Книга - The Greek Commands His Mistress

The Greek Commands His Mistress
LYNNE GRAHAM


I always get what I want…and I want you.Making billions and bedding beautiful women couldn't make Bastien Zikos forget the lustrous dark hair, haunting eyes and outrageous defiance of Delilah Moore.So Bastien has gone to great lengths to ensure that the one–and only–woman to have ever turned him down returns to him. If Delilah wants to save her father's ailing business, she must agree to Bastien's commands: be his mistress, wear his diamonds and wait for him in his bed!But what will this exacting tycoon do when he discovers that his sassy mistress is a virgin?









‘I don’t apologise for what I want and I always get what I want…and I want you. You should be flattered,’ Bastien told her without hesitation.


‘I’m not flattered. I’m shocked and disgusted at your lack of scruples!’ Lilah told him angrily, her blue eyes bright with condemnation. ‘You’re trying to take advantage of this situation and play on my affection for my family.’

‘I will use any advantage I have and do whatever I have to do to win you,’ Bastien stated, his wide, beautifully shaped mouth firming as he stalked fluidly closer to tower over her. ‘You’re the glittering prize here, Delilah. Doesn’t that thrill you?’

Lilah stiffened even more. ‘No, of course it doesn’t.’

‘It would thrill most women,’ Bastien told her drily, staring down at her with burnished dark golden eyes that sent an intoxicating fizz of awareness and frightening tension shooting through her every limb. ‘A woman likes to be wanted above all others.’

‘I very much doubt that you’re capable of wanting one woman above all others,’ Lilah retorted sharply.

‘Sexual satisfaction is extremely important to me,’ Bastien parried, studying her with cool gravity. ‘I don’t feel any need to explain that or apologise for it.’



Introducing Lynne Graham’s fabulous new duet, full of prestige, power and passion!

These are two alpha males you just won’t be able to put down.




The Notorious Greeks


…and the women they claim!

Whether it’s the boardroom or the bedroom,

Leo and Bastien Zikos are masters of all they survey. Until they each meet a woman who has the temerity to deny them the one thing they most desperately crave…

In a true battle of wills,

Lynne Graham whisks you away to glamorous destinations and epic tales of love in:

The Greek Demands His Heir August 2015

The Greek Commands His Mistress September 2015

Introducing Lynne Graham’s fabulous new duet full of prestige, power and passion!

These are two alpha males you just won’t be able to put down.


The Greek

Commands

His Mistress

Lynne Graham






www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


LYNNE GRAHAM was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen romance reader since her teens. She is very happily married, with an understanding husband who has learned to cook since she started to write! Her five children keep her on her toes. She has a very large dog, which knocks everything over, a very small terrier, which barks a lot, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.


Contents

Cover (#u5fc95a32-aa14-5dc2-8c27-96a617bc8b16)

Introduction (#uf45006ff-172d-5329-9bcd-81fc2aa9c738)

The Notorious Greeks (#ue26e4dd4-e0fc-5222-af93-3c024b9dae17)

Title Page (#ub6075f30-e440-549e-8fb3-384969b80532)

About the Author (#u7360113d-a7e2-5d5c-a130-51266b173f9e)

CHAPTER ONE (#ud11b80ee-facc-5f78-8681-fe8d2a37e46f)

CHAPTER TWO (#u0a836c57-90e7-5ebb-af95-707f31f34d40)

CHAPTER THREE (#u84a99fc2-2956-58e4-a45d-858924d6e10c)

CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)

EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)

Extract (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)


CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_ceef10cb-6841-5135-bfb3-c5d0a49051d4)

‘IT’S OVER, REBA,’ Bastien Zikos pronounced with finality.

The stunning blonde he was addressing flashed him a pained look of reproach. ‘But we’ve been great together.’

‘I’ve never pretended that this is anything more than it is...sex,’ Bastien traded impatiently. ‘Now we’re done.’

Reba blinked rapidly, as though she was fighting back tears, but Bastien wasn’t fooled. The only thing that would reduce Reba to tears would be a stingy pay-off. She was as hard as nails...and he was no more yielding. Indeed, when it came to women he was tough and cold. His mother, an eighteen-carat-gold-digging promiscuous shrew, with a polished line in fake tears and emotion, had been the first to teach her son distrust and contempt for her sex.

‘You got bored with me, didn’t you?’ Reba condemned. ‘I was warned that you had a short attention span. I should’ve listened.’

Impatience shivered through Bastien’s very tall, muscular frame. Reba had been his mistress, and terrific entertainment in the bedroom, but it ended now. And he had given her a small fortune in jewellery. He took nothing for free from women—not sex, not anything.

Bastien turned on his heel. ‘My accountant will be in touch,’ he said drily.

‘There’s someone else, isn’t there?’ the blonde snapped.

‘If there is, it’s none of your business,’ Bastien told her icily, his dark eyes chilling in their detachment as he glanced back at her, his lean, extravagantly handsome features hard as iron.

His driver was waiting outside the building to ferry him to the airport for his scheduled flight north.

A very faint shadow of a smile softened the tough line of Bastien’s mouth as he boarded his private jet. Someone else? Maybe...maybe not.

His finance director, Richard James, was already seated in the opulent cabin. ‘Am I allowed to ask what secret allure—evidently known only to you—exists in this dull northern town we’re heading to, and about the even more dull failed business enterprise you have recently acquired?’

‘You can ask. I don’t promise to answer,’ Bastien traded, flicking lazily through the latest stock figures on his laptop.

‘Then there is something special at Moore Components that I haven’t yet picked up on?’ the stocky blond man prompted ruefully. ‘A patent? A new invention?’

Bastien dealt the other man a wryly amused glance. ‘The factory is built on land worth millions,’ he pointed out drily. ‘A prime site for development close to the town centre.’

‘It’s been years since you played asset-stripper,’ Richard remarked in surprise, while Bastien’s personal staff and his security team boarded at the rear of the cabin.

Bastien had started out buying and selling businesses and breaking them up to attain the maximum possible profit. He had no conscience about such things. Profit and loss was a fact of life in the business world. Trends came and went, as did contracts. Fortunes rose and fell as companies expanded and then contracted again.

Bastien was exceptionally gifted when it came to spotting trends and making millions. He had a mind like a steel trap and the fierce, aggressive drive of a male who had not had a wealthy family to give him his breaks. He was a self-made billionaire, who had started out with nothing, and he took great pride in his independence.

