An expert at smiling through discomfort, she bestowed on him her best coquettish beam. She’d worked on the edges of Draco’s law and beaten him at his own game. One nil to Athena. Hopefully she’d soon be able to make it two nil.
First, though, she needed to leave her room. If it was anyone else blocking the doorway, she’d barge past them. It wasn’t Draco’s size that stopped her doing this—the only girl in a family of eight boys, she’d learned to use her elbows before she’d learned to use cutlery—it was some instinct warning her not to get too close, the same instinct that had made her turn her back to him in that nightclub all that time ago. Athena knew men. She knew how to play them and manipulate them and knew when to back away before things got out of hand.
Instinct and experience told her Draco Manolis posed danger to a girl like her. This was not a man who’d allow himself to be manipulated and toyed with. Teasing and flirting with him were fine in the office, but she wasn’t in the office, she was in her bedroom, and he was standing on the threshold, a place no man who wasn’t a Tsaliki had stood before, and he was the most ruggedly handsome man she’d met in her life, a real man, not a boy-man like the men she chose to play with.
She knew he wouldn’t make a sudden move on her, but that didn’t stop her heart from pumping hard to imagine it, and it wasn’t the pumping of fear that had happened a couple of times when she’d misjudged the boy-man she’d been toying with and found herself with a predator. Luckily, she’d been able to extricate herself from those situations without any harm being done—at least, not to her—but this was a whole new situation and a thousand times more frightening because, for the first time in her life, her skin was tingling and sensation was stirring between her legs, a sensation that excited, sickened and terrified in equal measure.
Suddenly the silence that had formed from nowhere between them had become deafening, the piercing sensation from Draco’s blue eyes gaining in strength, and she tore her stare away so she could breathe…for some reason, her lungs had stopped working…and tugged at the edges of her bedsheets more for the distraction while she tried to pull herself together than to straighten them.
‘So youcankeep something tidy,’ he observed, a strain in his gruff voice as he broke the silence. ‘I’d assumed from the state of the rest of the place that your hands didn’t work.’
She snatched at the open goal he’d just presented her with. ‘We can’t all be born poor and have to muck in with the chores. I’m sure your mother did an excellent job passing on her cleaning skills to you.’
The sharpening of his stare sent a burst of triumph through her. She’d known it! She was right and the rest of her family was wrong!
The triumph dissipated as quickly as it had risen, and not just because of the danger now ringing in his sharp, piercing stare or the ice that echoed in the warning of his gruff voice. ‘What the hell do you know about my mother?’
If there was one thing Athena was a pro at, it was her ability to keep talking and smiling whatever turmoil was occurring beneath her skin, and she smiled now as she met his dangerous gaze. ‘Know about her? Draco, Irememberher…well, I should say I remember when she was sacked. She wasn’t the first or the last person to be fired for screwing my father. Her bad fortune was that she didn’t screw him when he was married to my mother. Rebecca is a different breed. She turns a blind eye to most of his affairs but, unfortunately for your mother, she gets her claws out when he screws the domestic staff.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘I think she finds it extra humiliating.’
She knew the moment her tongue shut itself up that she’d gone too far. Her heart thumping harder than ever, the silence that followed filled with a thick tension different to the tension of moments earlier, one that posed a different kind of danger. It took all her strength to hold her nerve, hold her smile, hold Draco’s stare and stop the guilt curdling in her guts from showing, not just guilt for what she’d said but guilt for weaponising the woman who’d once been like a comfort blanket to her and who had shown Athena nothing but love. It took even more strength to maintain all this when he stepped off the threshold towards her.
Loath though Draco was to stand anywhere near the poisonousfemme fatale,he moved his face close to hers so Athena could feel as well as see and hear his contempt for her. ‘I was warned you were a grade-A she-devil when I made that deal with your brother,’ he said slowly. ‘But you’re worse than that—you’re like your father. He gets his kicks from screwing women; you get yours from screwing with people’s heads.’ Enjoying the way the golden colour of her face paled and the barely-there flicker in her green eyes, he pulled his lips into a cruel smile. ‘Still, the whole of Athens knows you also get your kicks from screwing anyone desperate enough to have you, so that makes you even more like him.’
Still smiling, he stepped back, needing to be out of the poisonous orbit of Athena Tsaliki and the soft scent of her perfume being that close to her soaked into his airwaves. ‘I don’t care what you think you remember; my mother did nothing wrong. She is worth a thousand of you and a thousand of your father, and if you think taking bitchy potshots at her means I’m going to sack you…’ He shook his head. ‘You need to do better than that, Athena. Much better.’ He left the room, shouting over his shoulder, ‘I’ve made coffee. Yours is getting cold.’
