Читать книгу A Deal with Demakis - Tara Pammi - Страница 10

CHAPTER THREE

NIKOS CURSED LOUDLY and violently. The words swallowed up by the crowd around him didn’t relieve his temper one bit.

It had been three days since Lexi Nelson had come to see him and yet the sneaky minx had avoided his assistant’s phone calls. Exasperated, Nikos had been reduced to having Kane discover her shift times at the club. Thoroughly disgusted by his minions’—a word he couldn’t stop using ever since she had—failure to persuade the woman to leave for Greece, he had flown back to New York.

He had arrived at three in the morning, forced himself to stay awake and arrived at Vibe five minutes after five. Only to find her gone. So he had his chauffeur drive him to her apartment in Brooklyn.

But even after a ten-hour shift, the irritating woman still hadn’t returned. He had been ready to call the cops and report her missing. In the end, he had entered her apartment, barged into a bedroom and forced the naked couple in the bed to tell him where Ms. Nelson was. Her eyes eating him up, the redhead had finally informed him that Lexi had gone straight to another shift at a coffee shop around the corner.

So here he was standing on the sidewalk at nine in the morning outside the bustling café amidst jostling New Yorkers. He was tired, sleep-deprived and furious.

He understood the need for money. He was the epitome of hunger for wealth and power, but this woman was something else.

Ordering his chauffeur to come back in a few minutes, he entered the café. The strong smell of coffee made his head pound harder. With the hustle and bustle behind the busy counter, it took him a few moments to spot her behind the cash register.

His heartbeat slowed to a normal pace.

A brown paper bag in hand, she was smiling at a customer.

Her hair was combed back from her forehead in that poufy way. The three silver earrings on her left ear glinted in the morning sunlight as she turned this way and that. A green apron hung loosely on her slender frame.

She thanked the customer and ran her hands over her face. He could see the pink marks her fingers left on her skin even from the distance. And that was when Nikos noticed it—the tremble in her fingers, the slight sway of her body as she turned.

He tugged his gaze to her face and took in the dark shadows under her stunning blue eyes. She blinked slowly, as though struggling to keep her eyes open and smiled that dazzling smile at the next customer.

Memories pounded through him, a fierce knot clawing his gut tight. He didn’t want to remember, yet the sight of her, tired and ready to drop on her feet, punched him, knocking the breath out of him.

He hadn’t felt that bone-deep desolation in a long time, because as hard as Savas had made him work for the past fourteen years, Nikos had known there would be food at the end of it. But before Savas had plucked them both from their old house, every day after his mother had died had been a lesson in survival.

The memory of it—the smell of grease at the garage, combined with the clawing hunger in his gut while the lack of sleep threatened to knuckle him down—was as potent as though it was just yesterday.

The bitter memory on top of his present exhaustion tipped him over the edge.

A red haze descending on him, he stormed through the crowd and navigated around the counter.

With a gasp, Lexi stepped back, blinking furiously. “Mr. Demakis,” she said, sounding squeaky, “you can’t be back—”

He didn’t give her a chance to finish. Ignoring the gasps and audible whispers of the busy crowd, he moved closer, picked her up and walked out of the café.

Crimson rushed into her pale cheeks, and her mouth fell open. “What are you doing?”

She wriggled in his hold and he tightened his grip. “Seeing dots and shapes, Ms. Nelson? I’m carrying you out.”

Weighing next to nothing, she squirmed again. The nonexistent curves he had mocked her about rubbed against his chest, teasing shocking arousal out of his tired body.

For the first time in his life, he clamped down the sensation. It wasn’t easy. “Stop wiggling around, Lexi, or I will drop you.” To match his words, he slackened his hold on her.

With a gasp, she wrapped herself tighter around him. Her breath teased his neck. He let fly a curse. As rigid as a tightly tuned chassis in his arms, she glared at him. “Put me down, Nikos.”

His limo appeared at the curb and he waited while the chauffeur opened the door. Bending slightly, he rolled her onto the leather seat. She scrambled on her knees for a few seconds, giving him a perfect view of her pert bottom in denim shorts before scooting to the far side of the opposite seat.

