Reluctant Mistress, Blackmailed Wife

‘What do you mean?’

‘You told me that the twins’ dad had money. Why don’t you spread a little of that cash in your own direction? If the stingy creep is newsworthy and wealthy enough, you could sell your story to the press.’

‘Don’t be daft.’ Katie pressed pale fingers to her pounding temples.

‘Of course you’d have to spice the story up. Ten-times-a-night sex, how insatiable or kinky his demands were—you know the sort of thing…’

Katie reddened to the roots of her hair. ‘No, I don’t—’

‘The sordid details are what make tittle-tattle like that entertaining and worth oodles of cash. Don’t be such a prude! The guy’s a total bastard. He deserves to be embarrassed!’

‘Maybe he does, but I couldn’t do it. That’s not what I’m about. I appreciate that you’re only trying to help, but—’

‘You’re never going to get up out of the gutter with that bad attitude.’ Leanne rolled scornful eyes heavy with mascara and glittering blue shadow. ‘Are you just going to lie down and die? Let the bloke get away with it? If you really love your little boys, you’ll be ready to do whatever it takes to give them a better life!’

Katie flinched as though she had been slapped.

Leanne dealt her a defiant look. ‘It’s true, and you know it is. You’re letting the kids’ father…this Alexandros whatever…you’re letting him escape his responsibilities.’

‘I contacted the Child Support Agency—’

‘Yeah, like they’ve got the time and resources to try and pin your kids on some foreign business tycoon! He’s rich. He’d refuse to take DNA tests, or he’d stay out of the country, or pretend he’d lost all his money. If you insist on playing it by the book, you’ll never see a penny from him,’ the other woman forecast with cynical conviction. ‘No, if you ask me, you’re only going to escape your current problems if you do a kiss-and-tell for the tabloids!’

Katie couldn’t sleep that night. She thought of the sacrifices her own mother had had to make to bring her up. Widowed when her daughter was only six, Maura had had to work as a cleaner, a caretaker and a cook to make ends meet. In the darkness, Katie lay still and taut with discomfiture. Alexandros had dumped her, ignored her appeal for help and broken her stupid heart. She had decided she would sooner starve than appeal to him again. But had she let false pride get in the way of her duty towards her infant sons? Was Leanne right? Could she have done more to press her case with Alexandros?

Two days later, Katie moved out of her bedsit with Leanne’s help. Luckily her friend was able to store some stuff for her. The surplus had to be dumped or passed on to be sold on a market stall, because Katie could not afford storage costs. The bed and breakfast hotel was crowded and her room was small, drab and depressing.

After spending her first night there, Katie rose heavy-eyed, but driven by a new and fierce determination. She had decided that she was willing to do whatever it took to give Toby and Connor a secure roof over their heads. The prospect of public embarrassment and humiliation and further rejection should not deter her. Right now she was letting her kids down by acting like a wimp, she told herself squarely. Leanne had been right to speak up. More vigorous action was definitely required.

With that in mind, Katie went to the library to use the internet and see if she could discover any new information about Alexandros. She had tried and failed several times before, and quite a few months had passed since her last effort. But this time the search offered her the option of trying an alternative name, and when she tried that link she stared in shock as the screen filled with potential sites. A recognisable photo of Alexandros folded down on the very first she visited.

It only then dawned on Katie that her previous searches had been unsuccessful because she had spelled his name as Crestakis, not Christakis. She had got his name wrong. She was stunned. That crucial yet simple mistake had ensured that she hadn’t found out that Alexandros was the chief executive of CTK Bank, which had a substantial office in London. All the time that she had been engaged in a desperate struggle for survival, Alexandros had been making regular trips to the UK!

For a while she just surfed, seeing him variously described as brilliant, beautiful, arctic-cool, impassive. This was the guy she had fallen crazily in love with, all right, although she had refused to accept back then that she was on a highway to nowhere. The nape of her neck prickled when she read a newspaper report about a merger announcement expected from CTK the next morning. If something big was in the air, Alexandros was almost certain to be putting in an appearance. If she got up early, she could go to the City, wait outside the bank, and try to intercept him when he arrived.

Of course she could also go the more normal route and ask for an appointment with him, couldn’t she? Her soft mouth down-curved at that idea. She was convinced that he wouldn’t agree to see her. After all, he had given her a useless phone number on which to contact him at their final meeting, and had also ignored her letter asking for his help. No, perhaps it would be wiser not to forewarn Alexandros. An element of surprise might just give her the edge she badly needed; she was no longer naive enough to believe that she could easily hold her own with someone that clever and callous.