In the small kitchenette, Draco tightly cupped the coffee he’d made for himself and closed his eyes.
How the hell had Athena Tsaliki of all people made the connection that he was Cora’s son? She could only have been a small child at the time his mother was sacked, an incident that would have been consigned to ancient history by a family continually seeped in scandal. Ancient history to them but not forgotten by him. Draco would never forget or forgive Georgios and Rebecca Tsaliki for what they’d done to his mother.
For five years she’d worked as the Tsaliki housekeeper, bearing witness to a chaotic household ruled by a stinkingly rich patriarch who played harder than he worked. Serially married, no woman expected Georgios to be faithful; his wives expected to turn a blind eye and hope his current passion wasn’t the one to oust them. Ousting, though, wasn’t a great hardship as being an ex-wife meant being installed in a grand home and having all your expenses paid and still being included in all the fun family stuff, all without having to share Georgios’s bed any more.
No woman was safe from Georgios’s advances—Draco’s mother had personally caught him in the act with two maids—but for five years Cora Manolis had maintained a cordial, professional relationship with Georgios and wife number three. Wife number four, Rebecca, as Athena had pointed out, was of a different breed to wife number three, and took an instant dislike to Cora. Six months after usurping wife number three, she got her chance to get rid of her and grabbed it with both hands. Her chance came when Cora’s father died unexpectedly. Cora received the call at work. Vulnerable and distraught, she’d accepted Georgios’s comforting embrace. Never one to miss an opportunity for a taste of female flesh, Georgios had taken full advantage of the moment and Cora’s grief-stricken weakness, and kissed her, a full-blown French kiss that was, unfortunately, observed by one of the maids, who went running off to tell Rebecca. When Cora returned to work the next day, she was unceremoniously fired in front of all the other staff, with no severance pay and no references, her name blackened.
Over twenty years later, Rebecca Tsaliki’s ruthlessness meant she was still to be usurped.
Draco had never thought it possible to despise a Tsaliki more than he despised Georgios and Rebecca, but Athena had just achieved that accolade, and he hated that when he’d been putting her in her place and giving her a verbal taste of her own medicine he’d experienced the strong compulsion to give himself a taste ofher.
Maybe he would, he thought moodily. Treat her the way her father had treated his mother. Taste her, discard her and humiliate her.
He tossed his coffee down the sink without drinking it. If Athena had touched it, it was probably poisoned, and God, what was he thinking? To taste her would be to poison himself—she was already poisoning his mind—and there was no humiliating someone as narcissistic as her. To feel humiliation, you had to feel shame, and Athena had none. Athena didn’t need to wear the armour and spear of her goddess namesake: her skin was so thick it was its own armour, her tongue more pointed than any spear.
Footsteps approached.
He dragged a breath in through his nose, inhaling the soft scent of her perfume, and braced himself before turning to face her.
‘You’ve tidied up,’ she said brightly, as if nothing had happened, as if she hadn’t just cruelly insulted his mother and he hadn’t cruelly rammed some home truths down her throat.
‘Someone had to.’ Her small open-plan apartment had been strewn with unpacked boxes. He’d stacked them together in the living area, noticing how she hadn’t even put any photos of the people she loved out. But then, to love, you needed to have a heart, and any heart Athena had been born with had long blackened. He’d also loaded her half-sized dishwasher with what he estimated was a week’s worth of chipped dirty cups and glasses, and wiped the surfaces down. His question of why there had been no dirty dishes had been answered when he’d looked in the bin and found it crammed with takeaway containers.
She shrugged. ‘Not much point in keeping it tidy or unpacking. I’ll be out of here soon.’
His mind unwittingly zipped to her bedroom. If he’d had to imagine it, he’d have pictured it like a witch’s coven, not the soft, feminine, spotlessly clean room that it was. ‘Not for another two months.’
‘You’ll have sacked me by then.’
‘No.’ He drilled his stare into her. ‘That is not going to happen. You are going to spend the next two months tied to my side. By the time you’re released from the contract, you’ll be as sick of me as I am of you. Now, drink your coffee. We need to get going—we’ve got a long day of work to do.’
For once, she didn’t make a quip, flirtatious or otherwise. Instead, she drank her coffee, grabbed her handbag and sashayed to the front door. Only when she turned back to see if he was following did he notice she’d replaced the too-short shorts with a black skirt that fell to mid-thigh and the knee-high socks with sheer but respectable black tights.
