The Greek's Hidden Vows Read online

  The kick of caffeine before the calm of alcohol threw a veil of equilibrium over his senses. He released the single button to his bespoke suit and loosened his tie.

  Jerking it free, he flung it on the sofa. With his gaze still on her, Christos tugged open the top three buttons of his shirt. He wasn’t in the least bit ashamed of enjoying the reaction that flitted across her face.

  Despite the brick wall she’d thrown up after that night in his penthouse, she wasn’t immune to him. Selfishly, since his day had gone to hell so very unexpectedly, he revelled in the quickening of her breath, the flair of gold in her brown eyes, the smallest step she took away from him under the guise of straightening the coffee-table book on medieval architecture. They were the same tics she’d exhibited soon after accepting the position as his executive assistant, that he’d dreaded her acting upon, only to discover that she had no intention of doing so after three years in her role.

  At first, Christos had resigned himself to waiting for the inevitable moment when Alexis, like his three prior seemingly superefficient and professional assistants, would drop the not-so-subtle hint that she would love their boss/assistant relationship to become something more.

  That moment had never arrived, but he’d remained sceptical, then increasingly on edge because Alexis was his most proficient assistant, anticipating his needs and executing them sometimes even before he recognised they existed. But Christos wasn’t a man who took things at face value—the harrowing events of his childhood had eroded his trust. So like the sword of Damocles hanging over his head, each interaction with her had become a watchful exercise, until it had grown into a peculiar kind of anticipation.

  It had been well into the first year before he’d spotted a single sign that she was aware of him. But even that had been ruthlessly snuffed out, his assistant seemingly as capable of clamping down her responses as he was.

  Until that night.

  Now, he watched her gaze dart to his neck and upper chest before flicking away. But the lips that were pursed minutes ago had grown softer, parting slightly as the tempo of her breathing escalated.

  ‘I drank the coffee and the whisky.’ In truth, he’d realised he needed both the moment he’d seen her holding them. Even now, they were further calming him, creating a little distance from the unsettling after-effects of his unexpected failure. ‘Now are you ready to do my bidding?’

  The tip of her pink tongue darted out, touched the inner edge of her lower lip before retreating. That small act was enough to redirect the surge of fire in his chest south. To confirm that once again he was treading dangerous ground when it came to how much he enjoyed her reaction to him.

  He didn’t want to lose Alexis as an executive assistant or jeopardise the private agreement he had with her to secure his birthright. She’d lasted three years working with him because she was the best. But if he was to accommodate his grandfather’s increasing demands, then knowing Alexis wasn’t the cold wall she usually projected would come in handy.

  ‘If that bidding involves getting Demitri on the line for you, then yes. The poor man is going out of his mind since the verdict was handed down. I told him you would return his calls within the hour,’ she answered.

  The reminder that beyond these walls, and the bubbling cauldron of whatever was going on between him and his assistant, there was a disaster waiting to be cleared up wasn’t welcome. But he’d never shied away from challenges. Not that Demitri Kyrios would challenge him after keeping crucial information from him.

  Alexis took another step back. ‘Shall we say, five minutes?’

  She was almost at the door, her brisk efficiency back in place like a well-worn suit of armour.

  ‘Three,’ he replied. He’d prevaricated enough. He rebuttoned his suit, reknotted his tie and crushed his frustration until it was a non-existent blip at the back of his mind. ‘Make sure I have the complete transcript of today’s proceedings on my desk.’

  She looked over her shoulder. ‘It was the first thing I did when I heard the outcome.’

  He allowed a ghost of a smile to cross his lips. ‘Be careful, Alexis. We don’t want to get to the point where I imagine you’re willing to cater to my every need, do we?’ he challenged.

  ‘I’m here to cater to your every professional need. If you don’t want me to be fully efficient in that capacity, then maybe I should find another employer? I’m sure someone out there will appreciate my dedication.’

  ‘Is that a threat?’ If so, it wasn’t an idle one.

  A month ago, he’d come across an email from a headhunting agency offering her an impressive salary and benefits package if she jumped ship to another firm. Whether she’d left the email open deliberately for him to see because he’d been in a particularly testy mood that day, he wasn’t sure. But its existence had niggled at him, prompting him to discreetly request she be given a mid-year review by HR and a thirty per cent raise.

  The uncertainty that she’d still choose to leave him chafed with each passing day. The same feelings of uncertainty had dogged his formative years, although he’d hoped he’d put that period far behind him. But he could do nothing about it, not when she was instrumental in helping him secure Drakonisos, the one thing that mattered to him above all things.

  Admitting it was enough to rake up his dying frustration and a few more emotions that should be buried deep enough to be dead. But weren’t.

  ‘No, sir. It’s a gentle reminder that we both have options,’ she answered his almost forgotten question.

  ‘Sir?’

  Her lips pursed. ‘It’s the correct form of address. I don’t know what you have against it.’

  She hadn’t called him that since her initial interview, when, for some reason, the sound of it falling from her lips had spiked his temperature high enough to make him demand she never use it again.

