi heaved a sigh, for both of them tried to ensure that their mother went to regular meetings and since the summer arrived and Daniel had finished school and only contrived to find part-time employment, he had taken over the duty. Sally Cartwright deserved her family’s support to stay sober. She had been sober now for three long wonderful years but Elvi was painfully aware that alcoholism was an affliction that never entirely went away. Denying herself the craving for that one dangerous drink was what Sally dealt with every day.

‘And?’

‘She was cleaning something and had to finish it, so she told me to sit down in the hall and not to touch anything,’ Daniel grumbled. ‘Like I was a little kid or something and I was annoyed, so I didn’t listen...’

‘What did you touch?’ Elvi almost whispered.

‘There was this little jade pot sitting on the console table in a patch of sunlight—honestly, Elvi...it was the sort of thing I’ve only ever seen inside a museum case—and I just wanted to hold it for a minute, so I picked it up and took it over to the window to hold it up to the light because it was so delicate—’

‘And then what?’ Elvi prompted with anxious impatience.

Daniel studied her in almost childlike discomfiture. ‘Then the doorbell went and Mum rushed out to answer it and I kept the pot hidden in my hand because I didn’t want her to see what I’d been doing. Unluckily for me, the man at the door worked for Mr Ziakis too and he was there to tell me that I shouldn’t be in the apartment in the first place and that I should be waiting for my mother downstairs. He made me leave immediately, like...he was sort of nice about it but I had no chance of putting the pot back with him standing there—’

‘For goodness’ sake, Daniel!’ Elvi erupted in vehement protest. ‘You should’ve handed it to him straight away! The minute you stepped out of that apartment door with it, you labelled yourself a thief—’

‘Yeah, you think I don’t know that now?’ Daniel traded with laden irony. ‘But I gave way to panic and I concealed it, brought it home and stuck the blasted thing in a drawer. I planned to ask Mum to put it back for me tomorrow but apparently the housekeeper reported it missing when she turned in for work in the evening, so that was that. I missed the boat and—’

Stupid, stupid, stupid, repeated in Elvi’s head but she didn’t let the word pass her lips because she could see that her sibling was already painfully aware that he had acted like an impulsive and reckless total idiot. ‘When did the police get involved?’ she interposed.

‘This morning...they arrived with a search warrant and of course they found it. Mum asked me to go into her room to get her handbag and while I was in there she may have confessed to taking it because by the time I came back out again because I couldn’t find the blasted thing she was being arrested and read her rights,’ he revealed chokily, gulping back more unmanly sobs. ‘We need a solicitor—’

Elvi was thinking hard and fast but coming up with nothing. Her brain was still in shock. She wished she didn’t know as much about her mother’s fabulously wealthy employer as she did. He was the guy with the colour-coded closets and alphabetically arranged books. He had a desk that must never be touched and a bed that had to be changed every day. Her mother’s duties in his apartment were hedged in by a very detailed list of do’s and don’ts. That in the flesh the same male looked as though he had stepped straight out of a glossy magazine advertisement as a supermodel for designer apparel had struck Elvi as uniquely unfair.

She had read up about her mother’s employer on the Internet, learning more that had made her grind her teeth together. Why? Because, Xan Ziakis seemed to have been born under a very lucky star, blessed by every conceivable attribute, and all he seemed to have learned from his remarkable good fortune was a marked tendency to behave as though he suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Of course, maybe he did, she allowed ruefully, because nobody could possibly be that perfect in the real world. When she was still meeting her mother out of work to accompany her to AA meetings, she had seen Xan Ziakis coming home on several occasions while she sat waiting in the foyer of the luxury apartment block. And he was gorgeous to look at, absolutely, unmistakably gorgeous.

* * *

‘I did the only thing I could,’ Sally Cartwright confided hours later as she sat with her adopted daughter in the bedroom they shared. In her forties, she was a slender brunette with anxious green eyes now lined and shadowed with strain.

