Unworldly Secretary, Untamed Greek

‘I bow to your superior knowledge of my brother.’ He dipped his dark head towards her and continued in the same sarcastic manner that had a nail scraping on blackboard effect on Beth’s nerve endings. ‘You are clearly an expert on the subject.’ Perhaps his brother had dropped a casual kiss on her cheek once and she had been fantasising about it ever since—or had they gone further?

Irritated by the returning theme, Theo rejected the idea before his mind supplied the accompanying images which, for some irrational reason, he found more disturbing than the very real image of his brother kissing his own ex-lover.

Elizabeth Farley might look a lot better minus the awful clothes but Andreas was not the type to look beyond the surface or even be curious.

Yet Ariana did have the insight he lacked. She clearly felt this pale, spiky girl was a potential threat so maybe his brother was attracted and didn’t even realise it?

Beth gritted her teeth and felt the colour flame in her cheeks; she had never wanted to wipe the smug smirk off a blackboard!

‘No…no, I didn’t mean that I…you get to know someone when you work for them; we’re close.’ Her cheeks flamed at the belated realisation of the sordid interpretation this hateful man might put on this comment and she added quickly, ‘Not obviously close like—’

He halted her mumbling, embarrassed retraction with a languid motion of one hand. ‘You think that my brother is above such petty things as sibling rivalry, you think he is noble and—’

His sarcasm brought a flush to her cheeks. ‘I think he is in love.’ Being selfless, she decided, was not all it was cracked up to be.

‘And you think you know all about love?’

She stared at him, sitting there looking what nine out of ten women—and these odds were granting her own sex more sense than they probably had—would call perfect and she felt the leaden lump of misery that had lain in her throat all day melt as a wave of incandescent rage swept over her.

He didn’t have a clue what it was like to be her! She jumped to her feet, sending her chair hurtling into the wall behind her. ‘I know a damn sight more about it than you do!’ she yelled, recoiling slightly as the volume of her own voice hit her.

He did not look offended by her accusation.

‘So you accept the situation and walk away. Don’t you want to fight for him?’

‘And how do you suggest I do that?’ Her response made him realise just how far past sensible she had allowed the conversation to go. ‘Look, you might have nothing to do but I think this joke has gone far enough…’ Silently willing him to take the hint, Beth thought her prayers had been answered when Theo rose to his feet.

Her relief was short-lived. He made no move to leave. Instead, he dragged a hand through his hair and allowed his gaze to travel from the soles of her sensible shoes to the top of her glossy head. ‘One obvious suggestion springs to mind. You could dress like a woman and not like a middle-aged librarian.’

An angry flush of mortification mounted her cheeks. ‘I’m not about to pretend I’m someone I’m not.’

‘An admirable sentiment, but do you suppose that Ariana gets to look the way she does without a hell of a lot of effort? And I’m not talking about the Botox. Ever heard the comment no pain, no gain? Well, in Ariana’s case it’s no food, no gain.’

‘She’s naturally slim!’ Beth protested.

He let out a deep growl of laughter. ‘You really are naive.’

Beth clenched her teeth. ‘If I was in love with your brother—which I am not—I’d be happy he has found someone to make him happy,’ she retorted piously.

‘Which makes you either incredibly virtuous and totally boring or a liar.’ He watched a fresh wave of warm colour wash over her skin and realised that she wore no make-up at all, but then he conceded that a woman with skin that smooth and flawless did not need to. ‘You do realise,’ he drawled, ‘that most men find the doormat mentality a real turn-off?’

Beth levelled a glare of seething dislike at his lean sardonic face. ‘I don’t claim to be selfless, though that would be preferable to being totally selfish,’ she flung back, too angry to reconsider the wisdom of insulting this man.

He had a well earned reputation for being utterly ruthless, and she knew he would not lose any sleep about sacking a humble secretary. Andreas might try to prevent it, but she had seen him cave in under pressure from Theo far too often to have any illusions that he would stand up to his brother and save her.

He arched a brow and observed, with an amused look, ‘The saint has claws.’ And, now that he thought about it, Theo realized, rather spectacular eyes he was able to see properly now that she had removed the glasses.

