Reluctant Mistress, Blackmailed Wife

‘Why?’ Alexandros enquired with the most studious casualness. Everything she had so far said was setting off warning bells of caution. ‘Do you need some sort of help? Is that why you asked to see me?’

‘Yes…but it’s not something I can discuss on the phone or without privacy,’ Katie told him tautly. ‘Just out of interest…er…did you ever receive a letter from me?’

‘No.’

‘Oh…’ Katie was stumped by that unhesitating negative, for if he didn’t even know that she had been pregnant he was in for a huge shock.

‘Why can’t you just tell me in brief what this is about?’ Alexandros enquired drily.

‘Because I have to see you to talk about it,’ she reminded him, feeling under unfair pressure and not knowing how to deal with it in the circumstances.

‘That may not be possible—’

Katie lowered her voice to say, almost pleadingly, ‘I wouldn’t have come here if I wasn’t desperate—’

‘Then cut to the chase,’ he cut in with cold clarity. ‘I’m not into mysteries.’

A surge of angry tears burned the back of Katie’s eyes. ‘Okay, so you won’t see me,’ she gasped. ‘But don’t say I didn’t give you the chance!’

With that ringing declaration, Katie cut the connection and marched back to the desk to return the phone. Before she could even set it down it started ringing again, and as she walked away the receptionist called her name a second time. She spun round. The handset was being offered to her. She shook her head in urgent refusal. She was uneasily conscious that quite a few people seemed to be staring in her direction, particularly a thin fair man with sharp eyes that made her colour. Without further ado she turned on her heel and headed hurriedly out of the bank.

She was furious that she had been so impulsive and naive. It had been downright stupid to try and speak to Alexandros again! He didn’t want to speak to her or hear from her, and the news that he was the father of twins would be even less welcome. She reckoned that the only way she was likely to get financial help from Alexandros now would be by approaching a solicitor to make a paternity claim. But she also knew that legal wheels turned very slowly, and would not provide an answer in the short term. So she needed to think about overcoming her scruples and approaching a newspaper, she conceded unhappily.

Alexandros would be very angry with her. A shard of all too vivid memory was assailing her. She remembered throwing a breakfast tray at him and screaming. His expression of shock would live with her to her dying day. It had dawned on her then that nobody had ever spoken to Alexandros like that before, or told him that he was absolute hell to work for and impossible to please. Her disrespect had affronted him. Only when he had been persuaded to see her side of things had he been willing to forgive the offence, and he had still ended up getting his own way. My way or the highway was a punchline that might have coined for Alexandros Christakis.

It took Katie an hour to get back to Leanne’s flat, but nobody was in when she got there. Her friend had warned her that she might go shopping with her mother, she recalled ruefully. As she walked back along the street, a limousine nudged into the kerb just ahead of her, and a big middle-aged man in a suit leapt out to jerk open the passenger door.

‘Mr Christakis would like to give you a lift,’ he announced.

Taken by surprise, she froze, studying the tinted black windows of the long glossy silver vehicle with frowning intensity before moving forward in abrupt acceptance of the invitation. Whether she liked it or not, she knew that it was the best offer she was likely to get. Her heartbeat racing so fast that she felt dizzy, she climbed into the limo.

CHAPTER TWO

ALEXANDROS dealt Katie a grim nod of acknowledgement that would have made her shiver, had not less cautious responses already been running rampant within her.

Lounging back in a black designer suit teamed with a striped shirt and smooth silk tie, he was the very image of the billionaire banker she had read about on the internet. Handsome, incredibly sophisticated, and intimidating to the nth degree though that sleek image was, there was also something impossibly sexy about him. She went hot pink with shame at that perverse thought. He had not lost the power to reduce her principles and her common sense to rubble round her feet.

‘If you wanted my attention, you’ve got it,’ Alexandros delivered with lethal cool, while he appraised her, his keen scrutiny highly critical. She had the heart-shaped face of a cat, big eyes above slanted cheekbones and a generous mouth. Unusual, rather exotic, but ultimately nothing special, with a tangle of bright copper hair that cruelly accentuated the hollows and shadows in her pale features. She was tiny and fine-boned—too thin for his tastes. By no stretch of the imagination was she beautiful—and some of the most beautiful women in the world had adorned his bed. He could not imagine why she had once made him seethe with lust.

Her lashes lifted on languorous eyes as rich and deep a green as moss. His gaze instantly narrowed, increasing in intensity almost without his volition. She shifted position with an indescribably feline movement of slender limbs that made his big powerful frame tense.

The silence stretched and stretched.

‘So…?’ Alexandros prompted, his dark drawl rough-edged as he fought the raw tide of sensual memory afflicting him. She had always smelt of soap and fresh air. The most expensive perfume in the world made her sneeze uncontrollably. He cleared his mind of that frivolous imagery with the rigorous restraint that had been second nature to him from his early twenties. He had learned then how to shut down and shut out unwelcome emotions and reactions. He thought it significant that he had got involved with Katie Fletcher when he had been emotionally off balance. Presumably, and ironically, that had added an extra edge which his encounters had lacked since then.

‘What’s this about?’ he asked with level austerity.