‘It wasn’t the only thing,’ Elvi argued in a low voice, neither of them wanting Daniel in the next room to overhear them. ‘You could’ve told the truth, both of you—’

‘And do you really think anyone would have believed us?’ her mother demanded tearfully, her cynicism unhidden. ‘We’re poor and down on our luck. Why? Because I wrecked all our lives, brought us down from a normal happy family to this!’

‘This’, expressed by a shamed hand gesture, encompassed the grim surroundings of their council flat in a tower block. But it was the guilt infused by Sally’s bitten-back sob that worried Elvi the most, fearful as she was that her mother’s distress would drive her back to alcohol. She knew better than to fall into reasoned argument with her mother on the score of her culpability because essentially the older woman was stating the unlovely truth.

At the time of Elvi’s father’s sudden death, the Cartwright family had been financially secure. They had owned their home and Sally had been a respected teacher in a girls’ school but alcohol and a tide of growing debt had washed that safe, comfortable life away. Inevitably, Sally had lost her job and Elvi had left school at sixteen to find work. Like bricks tumbling down in a child’s game, everything they had once taken for granted had been taken from them until they’d reached rock bottom and became homeless.

From there it had been a slow climb back to security, a very slow climb, Elvi acknowledged wryly, but until this theft incident occurred their lives had steadily been improving. The three of them had rejoiced the day Daniel was accepted into medical school because it had been the first positive event they had had to celebrate in a very long time. Sally was so proud that, in spite of all that they had lost, Daniel had kept on studying and finally won through against such stiff competition because places to study medicine were very much oversubscribed in the UK. The threat of Daniel being ruined by one foolish mistake could destroy her mother all over again, Elvi thought with a sick sinking sensation in her stomach.

‘No,’ Sally declared steadily, her troubled face set with strong determination. ‘This is my moment to make a sacrifice for everything I took from the two of you years ago and nothing you can say or do will change my mind on that score.’

Well, we’ll just see about that, Elvi thought defiantly as she lay in her bed that night, listening to her mother toss and turn, as unable to find sleep as her daughter. The mother she loved as much as she loved her little brother. Yet her mother had been her father’s first wife, a Finnish nurse, tragically mown down by a car in a hospital car park within months of Elvi’s birth. Her father had met and married Sally when Elvi was two years old and Elvi had no memories whatsoever of her birth mother. Her Scandinavian background came down to some faded photos and a handful of letters from an elderly Finnish grandma, who had died while she was still a child. For Elvi, family meant everything and she truly wished that her mother would accept that she and Daniel had long since forgiven her for her blunders.

After all, it wasn’t as though Sally had wanted to become an alcoholic. Shattered by the sudden death of the husband she had adored, left alone to raise a six-year-old and a toddler, Sally had fallen apart in the grip of her grief and had slid into addiction by using alcohol as a crutch. Sally had had no other relatives to turn to for support and no close friends either because shortly before her husband’s death, he had moved them all across the country to accept a new job. No, Elvi had sufficient compassion and understanding not to blame her mother for all their woes, nor was she willing to stand by and watch Sally undo all the progress she had made in recent years.

But realistically, what could she do?

Go and speak to Xan Ziakis in the hope that there was a streak of mercy beneath that designer suit and that frightening reputation for ruthless aggression and financial self-aggrandisement? Some hope, she mused wretchedly, feeling horribly weak and small and powerless. Xan Ziakis was feared in the City of London for his refusal to ever play as one of a team and his disdain for alliances, temporary or otherwise. He worked alone and her mother had never seen any evidence of a woman having been in his penthouse. Maybe he was gay...

No, not him, Elvi decided, shifting quietly beneath her duvet, remembering with shame a period when she had been almost obsessed by a need to see him daily. She didn’t like to think about it but a sort of juvenile crush had engulfed her when she first saw Xan Ziakis. Not before time, she told herself drily; after all, life might have been all swings and not much roundabout throughout her unsettled and unhappy adolescence, but she was now twenty-two years old even if she was still almost as innocent as a child. Even so, she still recalled the single scorching appraisal Xan Ziakis had given her months ago and the flame that had leapt through her like a soaring torch along with the surprise of its effects on her body. No, he definitely wasn’t gay, she was convinced. But the shock had been that a man who looked as he did could look at her that way.

