‘Here’s how things are going to work,’ he said roughly. ‘You are going to be my shadow. You will do everything I tell you to do without complaint. When you accompany me to meetings, you will sit in silence—your input will not be required. You will treat other members of staff with courtesy—in fact, let’s make it a blanket rule that you will treat each and every person you encounter in the course of your work with courtesy and respect. On the occasions you’re left in this office alone, you will stay at your desk and continue with whatever task I’ve set you. You will not use your phone for any purpose or use the landlines to make personal calls. Is this all clear or do I need to repeat myself?’
‘Crystal clear, boss.’
‘Any questions?’
‘How soon can I go on a break?’
Close to biting her head off, he caught the flash of mischief in the green eyes and came within a whisker of smiling. Maybe he would have done if she hadn’t then stretched and gathered her blonde hair and piled it on top of her head, only to immediately let it go, releasing a cloud of her shampoo as the silky tresses tumbled over her slender shoulders.
He knew then that she wasn’t just his burden to bear but his curse.
When Athena’s doorbell rang five weeks later, she dragged herself out of bed without even bothering to swear, padded to the front door, unlocked it, opened it, yawned, ‘Morning, boss,’ then shuffled back to her bedroom.
Before getting in the shower, she checked her phone for messages. Nothing. Lips tightening, she threw it on the bed, then reminded herself it was still the middle of the night and all her family would still be asleep.
Draco didn’t feel the need to make sure her brothers got out of bed, she thought resentfully. Or tie them to his side. The bastard had been as good as his word in that regard. The office that had once belonged to her father and then her brother Alexis and now belonged to Draco also belonged to her. Sure, the office was huge and she was at the far side of it from him, but he’d arranged it so she had to face him and had taken to strolling over with varying degrees of frequency to check she was actually working on the tedious tasks he set her and not scrolling through social media. She even had to ask permission for bathroom breaks!
She’d never been so bored in her life. The tasks he set her were so mind-numbingly tedious that a trained monkey could do them. Her hopes had been raised slightly when he’d informed her he had a job for her to do from one of his other business ventures, but then dashed when he’d given her a printout of email addresses thicker than her arm and told her to go through them one by one and strike out those who’d unsubscribed. She was one hundred per cent certain it was a task without any meaning and that once she was done—probably when she reached the age of ninety-eight—the printout would be shredded with no further action.
So yes, she was bored out of her skull and yet… The work itself was mind-numbing but there was a fizz in her veins that sustained her through the long working hours. Draco was so focused and serious that distracting him had become a thing of joy. She knew perfectly well he woke every morning cursing her name and probably cursed her under his breath an average of five times an hour, but the times he wasn’t quick enough to stop his eyes crinkling or his lips twitching at something she said never failed to accelerate the fizz.
As incredible as it was to believe, she would step into her apartment after another long working day and her spirits would plummet. She supposed the novelty of living alone after a lifetime living in a household filled with people and noise had sustained her the first month in her dingy flat, but since Draco the Dragon had decided to tether her to his side she was finding the solitude of her new life harder to endure. The childish art she’d long ago created as a way to switch her mind off enough to sleep was now being used to stave off this new loneliness. She was reaching for her drawing book and charcoal tin earlier and earlier.
She told herself it was this secret loneliness that meant she increasingly liked that Draco had turned himself into her personal human alarm clock. He had no idea his was the first and last face she saw each working day. He had no idea that the weekends she’d spent since being tethered to him had been spent entirely alone.
She liked, too, that she got to share her first coffee of the working day with him. Liked that he always made it while she showered and dressed. Liked that he would always raise an unimpressed eyebrow at whatever boundary-pushing outfit she was wearing.
Obviously, she would never share any of these likes with him because what she didn’t like was the way her fizzing blood heated those times their gazes would inadvertently meet across the vast office space, times when it didn’t feel that he was looking at her to ensure she wasn’t procrastinating. She would tease and flirt with him—often outrageously—and he would give her ‘the look’, but that was all fun and meaningless. The inadvertent gazes didn’t feel meaningless. Sometimes she would do some actual work just to distract herself and drive away the feelings they induced.
‘Just so you’re prepared, we’re flying to California on Sunday evening,’ he told her when she joined him in the kitchenette. ‘Pack enough clothes for a week.’
She picked up the coffee he’d made her. ‘Why?’
‘Because that’s where the North American headquarters of Manolis Technology is located.’
‘I know that, but why am I going?’
‘Because I don’t trust I’ll have any Greek staff left if I leave you behind. If you don’t think you’ll be back from Sephone in time, I’ll arrange for a helicopter to collect you…on second thoughts, I’ll send the helicopter anyway.’
Athena’s fingers tightened around her cup. That evening, her entire family were flying to Sephone so her brother Alexis and his wife Lydia could have their baby baptised in the private island’s chapel. This was the same chapel where Thanasis had married Athena’s nemesis, her stepsister Lucie. ‘No need, I’m not going.’ Just as she hadn’t gone to Thanasis and Lucie’s wedding.
Surprise furrowed his forehead. ‘You’re not going to your own nephew’s christening?’
She smiled breezily to prove she didn’t care. ‘My malevolent presence has been deemed unwanted.’ Or, translated, Thanasis and Lucie had refused to let Athena set foot on the island. As Thanasis, who was Lydia’s brother, owned the island, his word was law there, and none of the Tsalikis had cared enough to argue for Athena’s inclusion.
She didn’t care. Sephone was the most boring island in the whole of Greece, and if Alexis wanted to put his stepsister over his blood sister then she didn’t care about that either. Her family had been putting Lucie’s feelings over Athena’s since Athena was five.
‘I think they’re worried I’m going to curse the child like Carabosse inSleeping Beauty.’ Her nephew was three months old. She’d been allowed precisely one visit. In that visit, she’d been allowed to hold the baby for less than a minute, both her brother and sister-in-law staying close and watching her like hawks as if worried she was going to deliberately drop their precious bundle.
‘You mean they haven’t invited you?’
‘More accurate to say I’ve been ordered to stay away.’
He stared at her with disbelief. ‘Don’t youcare?’ Contempt laced his voice.
She pulled a face. ‘What’s there to care about? Babies are incredibly boring so it’s not as if I’m going to be missing out on anything, and I wouldn’t be able to go even if I had been allowed—I’m going clubbing tonight and intend to spend tomorrow in bed catching up on all the sleep I’ve missed since my dragon boss decided it was acceptable to wake me in the middle of the night every day just to get me to work on time.’
Contempt was no longer confined to his tone, etching itself in the lines of his face. It was a contempt she hadn’t seen since that first early human alarm clock morning when she’d so angered him, an incident that had never been mentioned by either of them since. Seeing it cut her deeper than she could have imagined. ‘That’s you all over, isn’t it—putting your own pleasure above your family and everyone else.’