  He walked over to the door and held it open for her to walk through. ‘You’re not going anywhere. I’m not ready to do without you. Not just yet anyway.’

  A look flitted through her eyes, gone before he could decipher it. Then her head dipped in a stiff nod as they walked together down a short corridor to the lift that would take them down to his office. ‘That’s good to hear. Your executive chef sent through the autumn menu today. I’d hate to be deprived of his culinary delights this side of Christmas.’

  ‘I’m sure his ego will be boosted to know he’s the only reason you’re bringing yourself to remain in my employ.’ He pressed the button to summon the lift, noting the reduced desire to stab at it. He didn’t want to admit her presence was the reason he’d calmed down, but Christos couldn’t deny it.

  Her unflappability in the face of his sometimes heated Greek temperament was one he appreciated.

  ‘I’ve tried to resist his cooking, but he gets me every time. I’ve had to up my thrice-weekly gym sessions to counterbalance the high calories.’

  Christos’s eyes narrowed as she preceded him into the lift. ‘Is that the reason you’ve been absent from your desk between six and seven lately?’

  She leaned past him to press the switch that closed the doors before resting her gaze on the bright green digital floor counter. ‘Yep. I didn’t think you noticed, though.’

  His gaze drifted past her profile and down her trim body to her slim legs and heeled feet. ‘I noticed both your absence, and the fact that your efforts aren’t necessary.’

  Their gazes met and again he experienced a split-second connection that froze time, before she raised a cool eyebrow. ‘You pound your treadmill every night without fail. Are your efforts necessary?’

  This time the smile that threatened stayed for longer than a second. ‘Touché.’

  Her gaze dropped to his mouth, lingering as her own lips curved.

  Then the doors opened, and Christos was back in his true domain. In the kingdom he’d built brick by brick with one simple but solid go
al in mind: to make sure people like his father never got another chance to perpetrate their despicable wrongs on helpless victims like him and his mother. And if his clients came to him already in the clutches of such vile treatment, to ensure he used the rule of law to make the perpetrators pay as high a price as possible.

  Before he tackled this recent rare failure, however, he needed to safeguard the two-miles-square piece of land in the Aegean that had been his sanity and salvation as a boy. The place where the seeds of the man he was today had been sown. The only place where he’d known a semblance of acceptance. Perhaps even affection? He shrugged the question away. While he wasn’t overly eager to probe the emotions tied to his need to possess Drakonisos, he wasn’t prepared to sit back and let his grandfather hand it over to his cousin either.

  To do that he needed to revisit his private agreement with Alexis. One that, in his moments of quiet, he’d repeatedly questioned his sanity over.

  ‘Alexis.’ The throb of...something in his voice stilled her.

  ‘Yes?’ Her response was a little wary. Between heartbeats, that momentary lightening of tension receded, and they were back in the tight bubble of awareness that flared up so readily between them these days. ‘Did you want something else?’ she tagged on when he took a moment to form the words.

  ‘Yes. It’s time to reprise your other role.’

  Christos wasn’t quite sure how to process her visible paling. The widening of her eyes. The decisive step she took back from him. All negative reactions when he wanted the opposite. When he’d dared hope for enthusiasm, even?

  ‘But...it’s only June. We’re not supposed to travel to Greece for another two months.’ Her voice held a shaky, uneven texture that spoke to how she felt. How, probably like him, she preferred to keep the entire subject at the back of her mind, calling upon it only when strictly necessary.

  But again, when he should’ve taken her response in his stride, because this was only another clinical transaction after all, he felt...disgruntlement.

  Their deal hadn’t been a one-sided affair. She’d negotiated her own terms, extracted her own rewards.

  Just as everyone had seen him in the key moments of his life, he’d been seen as a pawn. A means to an end.

  He refused to feel guilty about stacking the deck in his own favour.

  ‘There’s been a development regarding my grandfather.’ Another twist in their relationship he suspected was orchestrated by yet another greedy party.

  Her eyes widened even further, another layer of tension and electric awareness arcing in the space between them. Space he closed by strolling towards her until they were a foot apart. Until he was certain he could hear her frantic heartbeat and the tiny rush of air leaving her parted lips. ‘And? What exactly does that mean?’

  ‘It means it’s time for you to be my wife again, Alexis.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  YES, SHE WAS married to her boss, according to the pristine little document tucked in the farthest corner of her lingerie drawer that proclaimed her as Mrs Alexis Drakakis, wife of Christos Drakakis, enigmatic multimillionaire, world-renowned lawyer and rumoured heir to his grandfather’s billion-euro empire.

  A document she hadn’t been able to glance at since the single time she’d held it in her hand, wondering if she’d made the right decision or was still caught in the ninety seconds of madness that had made her agree to her boss’s preposterous proposition.

  A three-year deal struck—after that brief moment of insanity had passed—when she’d believed she could fully control every outcome with the same cool, unflappable efficiency as she ran his office.

  For a while, it had worked. Heck, in the beginning she’d managed to forget, for several hours at a time at least, her marital ties to the formidable man who ran his international law firm with an iron fist. Forget that underneath the marriage certificate lay a box containing a five-carat princess-cut diamond set in platinum, alongside a matching wedding ring, which he’d presented to her with firm-jawed, emotionless expediency at the sterile registrar’s office in Marylebone a year ago.