She was no show-stopping beauty and she bore not the smallest resemblance to the giraffe-legged bone-thin models she had seen on his arm in images on the Internet. Five feet two inches tall, she had white-blonde hair down to her waist, blue eyes and the sort of generous curves that made buying clothes a nightmare. She kept her hair long because the unusual colour was the one thing she liked about herself. As for the big breasts, the overly large bottom and the thick thighs, anyone was welcome to them. If only she had been the gym-bunny type, she reflected, but she hated gyms, hated dieting, hated getting on the scales and loved her food far too much. He must have been looking at the boobs, she thought ruefully.

Would the boobs get her into his presence? Embarrassed by her own thoughts, she winced, but she wasn’t in a position to be precious about what it might take to get a meeting with Xan Ziakis. He was a very powerful, influential and wealthy man, whose staff probably guarded access to him as if he were a solid platinum trophy to be seen only by the fortunate and equally rich and important few. So, approach him at home? Or at his office?

He was way too private in his lifestyle to be approached at his penthouse. It would have to be the office. Shortly before dawn when Sally had fallen into a restless sleep, Elvi crept out of bed, having finally decided what to do next. Since she doubted the likelihood of Xan being willing to grant her a personal interview, she would write him a letter, telling him what she needed to say. It was worth a try, she thought limply, and better than doing nothing. Only just, her intelligence warned her.

On Daniel’s laptop, she began to tell their family history, but only after humbly apologising for both troubling Xan and the theft. She wished it had been possible to tell him the truth but, like her mother, she reckoned it would be too dangerous to put Daniel back in the suspect corner. If she told Xan Ziakis the truth, he could easily drop the charges against her mother and instead pursue her brother and, even worse, he could then use the very letter she was writing against her family. Maybe writing anything down on paper was too dangerous, she thought fearfully, stopping in her task several times with a chill on her skin as she tried not to envisage even worse consequences coming their way.

But what other option did she have? Appealing to a man who might well have no heart was the only road she could take, and only then, if he was willing to see her, would she see him and plead her family’s case to the best of her ability. Having to lie and state that her mother must have succumbed to an inexcusable moment of temptation distressed Elvi, but since Sally had already owned up to the theft with the police she didn’t have much choice. She begged him to drop the charges because he had got his valuable artefact back. Did Xan Ziakis have any compassion? Was it possible that a man who had so much could be decent enough to be human and caring too?

The letter in an envelope squarely marked ‘private and confidential’ in one corner, Elvi waited on the pavement outside the Ziakis headquarters at eight that same morning. An assistant in a craft shop, she didn’t start work until nine. And, according to her mother’s idle chatter over the months, Xan Ziakis had a schedule that ran like clockwork. He left the penthouse at eight and travelled by limousine to his office seven days a week. Seven, she reflected wryly, a man who worked every day of the week for his success. Well, she could hardly criticise his work ethic.

The big black limousine drew up. The driver only opened the door after another car drew up behind and four men in dark suits sprang out. Looking on in dismay, Elvi registered that Xan Ziakis was guarded by a ring-of-steel protection before he even got a polished shoe out of his limo. Even so, she moved forward, her legs turning strangely wobbly as Xan himself emerged into daylight, blue-black hair gleaming like polished silk, his flawless bronzed cheekbones taut below dark deep-set eyes, his lean, powerful body encased in an elegant suit that fitted him like a second skin, and there she froze.

‘Get back!’ someone said to her and, disconcerted, she retreated several steps still clutching her envelope.

Her quarry stalked on into the building...out of sight, out of reach, and she felt sick with failure, her face drained of colour, her eyes bleak.