Katie left the twins with Leanne at a very early hour the next day.

‘Now, don’t you take any nonsense off this guy,’ her friend warned her anxiously. ‘He’s got more to lose than you have.’

‘How do you make that out?’ Katie lowered Toby and then Connor into the playpen already occupied by Leanne’s daughter, Sugar. As always, she was looking around herself and wishing she was in a position to afford similar accommodation. Although her friend’s home was tiny, the rainbow pastels she favoured made the rooms feel bright and welcoming even on a dull day. Helped by a family support network that Katie lacked, Leanne worked as a hairdresser. Her mother often looked after her grandchild in the evenings, and her ex-boyfriend paid maintenance.

‘I bet you anything he won’t want a scandal,’ Leanne declared. ‘According to what I’ve read, bankers are supposed to be a very conservative bunch…anything else makes the punters nervous!’

Conservative? That adjective danced around in the back of Katie’s mind when she was on the bus. On first acquaintance, Alexandros had struck her as conservative—indeed, icily reserved and austere. She hadn’t liked him, hadn’t liked being treated like a servant, and had hated the innate habit of command that was so much a part of his bred-in-the-bone arrogant assurance. But not one of those facts had snuffed out the wicked longing he had stirred up inside her. Her response to him had shocked her, and shattered all her neat, bloodless little assumptions about her own nature. His sizzling passion had shocked her even more. He had just grabbed her up and kissed her, and then carried her off to bed without hesitation or discussion. She cringed at that recollection, which she rarely let out of her memory-bank. She had acted like a slut and—not surprisingly, in her opinion—he had treated her like one.

CTK Bank was situated in the heart of the City of London, an impressive contemporary edifice with a logo hip enough to front a top fashion brand. She stared up at the light-reflecting gleam of ranks of windows, marvelling at the sheer size and splendour of the office block. Anger flared through her nervous tension, making her restless. Alexandros Christakis was, she finally appreciated, a very wealthy and powerful man. She positioned herself at the corner of the building so that she could watch both the front and the side entrances. Employees were starting to arrive. Rain came on steadily, quickly penetrating the light jacket she wore and drenching her. With her head bent to avoid the downpour, she almost missed the big car purring to a discreet halt in the quiet side street.

Straightening with a jerk, she began to walk very fast towards the limo—if the VIP passenger was Alexandros she didn’t want to miss him. Two other cars had also pulled up—one to the front of the luxury vehicle, the second to the rear. Several men emerged and fanned out across the street. Katie’s scrutiny, however, was glued to the tall dark male descending from the limousine. The breeze ruffled his luxuriant ebony hair. Without warning, a painful sense of familiarity, sharp as a knife-blade, pierced Katie. She would have known him anywhere just by the angle of his imperious head and the economic grace with which he moved. The chill of sudden shocked recognition engulfed her. Her attention locked to his lean, powerful face, marking the straight slash of his black brows, the dark, deep-set allure of his brilliant gaze. Her tummy flipped and she was dazzled.

‘Alexandros…’ She tried to speak but her voice failed her. Because even though he could not have heard her, for she was still too far away, he did seem to be looking her way.

Alexandros had picked up on the alert stance of his security team and zeroed in on the source. But the instant he saw the small slender figure approaching him he knew her, and he was so surprised he stopped dead in his tracks. The wet gleam of her wine-red hair and her pale heart-shaped face struck a haunting chord that plunged him into an instant flashback. He remembered sunshine streaming through a rain-washed window over that amazing hair, lighting up eyes of an almost iridescent green. It had been a stark moment of truth in an interlude that he was reluctant to recall. One of his bodyguards blocked her path with practised ease, just as a posse of paparazzi came charging down the street behind her, waving cameras.

‘Inside, boss,’ Cyrus, his head of security urged as Alexandros hesitated. ‘Paparazzi and a homeless kid…could be a set-up!’

In one long stride, Alexandros mounted the steps and vanished into the building. A set-up? A homeless kid? Cyrus could only have been referring to Katie. Why was she still dressing like a scruffy student? And why had she come to see him? He could not believe that her sudden appearance after so long would be a coincidence. What did she want from him? Why would she try to approach him in a public place? Had the paparazzi been waiting and watching to see if he acknowledged her, ready to spring some kind of a trap in which he was the target? Hard suspicion flaring in his shrewd gaze, he told Cyrus to watch Katie’s every move.

