Conveniently His Omnibus (20 page)

‘Saskia,’ she could hear her boss saying weakly as he looked on disbelievingly, ‘I don’t understand...’

He would understand even less if she tried to explain to him what was
really
happening, Saskia acknowledged bleakly. It seemed to her that it was a very unfair thing to do to deceive the man who had been so kind to her but what alternative did she really have.

‘You mustn’t blame Saskia,’ Andreas was saying protectively. ‘I’m afraid I’m the one who’s at fault. I insisted that our relationship should be kept a secret until the outcome of our takeover bid became public. I didn’t want Saskia to be accused of having conflicting loyalties—and I must tell you, Gordon, that she insisted that any kind of discussion about the takeover was off-limits between us... Mind you, talking about work was not exactly
my
number one priority when we were together,’ Andreas admitted, with a sensual look at Saskia that made her face burn even more hotly and caused more than one audible and envious gasp from her female co-workers.

‘Why did you have to do
that
?’ Saskia demanded fretfully the moment they were alone and out of earshot.

‘Do what?’ Andreas responded unhelpfully.

‘You know perfectly well what I mean,’ Saskia protested. ‘Why couldn’t we just have met somewhere?’

‘In secret?’ He looked more bored now than amorous, his eyebrows drawing together as he frowned impatiently down at her. He was a good deal taller than her, well over six foot, and it hurt her neck a little, craning to look up at him. She wished he wouldn’t walk so close to her; it made her feel uncomfortable and on edge and somehow aware of herself as a woman in a way that wasn’t familiar to her.

‘Haven’t I already made it plain to you that the whole object of this exercise is to bring our relationship into the public domain? Which is why—’ He smiled grimly at Saskia as he broke off from what he was saying to tell her silkily, ‘I’ve booked a table at the wine bar for lunch. I ate there last night and I have to say that the food was excellent—even if what happened later was less...palatable...’

Suddenly Saskia had had enough.

‘Look, I keep trying to tell you, last night was a mistake. I...’

‘I completely agree with you,’ Andreas assured her. ‘It
was
a mistake...
your
mistake...and whilst we’re on the subject, let me warn you, Saskia, if you
ever
manifest anything similar whilst you are engaged to
me
, if you ever even
look
at another man...’ He stopped as he saw the shock widening her eyes.

‘I’m half-Greek, my dear,’ he reminded her softly. ‘And when it comes to
my
woman, I’m more Greek than I am British...very much more...’

‘I’m
not
your woman,’ was the only response Saskia found she could make.

‘No,’ he agreed cynically. ‘You belong to any man who can afford you, don’t you, in reality? But...’ He stopped again as he heard the sharp sound of protest she made, her face white and then red as her emotions overwhelmed her self-control.

‘You have no right to speak to me like that,’ Saskia told him thickly.

‘No right? But surely as your fiancée I have
every
right,’ Andreas taunted her, and then, before she could stop him, he reached out and ran one long finger beneath her lower eyelashes, collecting on it the angry humiliated tears that had just fallen. ‘Tears?’ he mocked her. ‘My dear, you are an even better actress then I thought.’

They had reached the wine bar and Saskia was forced to struggle to control her emotions as he opened the door and drew her inside.

‘I don’t want anything to eat. I’m not hungry,’ she told him flatly once they had been shown to their table.

‘Sulking?’ he asked her succinctly. ‘I can’t force you to eat, but I certainly don’t intend to deny
myself
the pleasure of enjoying a good meal.’

‘There are things we have to discuss,’ he added in a cool, businesslike voice as he picked up the menu she had ignored and read it. ‘I know most of your personal details from your file, but if we are to convince my family and especially my grandfather that we are lovers, then there are other things I shall need to know...and things you will need to know about me.’

Lovers... Saskia just managed to stop herself from shuddering openly. If she had to accede to his blackmail then she was going to have to learn to play the game by his rules or risk being totally destroyed by him.

‘Lovers.’ She gave him a bleak smile. ‘I thought Greek families didn’t approve of sex before marriage.’

‘Not for their
own
daughters,’ he agreed blandly. ‘But since you are
not
Greek, and since
I
am half-British I am sure that my grandfather will be more...tolerant...’