But just at that moment Bastien wasn’t thinking about business. No, indeed. Bastien was thinking about Delilah Moore—the only woman who had ever rejected him, leaving him tormented by lust and outraged by the frustrating new experience. His ego would have withstood the rebuff had she been genuinely uninterested in him, but Bastien knew that had not been the case. He had seen the longing in her eyes, the telling tension of her body when she was close to him, had recognised the breathy intimate note in her voice.

He could forgive much, but unquestionably not her deceitful insistence that she didn’t want him. Fearlessly and foolishly judgemental, she had flung Bastien’s womanising reputation in his face with as much disdain as a fine lady dismissing the clumsy approaches of a street thug. In reaction, Bastien’s rage had burned, and now, almost two years on, it was still smouldering at the lack of respect she had demonstrated—not to mention her lies and her sheer nerve in daring to attack him.

And now fortune had turned the tables on Delilah Moore and her family. Bastien savoured the fact with dark satisfaction. He didn’t believe she would be hurling defiance at him this time around...

* * *

‘How is he?’ Lilah asked her stepmother in an undertone when she spotted her father, Robert, standing outside in the backyard of her small terraced house.

‘Much the same...’ Vickie, a small curvaceous blonde in her early thirties, groaned at the sink, where she was doing the dishes with a whinging toddler clinging to one leg. ‘Of course he’s depressed. He worked all his life to build up the firm and now it’s gone. He feels like a failure, and being unable to get a job hasn’t helped.’

‘Hopefully something will come up soon,’ Lilah pronounced with determined cheer as she scooped up her two-year-old half-sister Clara and settled her down with a toy to occupy her.

When life was challenging, Lilah was convinced that it was best to look for even the smallest reason to be glad and celebrate it. Just then she was busy reminding herself that, while her father had lost his business and his home, their family was still intact and they all had their health.

At the same time Lilah was marvelling at the reality that she had grown so close to the stepmother she had once loathed on sight. She had assumed that Vickie was another one of the good-time girls her father had once specialised in, and only slowly had she come to recognise that, regardless of their twenty-year age gap, the couple were genuinely in love.

Her father and Vickie had married four years earlier and Lilah now had two half-siblings she adored: three-year-old Ben and little Clara.

Currently Lilah’s family were sharing her own rented home. With only two small bedrooms, a cramped living room and an even tinier kitchen, it was a very tight squeeze. But until the council came up with alternative accommodation for her father and his family, or her father found a paying job, they didn’t have much choice.

The impressive five-bedroom home that her father and his wife had once owned was gone now, along with the business. Everything had had to be sold to settle the loans her father had taken out in a desperate effort to keep Moore Components afloat.

‘I’m still hoping that Bastien Zikos will throw your dad a lifeline,’ Vickie confided in a sudden burst of optimism. ‘I mean, nobody knows that business better than Robert, and surely there’s a space somewhere in the office or the factory where your father could still make himself useful?’

Lilah resisted the urge to remark that Bastien was more likely to tie a concrete block to her father’s leg and sink him. After all, the Greek billionaire had offered to buy Moore Components two years earlier and his offer had been refused. Her father should’ve sold up and got out then, she thought regretfully. But the business had been doing well and, although tempted by the offer, the older man had ultimately decided that he couldn’t face stepping down.

It was no consolation to Lilah that Bastien himself had forecast disaster once he’d realised that the firm’s prosperity depended on the retention of one very important contract. Within weeks of losing that contract Moore Components had been struggling to survive.

‘I’d better get to work,’ Lilah remarked in a brittle voice, bending down to pet the miniature dachshund pushing affectionately against her legs in the hope of getting some attention.

Since her family had moved in Skippy had been a little neglected, she conceded guiltily. When had she last taken him for anything other than the shortest of walks?

Thoroughly unsettled, however, by her stepmother’s sanguine reference to Bastien Zikos as a possible saviour, Lilah abandoned Skippy to pull on her raincoat, knotting the belt at her narrow waist.

She was a small, slender woman, with long black hair and bright blue eyes. She was also one of the very few workers still actively employed at Moore Components now it had gone bust. The Official Receivers had come in, taken over and laid off most of the staff. Only the services of the human resources team had been retained, to deal with all the admin involved in closing down the business. Engaged to work just two more days there, Lilah knew that she too would soon be unemployed.

Vickie was already zipping Ben into his jacket, because Lilah left the little boy at nursery school on her way into work.

It was a brisk spring day, with a breeze, and constantly forced to claw her hair out of her eyes, Lilah regretted not having taken the time to put her hair up long before she dropped her little brother off at the school. Unfortunately she had been suffering sleepless nights and scrambling out of bed every morning heavy-eyed, running late.

Ever since she had learned that Bastien Zikos had bought her father’s failed business she had been struggling to hide her apprehension. In that less-than-welcoming attitude to the new owner, however, Lilah stood very much alone. The Receivers had been ecstatic to find a buyer, while her father and various resident worthies had expressed the hope that the new owner would re-employ some of the people who had lost their jobs when Moore Components closed.

Only Lilah, who had once received a disturbing glimpse of the cold diamond-cutting strength of Bastien’s ruthlessness, was full of pessimism and thought the prospect of Bastien arriving to break good news to the local community unlikely.

In fact, if ever a man could have been said to have scared Lilah, it was Bastien Zikos. Everything about the tall, amazingly handsome Greek had unnerved her. The way he looked, the way he talked, the domineering way he behaved. His whole attitude had been anathema to her and she had backed off fast—only to discover, to her dismay, that that kind of treatment only put Bastien into pursuit mode.

Although Lilah was only twenty-three she had distrusted self-assured, slick and handsome men all her life, fully convinced that most of them were lying, cheating players. After all, even her own father had once been like that—a serial adulterer whose affairs had caused her late mother great unhappiness.

Lilah didn’t like to dwell on those traumatic years, when she had begun to hate her father, because it had seemed then that he could not be trusted with any woman—not her mother’s friends, not even his office staff. Mercifully all that behaviour had stopped once her father met Vickie, and since then Lilah had contrived to forge a new and much closer relationship with her surviving parent. Only now Robert Moore had settled down was his daughter able to respect him again and forgive him for the past.

Bastien, on the other hand, was not the family-man type, and he had always enjoyed his bad reputation as a womaniser. He was an unashamed sexual predator, accustomed to reaching out and just taking any woman who took his fancy. He was rich, astute and incredibly good-looking. Women fell like ninepins around him, running to him the instant he crooked an inviting finger. But Lilah had run in the opposite direction, determined not to have her heart broken and her pride trampled by a man who only wanted her for her body.

She was worth more than that, she reminded herself staunchly, as she had done two years earlier—much more. She wanted a man who loved and cared about her and who would stick by her no matter what came their way.