It took a lot to surprise Cyrus, but that instruction achieved it.

‘The female you assumed was a homeless kid? Her name is Katie Fletcher. Don’t let your team lose her!’ Alexandros warned in rapid Greek. ‘Follow her. I want to know where she lives.’

As his efficient security chief hurried back outside to carry out his orders, Alexandros switched back into working mode. Stepping into the executive lift held in readiness for him, he was immediately immersed in a quote of the latest share prices and the final adjustments to the press release to be made about the merger. When another memory tried to surface from his usually disciplined subconscious, he rooted it out with ruthless exactitude. He was not introspective. He did not relive past mistakes. In fact he had long since accepted that on the emotional front he was as cold as his reputation.

At the end of his first meeting he discovered that he had printed a K and encircled it, and the knowledge of that brief loss of concentration, that subliminal weakness that had defied his control, infuriated him.

Taken aback by the blocking technique of the security man, who had got in her way, and then rudely crowded off the pavement by the heaving, shouting and disgruntled members of the press, who had surged past her in an effort to get at Alexandros, Katie was momentarily at a loss. Alexandros had seen her. But had he recognised her? Had he sent that beefy security guy to ward her off? Would he have spoken to her if the journalists had not been present?

She thought not. He hadn’t smiled, hadn’t shown the smallest sign that a friendly welcome might be in the offing. He was such a bastard, she thought painfully, a horrible sense of failure seeping through her. But even as her shoulders drooped, a defiant spirit of rebellion was powering her up again. She marched back round the corner and through the front doors of the bank, and right up to the reception desk.

‘I’d like to speak to Mr Christakis,’ she announced.

The receptionist who came to attend to her studied Katie fixedly, as if trying to decide whether or not she was pulling her leg. In that intervening moment of assessment Katie became uncomfortably aware of her sodden hair and shabby jacket and jeans.

‘I’ll take your name.’ The elegant young woman behind the desk switched on her professional cool. ‘But I should warn you that Mr Christakis is exceptionally busy and his appointments are usually booked months in advance. Perhaps you could see someone else?’

‘I want to see Alexandros. Someone else won’t do. Please just see that he gets my name. He knows me.’ Aware of the silent disbelief which greeted that declaration, Katie retreated with as much dignity as she could manage to a seat. She watched the receptionist commune with her two colleagues. Someone stifled a giggle, and her anxious face burned as she affected an interest she did not feel in the heavy-duty financial publications laid out for perusal on a coffee table. She was getting paranoid, she scolded herself. In all probability nobody was talking about her—just as the most likely explanation for what had happened outside was that Alexandros simply hadn’t recognised her.

She lifted an uncertain hand to her wet hair and suddenly reached round to undo her ponytail. She dug a comb out of her bag and surreptitiously began to tease out the limp damp curls, praying for her natural ringlets to emerge, rather than the pure frizz that had made her scrape her hair back so tightly when she was a teenager that her eyes had used to water. She wondered why she was bothering. He wouldn’t agree to see her.

While she sat there she finally registered a fact that should have occurred to her sooner. She had got his name totally wrong. Had Alexandros ever even received her letter telling him that she was pregnant? She had sent one to his Irish residence, and when there had been no answer she had sent a second one care of the rental company that had leased the house to him. But would a letter with the wrong name on it have been forwarded? What if Alexandros hadn’t got either?

‘Miss Fletcher?’ the receptionist murmured.

Katie stood up hurriedly. ‘Yes?’

‘I have a call for you.’

Surprise marking her delicate triangular features, Katie accepted the cordless phone extended to her.

‘Katie?’

It was Alexandros, and she was so taken aback by the sound of that dark melodic drawl of his that she almost dropped the phone. ‘Alexandros?’

‘I’m waiting for a fix on a satellite link and I’m afraid that I only have a few minutes. You’ve picked a bad day to call…’

‘The merger,’ she filled in, the receiver crammed tight to her ear as she wandered away in a preoccupied daze. His voice had an aching familiarity that tugged cruelly at her heartstrings and threatened to take her back in time. ‘But that’s why I came. I knew you’d be here, and I have to see you.’