A Deal with Demakis

He flicked his head to the side in an economic movement, and his guests moved inward into the lounge, or rather retreated from her. Even their conversations restarted, their apparent curiosity swept away by his imperious command. Her spine locked at the casual display of power. “Not here,” he said, and whispered something in the brunette’s ear, while his gaze never moved from her. “Let’s go into my office.”

Lexi licked her lips and took a step to the side as he passed her. Now that she had his complete attention, a sliver of apprehension streaked through her. She looked around the lounge. Safety in numbers. Really, what could he do to her with his guests outside the door? But the sheer size of the man, coupled with that unexplained contempt in his gaze, brought out her worst fears. “There’s nothing to talk about, Mr. Demakis. I just want to know where Tyler is.”

He didn’t break his stride as he spoke over his shoulder. “It was not a request.”

Hints of steel coated the velvety words. Realizing that she was staring at his retreating back again, she followed him. Within minutes, they reached his state-of-the-art office, this one with an even better view of Manhattan. She wondered if she would be able to see the tiny apartment she shared with her friends in Brooklyn from here.

A massive mahogany desk dominated the center of the room. A sitting area with its back to a spectacular view of the Manhattan skyline lay off to one side and on the other was a computer, a shredder and a printer.

He shrugged his jacket off and threw it carelessly onto the leather chair. The pristine white shirt made him look even more somber, bigger, broader, the dark shadow of his olive skin under it drawing her gaze.

He undid the cuffs and folded the sleeves back, the silver Rolex on his wrist glinting in the muted light.

Leaning against the table, he stretched his long legs in front of him. Whatever material those trousers were made of, it hugged his muscular thighs. “I asked you to wait.”

Coloring, Lexi tugged her gaze up. What was she doing, blatantly staring at the man’s thighs? “I walked up nineteen floors for a few minutes of your time,” she finally said, feeling intensely awkward under his scrutiny. He just seemed so big and coordinated and thrumming with power that for the first time in her life, she wished she had been tall and graceful. A more nonsensical thought she had never had. “Tell me how Tyler is and I’ll be on my way.”

He pushed off from the table and she tried not to scuttle sideways like a frightened bird. Hands tucked into the pockets of his trousers, he towered over her, cramming his huge body into her personal space. His gaze swept over her, somehow invasive and dismissive at the same time. The urge to smooth out her hair, straighten her T-shirt, attacked again.

“Did you just roll out of bed, Ms. Nelson?”

Her mouth dropped open; she stared at him for several seconds. The man was a mannerless pig. “As a matter of fact, yes. I was sleeping after an all-nighter when the call came in. So please forgive me if my attire doesn’t match your million-dollar decor.” For some reason, he clearly disliked her. It made her crabby and unusually offensive. “FYI, you might have nothing better to do with your time than loll around with your girlfriend, but I have a job. Some of us actually have to work for a living.”

Amusement inched into his gaze. “You think I don’t work?”

“Then why the sneering attitude as if your time is more precious than mine? You obviously make more money per minute than I do, but mine pays for my food,” she said, shocked at how angry she was getting. Which was really strange. “Now, the sooner you answer my question, the sooner I’ll be out of your hair.”

He shifted closer, unblinking and Lexi’s heart pounded faster. A hint of woodsy cologne settled tantalizingly over her skin. She stood her ground, loath to betray how unsettling she found his proximity. “You’re here for your precious Tyler. No one’s forcing you. You can turn around and walk down the stairs the same way you came up.”

Lexi wanted to do exactly that, but she couldn’t. He had no idea how much it had cost her to come here to his office. “I had a phone call from someone who refused to identify himself that Tyler has been in a car accident along with your sister.” Maybe this was Nikos Demakis’s response to his worry over his sister? Maybe usually, he was a much more human and less-heartless alien? “How is he? Was your sister hurt, too? Are they okay?”

His brows locked together into a formidable frown, he stared down at her. “You’re asking after the woman who, for all intents and purposes, stole your boyfriend of—” he turned and picked up a file from the desk behind him in a casual movement and thumbed through it “—let me see, eleven years?”

There was no winning with the infuriating man. “I thought maybe there was a reason you were being a grouchy, arrogant prig—you know, like worry about your sister. But obviously you’re a natural ass...” Her words stuttered to a halt, the bold letters N-E-L-S-O-N written in red on the flap of the file ramming home what she had missed.

She moved quickly, a lifetime of ducking and evading bred into her muscles, and snatched the file out of his hands. She found little satisfaction that she had surprised him.

Cold dread in her chest, she thumbed through the file. There were pages and pages of information about her and Tyler, their whole lives laid out in cold bare facts, complete with mug shots of both of them.

Spent a year in juvenile detention center at sixteen for a household robbery.

Those words below her picture felt as if they could crawl out of the paper and burn her skin. Sweat trickled down between her shoulder blades even though the office was crisply cool. She dropped the file from her hands. “Those are supposed to be sealed records,” she said, struggling through the waves of shame. She marched right up to him and shoved him with her hands, the crushing unfairness of it all scouring through her. “What’s going on? Why would you collect information on me? I mean, we’ve never even laid eyes on each other until now.”

“Calm down, Ms. Nelson,” he said, his voice gratingly silky, as he held her wrists with a firm grip.