‘But he wouldn’t be tolerant if you were engaged to your cousin?’ Saskia pressed, not sure why she was doing so and even less sure just why the thought of his cousin should arouse such a sensation of pain and hostility within her.

‘Athena, my cousin, is a
widow
, a previously married woman, and naturally my grandfather...’ He paused and then told her dryly, ‘Besides, Athena herself would never accept my grandfather’s interference in any aspect of her life. She is a very formidable woman.’

‘She’s a
widow
?’ For some reason Saskia had assumed that this cousin was a young girl. It had never occurred to her that she might already have been married.

‘A widow,’ Andreas confirmed. ‘With two teenage children.’

‘Teenage!’

‘She married at twenty-two,’ Andreas told her with a shrug. ‘That was almost twenty years ago.’

Saskia’s eyes widened as she did her sums. Athena was obviously older than Andreas. A lonely and no doubt vulnerable woman who was being pressurised into a second marriage she perhaps did not want, Saskia decided sympathetically.

‘However, you need not concern yourself too much with Athena, since it is doubtful that you will meet her. She lives a very peripatetic existence. She has homes in Athens, New York and Paris and spends much of her time travelling between them, as well as running the shipping line she inherited.’

A shipping line and a hotel chain. No wonder Andreas’s grandfather was so anxious for them to marry. It amazed Saskia that Andreas was not equally keen on the match, especially knowing the hard bargain he had driven over the takeover.

As though he had guessed what she was thinking, he leaned towards her and told her grittily, ‘Unlike you,
I
am not prepared to sell myself.’

‘I was
not
selling myself,’ Saskia denied hotly, and then frowned as the waiter approached their table carrying two plates of delicious-looking food.

‘I didn’t order a meal,’ she began as he set one of them down in front of her and the other in front of Andreas.

‘No. I ordered it for you,’ Andreas told her. ‘I don’t like to see my women looking like skinny semi-starved rabbits. A Greek man may be permitted to beat his wife, but he would never stoop to starving her.’

‘Beat...’ Saskia began rising to the bait and then stopped as she saw the glint in his eyes and realised that he was teasing her.

‘I suspect you are the kind of woman, Saskia, who would drive a saint, never mind a mere mortal man, to be driven to subdue you, to master you and then to wish that he had had the strength to master himself instead.’

Saskia shivered as the raw sensuality of what he was saying hit her like a jolt of powerful electricity. What was it about him that made her so acutely aware of him, so nervously on edge?

More to distract herself than anything else she started to eat, unaware of the ruefully amused look Andreas gave her as she did so. If he didn’t know better he would have said that she was as inexperienced as a virgin. The merest allusion to anything sexual was enough to have her trembling with reaction, unable to meet his gaze. It was just as well that he knew it was all an act, otherwise... Otherwise what? Otherwise he might be savagely tempted to put his words into actions, to see if she trembled as deliciously when he touched her as she did when he spoke to her.

To counter what he was feeling he began to speak to her in a crisp, businesslike voice.

‘There are certain things you will need to know about my family background if you are going to convince my grandfather that we are in love.’

He proceeded to give her a breakdown of his immediate family, adding a few cautionary comments about his grandfather’s health.

‘Which does not mean that he is not one hundred and fifty per cent on the ball. If anything, the fact that he is now prevented from working so much means that he is even more ferociously determined to interfere in my life than he was before. He tells my mother that he is afraid he will die before I give him any great-grandchildren. If that is not blackmail I don’t know what is,’ Andreas growled.

‘It’s obviously a family vice,’ Saskia told him mock sweetly, earning herself a look that she refused to allow to make her quake in her shoes.

‘Ultimately, of course, our engagement will have to be broken,’ Andreas told her unnecessarily. ‘No doubt our sojourn on the island will reveal certain aspects of our characters that we shall find mutually unappealing, and on our return to England we shall bring our engagement to an end. But at least I shall have bought myself some time...and hopefully Athena will have decided to accept one of the many suitors my grandfather says are only too willing to become her second husband.’

‘And if she doesn’t?’ Saskia felt impelled to ask.

‘
If
she doesn’t, we shall just have to delay ending our engagement until either she does or I find an alternative way of convincing my grandfather that one of my sisters can provide him with his great-grandchildren.’

‘You don’t
ever
want to marry?’ Saskia was startled into asking.