On anyone else, he would have suspected that the colour—deep green shot with flecks of amber—of those almond-shaped eyes had been achieved with the assistance of contact lenses, but with this woman, who appeared to go out of her way to blend into the background, he seriously doubted it!

Finding herself the focus of the prolonged scrutiny of his heavy-lidded stare made her want to crawl out of her skin. Resisting the temptation to retreat behind the heavy curtain of hair that hung around her small face, she slid her fingers into the thick skein and tucked it behind her ears. Gran always said she had beautiful hair, but Beth would have happily exchanged her impossibly thick mop of mousey-brown wayward waves for smooth blonde or exciting red hair.

‘He does not see you as a woman; he sees you as a piece of office furniture.’

Beth’s breath caught as though someone had just landed a blow, which in a way they had; Theo used the truth with the ruthless surgical precision of a blade. Was he born this vicious? she wondered.

She opened her mouth to automatically refute his cruel assertion and then her innate honesty kicked in; he was probably right, she thought dully.

Theo hadn’t finished. ‘Do you think he even knows the colour of your eyes? You are useful to him; he knows that you will go the extra mile for him.’ He stopped, satisfied he had made his point.

Make it any more clearly and she’d be stretched out in a dead faint at his feet; she was looking at him like a child who had just been told there was no Santa Claus.

Aware that he was breathing too hard, Theo made a conscious effort to slow his inhalations. It was a long time since he had allowed anyone to get under his skin enough to make him feel guilty about his actions in any way. And why should he feel guilty?

It was totally irrational. All he’d done was tell her the truth, though possibly, he conceded, he might have done so less brutally.

It was just the way she idolised Andreas which made him want to shake some sense into her head; the woman was wasting her life mooning like some heroine in a romantic novel over a man who did not know she was alive.

‘You’re right.’

The sudden admission drew his alert gaze to her face. She looked pale but composed as she elaborated, ‘I am in love with Andreas and, yes, he doesn’t know I’m alive, not in that way, but I’m leaving.’ Her slender shoulders lifted in a shrug. ‘So the problem goes away.’

The admission had clearly cost her. Theo felt a fresh stirring of admiration—whatever else she was, the woman had guts.

‘Excellent—now we are on the same page.’

Beth sank back down into her chair, her wary gaze trained on his lean face. Once again, Theo had surprised her. She had fully expected he would be unable to resist the opportunity to rub her nose in it but, instead, he had allowed her admission to pass, almost without comment, and had turned all enigmatic.

She didn’t want to ask but she couldn’t help herself. ‘What page would that be?’ That they would share anything, even a page, seemed extremely unlikely to Beth.

‘We each, for our own reasons, think it would be a mistake for Andreas to marry Ariana.’ He dipped his head and waited for her response.

‘That really has nothing to do…’ The sardonic expression in his expressive eyes stopped her mid-sentence. ‘All right,’ she conceded crankily. ‘I don’t think that Ariana is good enough for Andreas.’ Now, she thought, this was where he pointed out that she was hardly what anyone would call objective.

‘She is poison.’

Beth was unable to display a similar restraint in her response. ‘You didn’t always think that.’ She encountered his wry stare and blushed. ‘Well, you were going to marry her yourself,’ she added defensively. Everyone knew that name-calling was a classic response of the dumped lover.

‘Any woman I find attractive is immediately of interest to Andreas. If we were lovers, he would find you irresistible.’

An image of his sleek, bronzed, powerful male body appeared in her head—an uneducated guess, but enough to send embarrassed colour flying to her cheeks. So it wasn’t the first time she had wondered what he looked like naked, and where was the harm in that?

Her defiant gaze slid from his as she scoffed, ‘And back to planet earth.’ If offered the opportunity to find out for real, she would have run for the hills.

‘Would it not be pleasant for you to have Andreas notice you are a woman?’ His dark eyes skimmed her body, his glance disturbingly intimate as it lingered on the suggestion of curves.

Beth, her mind still spinning from the moments she had allowed herself to imagine him without his clothes, was thrown into total confusion at the thought that he might be doing the same about her.

‘I…’ Beth swallowed to alleviate the dryness in her throat. In her chest, her heart was pounding like a piston.