Just watching him, Katie felt her mouth run dry—because he was so incredibly handsome. She found herself tracing the image of her sons in his lean bronzed features, noting the straight dark brows, the definite chin and nose, and the ebony hair that gleamed with vitality. Her little boys were like mini-clones of their father. She lowered her lashes, discomfiture taking over, for what she had to tell him loomed over her like a mountain that shut out the sun. He would soon be wishing that he had never laid eyes on her, she thought painfully. ‘I wish you’d got that letter I sent you…’

To Alexandros she looked so young at that moment that guilt penetrated even his polished armour of self-containment. What lustful madness had overcome his scruples eighteen months ago? He might as well have seduced a schoolgirl. Every word she spoke underlined the reality that she had been defenceless. The other women he had known wouldn’t write him letters after he dumped them.

‘Let’s move on from the letter.’ Alexandros was now taking further note of her shabby clothes, and the fact that the sole was peeling off one of her trainers. Her poverty was obvious and his distrust increased. He could not forget the potential threat with which she had concluded their exchange on the phone. ‘What’s happened to you?’

Wretchedly aware of his visual inspection, and inwardly cringing from it, Katie muttered tightly, apologetically, ‘I know…I don’t look the same, do I? Life’s been tough over the past year—’

‘If you need money, I’ll give it to you. Drama and sob stories are not required,’ Alexandros imparted.

Her pointed chin came up in a defiant motion, her green eyes full of strain and hurt pride. ‘My goodness, did you think I was about to make you sit through some sob story? Well, then, I won’t try to wrap up the bad news. I’ll just get to the point. You got me pregnant…’

Astonished by that claim, Alexandros went straight into defensive mode, not a muscle moving on his darkly handsome face.

Katie was as pale as milk. ‘I wasn’t very pleased either. Well, to be honest, I was just terrified—’

‘Is this some kind of sting? It’s a very clumsy one.’

Her white brow indented. ‘A sting?’ she repeated blankly.

‘I don’t believe that I made you pregnant. Why would I only be hearing about it now?’ Alexandros demanded in a smooth, derisive undertone that suggested that what she had said was too stupid for words. ‘How can you expect me to believe this nonsense?’

‘The reason that you’re only hearing about it now is that you didn’t give me your address.’

‘But I left you a phone number.’

‘And I rang it more than a dozen times, and every time I was told you were unavailable or in a meeting!’ Her voice rose as she recalled how her sense of humiliation had grown with every fruitless phone call.

Alexandros continued to look stonily unimpressed. ‘I don’t accept that. My staff are very efficient—’

‘Eventually one of your employees got so tired of my calls that she took pity on me. She explained that I wasn’t on the special list she had. And, as she said, “If your name isn’t on my boss’s list, you won’t get to speak to him this side of eternity!”’ Katie completed rawly.

Alexandros was frowning. ‘Your name must have been on the list—’

‘No, it wasn’t. Why pretend? We both know why my name wasn’t on your fancy VIP list,’ Katie condemned, with a bitterness she could not hide. ‘You didn’t want to hear from me. You had no wish for further contact. That’s fine, that’s okay, but don’t try and criticise me for not telling you I was pregnant when I had no way of contacting you!’

‘You’re hysterical…I’m not continuing this conversation with you,’ Alexandros asserted with cold clarity, outrage turning his dark eyes into chips of gold ice because she had raised her voice.

Katie snatched in a deep, shuddering breath even as she wondered if he remembered her once serving him coffee on her knees to make him laugh. ‘I’m not hysterical. I’m sorry I’m so angry, but I can’t help it. I should’ve known this wasn’t going to work. I shouldn’t have come to your precious bank and I shouldn’t have got into this car—’

‘Calm down,’ Alexandros interposed with chilling cool, while he tried to work out her motivation for the tale she was telling so badly. He could not credit that what she was telling him was true. He was willing to admit that with her he had not been one hundred per cent careful when it had come to contraception. There was a very slight possibility that conception could have taken place. He thought it highly unlikely, though, and his usually alert and versatile mind was curiously reluctant to move on from that concrete conviction. He did not recognise his own unresponsiveness as simple shock at the announcement she had made.

Katie put trembling hands up to her face and covered it. Calm down? Her brow was pounding hard with tension; her tummy was in twisting knots. As he watched her, his lean hands clenched but he remained otherwise motionless.

On the other side of the glass partition, Cyrus was trying to catch his employer’s eye in the mirror, to work out where to go next. In a sudden decision, Alexandros touched a button to seal the passenger area into privacy. If she cried, he did not want her tears to be witnessed. ‘It’s all right,’ he told her grittily, for gentleness did not come naturally to him and he would not let himself reach across the space separating them to make physical contact with her. ‘You’ll be fine.’

‘Nothing’s all right…’ Katie felt as if she was banging her head up against a brick wall. He wasn’t listening. He didn’t believe her. She was wasting her breath. He would probably look at Toby and Connor and find it equally easy to say that they weren’t his. Then what? She bowed her head, exhaustion overwhelming the nervous energy that had powered her into confronting him.

Alexandros recognised her fragile emotional state. She was desperate and broke. Presumably that was why she had come to him with a foolish story that she had hoped would engage his sympathy. It must not have occurred to her that a fictional tale about a pregnancy that had come to nothing was pointless. But his anger had already ebbed, to be replaced by an effort to understand her predicament that would have disconcerted anyone who knew him well. While he gave freely to a host of worthy charitable causes, he had always avoided situations where anything more personal was required.

‘Are you unemployed?’ he asked, deciding to concentrate on practicalities in the hope that those issues would ground her.