Being powerfully attracted to a man like Bastien Zikos had been a living nightmare for Lilah, and she had refused to acknowledge her reaction to him or surrender to the temptation he provided. Yet even now, two years on, Lilah could still remember her first sight of him across a crowded auction room. Bastien...tall, dark and devastating, with his glorious black-lashed tawny eyes.

She had been there to view a pendant that had once belonged to her mother and which Vickie, unaware of Lilah’s attachment to the piece, had put up for sale. Lilah had planned to buy it back quietly at auction, preferring that option to the challenge of telling Vickie that she had actually been pretty upset when her father had so thoughtlessly given all her late mother’s jewellery to his then live-in girlfriend.

And the first person Lilah had seen that day had been Bastien, black hair falling over his brow, his bold bronzed profile taut as he examined something in his hand while an auction assistant in overalls stood by an open display cabinet. When she had been directed to that same cabinet she had been hugely taken aback to see that Bastien had had her mother’s very ordinary silver sea horse pendant clasped in his lean brown hand.

‘What are you doing with that?’ she’d asked possessively.

‘What’s it to you?’ Bastien had asked bluntly, glancing up and transfixing her with breathtaking dark brown eyes enhanced by lush, curling black lashes.

In that split second he had travelled in her estimation from merely handsome to utterly gorgeous, and her breath had tripped in her throat and her heart had started hammering—as if she stood on the edge of a dangerous precipice.

‘It belonged to my mother.’

‘Where did she get it from?’ Bastien had shot at her, thoroughly disconcerting her.

‘I was with her when she bought it at a car boot sale almost twenty years ago,’ Lilah had confided. although she’d been startled by his question, not to mention the intensity of his appraisal.

‘My mother lost it in London some time around then,’ Bastien had mused in a dark, deep accented drawl that had sent odd little quivers travelling down her spine. He had turned over the pendant to display the engraving on the back, composed of two letter As enclosed in a heart shape. ‘My father Anatole gave it to my mother Athene. What an extraordinary coincidence that it should have belonged to both our mothers.’

‘Extraordinary...’ Lilah had agreed jerkily. as disturbed by his proximity as by his explanation. He’d been close enough that she’d been able to see the dark stubble shadowing his strong jawline and smell the citrus-sharp tenor of his cologne. Her nostrils had flared as she’d taken a hasty step backwards and cannoned into someone behind her.

Bastien had shot out a hand to steady her before she could stumble, long brown fingers closing round her narrow shoulder like a metal vice to keep her upright.

Lilah had jerked back again, breathless and flushed, heat flickering in places she had never felt warm before as her gaze had collided with the tall Greek’s stunning eyes.

‘May I see the pendant before it goes back in the cabinet?’ she had asked curtly, putting out her hand.

‘There’s not much point in you looking at it. I’m planning to buy it,’ Bastien had imparted drily.

Lilah’s teeth had snapped together as though he had slapped her. ‘So am I,’ she had admitted grudgingly.

With reluctance Bastien had settled the pendant into her hand. Her eyes had prickled as she looked at it, because her mother had loved the fanciful piece and had often worn it in summer. The pendant reawakened a few of the happier memories of Lilah’s childhood.

‘Join me for coffee,’ Bastien had urged, flipping the pendant back out of her hand to return it to the hovering assistant.

Lilah had dealt him a bemused look of surprise. ‘It would hardly be a-appropriate,’ she’d stammered. ‘Not when we’re both going to bid on the same lot.’

‘Maybe I’m sentimental. Maybe I would like to hear about where the necklace has been all these years.’

Bastien had dangled that unlikely assurance in front of her like a prize carrot and she had caved in to coffee, feeling that to do otherwise would be rude and unreasonable.

And so her brief acquaintance with Bastien Zikos had begun, Lilah recalled unhappily. Hurriedly she blanked out the memories of that short week she never, ever allowed herself to think about, far too well aware of how mortifyingly long it was taking for her to forget meeting Bastien Zikos. Yet she had never had any regrets about turning him down—not then and not since, even when the most cursory internet search of Bastien’s name always revealed the never-ending parade of different beauties that it took to keep Bastien happy. Quantity rather than quality was what Bastien went for in women, she had often thought, while telling herself that she had made the only decision she could...even if he still hated her for it.

As Lilah walked through the factory gates, saddened by the lack of vehicles and bustle that had used to characterise the once busy site, her mobile phone rang. Digging it out, she answered it. It was Josh, whom she had gone to university with, and he was suggesting she join him and a few friends for a night out. Every six weeks or so they met up as a group, went for a meal and out to see a film. One or two of the group were couples, the others simply friends. Josh, for example, was recovering from a broken engagement, and Lilah’s last boyfriend had dumped her as soon as her father’s business had hit the skids.

‘Tomorrow night?’ Lilah queried, thinking about it and liking the idea, because evenings in her crowded little house were currently far from relaxing and the idea of getting out was attractive. ‘What time?’

Her friends would take her mind off things, she reflected gratefully, and stop her constantly fretting about a situation she had no control over. Unfortunately for Lilah an instinctive need to fix broken things and rescue people and animals ran deep and strong in her veins.

* * *

From the main office on the top floor, Bastien watched Delilah Moore cross the Moore Components car park with laser-sharp attention. She was still the most beautiful creature he had ever seen, he acknowledged, angry that that should still strike him as being the case. There had been a lot of women in his bed since he had met Robert Moore’s daughter, but none of them had held his interest for very long.

Bastien still saw Delilah in the same light as he had first seen her, with her silky black curling cloud of hair falling almost to her waist and her sapphire-blue eyes electrifyingly noticeable against her creamy, perfect skin. Even wearing worn jeans and scuffed biker boots she’d had that casual effortlessly elegant look which some women had no matter what they wore.

Then, as now, he had told himself impatiently that she wasn’t his type. With a single exception he had always gone for tall curvy blondes. Delilah was tiny, and very slender—the complete opposite of voluptuous. He just couldn’t explain what made her so appealing to him, and that annoyed Bastien because anything he couldn’t control or understand annoyed him.

This time around, he would get close enough to see all her flaws, he promised himself grimly.

* * *

‘The new boss is in the building!’ carolled Lilah’s colleague Julie as soon as she walked into the small office the two women shared.

Halfway out of her coat, Lilah froze. ‘When did he arrive?’

‘The security guard said it was barely seven...talk about an early start!’ Julie gushed admiringly. ‘Mr Zikos has brought a whole team with him—I think that’s hopeful, don’t you? He is seriously good-looking too.’

Lilah’s coat finally made it on to the hook. Her slender spine was rigid. ‘Really?’

