TWO ANXIOUS DAYS in which she never allowed her phone to stray from her pocket passed for Elvi and on the third day, at the point where she had almost given up hope entirely, it finally rang.
One of Xan Ziakis’s staff invited her to a meeting late that afternoon. Distracted by what lay ahead of her, she pleaded a dental appointment with her employer to finish early and worked over her usual lunch break instead. She got through her working hours on autopilot while anxiously rehearsing speeches in the back of her brain, only to discard them again when she tried to picture herself saying such things to a stranger. She would have to be lucid and brief, she told herself, because Xan Ziakis was unlikely to give her more than ten minutes of his time.
Seated in the plush quiet waiting area on the top floor of Ziakis Finance, Elvi was a bundle of nerves. How likely was it that he would even consider dropping the theft charge? Very unlikely, she reckoned, because what would be in that for him? But he could be a really good person, a little voice whispered. What were the chances? her brain scoffed, unimpressed by such wishful thinking. Xan was a merciless financier renowned for his profit margins. Every single thing he did during his working day was focused on gaining an advantage...and what did she have to offer?
She plucked a piece of tapestry wool off a black-trousered knee and shed her jacket to reveal the long-sleeved blue tee below because she was too warm. It was a waste of time approaching the wretched man when she was already virtually drowning in a sense of defeat, she told herself furiously. He was a rich, privileged guy, who lived a life far beyond the imagination of other, more ordinary mortals. He would not understand where she was coming from unless he had a reformed alcoholic in his own family circle. He would not appreciate the challenges Sally Cartwright had already overcome in her efforts to rebuild her life, nor could he even begin to imagine the misery of the ‘lost’ years that Elvi and Daniel had lived through with their mother.
Stop it, stop with the negative inner talk, she urged herself just as the svelte receptionist uttered her name in the same low-pitched tone that everyone who worked on the top floor seemed to use. Elvi rose stiffly from her seat, full of apprehension but struggling to appear composed because she knew that that was necessary. She couldn’t afford to get emotional with such a self-disciplined man.
In his office, Xan was on a high because he was finally getting to meet her. The woman he had wanted, the only woman he had wanted in years that he couldn’t have, but now that her mother was no longer his employee, and that connection was at an end, he no longer had to consider that aspect. That was done, dusted, in the past as far as he was concerned. Now he could move forward freely. Admittedly she was still of much lower status than he or her predecessors in his life had been but did he really have to be so particular about the women he took to his bed? He straightened his jacket and leant back against his designer desk as the door opened.
The office was the size of a football pitch, probably supposed to intimidate, Elvi decided, inching in from the doorway like a mouse trying to evade a hungry cat before she threw back her shoulders, straightened her back and lifted her chin, determined not to appear either weak or too humble.
‘I’m Elvi, Sally Cartwright’s daughter,’ she declared quietly, battling to stand her ground as Xan Ziakis angled up his arrogant dark head, his classic nose as high as his perfect cheekbones to look directly at her.
Behind her the door closed, locking them into uneasy silence. Involuntarily Elvi connected with dazzling amber-gold eyes screened by criminally long and distinctive lush black lashes. She had never been close enough to him to see those eyes before, nor had she realised quite how tall he was, while even his formal business suit failed to conceal the power in his wide shoulders and muscular torso, not to mention the virile strength of his long thighs as he stood braced against his desk. He was drop-dead beautiful and at that moment she wasn’t at all surprised that for a little while she had succumbed to a pathetically juvenile crush on him. She’d been far from being a teenager, and that crush had mortified her pride.
‘Xander Ziakis,’ he matched, extending an elegant lean brown hand.
At least he had manners, Elvi conceded feebly as she advanced to shake that hand, finding his grasp warm and her own cold with nerves, goose flesh erupting beneath her top as nervous tension threatened again. That close to him she could hardly breathe as a faint tang of some exotic designer cologne infiltrated her nostrils.
‘Take a seat, Elvi,’ he instructed, angling his head in the direction of the chair in front of him.
‘I don’t think I would be comfortable sitting down while you’re still standing,’ Elvi confided, stepping back but avoiding the chair, wondering if he was always as domineering, deciding he very probably was when she caught the flash of surprise in his gaze before he cloaked it. She reckoned everyone did exactly what they were told in his radius.
Disconcertingly and with a gleam of humour lightening his dark eyes, for he was rarely challenged, Xan slid back behind his desk and waited for her to sit down as he had told her to do.
Outmanoeuvred, Elvi took a seat and rested her bag on her lap to hide her trembling hands.
‘Would you like a drink? Tea? Coffee? Water?’ Xan proffered politely.
