The Millionaires' Cinderellas: Playing the Greek's Game / The Forbidden Innocent / Too Proud to be Bought

‘Then I think you will find you’re in breach of contract. And in that case, I would be perfectly within my rights to ask you to leave.’

He leaned back in his chair, his eyes drawn to the luscious thrust of her breasts, and for one brief moment he found himself wishing that Nat had found himself another girlfriend. Any girlfriend except this one. Because her spirited response had unexpectedly ignited his sexual appetite and he could feel its ache deep in his groin. Nobody was usually so spectacularly rude to him—nobody else would have dared to be. And if his brother weren’t involved—mightn’t he be tempted to ask her to go home and get ready to have dinner with him? To put on a pretty dress that skimmed her delicious bottom and to leave the pale tumble of her blond hair free enough for him to run his fingers through it? Because didn’t spirited women make the very best lovers, even if they weren’t the best choice of wife?

He looked at her face to see that her eyes were now glaring at him and something in their pistachio fire made his blood grow heated. ‘You have some objection perhaps?’ he questioned idly.

‘Why, you’re nothing but a great big bully!’ she breathed.

He shrugged. ‘Your insults are redundant. Take it or leave it. The pay-off still stands if you decide on the latter.’

‘Oh, no!’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t give in to blackmail. Or threats. I think you’ll discover that you can’t get rid of me quite so easily, Mr Constantinides.’

‘Really? We’ll see about that. In the meantime, why don’t you give it some thought? That’s all,’ he added dismissively. ‘You can go now.’

Her face scarlet with rage, Emma rose to her feet— tempted once again to hurl the contents of the pencil pot at his infuriating head. But she concentrated on exiting his office with as much dignity as possible.

She had just reached the door when his voice halted her.

‘Oh, and Emma?’

It was the first time he’d used her Christian name and to hear it spoken in that gravelly Greek voice sounded so sinfully irresistible that she found herself turning round to look at him, her heart pounding painfully in her chest.

‘What?’

Zak’s eyes narrowed as he watched her and something about the way she held herself only increased the flicker of lust he’d felt earlier. She really did have the most amazing posture, he thought suddenly. Despite the worn and dishevelled clothes, she moved like a catwalk model. As if she were gliding across the room, rather than walking. ‘You could always look on this as a sort of test. To see whether your commitment to Nathanael survives an enforced absence. Who knows—it could even strengthen the relationship between you.’

For a moment she really thought he meant it. That he actually cared enough about his brother to test a relationship which didn’t really exist. Until she saw the cold glitter of his pewter eyes and realised that this was about nothing more than his legendary control. He didn’t care what Nat wanted. Or what she wanted. He just cared about Number One. What he wanted. All thoughts of dignity forgotten, Emma felt her blood boil as she turned her back on him.

‘You can keep your job offer and you can go to hell,’ she retorted, wrenching open the door to meet the eyes of his startled-looking assistant who was sitting in the outer office. ‘Except that the devil probably wouldn’t let you in on the grounds that he couldn’t stand the competition!’

And she slammed the door on his soft and mocking laughter.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_ab484b7b-9040-532e-936d-c2265e01e9d8)

‘THE man is a complete and utter tyrant!’

‘I did warn you.’

‘Yes, I know you did but …’ Emma put her knife and fork down with a clatter and stared into Nathanael’s face. It was a face which bore an unmistakable resemblance to his brother—and yet if they had been statues, then the two men would have been carved from very different stone. ‘You didn’t tell me that he’d be so … so …’

‘So what, Em?’

Emma bit her lip as she stared down at the plate of mozzarella salad, which she’d barely touched because her normally healthy appetite seemed to have deserted her. There was nothing between her and Nat other than friendship, and yet she recognised that it wouldn’t be the most diplomatic thing in the world to tell him that she’d found his brother sexually intimidating. Actually, she suspected that the seesawing of her emotions had been as much about attraction as intimidation, but that was something she had no wish to examine.

‘So determined to get his own way!’ she said instead.

‘That is generally what tyrants tend to do,’ offered Nat drily.