‘Absolutely beautiful...like a male supermodel. Maggie made coffee for him and even she agreed,’ Julie said, referring to the office cleaner and tea lady, a known man-hater, who was hard to impress. ‘But Maggie said it isn’t his first visit. Apparently he was here a couple of years back?’

‘Yes, he was. He was interested in buying this place then.’

‘You knew that? You’ve seen him before?’ Julie exclaimed in consternation. ‘Why didn’t you mention it?’

‘With all that’s been going on, it didn’t seem important,’ Lilah muttered, sitting down at her desk and closing her ears while Julie lamented her lack of interest in the new owner of Moore Components.

A young man with a neatly clipped beard entered their office an hour later. ‘Miss Moore?’ he asked, stopping in front of Lilah’s desk. ‘I’m one of Mr Zikos’ team—Andreas Theodakis. Mr Zikos would like to see you in his office.’

Lilah lost colour and tried and failed to swallow, scolding herself for the instantaneous fear that washed through her. Of course Bastien wasn’t going to harm her in any way. Why did even the thought of him charge her with near panic?

As she mounted the stairs she breathed slow and deep to compose herself. Bastien would want to crow, wouldn’t he? He had got the business at a knockdown price and the Moore family had lost it, exactly as he had predicted. Rich, powerful men probably liked to boast whenever they got the opportunity, she reasoned uncertainly. For, really, her brain cried, what did she know about rich, powerful men? After all, Bastien was the only rich and powerful man she had ever met.

He was using her father’s office, and it felt exceedingly strange to Lilah to be entering such a familiar space and find her father absent. Her eyes flickered super-fast over Bastien without pausing, as she registered that no other person was to be present for their meeting. Was that a good sign or a bad one?

‘Mr Zikos,’ she framed tightly.

‘Oh. I think you can still call me Bastien,’ he derided, studying her while wondering how on earth she could look so good in a plain black skirt of indeterminate length and a shapeless camel sweater.

Curly black hair lay in tumbled skeins across her shoulders. It was still the same length. He would have been vexed had she had it cut shorter. But, no, it was unchanged, and there was still something strangely fascinating about that long, long black hair that had ensnared his attention the instant he first saw it. And something equally memorable about the striking contrast between her bright blue eyes and her pale porcelain-fine skin.

Forced to look at him properly for the first time, Lilah froze, willing her rigid facial muscles to relax, ensuring that she betrayed no reaction to him. It was an exercise she had become adept at using in self-defence two years earlier. Her breath rattled in her throat, as if she had been dropped unexpectedly into a dark and haunted house where she was surrounded by unseen threats.

Bastien stood about six foot four inches tall, a clear twelve inches bigger than she was, which meant she could easily get away with focusing on his blue silk tie. But the glance she had got at him as she’d entered the office was still etched on her brain—as if it had been burned there in lines of fire with a red-hot poker.

Whether she liked it or not, Julie had hit it right on the nail: Bastien did have a supermodel look, from his sculpted high cheekbones, classically arrogant nose and strong jawline to his full, incredibly kissable lips. Uncomfortable warmth washed up over her skin and she reddened, gritting her teeth, because she knew that she was blushing and that he would notice. Why would he notice? Because Bastien never missed a trick.

‘Take a seat, Delilah...’ Bastien indicated one of the armchairs beside the coffee table in one corner of the spacious panelled room.

‘It’s Lilah,’ she corrected, and not for the first time.

He had always insisted on calling her by her full name—that name with its biblical connotations, which had caused her so much embarrassment from primary right up through to secondary school.

‘I prefer De-lilah,’ Bastien purred, with all the satisfaction of a jungle cat who had been lapping cream.

Lilah sank down in the chair, her slender spine too rigid to curve into the support of the seat. Her entire attention was locked on to Bastien and she clashed unwarily with his truly spectacular eyes. Tawny brown, golden in sunshine, literally mesmerising and surrounded by the most fabulous velvety black lashes, she reflected dizzily, plunged into one of the terrifying time-out-of-time lapses of concentration and discipline which Bastien had frequently inflicted on her two years earlier.

‘I can’t think why you would want to see me,’ Lilah told him quietly, just as the door opened and Maggie bustled in with a tray of coffee and biscuits.

Lilah jumped up and immediately removed the tray from the older woman’s grasp. Maggie had chosen to work well beyond retirement and, although she would never have admitted the fact, Maggie now found it difficult to carry heavy trays.

‘I would’ve been fine,’ Maggie scolded.

Lilah settled the tray of fancy silverware and fine china which her father’s secretary had kept for VIPs down on the table. Maggie departed. Lilah poured the coffee and sugared Bastien’s before she had even thought about what she was doing.

‘You can’t think why I would want to see you?’ Bastien queried, unimpressed by the claim. ‘How very modest you are...’

Suspecting him of mockery, Lilah flushed and extended his coffee to him. He reached for the cup and took a sip of the black, heavily sweetened coffee, smiling when he discovered that she had got it right.

Striving to play it cool and composed, Lilah lifted her own cup and saucer—but that smile...oh, that smile...was flipping up the corners of his beautiful mouth, transforming his lean, dark forbidding features with an almost boyish grin. Helplessly she stared, sapphire-blue eyes widening.

‘Today,’ Bastien drawled lazily, ‘you are a very influential young woman, because it is in your power to decide what happens next to Moore Components.’

Lilah kept on staring at him, literally locked into immobility by that astonishing assurance. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’


CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_49604ef2-33a0-5d1f-b7c2-bd1d4b4d33bc)

BASTIEN STUDIED HER, inordinate satisfaction glittering in his dark deep-set eyes. He had waited a long time for this particular moment and it was giving him even more of a kick than he had hoped.

‘I have a few options to put before you. The fate of Moore Components is now entirely in your hands.’

Lilah set her coffee down with a jarring rattle of china and leapt upright. ‘Why the heck would you say something like that to me?’ she demanded.

‘Because it’s the truth. I don’t lie and nor do I backtrack on promises,’ Bastien asserted levelly. ‘I assure you that what ultimately happens to this business will be solely your responsibility.’

Still frozen in place, Lilah blinked rapidly while she battled to concentrate. ‘I don’t understand. How can that be?’

‘You’re not that naïve,’ Bastien drawled with a curled lip. ‘You know I want you.’

‘Still?’ Lilah gasped in astonishment at that declaration, because after all two years had passed since their last meeting, and even six months on she would have expected Bastien barely to recall her name, never mind her face.

The faintest scoring of colour had flared across Bastien’s high cheekbones and he parted his lips, even white teeth flashing. ‘Still,’ he confirmed, with forbidding emphasis.