‘Well, let’s just say that since I have reached the age of thirty-five without meeting a woman who has made me feel my life is unliveable without her by my side, I somehow doubt that I am likely to do so now. Falling in love is a young man’s extravagance. In a man past thirty it is more of a vain folly.’

‘My father fell in love with my mother when he was seventeen,’ Saskia couldn’t stop herself from telling him. ‘They ran away together...’ Her eyes clouded. ‘It was a mistake. They fell out of love with one another before I was born. An older man would at least have had some sense of responsibility towards the life he had helped to create. My father was still a child himself.’

‘He abandoned you?’ Andreas asked her, frowning.

‘They both did,’ Saskia told him tersely. ‘If it hadn’t been for my grandmother I would have ended up in a children’s home.’

Soberly Andreas watched her. Was
that
why she went trawling bars for men? Was she searching for the male love she felt she had been denied by her father? His desire to exonerate her from her behaviour irritated him.
Why
was he trying to make excuses for her? Surely he hadn’t actually been taken in by those tears earlier.

‘It’s time for us to leave,’ he told her brusquely.

CHAPTER FOUR

I
F
SOMEONE
had told her two weeks ago that she would be leaving behind her everything that was familiar to fly to an unknown Greek island in the company of an equally unknown man to whom she was supposed to be engaged, Saskia would have shaken her head in denial and amusement—which just went to show!

Which just went to show what a combination of male arrogance, self-belief and determination could do, especially when it was allied to the kind of control that one particular male had over her, Saskia fretted darkly.

In less than fifteen minutes’ time Andreas would be picking her up in his Mercedes for the first leg of their journey to Aphrodite, the island Andreas’s grandfather had bought for his wife and named after the goddess of love.

‘Theirs was a love match but one that had the approval of both families,’ Andreas had told Saskia when he had been briefing her about his background.

A love match...unlike
their
bogus engagement. Just being a party to that kind of deceit, even though it was against her will, made Saskia feel uncomfortable, but nowhere near as uncomfortable as she had felt when she had had to telephone her grandmother and lie to her, saying that she was going away on business.

Andreas had tried to insist that she inform her grandmother of their engagement, but Saskia had refused.

‘
You
may be happy to lie to your family about our supposed “relationship”,’ she had told him with a look of smoky-eyed despair. ‘But I
can’t
lie to my grandmother about something so...’ She hadn’t been able to go on, unwilling to betray herself by admitting to Andreas that her grandmother would never believe that Saskia had committed herself and her future to a man without loving him.

Once the fall-out from the news of her ‘engagement’ had subsided at work, her colleagues had treated her with both wary caution and distance. She was now the boss’s fiancée and as such no longer really ‘one of them’.

All in all Saskia had spent the week feeling increasingly isolated and frightened, but she was too proud to say anything to anyone—a hang-up, she suspected, from the days of her childhood, when the fact that her parents’ story was so widely known, coupled with the way she had been dumped on her grandmother, had made her feel different, distanced from her schoolmates, who had all seemed to have proper mummies and daddies.

Not that anyone could have loved her more than her grandmother had done, as Saskia was the first to acknowledge now. Her home background had in reality been just as loving and stable, if not more so, than that of the majority of her peers.

She gave a small surreptitious look at her watch. Less than five minutes to go. Her heart thumped heavily. Her packed suitcase was ready and waiting in the hall. She had agonised over what she ought to take and in the end had compromised with a mixture of the summer holiday clothes she had bought three years previously, when she and Megan had gone to Portugal together, plus some of her lightweight office outfits.

She hadn’t seen Andreas since he had taken her out for lunch—not that she had minded
that
! No indeed! He had been attending a gruelling schedule of business meetings—dealing, if the trickles of gossip that had filtered through the grapevine were anything to go by, heroically with the problems posed by the challenging situation the hotels had fallen into prior to the takeover.

‘He’s visited every single one of our hotels,’ Saskia had heard from one admiring source. ‘And he’s been through every single aspect of the way they’re being run—and guess what?’