Emma shook her head. For all her outward anger, she had been deeply unsettled by her encounter with Zak Constantinides. He had made her feel stuff she wasn’t used to feeling and that had been bad enough. But even worse was the fact that he had forced her to look at the past, a place which she’d hoped she’d left behind for ever.

And the trouble with looking back was that it made you start to pick away at the present—and to wonder if this was the way your life was meant to be. Since their meeting she’d felt … unsettled. As if the odd, quiet calm before a storm had suddenly descended on her. ‘You’ll never believe what he suggested.’

‘What?’

She stared into Nat’s more traditional inky-black eyes. ‘Only that I go and work in one of his other hotels!’

‘Which hotel?’

‘He didn’t say, but what he meant was any hotel that isn’t the Granchester—preferably somewhere in a different country. Anything to get me as far away from you as possible—because, apparently, I’ve got my gold-digging hooks into you.’

‘He can’t look at a woman without seeing dollar signs in her eyes,’ commented Nat wryly. ‘Though, to be fair, he’s seen enough examples of that particular breed in his time. What did you tell him?’

Expelling a slow breath, Emma sat back in her seat and looked around. She loved this little Italian restaurant.

It wasn’t far from the Granchester and was just about affordable as long as you stuck to one course, which she insisted was all they needed—as well as always splitting the bill fifty-fifty, much to Nat’s amusement.

They often ate here, depending on the current state of Nat’s love life. If it was full-on passion, then their meetings tended to be erratic—but if he’d discovered that his latest goddess had feet of clay, then they became more frequent. Nat hadn’t been ‘in love’ for quite some time—and so they’d seen quite a lot of each other. It was easy and it was comfortable and up until this afternoon’s meeting with Zak she had been more than happy with the arrangement. But now? Now she felt as if she had been woken from a bad dream and couldn’t quite remember what had frightened her so much.

‘I told him he could keep his job,’ she said, in reply to his question. ‘And I told him to go to hell.’

There was a pause while Nat looked at her with an expression on his face she’d never seen before. ‘You told Zak to go to hell?’

‘Actually, I implied that hell was too good for him.’

Nat started laughing. ‘I wish I could have seen his face.’

Emma took a quick sip of wine, because thinking about Zak’s face wasn’t remotely good for her blood pressure.

‘Well, I hope I never see him again,’ she said quietly, even though her heart leapt at the memory of those intense pewter eyes and hard lips. ‘He can keep his job and his outrageous attempts at manipulation. Who the hell does he think he is that he can move people around as if they’re pieces on a chequerboard? I’ll hand my notice in and go freelance again. There’s loads of work in London at the moment.’

Nat frowned. ‘But you don’t know where the job is, do you? Think about it. It could be great, Em. New York, maybe—you know that Zak has an amazing hotel on Madison, near Central Park? Or in Paris, maybe—he owns a sumptuous place on Av Georges V, right down from the Seine.’

‘I know all about your brother’s impressive property portfolio, Nat—and I’m not remotely tempted.’

There was a pause. ‘Not even as a favour to me?’

‘A favour to you?’ Putting her glass back down on the table, Emma narrowed her eyes. ‘How does that work?’

He shrugged. ‘Think about it. Zak’s a control freak who likes to keep an obsessive brotherly eye on me.’

‘I know. Why is that?’

‘Because he’s terrified that some scheming beauty is going to get her hands on the Constantinides fortune and bleed it dry. It’s happened before. My theory is that he hates women. Actually, scrub that—he does hate women.’ He saw the question in her eyes and gave a grimace. ‘It’s a long story.’

‘I’m not interested in Zak’s story,’ she said quickly because she didn’t want to ‘understand’ the man. What was there to understand, other than that he was a tyrant? ‘It can’t be that different from yours, surely?’

‘Oh, I think it was worse. He was older, you see—and he bore the brunt of my parents’ divorce.’ Nat shrugged. ‘And he thinks the women I meet are only after me because of my wallet. Not realising that my abundant charm and prowess in bed are what keep them flocking into my arms! He thinks that one day I should go back home and marry a suitable and beautiful Greek woman.’

‘And what do you think, Nat? Is that what you want? Or aren’t you allowed an opinion?’