Lilah didn’t understand how that was possible. How could he still find her attractive after all the other women he had been with in the intervening months? It didn’t make sense to Lilah at all.

It was not as if she was some staggeringly beautiful woman who regularly stopped men dead in the street. Admittedly she had never had a problem attracting men, but retaining their interest when she wasn’t prepared to slide casually into bed with them had proved much more of a challenge. In fact, most men walked away fast sooner than test her boundaries, choosing to assume that she was either devoutly religious or desirous of a wedding-ring-sized commitment before she would share her body.

Lilah dropped back into the seat she had vacated, her brain buzzing with bewildered thoughts. How could Bastien’s continuing physical desire for her have anything to do with the business and its prospects? And how could he still find her attractive when he had so many other more sophisticated women in his life? Was it simply the fact that Lilah had once said no to him? Could a male as clever as Bastien be that outrageously basic?

‘I don’t want to keep you all morning, so I’ll run through the three options.’

‘Three...options...?’ Lilah queried even more uneasily.

‘Option one—you choose to walk away from me,’ Bastien extended grimly, shooting her a glance of warning that made her pale. ‘In that event I sell the machinery in the factory and sell the site to a developer. I already have a good offer for the land and it would turn an immediate healthy profit...’

Lilah dropped her head, appalled at that suggestion. The town needed this factory for employment. The closure of Moore Components had already damaged the small town’s economy. Shops and entertainment venues were suffering from a downturn. People were struggling to find work because there were few other local jobs, and many had already had to put their houses up for sale because they could no longer afford their mortgages.

Lilah was well-acquainted with the human cost of unemployment and had done what little she could in her HR capacity to offer her father’s former workers guidance and advise them on suitable retraining schemes.

‘Option two—you choose only to spend one night with me,’ Bastien framed, impervious to the slight sound Lilah made as her lips parted on a stricken gasp of disbelief. ‘I will then make the business function again for at least a year. It will cost me money and it will be a waste of time, because the factory requires sustained and serious investment to win and retain new contracts. But if that’s the best I can get from you I’m prepared to do it...’

Lilah lifted her head and focused on Bastien’s lean darkly handsome face in sheer wonderment. ‘Let me get this straight. You are using Moore Components as a means of bargaining with me for my body?’ she spelled out incredulously. ‘Are you out of your mind?’

‘Be grateful. If I didn’t want you there would be nothing at all to put on the table. But for you I wouldn’t even have bothered coming up here. I simply would have sold the land,’ Bastien informed her with lethal cool.

Lilah had great difficulty hinging her jaw closed again, because she was stupefied by the options he was laying out before her. ‘You can’t possibly want me that much,’ she told him involuntarily. ‘That would be crazy.’

‘Obviously I’m crazy.’ Bastien dealt Lilah a slow, lingering appraisal that began at her lush pink lips, segued down to the small pert breasts outlined by her sweater and glossed over her delicately curved hipline to her shapely knees and ankles. ‘You have terrific legs,’ he mused, fighting the sting of awakening interest at his groin with fierce determination.

Two years back Delilah Moore had kept him in a state of virtually constant arousal that had given him sleepless nights and forced him into cold showers. He was damned if he was going to let her have that much of an effect on him again! He wanted her and that was that—but their affair would be on his terms only.

Option two was probably the wisest choice for him, because once he had bedded her, her fascination would surely wane fast and he would tire of her as he had tired of all her predecessors. But although he was convinced that one night should completely exorcise her from his fantasies, he still didn’t want to be forced to agree to that restriction.

Lilah yanked her skirt down over her knees, suddenly boiling up below her clothing, her whole skin surface prickling and reacting to his visual assessment with a rush of heat. He was such a very sexual male, she conceded in bewilderment. The atmosphere pulsed with astonishing tension and she hurriedly snatched her attention from him, recognising the swelling tautness of her nipples and the surge of ungovernable heat between her thighs as totally unacceptable reactions.

But she couldn’t prevent those reactions—couldn’t stop them happening around Bastien. On that level two years earlier Bastien had drawn her like a moth to a flame, because the wild, seething excitement he’d evoked in her had been incredibly seductive.

In a desperate attempt to regain control of her disordered thoughts, Lilah said with careful precision, ‘I refuse to believe you’re serious about this, Bastien. A man of your stature and wealth cannot possibly want a woman like me so much that he would make such a bargain.’

‘What would you know about it?’ Bastien cut in, whiplash-abrupt in that dismissal. ‘I haven’t reached option three yet.’

Outraged by his persistence, Lilah rose to her feet again. ‘I refuse to listen to any more of this nonsense!’

‘Then I sell this place today,’ Bastien fired at her with cold finality as she walked towards the door. ‘Your choice, your decision, Delilah. You’re lucky I’m giving you options.’

Lilah was still and then spun round again, black hair sliding in a glossy fall across her shoulders. ‘Lucky?’ she exclaimed in angry disbelief, her temper stirring as she thought about the contemptible offer he had made to her. Bottom line: Bastien Zikos was willing to do just about anything to get her into bed. Was she supposed to be pleased about that? Was it normal to feel as insulted as she did...as hurt? Why did she feel hurt?

‘With my backing you can wave a magic wand here and be a heroine if you want to be,’ Bastien imparted very drily. ‘Option three—I do almost anything you want, up to and including employing your father as consultant and manager.’

That startling suggestion not only stopped Lilah’s thoughts mid-track and froze her feet to the carpet, it also made everything else inside her head blur. For a split second she pictured her deeply troubled father restored to some semblance of his former confident, energetic self, able to earn again and provide for his family. What a huge difference that would make to Robert Moore!

‘So that’s what it takes to stop you walking out...you’re a real Daddy’s girl!’ Bastien remarked with galling amusement. ‘Are you ready to listen now, and stop flouncing around dramatically and asking me if I’m crazy? The answer to that is that I’m only crazy to have you in my bed...’

Colour blossomed below Lilah’s skin and ran up to her hairline in a scalding surge. She could barely credit that he had said that without even a shade of discomfiture. But then she reckoned it would take something considerably more shocking than sex to embarrass a male as resolute and dominant as Bastien. ‘All right...for my father’s sake I’ll agree to hear you out,’ she conceded with flat reluctance.

‘Then sit!’ Bastien indicated the chair.

It occurred to Lilah that Bastien had spoken to her just then as she spoke to Skippy when the dog was playing up.

Raising a wry brow at his disrespectful mode of addressing her, she sat down again. ‘Option three?’ she reminded him succinctly.

‘You become my mistress and stay with me for as long as I want you.’