‘Some water if it’s not too much trouble,’ Elvi framed, watching as he pressed a button and gave an order to some employee. Thirty seconds later, a moisture-beaded tumbler of water was clutched between her restive hands and she sipped, wetting her dry lips.
Xan studied her in fascination, because she was much more controlled than he had expected and possibly ten times more attractive close up than he had forecast. In reality he had been prepared for disappointment, having only seen her so fleetingly in the past. But there she was in front of him with skin that had the natural lustre of a pearl, eyes as blue as the Greek sky, dainty features and white-blonde hair falling like a cloak to her waist. And then there were the fabulous hourglass curves with that tiny waist, the amazing feminine bounty at breast and hip she had hidden beneath that awful coat. Not overweight, glorious, Xan decided hungrily, wondering if it would even occur to her that he had been forced to sit down because her body made him hot as hell. He thought not, for there was nothing even slightly flirtatious or inviting about either her clothing or her attitude, and he wasn’t accustomed to that lack of interest in the women he met. This one hadn’t even bothered to put on make-up, he registered in mounting surprise.
‘Why do you think I offered you this appointment?’ Xan enquired with innate ruthlessness, because he doubted his reading of her character from her appearance and behaviour. He didn’t trust women. He had learned not to trust women through the experience of growing up with several unpleasant stepmothers and the conviction had been rubber-stamped by his first love’s change of heart the instant she realised his family fortune was gone.
‘I don’t know, which is why I am here,’ Elvi said truthfully. ‘Obviously you read my letter—’
Xan lounged back in his chair and lightly shifted an eloquent brown hand as if in dismissal of the letter. ‘Why would I want to do anything for a woman who stole from me?’ he asked bluntly.
In receipt of that acerbic enquiry, Elvi lost colour. ‘Well, maybe not want—’
‘That’s the problem,’ Xan interposed before she could even finish speaking. ‘I don’t want to help her because I believe that those who break the law should be punished—’
‘Yes, but—’ Elvi began afresh, thrown on the back foot because before her mother had been charged with theft she would have agreed with him on that score.
‘There is no saving exception in my book,’ Xan Ziakis sliced in again. ‘I felt more sorry for you growing up with an alcoholic parent than I feel sorry for her.’
Elvi’s hands tightened around the glass cradled between her hands and she forced herself to sip again; she wanted to slap him and shut him up because he wasn’t allowing her to get in a word in her mother’s defence. ‘We don’t need your compassion!’ she heard herself snap back and then she bit her lip hard, knowing she shouldn’t have responded in that tone for there was truth in that old adage about catching more flies with honey than vinegar.
‘But you chose to ask for my compassion,’ Xan reminded her with dogged purpose. ‘And I have to wonder, what’s in it for me?’
‘You have your jade pot back?’ Elvi suggested shakily.
‘But I don’t. It’s police evidence at this moment in time,’ Xan told her gently.
Elvi breathed in deep and slow, battling to think straight while he sat there as cool as a block of untouchable ice, and then she clashed with eyes that flamed over her like a fire and realised that his apparently glacial outlook had given her a mistaken impression of him. For a split second as her chest swelled on that breath, his gaze had dropped revealingly below her chin and she was shaken that he could be quite as predictable as most of the men she met. Her boobs were playing more of a starring role than she was, she thought bitterly.
‘My mother has been punished,’ Elvi argued, taking another tack in her growing desperation. ‘She’s been arrested and that was frightening for her and more than enough to teach most people a hard lesson. She has also lost her job and her good name—’
‘Elvi...’ Xan leant across his desk to interrupt her again.
‘No, don’t cut me off this time!’ Elvi urged impatiently. ‘Tell me why you can’t drop the charges—’
‘I’ve already answered that question,’ Xan reminded her with finality.
Enormous blue eyes fixed on him hopefully. ‘But don’t you think that making a benevolent gesture would make you feel good?’
Xan could not believe how naïve she was and he almost laughed. ‘I don’t have a benevolent bone in my body,’ he admitted without embarrassment. ‘I’m a hard-hitter. That’s who I am.’
‘Well, I didn’t come here to repeat the sob story I already put in my letter,’ Elvi assured him with cringing dignity as she started rising from her seat. ‘So, if that’s your last word—’
‘It’s not. You don’t listen very well, do you?’ Xan shot back at her in exasperation. ‘I asked you what would be in this benevolent gesture for me and I do have an option to offer you—’
Taken aback at the very point where she had felt that she was getting nowhere with him, Elvi sank slowly back into the chair. ‘You...er...do?’ she queried dubiously, her eyes openly bemused by the concept.
