Chapter Two
SOMEONE HAD PUT a drill to Athena Tsaliki’s head. Opening one bleary eye, her dream dissipated enough for consciousness to tell her it wasn’t a drill but her doorbell. Someone had their finger on it.
Opening her other eye, she focused enough to see her bedside clock telling her it was seven a.m. And still the ringing continued unabated.
Muttering curses under her breath, she crawled out of her lovely warm bed, padded to the front door and put her tired eye to the spy-hole.
Her heart slammed against her ribs, and she went from half-asleep to fully awake in a blink.
She didn’t know who she’d expected—in the month she’d been living in this dump of an apartment, she hadn’t had a single visitor—but the last person she’d imagined was Draco, suited and booted and ready to embrace another boring day of work.
For a moment, she debated ignoring him and going back to bed.
She would never show it, but she found his presence increasingly disturbing.
She didn’t know why; he was just a man. A good-looking man for sure, but her world brimmed with good-looking men.
She didn’t think he’d had the surgery so many of them had started dabbling in though.
If he had, he needed a new surgeon because his face was too lined to justify the cost. A manly, lived-in, rugged face with a firm mouth, straight nose tipped up at the end and a dark brown close-cropped beard, all topped with a thick head of dark brown hair worn short at the sides and slicked up at the top.
He was also tall and muscular, but her brothers were tall and muscular so that couldn’t be it either.
He let go of the doorbell to rap loudly on the door. ‘I know you’re there, Athena,’ he called before putting his finger back to the bell. ‘I can do this all morning.’
Muttering another curse, she yanked the door open. ‘What do you want?’
‘Not a morning person, I see,’ he said, stepping uninvited into her temporary home, bringing in the winter air and a cloud of the cologne her nostrils always twitched to inhale deeply. ‘I thought as much.’
‘I am a morning person when it’s the morning.
This is the middle of the night.’ And she was in her pyjamas.
Embarrassingly, they were her oversized red and black checked pyjamas, the ones she wouldn’t let anyone see her dead in.
Terrible reputations like Athena’s didn’t maintain themselves; they needed cultivation. ‘Why are you here?’
‘To get you to work on time.’
She groaned. ‘I will get to work on time. I just need another hour in bed.’
‘No, you need to do your Pilates and take a shower.’
‘How do you know I do Pilates? Have you been spying on me?’ She stepped backwards and feigned fear. ‘Are you secretly stalking me?’
He gave her the unimpressed face she’d been on the receiving end of more times than she’d had birthdays. ‘Athena, you sat in the middle of a warehouse the other week and did half an hour of Pilates and refused to move when people told you that you were in the way.’
‘Sometimes the mood just takes me.’ And she’d known it would get her, if not sacked, then moved to a different department.
Of all the departments she’d been assigned to, the colossal warehouse in Inland Services had been the worst. It had been so cold in there that her hands had become all dry and she’d needed daily manicures to fix the terrible state they’d got into.
At least, that was what she’d told her immediate boss all the times she’d failed to return after lunch.
That boss had ended up threatening to resign if Athena wasn’t moved somewhere far, far away. Result!
She had a feeling that this boss, her ultimate boss, would prove much harder to wear down.
Unlike the other bosses she’d been lumbered with—and the colleagues she’d been forced to work alongside—this one was proving a tough nut to crack.
He hadn’t even raised his voice at her! Still, Athena was nothing if not tenacious, and the sooner she made Draco crack and fire her, the sooner she’d get her life back.
Just look at what she’d achieved in a month!
Six different departments, and now he’d run out of options for where to place her because no one else would have her and so he’d lumbered himself with her!
He’d be throwing the billion-euro penalty at her brother before the week was out, possibly even the end of that very day if she played her cards right.
‘Just get yourself sorted. We leave in an hour.’
‘It takes that long to dry my hair.’
‘Don’t wash it then.’
She feigned horror. ‘Are you mad?’
There was a slight crinkling of the lines around his eyes, but his voice remained stern. ‘One hour, Athena. If you’re not dressed and ready in that time, I’ll dress you myself.’
She pouted her lips. ‘Ooh, I love it when you’re all masterful.’