‘Keeping a mistress is an astonishingly old-fashioned concept,’ Lilah remarked, to mask the reality that inwardly she was knocked sideways by that proposition.

Bastien shifted a broad shoulder in a careless shrug. ‘In my world it’s the norm.’

‘I assumed sex slavery of that sort ended about a hundred years ago.’

‘But then you don’t have a clue what the role entails,’ Bastien said drily, watching her while picturing her slender body sheathed in decadent silk and lace and diamonds purely for his private enjoyment.

The image gave him both a high and a hard-on.

‘In return for your agreement to become my mistress I will set this business up and invest in it. As the owner of a network of companies I can easily provide contracts to keep the factory busy. I will instruct your father to rehire his former workforce. After all, skilled employees are difficult to replace. With my full financial support, virtually everything could go back to the way it was before Moore Components lost that crucial contract.’

Lilah was floored by those comprehensive assurances. Now she understood Bastien’s jibe about her having the opportunity to play the heroine and wave a magic wand. Everything back the way it was! How many times in recent months had she longed for that to happen and for everyone to be content again instead of stressed, broken and unhappy? Countless times.

Bastien was a very powerful, enormously wealthy male, and perhaps for the first time she fully appreciated that reality—because she knew it would take thousands and thousands of pounds to get the factory up and running again, never mind build the business up to survive in the long term. It would be a hugely expensive challenge, but it would turn around the lives of so many people, Lilah reflected with a sinking heart.

‘Like Tinker Bell, you’re quite taken with the offer of a magic wand?’ Bastien quipped with brooding amusement as he watched her expressive face intently. ‘I suppose your response will depend on how much of a do-gooder you are. So far you’re ranging fairly high in that list of good works now that you have your whole family living with you. You’re keeping them too, aren’t you?’

Lilah was furious that he should have access to such facts about her personal life, and the label of ‘do-gooder’ offended her. ‘I’m not a do-gooder.’

‘By my estimation you are,’ Bastien countered drily. ‘You’ve saved your wicked stepmother from living in emergency accommodation and you also raise funds for abandoned dogs and starving children.’

Lilah stood up again in a sudden motion. ‘How on earth do you know so much about me?’

‘Obviously I’ve kept an eye on developments here.’

‘My stepmother is not wicked,’ Lilah added uncomfortably. ‘How do you know my family are staying with me? How do you know about the volunteer work I’ve done for the dog sanctuary?’

‘I had to check you out before I came up here,’ Bastien pointed out impatiently. ‘If you’d got married or picked up a boyfriend since we last met there would have been little point in my approaching you. I don’t like to have my time wasted.’

Lilah’s chin lifted. ‘I did have a boyfriend!’ she bit out resentfully.

‘Not for very long. He dropped you the minute your father’s business went down.’

Angry words brimmed on Lilah’s tongue, but she swallowed them whole because she wasn’t going to sink to the level of arguing with Bastien over someone as unworthy of her defence as Steve, her ex-boyfriend.

Ironically, Bastien’s reading of Steve’s behaviour exactly matched her own. Steve had turned out to be very ambitious. He had started dating Lilah when Moore Components was thriving and had tried to persuade her father to take him on as a junior partner. It mortified her that Bastien should know about the revealing speed and timing of Steve’s defection.

Rigid with self-control, Lilah lifted her head high. ‘I can’t believe that you really mean those options you outlined. They’re immoral.’

‘I’m not a very moral man,’ Bastien told her without hesitation. ‘I don’t apologise for what I want and I always get what I want...and I want you. You should be flattered.’

‘I’m not flattered. I’m shocked and disgusted at your lack of scruple!’ Lilah told him angrily, her blue eyes bright with condemnation. ‘You’re trying to take advantage of this situation and play on my affection for my family.’

‘I will use any advantage I have and do whatever I have to do to win you. Of course whether or not you choose to accept one of my two preferred options is entirely your decision,’ Bastien pointed out, his wide, beautifully shaped mouth firming as he stalked fluidly closer to tower over her. ‘You’re the glittering prize here, Delilah. Doesn’t that thrill you?’

Lilah stiffened even more. ‘No, of course it doesn’t.’

‘It would thrill most women,’ Bastien told her drily, staring down at her with burnished dark golden eyes that sent an intoxicating fizz of awareness and frightening tension shooting through her every limb. ‘Most women like to be wanted above all others.’

‘I very much doubt that you’re capable of wanting one woman above all others,’ Lilah retorted with sharp emphasis. ‘Women seem to be very much interchangeable commodities to you, so I really can’t understand why you should have a fixation about me.’

‘It’s not a fixation,’ Bastien growled, dark eyes hard, strong jawline squared.

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake—call a spade a spade, Bastien!’ Lilah countered in exasperation. ‘At least look at the lengths you’re willing to go to to make me do what you want...does that strike you as normal?’

‘Sexual satisfaction is extremely important to me,’ Bastien parried, studying her with cool gravity. ‘I don’t feel any need to explain that or to apologise for it.’

Lilah felt like someone beating her head up against a brick wall. Bastien didn’t listen to what he didn’t want to hear. He went full steam ahead, like an express train racing down a track. He saw what he wanted and he went for it, regardless of reason and the damage he might do.

‘Delilah... I would treat you well...’ Bastien murmured huskily.

‘What you’ve suggested...it’s out of the question—impossible!’ she exclaimed in a furious outburst of frustration. ‘Not to mention downright sleazy!’

Bastien lifted a lean tanned hand and scored a reproving fingertip along the strained line of her lush lower lip. ‘I am never, ever sleazy...’ He positively purred. ‘You have a lot to learn about me.’

Subjected to even that minor physical contact, she felt her whole skin surface break out in enervated goose bumps and jerked back a hasty step.

‘What I’ve learnt today, just listening to you, is more than enough,’ she stressed in biting rejection. ‘You talk as if you’re playing some amusing game with me, but what you’re proposing is offensive and unthinkable. And nothing you could hope to offer would persuade my father to accept a job that would literally sell me to the highest bidder as part of the deal!’

Bastien scanned her flushed and furious face and the sapphire-blue eyes shooting defiant sparks at him. ‘Only an idiot would suggest that you tell your father the truth and nothing but the truth,’ he derided. ‘All you would need to tell your family is that I have offered you your dream job, which will entail a lot of foreign travel and an enviable lifestyle.’

With a reflexive little shudder at that Machiavellian suggestion, Lilah snapped, ‘My goodness, you have absolutely everything worked out!’

‘But will you take the bait?’ Bastien breathed in a roughened undertone. ‘You have until ten tomorrow morning to make your decision and choose an option.’