  Because the agreement was that she would need the rings for only two-week stretches, twice a year, when they visited Costas Drakakis in Greece, his ageing, reclusive grandfather whose demands on his grandson had compelled Christos’s proposition to her.

  It had all seemed so clear-cut back then—bar those ninety seconds when she’d experienced a depth of terrifying possessiveness and increasing desire to remain in the intoxicating orbit of Christos Drakakis’s success. To know she was a small but key component that made his professional life revolve with oiled smoothness.

  In that moment, she’d felt...needed, not an unwanted object to be thrown away as her mother had so effortlessly done mere hours after giving birth to her. Alexis knew deep down that need was what prompted her to agree to the highly irregular proposition. That and the painful but necessary decision she’d made after her one devastating relationship.

  She might have accepted that intimacy and marriage weren’t on the cards for her, but that damning need to be wanted, to be needed, the craving to be moored to something stable and solid had never relented.

  Once she’d got over those ninety seconds it had been a simple decision. With occasional bouts—deep in the night when she tossed and turned with curious restlessness—of mild astonishment at what she’d done. Thankfully, those moments always took their rightful place at the back of her mind come morning.

  ‘Alexis, did you hear me?’ came the deep, firm demand.

  As if she could dismiss him that easily. As if her every sense weren’t greedily attuned to his every word. As if she didn’t spend every moment of every working hour steeling herself against any betrayal of what his face, his voice, his six-foot-three frame did to her equilibrium.

  She’d succeeded. For the most part. Until that night two months ago. When everything had tilted and never quite righted itself again.

  She cleared her throat. ‘Of course I heard you. I’m still waiting for an explanation as to the change of plans though.’

  A hot flame flickered through his eyes. A temperamental flash that warned her about stepping out of line, while at the same time signalling his respect for standing up to him.

  It was a curious expression, that one. It made her daring. It kept her spine straight and her senses alert. It certainly didn’t make things boring around here.

  Not that at thirty-three, and as one of the youngest managing partners of an international law firm, Christos Drakakis had ever attracted a label like boring.

  From the tips of his close-cropped, so-dark-it-almost-seemed-black hair to the heels of his custom-made Italian shoes, he possessed a bristling energy that encompassed anyone in his vicinity. It was an intensely magnetic force field that commanded attention, which he then held with his steel grey eyes. With that slash of hard but sensual mouth that could cut his opponent to pieces in the courtroom without raising his deep, faintly accented baritone.

  Watching him strike ruthless deals across a conference table or walking in a deceptively calm but predatory stride across a courtroom had evoked near hero worship amongst lawyers and staff alike. In Alexis it had evoked a curious mix of awe and mild terror. Of quiet pride. Of an electric hum deep in her belly that she refused to acknowledge or analyse.

  She tried to slow her pulse with deep, controlled breaths as he stared at her now, his nostrils flaring ever so briefly before he shoved his hands into his pockets.

  ‘I haven’t been fully apprised of the reasons. Only that my presence is required in Greece. Which means yours is too, as my wife,’ he drawled.

  Wife.

  A term she only allowed herself to think about twice a year. A term that fired up tectonic bolts through her system. ‘If you don’t know for sure, then my presence may not be required—’

  His headshake cut her off. ‘Our deal was that you wou
ld accompany me whenever I visited Drakonisos in return for keeping and maintaining your precious little project.’

  Yes, the flip—and more important—side of her deal with Christos. Another desire to feel needed that had kept her tied to the only home she’d ever known.

  Hope House.

  Her need to keep it from being razed to the ground.

  Christos’s agreement to keep the children’s home going in perpetuity in return for her agreement to act as his wife for a minimum of three years. In those restless moments deep in the night, she clung to this reason more than anything else. Because in this, she knew she’d made the right choice. Knew that she hadn’t acted completely rashly when Christos had invited her for a drink in his office and confessed his need for a wife in order to secure his birthright. Hope House, she told herself, was far more important than the intimacy and marriage hopes she’d had to abandon after the emotional wringer she’d been through in her one and only relationship.

  Hope House had been her single constant, a solid signpost she could cling to in a life whose beginnings had been murky.

  Fresh from a phone call with the distressed director of the children’s home who had taken Alexis in when she’d been abandoned in front of their high-street charity outlet, she’d blurted out her own request.

  Curiously, that quid pro quo transaction had pleased Christos. As if her wanting something in return had established the true parameters of their agreement. She’d felt a peculiar sting deep in her chest that she attributed to the extreme relief she’d saved Hope House. That the spread-thin staff who manned the children’s home just outside London would shelter other children, if not from the ever-present abandonment-induced heartache and fear of future rejection, then at least with a roof over their heads.

  Viewing it rationally, Alexis knew she was getting the better end of the deal. Seriously, who wouldn’t want a twice-yearly semi-vacation on the jaw-dropping jewel in the Aegean that was Drakonisos?