He folded his arms across his impressive chest and pulled another unimpressed face.
She gave an exaggerated roll of her eyes. ‘Okay, okay, I’ll go get ready.’
Bed hair swishing, she sauntered back to her bedroom figuring that as she’d been caught in unsexy oversized pyjamas, she might as well own it.
When the door closed, though, she stilled and let out a long breath.
Her heart was beating even harder than it usually did around him.
Probably latent embarrassment at the state of her apartment.
Not that she would allow embarrassment to show.
Athena didn’t do embarrassed. People could take her or leave her; she didn’t care.
Most chose to leave. Actually, make that all chose to leave.
Which was fine by her because who needed people?
Not her. Best to push them away before they got too close because the closer people got, the more it hurt when they left, and Athena did not do hurt, not since she was six when, as fate’s quirk would have it, Draco’s mother had been driven out of her life.
Athena hadn’t allowed herself to think about Cora Manolis for years, not until Draco Manolis made the business headlines with the billion-euro sale of his tech start-up company founded on a ten thousand euro investment.
Since those headlines a good decade ago, their lives had skirted around each other, which was the way of the Athens society scene—everyone knew everyone even if they’d never been introduced—but the first time she’d voiced her belief that he was their old housekeeper’s son had been when Alexis announced he was selling Tsaliki Shipping to him.
The scorn that had been heaped on her for this would have wounded if she allowed herself to feel pain.
None of her family remembered Cora having a son and, as more than one of her brothers patronisingly reminded her, Greek women kept their surnames on marriage and Greek children took their father’s surnames.
Rebecca, her English stepmother, had been the most scathing, saying, ‘If that cheap slut had a son, he would never have amounted to anything.’
‘Don’t you think due diligence means you should check if I’m right?’ Athena had said, addressing Alexis directly. ‘After all, why would a tech giant want to go into shipping?’
‘He wants to diversify. Draco has the funds and is proving himself receptive to my conditions, so stop trying to cause drama where there is none.’
‘What conditions?’ she’d asked, immediately suspicious.
Alexis had smiled, and not in a kindly way. ‘You will find out in due course.’
Well, due course had come about and here she was, evicted from the family home, stripped of her allowance and installed in this poky apartment with the order to work and fend for herself for three months so she could appreciate the privileges of her life.
And she was still convinced Draco was Cora’s son.
He looked nothing like her—for which Athena was grateful as she didn’t think her stony-cold heart could bear it if he did—but there was something about him that felt so familiar, and if the others wanted to bury their heads in the sand about it then that was their problem.
Whatever Draco’s real intention behind the purchase, it would come out, as her brother would put it, in due course, and if that due course should bring humiliation to the family then they couldn’t complain they hadn’t been warned.
If she wasn’t so intent on getting herself sacked at the soonest opportunity, she’d use the fact she’d now be working at his side as a means to get sleuthing.
Athena was ready to go in forty-seven minutes.
Not wanting Draco to think he’d got the better of her or that she had any intention of complying with his directives, she lay belly down on her bed for the next thirteen minutes drawing.
Trying to draw. Draco was in her apartment, a fact that had made her shower and apply her make-up much more quickly than she usually did and was distracting her now.
Maybe, she mused, he disturbed her because he didn’t react to her antics in the usual way.
His reactions were thoughtful. Calculated.
He didn’t shout or show exasperation or even look as if he secretly itched to raise his hand to her.
Maybe that was it—the way he looked at her.
Draco had the brightest, bluest eyes she’d ever seen, and when they fixed on you it was like they pierced right through you.
She remembered catching his eye once in a nightclub and experiencing that pierce.
She’d turned away and continued dancing, but the sensation had lingered.
Anyone would find that disturbing. Luckily, Athena was an expert at not letting her inner feelings show, and even more luckily, she’d be fired soon and would never have to be disturbed by him again.
Exactly one hour after she’d gone for her shower, there was a loud rap on her bedroom door and a rough, gruff voice called, ‘Are you ready?’
‘Nearly,’ she called back. ‘Two minutes.’
The door opened.
She looked up from her drawing book while hastily closing it. ‘Oi!’