Unworldly Secretary, Untamed Greek Read online

  A deep furrow formed between his brows as a possible answer occurred to him. ‘Have you had a better offer?’

  Beth’s confused gaze lifted from the waste paper bin containing the remains of the letter she had redrafted three times already; fortunately, all she had to do was print out another. ‘Offer?’

  ‘Do not be coy,’ he advised, a shade of impatience creeping into his abrupt manner. ‘Has someone approached you?’

  ‘For a job, you mean?’ Her eyes widened at the startling suggestion. Did he really think she’d been headhunted?

  He angled a questioning brow and Beth shook her head. ‘No, I haven’t.’

  His eyes narrowed speculatively as his dark glance swept across her face. ‘If challenge is a problem?’ She was obviously intelligent, though the blank way she was looking at him at the moment suggested otherwise. ‘If you are not feeling stretched with the work here?’

  Theo, who thrived on challenge himself, understood this frustration of boredom and recognised it in others. Many people enjoyed being in a job that they could do on autopilot, but it was possible this woman was not one of those.

  ‘Do you not think it more sensible to discuss the situation with Andreas before you make any rash decisions?’

  The casual way he tossed the suggestion brought a mutinous sparkle to Beth’s eyes as she got to her feet, her chest heaving with indignation.

  Did the man actually think she had made this decision without a great deal of soul-searching? She was in no position to walk away from any job, let alone one this well paid but the alternative was even less palatable.

  It was one thing to fall for the boss; it was another entirely to find yourself expected to help him pick the engagement ring for his girlfriend. After finding herself in that situation the previous week, Beth knew that she did not have the masochistic leaning required for this situation, or this job, any longer.

  It probably made her weak, stupid or both but it wasn’t as if she hadn’t tried to fall out of love with him!

  ‘I can’t do it!’ she yelled. ‘If I have to watch him—’

  Encountering the expression of total amazement etched on Theo Kyriakis’s lean face, she dropped back into her chair and felt a mortified flush climb to her cheeks. ‘You’d better go in,’ she mumbled, allowing her hair to fall in a concealing curtain around her face.

  Conscious of his silent presence, it felt like an age to Beth before he responded. The breath left her body in a sigh of relief as she heard the interconnecting door open.

  Theo’s thoughts still very much occupied by the baffling behaviour of Elizabeth Farley, the unexpected passion in her outburst and the sexiness of her quivering lips, it took him a few seconds to fully assimilate the scene he walked into.

  His brother in a passionate clinch with the woman he had once been engaged to.

  It was a moment of déjà vu—but not quite. On the previous occasion he had walked in on her in another man’s arms, he had not been the intended target audience; it did not seem a big leap to assume that this time he was!

  The scene was strikingly similar but there were significant differences—in both the scene and his reaction to it.

  Last time had involved naked flesh but, happily, his brother and Ariana were both fully dressed. Last time, his illusions had been shattered. He no longer had illusions, romantic or otherwise, which meant he could view the scene with an objectivity—tinged, admittedly, by distaste—he had not been capable of six years ago.

  Six years ago, he’d been romantic and optimistic enough to consider himself the luckiest man in the world; he had met his soulmate—back then, he had firmly believed that such things existed—he had been in love.

  And it had not been unpleasant to be the object of his friends’ envy—he had a beautiful bride-to-be.

  She was still beautiful and his brother clearly thought so too.

  Was it genetic or was making a total fool of yourself with this woman a rite of passage that all Kyriakis men had to experience? If this was indeed so, it was a rite of passage that he had personally passed with flying colours! But no experience, however humiliating, was wasted and he had learnt from it.

  In his professional life Theo had always worked on the premise that everyone had an angle, an agenda; now, thanks to Ariana, he had extended this attitude very successfully to his personal life.