‘It’s simple and unscrupulous,’ Xan warned her without hesitation. ‘I want you. Give yourself to me and I will drop the charges.’
Elvi’s lower lip parted company with the upper one as she stared back at him in complete astonishment, not quite willing to believe he had actually said those words to her. Give yourself to me. He meant sex. What else could he mean? I want you. The most enormous sense of shock engulfed her. It wasn’t simply unscrupulous, it was filthy, and she was shattered that he could sit there behind his rule-the-world desk and dare to offer her such an offensive escape clause on her mother’s behalf. What world did he live in? What kind of women was he accustomed to dealing with? It was a horrific suggestion no decent woman would accept.
‘I finally appear to have silenced you,’ Xan remarked with unhidden amusement.
And it was that glint of amusement in his extravagantly handsome face and the energy of it in his accented intonation that set free the tide of rage inside Elvi. She flew upright like a rocket and her hand jerked up and she flung the glass of water over him. ‘How dare you?’ she snapped at him furiously. ‘I’m not a slut!’
Xan shook his dark head, water droplets rolling down his lean, dark, dangerous face. Never had he been attacked in such a way, but it didn’t show because he did not move a single muscle. He gazed broodingly back at her, disturbed by her passionate nature but already wondering how that seeming flaw would play out between his sheets. Obviously he was bored with the identikit mistresses who had met his physical needs for years, but that rational, unemotional approach worked for him, he reminded himself, staving off the risks of more personal entanglements. ‘I didn’t suggest that you were, but there’s a vacancy in my bed at present and I would be happy for you to fill it for a couple of months—’
‘Well, I wouldn’t be happy to fill it!’ Elvi snarled back incredulously. ‘A vacancy? Is that how you think of sex?’
‘It is a need like hunger, an appetite that must be met,’ Xan responded levelly, his hard, dark gaze locked to hers like a laser beam that made her body as hot and perspiring as if she were under a spotlight. ‘If it makes you feel better, I wanted you the first time I saw you waiting in the foyer of my apartment block. I found out your name then and your connection to my maid. Doing anything about the attraction would’ve been inappropriate at that time—’
Elvi studied him in helpless wonderment. ‘I don’t believe this... I don’t believe any of it!’ she gasped. ‘You don’t even know me—’
Xan lounged back in his seat, damp but disciplined. ‘I don’t need to know you to want to have sex with you. I’m more about the physical than the cerebral with women,’ he admitted smoothly.
‘But you’re trying to buy me with a bribe!’ Elvi condemned furiously.
‘And if the offer suits you, I’ll drop the theft charge. That’s how negotiations work in this world, Elvi. You give, I give. It really is that basic—’
‘But it’s blackmail!’ Elvi accused heatedly, increasingly unnerved by his shattering level of inhuman self-control.
‘No, it’s not. You have a choice. Whether you choose to accept my offer or not is entirely up to you,’ Xan pointed out with precision. ‘Think it over for a week...’
‘I’m not going to think it over!’ Elvi assured him with blazing conviction. ‘It’s a filthy proposition and I’m not that sort of woman—’
‘Presumably you enjoy sex like other women,’ Xan interposed very drily. ‘If you’re afraid that I might be into something different like BDSM, you’re wrong. I’m completely normal in the sex department—’
‘I don’t care! I’m not interested in what you do in the bedroom!’ Elvi proclaimed, pacing his office carpet in a passion of disbelief at the direction their interview had gone in, her triangular face as red as a tomato. ‘I couldn’t imagine being some sort of sex slave—’
Xan laughed out loud, shocking her again, startling her as he sprang up from behind his desk and extended a business card to her. ‘The word you seek is mistress, not sex slave, which is rather melodramatic, if you don’t mind me saying so—’
‘Yes, I do mind!’ Elvi gasped, snatching the card off him and backing away at speed from his proximity, her heart beating so fast she feared it might bounce right out of her tight chest. ‘I mind every darned thing you’ve said since I arrived. I didn’t like any of it and I wouldn’t have come to this meeting if I’d known you were likely to suggest some immoral arrangement to me! Call me stupid but that idea didn’t even cross my mind!’
Xan had never wanted to touch a woman as badly as he did at that moment. Thee mou...she excited him to the most extraordinary degree. Her amazing chest was heaving, her blue eyes were huge with anxiety and her opulent pink pouty mouth was yet another temptation that tugged at him as he pictured her lying in his bed. It was lust of the lowest possible order, he acknowledged grimly, but somehow, even though lust had never driven him to such a degree and he thoroughly distrusted the urge, he couldn’t shake free of it. The harder she argued with him, the more he wanted to persuade her because, whatever else Elvi Cartwright was, she was neither boring nor insipid. A sex slave though, he savoured with unholy amusement, even while he wondered if that could possibly be a fantasy of hers...how did he know? But he very badly wanted to know about her fantasies. Yet he could not recall ever being so curious about any other woman and his innate caution cut in.