‘You haven’t given me even one reasonable or fair option,’ Lilah condemned bitterly.

‘If you don’t give me your answer tomorrow I will sell,’ Bastien warned her with chilling bite.

Her narrow spine went poker-straight with the force of her resentment and her slender hands knotted into fists. It was far from being the first time she had been in Bastien’s company and had longed to knock his teeth down his throat.

In the smouldering silence, Bastien released his breath in a hiss of impatience. ‘It doesn’t have to be like this between us, Delilah. We could discuss this over dinner tonight.’

Lilah flung him a shaken and furious look over her shoulder as her perspiring hand worked frantically at the doorknob. ‘Dinner? You’ve got to be joking! Anyway, I’m already booked,’ she fibbed, refusing to give him the idea that she sat in every night.

‘To see who?’ Bastien demanded, pressing a hand against the door to prevent her from opening it.

‘That’s none of your business.’ Refusing to fight for control of the door, Lilah stood back and folded her arms defensively. ‘Nothing I do is any of your business. You may own Moore Components, but that’s the only thing you own around here.’

Dark eyes glittering brilliant as stars, Bastien flung the door wide for her exit. ‘I wouldn’t be so sure of that, kouklamou.’

Lilah hurried downstairs and straight into the cloakroom, needing a moment before she returned to work and faced Julie and her curiosity. She was shaking and sweating, and she held her trembling hands below the cold tap while snatching in a deep sustaining breath, praying for self-control.

Unfortunately Bastien had struck her on her weakest flank. The very idea that she could rescue her family from their current predicament had turned her heart inside out with hope and desperation. And what about all the other people whose lives would be transformed by the opportunity to regain the jobs they had lost? Jobs in a revitalised business which would be much more secure with Bastien’s backing? All their former workers would be ecstatic at the idea of the factory reopening.

But Bastien Zikos had put an incredibly high price on what that miracle would cost Lilah in personal terms. It was too much to think about, she thought weakly, anger still hurtling through her, tensing her every muscle. How could he do that? How could he stand there in front of her and outline such demeaning options? A one-night stand...or a one-night stand which ran and ran until he got bored? Some choice! What had she ever done to him to deserve such treatment?

Her temples thumped dully—a stress headache was forming. She was stressed, out of her depth and barely able to think straight, she acknowledged heavily. Hadn’t she felt very much like that when she was first exposed to Bastien’s soul-destroying charm?

Of course that charm had not been much in evidence just now, during their office meeting, she conceded bitterly. It had, however, been very much in evidence when Bastien had taken her for coffee at the auction house two years earlier.

After a casual exchange of names and information Bastien had taken out his business card to show her that his company logo was, in fact, a seahorse. The awareness that he also had a strong family connection to the pendant had made Lilah relax more in his company. Noting his sleek gold Rolex watch, and the sharp tailoring of his stylish suit, she had recognised the hallmarks of wealth and suspected that it was highly unlikely that she could hope to outbid him at auction.

She had teased him about the amount of sugar he put in his coffee and a wickedly sensual smile had curved his lips, sending her heartbeat into overdrive. Oh, yes. At first sight she had been hugely, hopelessly attracted to Bastien and had hung on his every word.

‘You still haven’t explained one thing,’ Bastien had mused. ‘If you value it so much, why is the pendant being sold at auction?’

She had explained about the jewellery her father had given her stepmother. ‘Now Vickie’s having a big clean-out, and I didn’t want to risk upsetting her by admitting how I felt.’

‘If you don’t ask, you don’t get,’ Bastien had censured drily. ‘Not that I’m complaining. Your delicate sense of diplomacy has worked in my favour. If the necklace hadn’t gone on sale I wouldn’t have known where it was. I’ve been trying to track it down for years.’

‘I suppose you remember your mother wearing it?’ she remarked.

‘No, but I remember my father giving it to her,’ Bastien had countered rather bleakly, his dramatic dark eyes veiled while his beautiful mouth had tightened unexpectedly. ‘I was about four years old and I honestly believed we were the perfect family.’

‘Nothing wrong with that,’ she had quipped with a big smile, trying to picture him as a little kid, thinking that he had probably been very cute, with a shock of black hair and brown eyes deep enough to drown in.

‘Irrespective of what happens at the auction tomorrow, promise that you will have dinner with me tomorrow evening,’ he’d urged, and had invited her to his hotel.

‘I’m still planning to bid,’ she warned him.

‘I can afford to outbid most people. Dinner?’ he’d pressed again.

And she had crumbled, like sand smoothed over and reshaped by a powerful wave.

Bastien hadn’t made the connection between her and Moore Components, and it had been a big surprise for both of them when her auction disappointment had been followed by an unexpected meeting with Bastien in her father’s office the next day. Dinner at Bastien’s hotel had been replaced by dinner at her father’s home, to which she had been invited as well.

When a phone call had claimed Robert Moore’s attention he had asked his daughter to see Bastien out to his car.

‘If you’re expecting me to congratulate you on your win, you’re destined for disappointment,’ Lilah had warned Bastien on their way down the stairs. ‘You paid a ludicrous amount for that pendant.’

Bastien laughed out loud. ‘Says the woman who bidded me up to that ludicrous amount!’

Lilah reddened. ‘Well, I had to at least try to get it. Why are you seeing my father?’ she had asked abruptly as they came to a halt in the car park.

‘I’m interested in acquiring his business and he wants some time to think my offer over. You work here. You could be my acquisition too,’ Bastien had said huskily, sexily in her ear, making the tiny hairs at her nape stand up while an arrow of heat shot straight down into her pelvis.

Unsettled by the strength of her reaction to him, Lilah had stiffened. ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think Dad will sell up either—not when he’s riding the crest of a wave.’

‘That’s the best time to sell.’

Bastien had dealt her a dark, lingering appraisal that had made her toes curl even as her gaze widened at the sight of the limousine that had rolled up to collect him. She’d been impressed but troubled by the obviously large difference in their financial status and had resolved to look him up on the internet as soon as she got the time.

‘I wish your father hadn’t invited us to his family dinner.’ Bastien had sighed. ‘I was looking forward to having you all to myself at my hotel.’

Unease had filtered through Lilah. He was coming on very strong, and while initially she’d been delighted by that, she was unnerved by the suspicion that he might be expecting her to spend the night with him. An impulsive move like that would have been way outside Lilah’s comfort zone.

