His eyes rested on her...on the beauty that had been revealed to him...the beauty he could not now forget. Could not pass by...
There was a truth about her he could not deny—a truth that had been blazing in him like a fire that could not be quenched. It was flaring again now, as she sat opposite him, gazing at him incredulously with those luminous wide-set grey-green eyes, so incredibly beautiful...
I want her—I desire her. Since the moment she revealed her amazing beauty to me in all its radiance I have known that. I thought I had to ignore it, suppress it, because I refused to play Stavros’s infernal games! But if she can be persuaded to what I am urging her now... I can indulge in my desire for her! She can be mine!
Six months, he’d said. Well, that was all his amours ever lasted anyway. After that they always burned out, became stale and tedious. No woman he’d desired had ever lasted longer and he preferred it that way—he freely admitted that.
Six months would get him everything he wanted! It would guarantee a business merger that would double the Lakaris fortune, just as his father had intended, and, as a sweetener like no other, this stunningly beautiful woman he could not take his eyes from would be his for the duration.
What more could he possibly want?
The question was rhetorical—the answer was blazing in his head.
All he needed was her agreement, and his eyes willed her to give him the answer he sought...
* * *
Rosalie heard what he was saying—heard his words, though she could scarcely credit them—but it was the last of them that was echoing in her head as he fell silent.
‘You will never know poverty again.’
She swallowed. Looked about her. The swish restaurant they were lunching at was filled now with diners, all well heeled. Waiters hovered discreetly, taking orders for the delicious gourmet food that was the everyday fare of those who frequented places like this.
She shifted position in her chair, feeling the soft fabric of the outfit she was wearing—remembered the price tag that had been on it. It would have been as impossible for her to buy on her cleaning wages as buying a villa in the Caribbean...
Memory plunged through her of the last two days...the night she’d spent at that five-star London hotel, the luxury and the lavishness of it all. The fortune it had cost.
Her eyes went back to the man sitting opposite her with his unreadable expression, waiting for her response.
She looked at the superb cut of his business suit easing across his broad shoulders, the silk tie, the gold tiepin, the svelte look of sleek, expensive grooming about him...thought back to the low, lean car he’d driven her here in, with its famous logo on the bonnet and the deep soft leather bucket seats she’d sunk into. Thought back to the flight in first class she’d taken to Athens, the non-stop champagne, the hovering flight attendants, the very lap of luxury...
She’d tasted that world—that luxury—glimpsed like a tantalising marsh-light what might have been hers had her father been the kind of father she’d woven such futile hopes and longings around...
But because those hopes and longings had crashed and burned, all she could do now was go back to London—back to the life she had there...all she’d ever have.
A sick feeling of dread and deep reluctance filled her.
Can I face it? Can I truly face it? Once my anger and my hurt and my outrage have worn off? Once I’m back in that dump of a bedsit, listening to the addicts and the drunks in the other bedsits? Hearing the endless traffic in the street, smelling the damp in the walls...spending my days slogging to clean up other people’s filth and my nights trying to stay awake to study, because study is the only hope I have of escaping from the life my father’s callousness has condemned me to...
The grim, bleak life she would be condemned to again.
Unless...
CHAPTER SIX
SHE FELT HER hands clench in her lap. Made herself look at the man who had just said what he had said. His eyes were resting on her, his expression veiled. He was waiting for her to answer him.
‘So,’ Alexandros Lakaris said, his voice level, eyes resting on her still, ‘what do you say?’
She couldn’t answer him. Not yet. Too much was in her head. He seemed to realise that, because his expression changed, became less intent. He was backing off. Giving her space.
She saw him sit back, pour himself more coffee.
‘It’s a lot to take in—for both of us.’
There was a smoothness in his voice now, and the slightest masking of the expression in his amazingly dark deep eyes. Eyes which she was all too aware she just wanted to go on gazing into, despite all the tumult in her beleaguered mind.
How easy it would be, she found herself thinking, just to go on looking into them...letting all the stormy emotions twisting inside her subside, letting herself just fall into that dark, gold-flecked gaze...