Chapter Three
WILLA STARED AT the man in front of her, mute with shock and sheer disbelief.
He looked, if anything, even better than he had that first night in another of those custom-made suits that sat somewhere between armour and a work of art.
Reluctantly, she let her gaze graze his face.
He really was astonishingly good-looking.
Beautiful in that way only very masculine men could be.
But then, as someone a whole lot wiser than her once said, beauty was only skin-deep.
Ares Konstantinou might have the face of an angel and the body of an Adonis but for once the media was right.
He was every bit as arrogant and ill-mannered and ruthless as the man in the headlines.
So why was her body acting as though he was the human equivalent of catnip? Why did she feel flustered and twitchy and cornered all at once?
Probably because she was struggling to reconcile how the man she’d slept with two weeks ago could also be a billionaire heartbreaker.
And more crucially, the newest and most important client of her career.
She had thought about Ares so often these last two weeks.
Too often. Mostly at night but sometimes when she was strap-hanging in the tube, she would remember the weight of his body and his hot breath against her throat as she canted her hips up to meet his, and her face would burn.
Other times she had imagined coming face-to-face with him and telling him exactly what she thought of his shoddy behaviour.
But it had never crossed her mind that they would meet like this, here in her new workplace, with her new boss beaming beside her.
Resentment and confusion and frustration swelled and swirled in her stomach, making the fact that his attention was focused on shaking her boss’s hand both another insult and a tiny, temporary act of mercy.
Larry turned towards her, still smiling. ‘Willa, this is my good friend, Ares Konstantinou. Ares, this is our newest associate, Willa Hamilton. I’m not sure if you caught her name in the message I left you.’ He screwed up his face. ‘I was coming out of an underground car park.’
As Ares tilted his head in her direction, Willa was ready for him, and meeting his gaze she saw that he was ready for her too. That in the time it had taken for Larry to make his introduction he had regrouped and was now staring at her steadily, taking in her new status.
The slight narrowing of his eyes suggested that the change pleased him less than it did her. But why? He wasn’t the one who’d been made to feel like a fool.
‘Ms Hamilton.’ He paused and held out his hand, and she took it because not doing so would have looked weird, but it was hard not to jump out of her skin when his fingers curled around hers.
Two weeks ago, his touch had burned her. No one had ever touched her like that. Even the memory of his hands moving on her belly and on her hips and between her thighs made her breath knot in her throat because Ares Konstantinou had a great sense of touch.
Precise. Measured. Intuitive.
Now, though, his grip felt just a fraction too tight as if he wanted to pull her close and demand what she was doing there.
‘Willa’s a new recruit.’ Larry smiled. ‘She was actually at the anniversary party, but I’m guessing you two didn’t cross paths.’
‘No,’ she lied.
‘No.’ He spoke a fraction after her, and the sensation of his voice overlapping hers made Willa’s body stiffen, and she had a sudden flashback to the moment in the pool when he’d thrust inside her and they’d both cried out at the same time.
Larry’s glance ping-ponged between them.
‘Well, as I said in my message, I know you’re going to be as impressed as I am with Willa’s skill and care, but I also think in relation to Ariana she has a kind of superpower.
Being around the same age as Ariana makes her uniquely placed to get inside your sister’s mindset. ’
Glancing over at Ares’s taut jaw-line, Willa was willing to bet her entire annual salary that he was wishing he had a superpower of his own that would allow him to turn back time and erase her from his life.
‘But she doesn’t need me giving her the hard sell, so I’m just going to leave you in her capable hands.’ Reaching out, Larry clapped Ares on the shoulder. ‘Don’t forget we’re having lunch.’
There was a taut silence like a held breath as the door closed behind him, and suddenly they were alone. Again. Just like they had been on the roof of the Clarendon.
Time stalled, each second creeping forward in slow motion, and she felt his gaze, the stinging intensity of his focus.
‘Is this some kind of a joke?’
His voice snapped across the space between them like the crack of a whip, and she met his gaze head-on.
Because even though he was a high net-worth individual and a family friend of her boss, she refused to kowtow to a man who didn’t even have the decency and good manners to say goodbye. Even if it was just sex.
