She, Alice, was a fraud. A woman dressed up to play a part. And she needed to remember that; for her own sanity and emotional well-being, she couldn’t let herself be suckered into this fantasy. She couldn’t let herself believe, even for a moment, that this kind of thing could ever really happen to her.
It was just an act.
And soon, it would all be over.
* * *
She moved like an angel.
The discovery that his sensible, staid assistant actually had a killer figure and danced as though she’d been born with a beat inside her bones gave him the first tremor of alarm he’d felt since acquiescing to Leonidas’s suggestion and proposing a marriage of convenience.
Alice had been easy to imagine as his wife.
Alice, as she’d been in the office, had been attractive in a way you’d never really notice. Nice face, nice eyes, nice smile, but there wa
s nothing remarkable about her. He’d imagined her as the perfect bride to show Kosta how much he’d changed, without really demanding too much of Thanos’s attention, once they were married.
But now, as she moved on the dance floor, her body being pushed close to his by the crush of people dancing around them, he began to see that perhaps he’d miscalculated.
She might not be anything like his usual lovers—blonde, leggy, slender and oftentimes dull as anything—but she was also nothing like he’d imagined either, and Thanos didn’t generally like surprises. He dealt in known quantities and he had every reason to worry that Alice was not precisely that.
The music seemed to pulse through her, so she danced with her eyes shut, her generous lips pouted into a half-smile, half-hum, her arms moving rhythmically, and her breasts pushed against the fabric that had seemed like such a good idea at the time.
He moved his own body, hoping that it would distribute his blood a little more evenly throughout, rather than letting it pool in one limb only.
Her hips were mesmerising. She swayed and rolled them as if it was second nature and the very unwelcome image of her completely naked, straddling him, rolling her hips in just this manner, filled his mind so he knew he was fighting a losing battle trying to bring his blood back to his body.
Theos. What was the matter with him? He went dancing with women all the time. He could control this. He had to.
Besides, he’d brought her here to be photographed, so word could get around that he was getting married. It was hardly going to work if he spent the whole night forcibly keeping her at arm’s length so she wouldn’t realise that desire was flooding his body.
‘Thank you for this,’ she said, lifting up onto tiptoes to offer the words closer to his ear. Her breasts brushed his torso and he had to pull back a little so she wouldn’t feel the force of his arousal against her gut.
‘For what?’
‘For everything.’ Her smile was quick to spread. He stared at it, desire like a drug now. ‘Mom, mainly. But also for this. I haven’t been dancing in a long time. I’d forgotten how much I love it.’
Her gratitude was the last thing he’d expected. He smiled, but knew it to be dismissive, and he felt her pull away from him, a hint of hurt on her features as she put a little physical space between them and began to dance once more.
He fought an urge to apologise and explain. This was business. Even this—the dancing—was a carefully staged photo op. And his body needed to remember that.
This wasn’t a normal date. He wasn’t going to take Alice home to his bed, seduce her all night until she screamed his name into his apartment, nor was he going to coax pleasure and euphoria from her, syllable by syllable.
Up until three days ago, she’d been his damned assistant. Up until three days ago, he hadn’t known she existed. Not outside a voice at the end of the phone, or a name at the bottom of an email.
And she was definitely not his type.
Okay, tonight she looked a lot more like his type—only better. Fascinating. Rare. Unusual.
But Alice Smart was complicated. She moved in a completely different circle from him. He didn’t need to look beyond the meagre requirements she’d voiced when they’d first negotiated their marriage bargain to know that they lived in different worlds.
Besides which, Thanos wasn’t interested in a real relationship.
The very idea turned his blood to ice in his veins. All his life, he’d known one thing with blinding clarity: love stinks.
If his own mother’s decline hadn’t proven that, then having a front-row seat to Dion and Maria’s marriage breakup—a situation his arrival had caused—had definitely sent him the message with complete certainty.
People were born alone; they died alone. It was futile to try to live your life in a way that defied this. A marriage that would get him back a company he should never have lost seemed about the best thing Thanos could hope for.