  He continued to enjoy sex—it was, after all, as much of a basic need as eating—but he no longer expected or wanted any mystical connection. He sometimes wondered how long he would have gone on believing the romantic fantasy he had bought into had not fate in the guise of a cancelled flight stepped in—the same fate that had brought him to the open door of his fiancée’s apartment at the same moment as her much older ex-husband, Carl Franks.

  Theo did not anticipate the time would ever come but if, by some cruel twist of fate, or possibly a blow to the head, he ever found himself in a situation where he was tempted to express his carnal appetite with the word love or forever Theo knew that replaying the deeply unpleasant scene etched into his brain would restore him to sanity.

  On that previous occasion Theo had turned on his heel and walked away; that, unfortunately, was not on this occasion an option.

  Now, his responsibility was clearly to save his brother.

  It seemed unlikely that Andreas would appreciate his efforts. Though, on the plus side, Andreas, for all his faults, had never been what anyone would call a romantic and he had never displayed his own embarrassing youthful tendency to put women on pedestals; to recall the idealism of his youth still made Theo wince.

  He wondered briefly whether Ariana had been unable to resist the temptation of his brother when an opportunity had presented itself or if she had gone out of her way to entrap Andreas, not that it mattered. He was genuinely astounded that she thought he would sit back and let this happen; maybe, in retrospect, it had sent the wrong message when he had permitted her to enjoy her petty revenge six years ago.

  At the time he had calculated that responding to the interview she gave to a women’s magazine would have only prolonged the public interest, even though the story she had shared with the readers had been fiction from start to finish.

  I was crazy about Theo but I was shocked when he gave me an ultimatum. Theo made me choose between him and my career. He’s very Greek; he wanted an old-fashioned sort of wife who would live her life through him.

  She had phoned him to tell him that the article had been directly responsible for getting her the contract as the face a new perfume ahead of the model who had been tipped for the job.

  ‘So thanks, Theo,’ she’d said, warning, ‘but you still owe me.’

  Presumably this was payback time.

  ‘Am I interrupting?’

  The ironic question caused the couple, who were in a tight embrace, to pull apart. The woman rather ostentatiously adjusted the low gaping neckline of her dress and the man, looking flushed and embarrassed, dragged a hand through his tousled hair and cleared his throat.

  ‘Theo…I…we…didn’t hear you. We were…’

  Theo arched a questioning brow at his clearly embarrassed brother and smiled. Actually, he wanted to throttle him; how could he not know that Ariana was poison, that she was motivated by two things—revenge and greed?

  Like you did?

  Ariana lifted a beautifully manicured hand to Andreas’s lips and gave a complacent smile as she observed, in a voice that had been likened by more than one smitten man to a purr, ‘Darling, Theo knows what we were doing.’

  Andreas kept a wary eye on his brother as she pressed a lingering kiss to his lips. ‘Well, I don’t need to introduce you two, do I…?’ he said, grinning weakly at his own joke.

  Tall and universally considered good-looking, Andreas Kyriakis had learnt early in life that the warmth and charm of his smile would tip the balance of most situations in his favour, but on this occasion his smile was wary as he reached for the chilled champagne.

  The unease van
ished as his attention turned to his beautiful bride-to-be. As he popped the cork he was unable to stifle a smile of triumph.

  It was his brother’s turn to be second best.

  Ariana had not wanted Theo but she wanted him.

  Chapter Two

  ‘THAT was all a very long time ago. We were children, weren’t we, Theo?’ Ariana took the glass of champagne and looked at the older brother through the mesh of her darkened lashes, experiencing a moment’s uncertainty as she realised that Theo was looking relaxed when he was meant to be denouncing her to Andreas and flinging ultimatums.

  ‘Infants,’ Theo agreed as his sardonic glance brushed the rock sparkling on Ariana’s finger. ‘At least I was.’

  As he smiled and watched the puzzled pout settle on Ariana’s lips he found himself comparing the cosmetically enhanced fullness, which he found not even vaguely inviting, with the softer and much sexier lushness of Elizabeth Farley’s naturally pink lips.

