The Antonides Marriage Deal

The office was deserted. Rosie had left ages ago, but not without poking her head in to remind Tallie to bring the recipes tomorrow.

She’d promised them to Paul, too, who thought his fiancée would like them, and to Dyson who’d said he didn’t have a fiancée, but who needed one? If you wanted cookies badly enough—and they were good enough—you just baked them yourself.

“I’m liberated,” he’d told Tallie.

She smiled now at the memory, glad she’d brought them, determined to bring others tomorrow. They were good for morale. And they were an excellent way to connect with the staff, even if some people, she thought as she opened the supply closet, looked down their once-broken noses at them.

“Ah, excellent,” she muttered, discovering a box behind the paper supplies. She fished it out, then stood up and turned, slamming into a hard male chest.

“Can I help you find something?” Elias’s tone was polite, his meaning was anything but. Loosely translated, Tallie knew, he wanted to know what the hell she was doing.

She smiled brightly at him. “You’re still here, too? I was just getting a box to take some work home.” She tried to step around him.

He blocked her way. “What work?”

“Some of that reading material you provided. Excuse me.” Her tone was polite, too, but when he didn’t move, she sidestepped him and—accidentally, of course—knocked the box into his solar plexis. “Oh! Sorry.”

Not exactly the truth, but if he was going to stand in her way… She heard him mutter under his breath as she hurried back down the hall with the box in her arms.

Footsteps came after her. “You don’t need to take things home.” He stopped in the door of her office, scowling as she piled the papers into the box.

“Well, I don’t plan to stay here all night.”

“You’re taking way too much trouble.”

“It’s not trouble. It’s my job.”

His jaw bunched, and she knew he was itching to say, “No, it’s mine.”

But he didn’t say anything, just exhaled sharply and rocked back on his heels before muttering something under his breath, then turning and stalking off down the hall.

“Welcome to your first wonderful day at Antonides Marine,” Tallie murmured to herself as she watched him stalk away.

No question about it—Tallie Savas was going to be a pain.

Who the hell needed a president who baked cookies? Who came to meetings and sat there, scribbling furiously on a notepad and never said a word? Who buried herself in her office with the piles and piles of reports he’d given her and actually read them? And took them home with her?

Elias stood glaring after her from his office as she tottered toward the door, the box full of files balanced on top of her briefcase, and three empty cookie tins teetering precariously on top of that.

A gentleman would help her with it.

Elias didn’t feel much like a gentleman. He would have liked to have seen her collapse in a heap.

But the way his life was going at the moment, his father would probably want to pay all her medical bills with money Elias hadn’t made yet!

Grimly he strode after her. “Allow me,” he said with frigid politeness and opened the door for her.

“Thanks.” She gave him a sweet smile that was completely at odds with her stubborn refusal to go home and let him get on with the job. “Have a good evening.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said drily.

She turned her head to grin at him. The top cookie tin teetered, and she nearly dropped them all, rescuing it.

Against his better judgment, Elias said grudgingly, “Do you want some help?”

Tallie shook her head—and the cookie tins and the briefcase and the box. “No, thanks.” And she wobbled off down the hall.

Oddly annoyed at having his offer refused, Elias shut the door behind her. But he didn’t move away. He continued to watch her through the glass. If she dropped the damn things, she’d have to let him help her.

But at that moment one of the doors down the hall opened and a man came out. Elias recognized Martin de Boer instantly from his tweedy elbow-patched jacket and his floppy earnest-and-intense-journalist-too-busy-to-get-a-haircut hair.

Martin wrote for the snooty monthly opinion mag, Issues and Answers, that rented a group of offices down the hall. When Elias had leased to them, he’d figured they’d be congenial tenants, and the people who worked on the physical magazine were. He even played recreational league basketball with the layout director.

But the journalists who wrote for Issues and Answers were a different story. They thought everyone else had issues but only they had answers. And from the few conversations Elias had had with him, Martin de Boer had more answers than most. As far as Elias could see, de Boer was a pompous, arrogant know-it-all who stuck his oar in where it wasn’t needed.

And his opinion didn’t improve as he watched Martin smile and speak to Tallie, obviously offering to help carry her box. In this case he got a brilliant smile in return and a reply that permitted him to whisk the box out of her arms gallantly and cradle it in his own.

Hell! Elias glared. She’d practically kicked his shins when he’d offered! He was half tempted to stalk down the hall and jerk the damn box out of de Boer’s skinny arms.

Good thing his cell phone rang.

Bad thing to hear his father’s voice, jovial and upbeat, booming down the line. “Well how’d it go today with our new president?”

Elias, watching Tallie disappear into the elevator with Martin the Bore, bit out two words: “Don’t ask.”

CHAPTER THREE

THE PHONE began ringing right after she came in the door.

“Just wanted to see how things went,” Socrates said. Her father’s tone was deliberately casual and offhand but at the same time simply simmering with curiosity.

Tallie, who was feeding a very hungry and indignant cat who thought he should have eaten two hours before, scooped some fishy-smelling glop onto a plate and set it on the floor. Harvey fell on it ravenously. She straightened and took a deep breath. “Just fine.”

She would have left it at that, but she knew from experience that that wasn’t the way to handle Socrates. Less was never more with her father. And letting him ask questions was worse than telling him more than enough to lead him astray.