He got into the limo, settled back into the seat and stretched his legs. Perverse anger flew hotly in his veins. He shouldn’t care but he couldn’t control it. “A bartender at night, a barista by day. Christos, are you trying to kill yourself?”

Lexi had never been more shocked in her entire life. And that was big, seeing that she had run away from a foster home when she was fifteen, had stolen by sixteen and had been working at a high-class bar in Manhattan, where shocking was the norm rather than the exception, since she had been nineteen.

She clumsily sat up from the leather seat. The jitteriness in her limbs intensified just as the limo pulled away from the curb. “I can’t just leave,” she said loudly, her words echoing around them. The arrogant man beside her didn’t even bat an eyelid. “Order your minion to turn around. Faith will lose her job and I can’t—”

He leaned forward and extended his arm. Her words froze on her lips and she pressed back into her seat. The scent of the leather and him morphed into something that teased her ragged senses. The intensity of his presence tugged at her as if he were extending a force field on some fundamental level. Outside the limo, the world was bustling with crazy New York energy, and inside...inside it felt as if time and space had come to a standstill.

He reached behind her neck and undid the knot of her apron. She dug her nails into the denim of her shorts, her heart stuck in her throat. The pad of his fingers dragged against her skin and she fought to remain still. The long sweep of his lashes hid his expression but that thrumming energy of his pervaded the interior. Bunching the apron in his hands, he threw it aside with a casual flick of his wrist.

Even in the semicomatose state she was functioning in, unfamiliar sensations skittered over her. She had never been more aware of her skin, her body than when he was near. Noting every little movement of hers, he handed her a bottle of water. “Who is Faith?”

The question rang with suppressed fury. Lexi undid the cap and took a sip. She was stalling, and he knew it.

“Why are you so angry?” she blurted out, unable to stop herself.

He pushed back the cuffs of his black dress shirt. The sight of those hair-roughened tanned arms sent her stomach into a dive. “Who is Faith?” he said again, his words spoken through gritted teeth.

She sighed. “My roommate, for whom I was covering the shift. She’s been sick a few times recently, and if she misses any more shifts, she’ll lose her job. Which she will today, because of you.”

He leaned back, watching her like a hawk. His anger still simmered in the air but with exhaustion creeping back in, she didn’t care anymore. She let out a breath, and snuggled farther back into the plush leather. She was so tired. If only she could close her eyes for just a minute...

“What does this Faith look like?”

“Almost six feet tall, green eyes, blond.”

“But she’s a natural redhead, isn’t she?”

Heat crept up her neck at the way he slightly emphasized the word redhead. “How would you know something like that?” Tension gripped her. “Nikos, you barge into my work, behave like a caveman and now you’re asking me these strange questions without telling me what—”

“The last time I checked, which was an hour ago, your so-called ‘sick’ friend was lolling about in bed naked with a man, while you were killing yourself trying to do her job. From what I could see of her, which was a lot, she’s perfectly fine.”

Her cheeks heating, Lexi struggled to string a response. “Faith wouldn’t just lie...”

Faith would. And it wasn’t even the first time, either. Her chest tightened, her hands shook. But Faith was more than a mere roommate. She was her friend. If they didn’t look out for each other, who would?

Struggling not to show how much it pained her, she tucked her hands in her lap. “Maybe it wasn’t Faith,” she offered, just to get him off her back.

“She has a tattoo of a red rose on her left buttock and a dragon on her right shoulder. When it was clear no one would answer, I opened the door and went right in. Your friend, by the way, is also a screamer, which was how I knew there was someone inside that bedroom.”

Flushing, Lexi turned her gaze away from him. Even if she didn’t know about the tattoos, which she did, the last bit was enough to confirm that he was talking about Faith. “All right, so she lied to me,” she said, unable to fight the tidal wave of exhaustion that was coming at her fast. As long as she had felt that she was helping Faith, she’d been able to keep going. She pulled up her legs, uncaring of the expensive leather. “What I don’t get is why you felt the need in the first place to barge into our apartment and confront her.”