A man appeared in front of her then, an older man, and there was something vaguely familiar about his craggy face. ‘Is that letter you’re gripping about your mother?’ he asked bluntly. ‘I work for Mr Ziakis too—’

‘Oh,’ Elvi said, taken aback by his approach. ‘Yes, it’s about Mum—’

‘Then give it to me,’ he urged. ‘I’ll see that it reaches the boss’s desk.’

In a daze Elvi looked up and saw the kindness in his gaze. ‘You’re—?’

‘Dmitri,’ he supplied, twitching the letter out of her loosening grasp. ‘I know your mother. I can’t promise that the boss will read it or anything but I can put it on the desk.’

Elvi blinked. ‘Thank you very much,’ she murmured with warmth.

‘No problem. She’s a lovely lady,’ Dmitri told her, walking off again at speed and vanishing into the building while tucking her letter into a pocket.

And Dmitri, whoever he is, doesn’t think Sally Cartwright’s a thief, Elvi realised as she climbed on a bus to get to work and mulled over that surprising encounter. Just as well, considering that she had frozen like an ice sculpture when she saw Xan Ziakis, not that she thought his bodyguards would have allowed her anywhere near him, because someone had told her to get out of the way. Dmitri? One of the other three men?

It didn’t matter, she decided as she stocked shelves of knitting wool at work. The letter might land on Xan’s desk but, as Dmitri had said, that didn’t mean he would actually bother to read it or even more crucially respond to it.

But in that Elvi was mistaken. Xan was so disconcerted by the unexpected sight of his head of security covertly sliding an envelope onto his desk, when Dmitri clearly thought he was unseen, that nothing would have kept him from opening up that letter out of sheer human curiosity. Xan skimmed down to the signature first: Elvi Cartwright. He knew that name well enough and he also knew he should’ve been prepared for the tactic in such a situation. Instantly he wanted to crumple the letter up and bin it without reading it. That would have been the cautious way to deal.

Even so, although Xan was very cautious with women, he couldn’t bring himself to dump the letter unread. A couple of months ago, he had noticed her, well, really, really noticed her, he acknowledged grimly, and he had instructed Dmitri to find out who she was, assuming that she lived in the same apartment block. He had, however, learned that she was his maid’s daughter, which had naturally concluded his interest. Billionaires did not consort with the daughters of their domestic staff. The gulf was too immense, the risk of a messy affair too great.

And yet, all the same...the letter still unread, Xan drifted momentarily into the past, recalling Elvi Cartwright with intense immediacy. The shining pale-as-milk hair, the wonderful blue eyes, the crazy natural glow of her, not to mention the extraordinary fact that she looked very different from the sort of women he usually slept with and yet, inexplicably, one glance at her turned him on harder and faster than any of them.

She was a bit overweight, he supposed abstractedly; hard to tell when he had only ever seen her in a loose black jacket that swamped her. Very short in stature, not his type, absolutely not his type, he told himself sternly as he shook out the letter, more concerned by Dmitri’s bizarre involvement in its delivery than by what it might say. If he couldn’t trust his head of security, who could he trust? Why had Dmitri got personally involved in so tawdry an incident?

Xan had a scientific approach to everything he read. Elvi’s use of English was far superior to what he would have expected and then he began reading and what he read was most educational from his point of view even if, by the end of it, he couldn’t think why she expected him as the victim to want to do anything about Sally Cartwright’s self-induced predicament.

Inevitably he studied the situation from his side of the fence, where all the power lay, and the sort of ideas that had never occurred to Xan Ziakis before when it came to a woman began very slowly to blossom. Xan, who never ever allowed himself to succumb to any kind of unwise temptation. Xan, who usually policed his every thought, suppressing any immoral promptings to concentrate more profitably on work. And once he let those bad ideas out of the box they created a positive riot in his imagination, raising the kind of excitement that only a good financial killing usually gave him...and that was it, Xan Ziakis was seduced by erotic possibilities for the first time in his life.

Xan folded the letter with a dark forbidding smile that his opponents would have recognised as a certain sign of danger and threat. He would give his quarry a couple of days to stew and wonder and then he would get in touch...