She met his gaze. ‘I don’t know. Do you feel like a punchline?’
The grey of his eyes darkened to black. ‘Don’t get cute with me, Ms Hamilton.’ His gaze dropped to her ring finger momentarily as if to check her marital status, and watching his face harden, she knew that Larry’s hard sell hadn’t found a buyer.
There was a beautiful malachite and ormolu clock on the mantelpiece to the left of Ares’s shoulder, and she watched the second hand tick forward before saying crisply, ‘Then, don’t get snippy with me, Mr Konstantinou.
I didn’t ask for this. Or make it happen.
Unless you think I can miraculously burst someone else’s appendix by the power of thought alone. ’
He was staring at her as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing, which was understandable because she couldn’t quite believe what she was saying. But why was he making out that this was something she had engineered?
Her heart thumped dully in her chest as he stared down at her, his expression hardening. ‘You seem to have forgotten who you’re talking to.’
With another man, another entitled member of the one percent she might have taken his words at face value, but there was something in his eyes that arrowed into her, stirring up memories of their night together.
Because that was what this was about. This strange, weaving tension between them, part anger, part frustration, part lingering contrail of heat.
She had broken the rules by turning up in his life like this.
She lifted her chin. ‘I haven’t forgotten.’
‘I see.’ His voice was terse. ‘So do you talk to every client like this?’
Client. She fought the wild beating of her heart as the word echoed ominously inside her head. But whatever he had been before, that was what he was now.
‘No, I don’t.’ She didn’t sleep with them either. The memory of his body slanting over hers in the pool made everything tilt a little, and she reached out to steady herself on the back of a chair.
‘But obviously I didn’t expect to see you here.
’ Didn’t expect to see him again, period.
‘It was a shock. For both of us.’ She glanced towards the door, longing to escape, but there would be no escape unless she could come up with a reason for not wanting to work with Ares—other than the truth, of course.
Maybe his thoughts were following the same path, because his eyes narrowed on her face. ‘I take it you didn’t know who I was when you invited me up to the roof?’
Was that why he was so annoyed with her? It was tempting to dismiss his question as some kind of paranoia, but when Larry had told her who they were meeting, her mind had gone there too.
It felt too staged, too unlikely to be a coincidence, the two of them meeting like this.
But now she had all the facts, now she knew that Ares was both a friend of Larry’s and a client of the firm, it was still an unwelcome shock to find herself face-to-face with her one-night stand. And yet, it felt less surprising.
But that didn’t mean she had known about the surprise.
Briefly she replayed that first encounter on the street. There was a moment of recognition, but truthfully, she just hadn’t put two and two together until she’d heard his surname a moment ago.
She hadn’t followed the Konstantinou/Gilmour split story at the time.
There were other, bigger things happening in her life, but she could remember their names being clickbait for months.
Because who didn’t love a story about a bride jilted at the altar?
It was basic Schadenfreude, and of course it had no doubt helped that the bride and groom looked like something out of a telenovela.
No wonder she had woken alone in her hotel room.
Any man who could walk away from a woman in a bridal gown with several hundred witnesses watching was going to have no trouble hitting and splitting without a word.
And yet—and she knew she was being ridiculous—it still stung that it hadn’t been what she’d thought.
That she had misread the signals so spectacularly.
‘No, I didn’t,’ she said, after a moment.
‘I mean, yes, your face looked familiar, but that’s the trouble when you move to a new city.
Everyone’s a stranger, but they also look like someone you know back home.
’ She hesitated. ‘I didn’t know you were a client.
I would never have slept with you if I had.
’ The sceptical look on his face made her want to throttle him with his silk tie.
Instead, she said firmly, ‘I want you to know that’s not something I do—’
‘How old are you?’ His voice cut across hers, but it wasn’t the abruptness of his question that startled her but the way he was looking at her, as if he was seeing her as a woman again, not his lawyer.
‘I’m twenty-nine.’ It made her feel nervous, exposed, him wanting to know things about her, and she told herself that was why it was suddenly hard to breathe, and why her body felt taut and achy and hot—