She was saying no, shrieking no, in fact, and possibly that was for the best, he reasoned flatly even as all the potential colour and enjoyment drained straight back out of his immediate future again. Was he so bored with his life that he had proposed such an innovative exchange of favours? It was out of character for him. He picked up women and dropped them again as easily as he worked seven days a week. He didn’t normally picture them in that apartment bed, he merely joined them there to satisfy a natural desire for physical satisfaction.
‘You have my phone number if you change your mind,’ Xan Ziakis intoned, as if he could not quite credit that she had turned him down.
Elvi tossed her head, platinum-blonde hair spilling across her shoulders. She would have made a terrific Lady Godiva, Xan reflected abstractedly, wondering why he was even thinking that. He stalked across to the door and opened it for her, now determined to bring the unsettling meeting to a quick conclusion.
‘Good luck,’ he murmured graciously, feeling inordinately proud of himself for his restraint.
Blue eyes collided with his. ‘You are the most hateful man I have ever met!’ she hissed at him like a cat flexing her sharp claws and, turning on her heel, she sped off down the corridor.
Xan noted that she had left her jacket behind, lifted it and strode out of his office again.
‘Elvi!’ he called when he saw her standing at the lift, hugging her handbag as if it were a comforter.
Eyes flying wide, she spun and he handed her the jacket.
‘Oh...thanks,’ she mumbled in disconcertion, suddenly uncomfortably aware that every employee in the area had stilled to watch them.
That was the instant when Xan saw the tears glimmering in her eyes and wished he hadn’t followed her. It made him feel like an ogre who kicked puppies, a complete bastard. But he was what he was and he had never been soft in heart or deed, he reasoned harshly. She needed to toughen up because the world was a thoroughly nasty place.
* * *
Still shell-shocked by that encounter with Xan, Elvi went home and found her mother in tears at the kitchen table. ‘I don’t know how I’m going to get work anywhere without a reference from my last job,’ she confided chokily. ‘And I can’t tell the truth either. Nobody wants a light-fingered employee!’
Elvi paled. ‘We’ll think up something,’ she said soothingly. ‘Is Daniel at the restaurant?’
‘Yes. Thank goodness he got that bar job. At least it gets him out of his room,’ his mother remarked unhappily. ‘He’s so depressed, Elvi. He feels so guilty—’
Elvi nodded, trying not to think that, had she been of a different persuasion, she might have been able to make the whole nightmare go away. It would be indecent, though, for her to have sex with Xan Ziakis in return for him dropping the theft charge. Totally disgustingly indecent, she told herself squarely. Surely she didn’t have to sink that low to help her family?
She lay awake half the night thinking about it. The irony was that before she had met Xan Ziakis he was the only man she had ever thought of having sex with. Well, in her dreams, her imagination, that was, because he was the first man she had ever been strongly attracted to. Of course, she had met very few men. Few men went into craft shops; customers who liked to knit, crochet and embroider were mostly of the female persuasion, although not exclusively. Throughout most of her teen years, while other young girls were flirting and dating, Elvi had been looking after her little brother and tucking her comatose mother into bed at night. She had missed out on a large chunk of her supposedly carefree youth, having to be responsible, having to be the adult for as long as Sally had been incapable of meeting that challenge.
By the way, I’m still a virgin, she tried to picture herself telling Xan Ziakis. Unexpectedly, her body shook with sudden laughter at the image. No doubt Xan had assumed that she was experienced when he’d made that crack about women enjoying sex as well. No doubt he also believed she would be mistress material with the sort of sexy tricks a more practised lover would provide. But she had no tricks, no clue, nothing to give in that department, and she was quite sure that that would have disillusioned him, maybe even put him off.
Although, how would that have helped them? He had only made that ridiculous offer because he found her attractive. For a split second, she cherished the knowledge of that startling truth. Xan Ziakis found her attractive as well. It was a fact that bolstered her ego even though she knew it shouldn’t. Probably the boobs again, she thought wryly. As an adolescent, who had been tormented at school by the boys once she began developing way beyond what she had deemed an acceptable size, she had always loathed her large breasts and ample hips. Joel, her best mate since primary school, told her she looked lush and feminine, but then that was exactly the sort of comforting comment a friend was supposed to make, so she hadn’t paid any heed to it.