Saskia, who had been on the edge of the group who’d been listening eagerly to this story, had swallowed uncomfortably, expecting to hear that Andreas had instituted a programme of mass sackings in order to halt the flood of unprofitable expenses, but to her astonishment instead she had heard, ‘He’s told everyone that their job is safe, provided they can meet the targets he’s going to be setting. Everywhere he’s been he’s given the staff a pep talk, told them how much he values the acquisition his group has made and how he personally is going to be held responsible by the board of directors if he can’t turn it into a profit-making asset.’

The gossip was that Andreas had a way with him that had his new employees not only swearing allegiance, but apparently praising him to the skies as well.

Well, they obviously hadn’t witnessed the side to his character she had done, was all that Saskia had been able to think as she listened a little bitterly to everyone’s almost euphoric praise of him.

It was ten-thirty now, and he wasn’t... Saskia tensed as she suddenly saw the large Mercedes pulling up outside her grandmother’s house. Right on time! But of course Andreas would not waste a precious second of his time unless he had to, especially not on her!

By the time he had reached the front door she had opened it and was standing waiting for him, her suitcase in one hand and her door key in the other.

‘What’s that?’

She could see the way he was frowning as he looked down at her inexpensive case and immediately pride flared through her sharpening her own voice as she answered him with a curt, ‘My suitcase.’

‘Give it to me,’ he instructed her briefly.

‘I can carry it myself,’ Saskia informed him grittily.

‘I’m sure you can,’ Andreas agreed, equally grimly. ‘But...’

‘But what?’ Saskia challenged him angrily. ‘But Greek men do not allow women to carry their own luggage nor to be independent from them in any way?’

Saskia could see from the way Andreas’s mouth tightened that he did not like what she had said. For some perverse reason she felt driven to challenge him, even though a part of her shrank from the storm signals she could see flashing in his eyes.

‘I’m afraid in this instance you should perhaps blame my English father rather than my Greek mother,’ he told her icily. ‘The English public school he insisted I was sent to believed in what is now considered to be an outdated code of good manners for its pupils.’ He gave her a thin, unfriendly look. ‘One word of warning to you. My grandfather is inclined to be old-fashioned about such things. He will not understand your modern insistence on politically correct behaviour, and whilst you are on the island...’

‘I have to do as
you
tell me,’ Saskia finished bitterly for him.

If this was a taste of what the next few weeks were going to be like she didn’t know how she was going to survive them. Still, at least there would be one benefit of their obvious hostility to one another. No one who would be observing them together would be surprised when they decided to end their ‘engagement’.

‘Our flight leaves Heathrow at nine tomorrow morning, so we will need to leave the apartment early,’ Andreas informed Saskia once they were in the car.

‘The
apartment
?’ Saskia questioned him warily immediately.

‘Yes,’ Andreas confirmed. ‘I have an apartment in London. We shall be staying there tonight. This afternoon we shall spend shopping.’

‘Shopping...?’ Saskia began to interrupt, but Andreas overruled her.

‘Yes, shopping,’ he told her cautiously. ‘You will need an engagement ring, and...’ He paused and gave her a brief skimming look of assessment and dismissal that made her itch to demand that he stop the car immediately. Oh, how she would love to be able to tell him that she had changed her mind...that there was no way she was going to give in to his blackmail. But she knew there was no way she could.

‘You will need more suitable clothes.’

‘If you mean holiday clothes,’ Saskia began, ‘they are in my case, and...’

‘No, I do not mean “holiday” clothes.’ Andreas stopped her grimly. ‘I am an independently wealthy man, Saskia; you don’t need me to tell you that. Your department’s investigations prior to our takeover must have informed you to the nearest hundred thousand pounds what my asset value is. My grandfather is a millionaire many times over, and my mother and my sisters are used to buying their clothes from the world’s top designers, even though none of them are what could be considered to be fashion victims or shopaholics. Naturally, as my fiancée...’

Without allowing him to finish Saskia took a deep, angry breath and told him dangerously, ‘If you think that I am going to let
you
buy my clothes...’

With only the briefest of pauses Andreas took control of the situation from her by asking smoothly, ‘Why not? After all, you were prepared to let me buy your
body
. Me or indeed any other man who was prepared to pay for it.’

‘No! That’s not true,’ Saskia denied with a shocked gasp.