“You left that bar at five in the morning, and two hours later, you weren’t at your apartment in Brooklyn. I’ve no idea how you’ve managed to not get yourself killed all these years.”

Her breath lodged in her throat, painfully. Hugging her knees tight, she stared at him. Shock pulsed through the exhaustion. She lived in the liveliest city on the planet, and even with Tyler around, she’d felt the loneliness like a second skin most of her life. Nikos’s matter-of-fact statement only rammed the hurtful truth closer.

“You don’t have to worry about me. I take my safety very seriously.” His anger was misplaced and misdirected. Yet it also held a dangerous allure.

His nostrils flared, his jaw tight as a concrete slab. “My sister’s welfare depends on you,” he said, enunciating every word as though he was talking to someone dimwitted. “I need you alive and kicking right now, not dead in some Dumpster.”

“You don’t like it that you felt a minute’s concern for me? At least it makes you human.”

“As opposed to what? Are you also a part-time shrink?”

The caustic comment was enough to cure her stupid thinking.

“As opposed to an alien with no heart. Why is this even relevant to you? Are you keeping tabs on all my friends so that you can manipulate me a little more?”

“She took advantage of you.” He looked at her as though he was studying a curious insect, something that had crawled under his polished, handmade shoes. “Aren’t you the least bit angry with her?”

“She doesn’t mean to—”

“Hurt you? And yet it seems she has accomplished that very well.”

Was she imagining the compassion in those brown depths? Or was her sleep-deprived mind playing tricks on her again? She scrunched back into the seat, feeling as stupid as he was calling her. “Faith’s had a rough life.”

“And you haven’t?”

“It’s not about who had the roughest life or who deserves kindness more, Nikos. Faith, for all her lies and manipulation, has no one. No one who cares about her, who would worry about her. And I know what that loneliness feels like. I don’t expect you to—”

“I know enough,” he said with a cutting edge to his words. “You haven’t signed the contract yet. Now you have forced me to fly back to New York for the express purpose of accompanying you to Greece.”

Way to go, Lexi, exactly what you wanted to avoid.

“I’ve been busy.”

He leaned forward in a quick movement. For such a big man, he moved so quickly, so economically. But she must be getting used to him because she didn’t flinch when he ran the pads of his thumbs gently under her eyes. The heat of his body stole into hers. “Are you having second thoughts about dear Tyler? Have you decided that he’s not worth the money I’m paying?”

It almost sounded as if he wanted her to refuse to help him. Which couldn’t be true.

She had been unable to sleep a wink ever since the horrid contract had arrived on her doorstep and she had taken a look at the exorbitant amount of money listed there. More than she had ever seen in her lifetime or probably ever would.

Just remembering it had her heart thumping in her chest again.

Money she could use to take art classes instead of having to save every cent, money she could use to, for once, buy some decent clothes instead of shopping the teenager section at the department store or thrift store.

Money she could use to take a break from her energy-draining bartending job and invest her time in developing her comic book script and develop a portfolio without having to worry over her next meal and keeping a roof over her head.

The possibilities were endless.

Yet she also knew that anything she bought with that money would also bring with it an ick factor. It would feel sullied.

But there had been something more than her discomfort that had held her back from signing that contract.

The man studying her intently had volunteered it happily enough. In fact, he had seemed more than happy to make her his paid employee.

Because it gave him unmitigated power over her. That was it.

She stilled in place, her stomach diving at the realization. That’s what had given her the bad feeling.

If she had accompanied him without complaint, it meant she was doing him a favor. This way, she wasn’t. It seemed he was either prepared to blackmail her into it or pay her an enormous amount of money so that she was obligated to do as he ordered.

Rather than simply ask her for help. The lengths he would go to just so that his position wasn’t weak made her spine stiff with alarm.

“About that money,” she began, feeling divided in half within. She couldn’t even stop seeing the number in front of her, a bag with a dollar sign always hovering in her subconscious as though she was one of her own comic characters, “I was angry with you for manipulating me. I can’t accept—”

His long, tanned finger landed on her mouth, short-circuiting her already-weak thought process. Her skin tingled at the barest contact. “In the week that I have had the misfortune to make your acquaintance,” he said, leaning so close that she could smell his cologne along with the scent of his skin, “asking for money to look after Tyler was the one sensible, one clever thing you did.”