The following morning, Joel sent her a text asking her to meet him at lunchtime. She smiled at the prospect, knowing she could tell her friend the truth about her mother and her brother, although she had no intention of mentioning Xan’s proposition.
‘How could a boy as smart as Daniel be that dumb?’ Joel demanded, smoking while they sat outside a bar close to where she worked.
‘Clever people don’t always have common sense,’ Elvi pointed out, leaning across the table to add, ‘You’re getting eyed up by that beautiful blonde over there. I think it’s time I went back to work—’
‘No!’ Joel protested, closing an imprisoning hand over the one she had braced on the tabletop to rise. ‘I’m not interested—’
‘You haven’t even looked yet,’ Elvi rebuked as she met his brown eyes and wondered how his could be so different from Xan’s, because they did not make her melt or heat up to even the smallest degree. Yet, Joel was tall and attractive with tousled dark curls. He was also an up-and-coming successful painter, already being singled out for his talent with portraits. But then Joel’s life had gone much more smoothly than her own, she reflected ruefully, and sometimes she marvelled that he still stayed in touch with her because they now led such divergent lives.
‘All I want to do right now is give you some cash to help out,’ Joel told her ruefully. ‘You earn a pittance and with Sally out of work—’
‘No, thanks,’ Elvi cut in hastily. ‘Thanks for offering but no, thanks—’
‘Don’t you ever just want to walk away from the two of them and their problems?’ her friend enquired ruefully. ‘You could’ve been so much more without them holding you back—’
‘You’re talking about my mother and my brother,’ Elvi reminded him tartly. ‘I love them and they love me and you don’t turn your back on that kind of love and support—’
‘But you’re always supporting them, not yourself!’ Joel argued.
He didn’t understand, he never had understood, Elvi reflected wryly, because his was not a close family. Elvi, however, knew that, no matter what happened to her, her mother and her brother would always be there for her just as she was for them. That made her feel warm and complete inside herself in a way she couldn’t have described even to her longest-standing friend.
‘I’m wasting my breath,’ Joel recognised impatiently as Elvi slid back into her black jacket. ‘For some bizarre reason you don’t want the stuff other women want...the new clothes, the parties, the fun—’
‘I’d give anything to own a dog,’ she confided, and not for the first time.
‘A dog would just be another burden,’ Joel reproved.
Didn’t stop her wanting one, Elvi reasoned wryly as she got off the bus to go home that evening. A dog to walk and cuddle when she felt lonely. A cat was a possibility but cats weren’t necessarily cuddly, being more independent. As usual the lift was out of service and she had to climb flight after flight of stairs to the tenth floor, telling herself all the while that the exercise was keeping her fit even if she was wheezing like an old lady by the time she walked into the kitchen. That lighter mood didn’t last once she saw her mother and brother standing there, clearly in the middle of a rare argument.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked tightly.
‘Look, what I did wrecked everything for all of us,’ Daniel declared forthrightly. ‘Mum can’t find work now, and you hardly earn anything. How are we going to live? Obviously I have to find a permanent job—’
‘No, that’s not what this is all about,’ Elvi cut in hastily. ‘That would make what Mum did pointless, Daniel. We want you to go to university and train to be a doctor—’
‘I did this. This is my responsibility and I’m old enough to behave like a man,’ her little but very tall baby brother announced. ‘A man doesn’t turn his back on his family and just go off and become a student without thinking about how they are going to survive!’
Elvi thought a very rude word inside her head, her shoulders slumping, and passed on by into the bedroom to sink down on her bed. Daniel was like a mule when he set his heart on anything and now he too was in full sacrificial mode, just like her mother. What now? If Daniel threw away his chance, it wouldn’t come around again, and if he did that Sally Cartwright would self-destruct because her son going to medical school was the one thing she had in life to focus on and be proud of.
Xan Ziakis had won, Elvi reflected wretchedly, because her family was falling apart before her very eyes. From the kitchen she could hear the distressing noise of her mother and her brother having a major row as Sally tried to dissuade him from his plans and he fought back loudly. She pulled the business card out of her bag and reached for her phone. She didn’t want to speak to a man she hated, a man who was forcing her into a choice that went against everything she had ever valued, so she texted him instead.
Rethink on mistress as you forecast. Need to discuss conditions of servitude.
Across London, Xan checked his phone and laughed out loud, something he didn’t do very often and which spooked him with its unfamiliarity. He had won. He always won, he reminded himself with satisfaction. But even so there was a sweeter taste to this victory than most.
Meet you for dinner at eight...
And he gave her the address, telling her to ask for his table.