‘Very good,’ Andreas mocked her. ‘But you can save the special effects for my family. I know
exactly
what you are—remember. Think of these clothes as a perk of your job.’ He gave her a thin, unkind smile. ‘However, having said that, I have to add that I shall want to vet whatever you wish to purchase. The image I want you to convey to my family as my fiancée is one of elegance and good taste.’

‘What are you trying to suggest?’ Saskia hissed furiously at him. ‘That left to my own devices I might choose something more suited to a...?’ She stopped, unable to bring herself to voice the words burning a painful brand in her thoughts.

To her bemusement, instead of saying them for her Andreas said coolly, ‘You are obviously not used to buying expensive clothes and there is no way I want you indulging in some kind of idiotic unnecessary economy which would negate the whole purpose of the exercise. I don’t want you buying clothes more suitable for a young woman on a modest salary than the fiancée of an extremely wealthy man,’ he informed her bluntly, in case she had not understood him the first time.

For once Saskia could think of nothing to say, but inside she was a bundle of fury and shame. There was no way she could stop Andreas from carrying out his plans, she knew that, but she fully intended to keep a mental record of everything he spent so that ultimately she could repay him, even if doing so totally depleted the small nest egg she had been carefully saving.

‘No more objections?’ Andreas enquired smoothly. ‘Good, because I promise you, Saskia, I mean to have my way—even if that entails dressing you and undressing you myself to get it. Make no mistake, when we arrive on Aphrodite you will be arriving as my fiancée.’

As he drove down the slipway onto the motorway and the powerful car picked up speed Saskia decided diplomatically that quarrelling with him whilst he was driving at such a speed would be very foolish indeed. It was over half an hour later before she recognised that, in her anxiety to reject Andreas’s claimed right to decide what she should wear, she had neglected to deal with the more important issue of her discomfort at the idea of spending the night with him.

But what did she really have to fear? Certainly not any sexual advances from Andreas. He had, after all, made it shamingly plain what he thought of her sexual morals.

She had far too much pride to admit to him that she felt daunted and apprehensive at the thought of sharing the intimacy of an apartment with him. On the island it would be different. There they would be with his family and the staff who ran the large villa complex he said his grandfather had had built on it.

No, she would be wise to grit her teeth and say nothing rather than risk exposing herself to his disbelief and mocking contempt by expressing her anxieties.

* * *

A
S
SHE
WAITED
for the chauffeur to load her luggage into the boot of her hired limousine Athena tapped one slender expensively shod foot impatiently.

The moment she had heard the news that Andreas was engaged and about to bring his fiancée to Aphrodite on an official visit to meet his family she had sprung into action. Fortunately an engagement was not a marriage, and she certainly intended to make sure that
this
engagement never made it as far as a wedding.

She knew why Andreas had done it, of course. He was, after all, Greek to the very marrow of his bones—even if he chose to insist on everyone acknowledging his British blood—and like any Greek man, indeed any
man
he had an inborn need to be the one in control.

His claim to be in love with this other woman was simply his way of showing that control, rejecting the marriage to her which was so very dear to his grandfather’s heart and to her own.

As the limousine sped away from the kerb she leaned forward and gave the driver the address of a prestigious apartment block overlooking the river. She herself did not maintain a home in London; she preferred New York’s social life and the Paris shops.

Andreas might think he had outmanoeuvred her by announcing his engagement to this undoubtedly cold and sexless English fiancée. Well, she would soon bring an end to that, and make sure that he knew where his real interests lay. After all, how could he possibly resist
her
? She had everything he could want, and he certainly had everything
she
wanted.

It was a pity he had managed to prevent her from outbidding him for this latest acquisition. Ownership of the hotels themselves meant nothing to her
per se
, but it would have been an excellent bait to dangle in front of him since he obviously set a great deal of store by them. Why, she could not understand. But then in many ways there were a considerable number of things about Andreas that she did not understand. It was one of the things that made him so desirable to her. Athena had always coveted that which seemed to be out of reach.

The first time she had realised she wanted Andreas he had been fifteen and she had been on the verge of marrying her husband. She smiled wantonly to herself, licking her lips. At fifteen Andreas, although a boy, had been as tall as a man and as broad, with a superbly fit young body, and so indescribably good-looking that the sight of him had made her melt with lust.

She had done her best to seduce him but he had managed to resist her and then, within a month of deciding that she wanted him, she had been married.