  Well, now he had the cause of the tears and tantrums in the outer office; it appeared he wasn’t the only one unhappy about that diamond.

  ‘You should have been at Ariana’s birthday bash in Paris, Andreas,’ he commented offhandedly.

  He paused, a flicker of something close to shock moving across the reflective surface of his dark eyes—he had just thought sexy, inviting and Elizabeth Farley in the same sentence!

  How had that happened?

  ‘But, no, I remember now, you were doing your exams. What was it, Ariana—your thirtieth?’ he asked innocently.

  Ariana’s careful smile slipped; her blue eyes were hard as she corrected sharply, ‘I was still in my twenties.’

  ‘Yes, that would be right,’ Theo agreed, feeling no remorse for attacking one of Ariana’s weak spots. ‘I did have a thing for older women at that age. Do you remember there were balloons and clowns?’

  ‘There was a famous mime artist,’ Ariana told Andreas, ‘and Theo fell asleep.’

  ‘Age isn’t relevant when you’re in love,’ Andreas said quickly and with enough defensiveness in his manner to reveal this was not an opinion he had formed in the moment. ‘And Theo was never a child; he emerged with a phone in one hand and a contract in the other.’

  Theo accepted the glass from his brother and turned to close the door behind him while he fought to control his temper.

  He would lock his brother in a cellar if that was what it took, but he was hoping to come up with a more imaginative solution.

  Failure was not something that Theo considered.

  Considering failure was not the attitude that had quadrupled the profits of the already prominent international company he’d become head of after his father’s death; considering failure was not why Theo was spoken of as one the most influential figures of the decade, the template for any man who wanted to make his first billion before he was thirty.

  ‘So what is the occasion?’ he drawled, his dark glance sliding once more to the ostentatious diamond before his eyes lifted and he looked directly at his brother. ‘Or is that a foolish question?’ he asked, resisting the strong impulse to yell, Have you lost your tiny mind? And added, ‘I take it congratulations are in order.’

  Ariana fluttered her lashes and waved her left hand at him. ‘We wanted you to be the first to know, Theo.’

  But he wasn’t; the girl who was probably composing a second resignation letter as they spoke had known.

  ‘I’m touched,’ Theo said, his thoughts turning to the problem at hand—namely, how to make his brother see that he would be better off marrying a barracuda, or at least safer.

  Forcibly beating the information into his brother’s head was an appealing option and it would have the added bonus of making Theo feel moderately better in the short term but, as this was the reaction Ariana was probably hoping for, he was not going to give her the opportunity to call him the jealous brother.

  It was actually not jealousy but nausea he felt as he watched Andreas slide his arm around Ariana’s slender waist.

  His brother’s expression was tinged with defiance as he hugged her to him and announced with pride, ‘Ariana has agreed to be my wife. I hope…we hope that this won’t be awkward…’

  There was only a moment’s pause before Theo lifted his glass and drawled, ‘Not awkward for me. Congratulations.’

  Andreas, his relief visible, relaxed and reached for another glass. ‘I’ll just take one out for Beth; she should join us.’

  Theo held out a hand. ‘I’ll do it.’

  Before his brother could respond to his offer, Ariana intervened. ‘Beth?’ the blonde echoed. She adopted an expression of wide-eyed bewilderment as she asked, ‘Who’s Beth?’

  ‘Beth—my secretary, Beth—you passed her on the way in; you’ve seen her every time you’ve been here, darling.’

  ‘Oh, her!’

  Theo watched as the glamorous model dismissed the younger woman with a laugh and went on to convince his brother that to invite his assistant, who was obviously a shy little creature, to join in with what was, after all, a family occasion would only embarrass her.

  Andreas gave a shrug. ‘I suppose you’re right; this is a family thing.’

  Despite his agreement, it was obvious to Theo that his brother was not happy to exclude his assistant.