The sight of her small, pale hands in his big brown ones sent a kick to her brain. She jerked her hands back. How dare he toy with her?

“I’ll lose my job if that information gets out.” She clutched her stomach, fear running through her veins. “Do you know what it feels like to live on mere specks of food, Mr. Demakis? To feel as though your stomach will eat itself if you don’t have something to eat soon? To live on the streets, not knowing if you will have a safe place to sleep in? That’s where I will be again.” She looked around herself, at the thick cream carpet, at the million-dollar view out the window, at his designer Italian suit and laughed. The bitter sound pulsed around them. “Of course you don’t. I bet you don’t even know what hunger feels like.”

His mouth tightened, throwing the cruel, severe lines of his face into sharp focus. For an instant, his gaze glowed with a savage intensity as though there was something very primitive beneath the sophistication. “Don’t be so sure of that, Ms. Nelson. You’ll be surprised at how well I understand the urge to survive.” He bent and picked up the file. “I don’t care if you robbed one house or a whole street to feed yourself. Nothing in the file has any relevance to me except your relationship with Tyler.”

His smooth mask was back on as he handed the file to her. “Do what you want with it.”

* * *

Nikos smiled as the slip of a woman snatched the file from him. Clutching the file to her body, she moved to the high-end shredder, ripped the pages with barely controlled vehemence and pushed them in.

With his photographic memory, he didn’t need to refer to the file, though. She was twenty-three years old, grew up in foster care, had little to no education, worked as a bartender at Vibe, a high-end club in Manhattan and had had one boyfriend, the charming Tyler.

Based on the personal history between her and Tyler, and the codependent relationship between them, Nikos had expected someone meek, plain, biddable, easily led, someone with no self-esteem.

The woman standing in front of the shredder, while small and not really a beauty, didn’t fall into any of those categories. The tight set of her shoulders, the straight spine, even her stance, with her legs apart and hands on her hips, brought a smile to his face. The fact that she wasn’t exactly what he had been expecting—really, though, what kind of a woman would be concerned about her lover’s new girlfriend?—meant he would have to alter his strategy.

She turned around, dark satisfaction glittering in her gaze. The hum of the shredder died down leaving the air thick with tension.

He ran his thumb over his jaw. “Are you satisfied now?”

“No,” she said, her mouth set into a straight, uncompromising line. “Whatever you might have read in that file, it should tell you I’m not an idiot. It was one paper copy I shredded. You and your P.I. still have the soft copy.”

He raised a brow as she picked up the paperweight from his desk and tossed it into the air and then caught it. “Then what was the point in shredding it?”

Up went the paperweight again, her blue gaze, alight with defiance, never wavering from him. “A symbolic act, an outlet because as much as I wish it—” she nodded at the shredder behind her and caught the paperweight in a deft movement “—I can’t do that to you.”

Nikos reached her in a single step and caught the paperweight midair this time, his hand grazing hers. She jumped back like a nervous kitten. “I mean you no harm, Ms. Nelson.”

“Yeah, right. And I’m a Victoria’s Secret model.”

Laughter barreled out of him. Her blue eyes wide, she stared at him.

She was no model with her boyish body and nonexistent curves. Yet there was something curiously appealing about her even to his refined tastes. “I think you’re a foot shorter—” he let his gaze rove over her small breasts, and her hands tightened around her waist “—and severely lacking in several strategic places.”

Crimson slashed her cheeks. She lifted her chin, her gaze assessing him, and despite himself, he was impressed. “Why the power play? You didn’t open that file in front of me to double-check your facts. You wanted me to know that you had all that information on me. Is that how you get your kicks? By collecting people’s weaknesses and using them to serve your purpose?”

“Yes,” he replied, and the color leached from her face. He has no delusions about himself. He was by no means above using any information in his hands to gain the upper edge in business or life. And especially now when it concerned his sister’s well-being, he would do anything. If you didn’t protect the ones who depended on you, what was the point of it all? “I need you to do something for me and I can’t take no for an answer.”

CHAPTER TWO

DISBELIEF PINCHING HER mouth, she stared at him. “It didn’t occur to you to just ask nicely?”

He covered the distance between them, shaking his head. She stepped back instantly, but not before he caught her scent. And racked his brains trying to place it. “Nicely? Which planet are you from? Nothing in this world gets done with please and thank you. Hasn’t your life already taught you that? If you want something, you have to take it, grab it with both hands or you’ll be left behind with nothing. Isn’t that why you robbed that house?”

“Just because life gets hard doesn’t mean you lose sight of the good things.” Her hands tightened around the strap of her bag, her skin tugged tight over her cheekbones. “I robbed the house because it was either that or starve for another day. It doesn’t mean I’m proud of my actions, doesn’t mean I don’t wish to this day that I had found another way. Now, please tell me what happened to Tyler.”

Her words struck Nikos hard, delaying his response. The woman was nothing short of an impossible paradox. “Venetia and he were in a car accident.”

Her face pale, she flopped onto the leather couch behind her, her knees tucked together. “Physically, there’s not a scratch on him,” Nikos offered, the pregnant silence grating on his nerves.

She pushed off from the couch again. “The person who called me made it sound like it was much worse. I kept asking for more details but he wouldn’t answer my questions.”