Really, she had no idea what he would say next or what would suddenly send him into a spiral of anger.

“Don’t embrace useless principles now and turn it down, Ms. Nelson. Think of something wild and reckless that you have always wanted but could never afford. Think of all the nice clothes you can buy.” His gaze moved over her worn T-shirt, and she fought the impulse to cover her meager chest. “Maybe even something that will upstage Venetia in front of your ex?”

Her mouth falling open wordlessly, she stared at him. Apparently, her new, standard expression in his company. “I have no intention of competing with Venetia, not that I harbor any delusion that I even could.”

Dark amusement glittered in his gaze. It was as if there was a one-way connection between them that let him see straight into her thoughts. Like Mr. Spock doing a Vulcan Mind Meld. If only it worked both ways. She had absolutely no knowledge about him, whereas he literally had a file on her.

He settled back into the seat and crossed his long legs. “You’re a strange little woman, Ms. Nelson. Are you telling me you didn’t think of using this opportunity to win him back? That the idea didn’t even occur to you?”

“No,” she repeated loudly, refusing to let him sully her motives. She would love to have her friend back, yes, but she wasn’t going to engage in some bizarre girl war with Venetia to get Tyler back the way he assumed.

“Fine. My pilot’s waiting. We leave in four hours.”

“I can’t leave in four hours,” Lexi said, anxiety and the energy it took to talk to him beginning to give her a headache. “I have to find someone to sublet my room, have to get the plumber to fix the kitchen before I leave and I promised Mrs. Goldman next door that I would help her after her surgery in two days. I can’t just up and leave because your sister can’t bear the thought of not being the center of Tyler’s universe for a few more days.”

He shrugged—a careless, elegant movement of those broad shoulders. “I don’t care how many things you had lined up to do for your parasitic friends or how much you were planning to bend over backward for the whole world, Ms. Nelson. I won’t wait anymore.”

She frowned. “I don’t bend over back—”

His gaze sliced through her words. “You’re the worst kind of pushover.”

She slumped against the seat, bone-deep exhaustion taking away her ability to offer even token protest. She shouldn’t be hurt by his clinical, disparaging words. But she was.

And the fact that his words could even affect her only proved him right.

How could she feel bad about what a stranger, someone as ruthless as Nikos Demakis thought about her?

“Your room at the apartment will go nowhere. If there’s anything else you need help with—” his gaze lingered on her clothes again “—something that is solely your concern, your problem, I can have my assistant at your disposal.”

“If I don’t agree?”

He shrugged. “Your agreement or the lack of it doesn’t play into it. The choice is whether you travel as my guest or my captive.”

“That is kidnapping.”

He plucked a couple of pages from his case and pushed it toward her along with a legal pad and a pen. “It’s hard to admit, but I see that I did this all wrong.”

“What?”

He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. His gaze solemn, he blinked. Really, no single man should be allowed to be so gorgeous. “I should have appeared on your doorstep with my heart in my hands, pleaded my sister’s case, begged you to help, tried to become your best friend. Maybe talk about my own horrible childhood, pretend to be on my death bed—”

“Okay, okay, fine. You’ve made your point,” Lexi said loudly, cutting off his mocking words. She had always liked to help if she could. She would not let the manipulative man in front of her make her feel stupid about it.

Pulling her gaze away from him, she scanned the document again. She’d had the contract looked over by a paralegal friend, but there was no discounting the hollow fear in her gut.

She would be in his personal employ for two months and would be paid fifty thousand dollars for it, half now, and half when he deemed her job done, subject to his sole discretion.

She was being paid an exorbitant amount of money to spend time with Tyler on a Greek island, the likes of which she had no other hope of seeing in this lifetime.

Yet as the limo came to a stop on her street in the cheap neighborhood of her apartment complex, she couldn’t shake off a feeling that there was an unwritten price that she would have to pay.

And she had no idea what that was.