  Now this was interesting. It did not surprise him that Ariana had picked up on the fact that the girl was desperately in love with her boss; she was about as subtle as a slap in the face—she looked at Andreas as if she was on a carb-free diet and he was freshly baked bread.

  But Ariana’s determination to exclude her did.

  Did she actually view the younger girl as a threat, a possible rival for Andreas’s affections that had to be kept out of the picture?

  His eyes narrowed slightly as he summoned a mental picture of the features of the woman who had not seemed a shy creature when she had yelled at him moments earlier.

  Possibly it was the novelty value of her attitude towards him that made it surprisingly easy for Theo to recall her small heart-shaped face, big eyes and, of course, her soft mouth in such detail.

  He still didn’t think it was possible that anything had happened between his brother and Elizabeth Farley but if Ariana was insecure about the girl, who could make a nun look flamboyant by comparison, if she considered her a threat, what had or hadn’t happened was not the point.

  The point was, he might be able to use Ariana’s obvious insecurities to his advantage…As he listened to his brother describing their plans for the wedding, the bones of a plan began to formulate in his head.

  Beth tried to turn a deaf ear to the sounds emanating from the adjoining room. She was doing quite well until she started at the loud distinctive sound of a champagne cork popping and deleted the page of statistics that had taken her the entire morning to meticulously research.

  ‘Get a grip, Beth!’ she growled with a grimace of self-disgust as some of the moisture pooling in her hazel eyes escaped.

  Biting her wobbling lower lip, she angrily blotted a tear from her cheek with the back of her hand.

  ‘What did you expect, you idiot—that he’d stay single? That he’d wait for you? That was really going to happen!’

  It would not be so bad, Beth told herself as she blotted her face and went about retrieving the deleted figures, if it hadn’t been that woman.

  Obviously, no woman was good enough for Andreas, who possessed the rare qualities that made him perfect husband material, but there was not good enough and then there was Ariana.

  An image of the willowy blonde’s suspiciously smooth face flashed before her eyes and she scowled. There was just something about Ariana Demetrios that really got under her skin—correction, it was everything, from the older woman’s fake smile to her fake breasts.

  The bitchy thought afforded her a brief moment of satisfaction before the self-pity crowded in once more.

  If it had been anyone else he had fallen for, she could have been happy for him…Well, not happy, but r
esigned at least.

  She didn’t feel resigned; she felt…Beth pressed a hand to her stomach and shifted restlessly in her swivel chair…actually, she felt sick. Her dreams had just died and a person needed dreams, or at least she did, even of the impossible variety.

  And while sitting by and watching Andreas work his way through every drop dead gorgeous blonde with a D cup in the City had not been pleasant, it had at least left her room to hope.

  Now, she didn’t have that—he was getting married, and to the toxic Ariana!

  At least she had her pride intact. Andreas had no idea that she had been smitten from that very first smile; Beth comforted herself with this crumb. If she had had a scrap of sense, of course, she reflected miserably, she would have walked back out through the door that first day, but better late than never, she decided, patting the reprinted letter that lay safe in her pocket.

  It might not seem like it now but Andreas had done her a favour—it was about time she got a real life, even a real boyfriend, she told herself, struggling to work up much enthusiasm for the idea.

  She had to start thinking about the future as a place full of exciting possibilities and step one was handing in her notice. Another job might even leave her time for that night class in business studies she had wanted to do for ages.

  ‘Be positive, Beth,’ she told herself as she made a fresh attempt to retrieve the information that Andreas had asked her to have on his desk by Friday.

  Despite her best intentions, she lifted her head, a wistful expression forming on her soft features as she heard the familiar warm tones of her boss’s voice; she heard him laugh, a warm sound, then heard the deeper, more vibrant tone of his brother.

  Her expression hardened as an image of Theo Kyriakis flashed into her head. It always amazed her that the brothers, separated by only five years, could be so dissimilar. How could their shared gene pool produce two men who were opposites in every way imaginable?

  The only thing they did share, apparently, was a weakness for one particular blonde model.