But at the same time still being a virgin at the age of twenty-one had not been part of Lilah’s life plan either. She just hadn’t met anyone at university who had attracted her enough to take that plunge. Lilah didn’t give her trust easily to men, and by the end of first year, after standing by and watching friends commit too fast to casual relationships that had ended in tears and recriminations, she had decided that she would definitely hold off on sex until she met a man who cared enough about her to be prepared to wait until she was as ready for intimacy as he was.

‘Bastien’s really into you in a big way,’ Vickie had whispered in amusement after dinner at her father’s comfortable home that evening. ‘He watches your every move. And although I prefer men to be more grey round the edges, he is gorgeous.’

Before Lilah had been able to call a taxi, Bastien had offered to run her home. Within seconds of them getting into the limo Bastien had reached for her with a determined hand and kissed her with a hungry, sensual ferocity that had set her treacherous body on fire. She had pulled back, trying to cool the moment down, but Bastien had ignored her.

‘Spend the night with me,’ he’d pressed, his thumb stroking her wrist where her pulse was racing insanely fast.

‘I hardly know you,’ she had pointed out hastily.

‘You can get to know me in bed,’ Bastien had quipped.

‘That’s not how I operate, Bastien,’ Lilah had murmured, reddening with discomfiture. ‘I would need to know you really well before I slept with you.’

‘Diavelos... I’m only here for another forty-eight hours!’ Bastien had ground out incredulously, studying her as though she was as strange and incongruous a sight as a snowball in the desert.

‘I’m sorry. I can’t change the way I am,’ Lilah had told him quietly as the limousine drew up outside the terraced house where she lived.

‘You’re my polar opposite. I don’t get to know women really well. To be brutally honest, sex is the only intimacy I want or need,’ Bastien had breathed in a driven undertone.

‘We’re like oil and water,’ Lilah had mumbled, hurriedly vacating his car and heading indoors, to heave a sigh of relief as soon as the door was closed behind her.

In the aftermath of that uneasy parting tears had burned her eyes and she’d been immediately filled with self-loathing. She was guilty of having woven silly romantic dreams about Bastien. Hadn’t she just got what she deserved for being so naïve? He was only interested in a night of casual sex—nothing more. It wasn’t a compliment...it was a slap in the face—and a wake-up call to regain control of her wits.

Although Lilah had initially been attracted by Bastien’s stunning good looks, she had been infinitely more fascinated by his strong personality, and the seemingly offbeat way his brain worked. That same night she’d sat up late, looking Bastien up on the internet, and the sheer number of women she’d seen pictured with him had shaken her almost as much as his reputation for being a womaniser. Bastien Zikos slept around and he was faithless.

At first Lilah had been appalled by what she had discovered, but there had also been an oddly soothing element to those revelations. After all, what she had found out only emphasised that she could never have any kind of liaison with Bastien: he didn’t do relationships...and she didn’t do one-night stands.

Sinking back to the present, Lilah was dismayed to register that her eyes were swimming with tears. She blinked them back and freshened up, writing off her far too emotional frame of mind to the shocks Bastien had dealt her. She hated the way that Bastien always got to her—cutting through her common sense and reserve like a machete to make his forceful point.

‘You were a long time upstairs with the boss,’ Julie commented as Lilah dropped back behind her desk.

‘Mr Zikos wanted to discuss his plans for the business,’ she said awkwardly.

‘Oh...wow!’ Julie gushed, fixing wide, speculative eyes on Lilah’s flushed and taut face. ‘You mean he’s planning to keep Moore Components open? He’s not just going to sell up?’

Lilah cursed her loose tongue. ‘No, his selling up is a possibility too,’ she backtracked hastily, fearful of setting off a round of rumours that would raise false hopes. ‘I don’t think he’s actually made a final decision yet.’

With a regretful sigh, Julie returned to work. But Lilah found that she could not concentrate for longer than thirty seconds. Aftershocks from her meeting with Bastien were still quaking through her.

He might as well have taken the moon down from the sky and offered it to her, she reflected in a daze. Her family were suffering—just like everybody else caught up in the crash of Moore Components. The little half-brother and half-sister so dear to Lilah’s heart no longer had a garden to play in, and their more elaborate toys had been disposed of because there was no room for such things in Lilah’s little house. Her father was suffering from depression and taking medication. The day the factory had closed the bottom had dropped out of his world. Without work, without his business, Robert Moore simply didn’t know what to do with himself.

Lilah blinked back stinging tears. In spite of the troubled years, when her parents had been unhappily married, Lilah still loved her father very much. She had only been eleven years old when her mother had died very suddenly from an aneurysm. Her father had been very much there for her while she was grieving, but he was also a very hard worker, who had soon returned to work, slaving eighteen hours a day to build up his business.

Now, shorn of his once generous income and humbled, he felt less of a man—and at his age, with a failed business under his belt, who was likely to employ him? Although Lilah had told herself that she shouldn’t be thinking about it, she could not resist picturing her father returning to work with a new spring in his step.

She blanked out the thought.

Was she really prepared to become a mistress?

Bastien’s sex slave?

An extraordinary little chirrup of excitement twisted through Lilah and she was seriously embarrassed for herself. She was pretty sure Bastien wouldn’t be expecting a virgin. But what did that matter? It was not as though she was seriously considering his sordid options, was it?

Still mentally far removed from work, she sank back two years again into her memories and recalled the flowers Bastien had sent her the morning after that family dinner and her rejection of what little he’d had to offer her. He had shown up on her doorstep the following evening as well, displaying a persistence that had taxed her patience. When he had tried to persuade her to join him that night for dinner she had lost her temper with him.

Why had she lost her temper?

Remembering why, Lilah paled and then flushed a painful pink. Utterly mesmerised by Bastien, she had already started falling for him. Being rudely confronted with the reality that he was a stud, who only wanted her for sex, had been hurtful and demeaning. That was why she had lost her temper. She had been angry with herself because somehow he had contrived to tempt her with that single erotically charged kiss and had made her question her own values. She had resented his power over her and she had flung her knowledge of his bad reputation in his teeth and called him a man whore.

Lilah was still secretly cringing from that memory as she walked home after work. Attacking Bastien had been wrong. He was what he was, and she was what she was. They were very different people. Insulting him had been ill-mannered, pointless and immature. His dark eyes had glittered like black ice, the rage in his stunning gaze filling her with fright. But he had done nothing, said nothing. He had simply turned on his heel and got back into his opulent limousine to drive away.

A few weeks later an unexpected gift had arrived for her at work. She had unwrapped an almost exact replica of the seahorse pendant Bastien had won at auction. The only difference between it and the original was that the new piece lacked the engraved initial As on the back. Only Bastien could have had it made for her and sent it to her. That he had given the pendant to her in spite of the way she had spoken to him had shocked Lilah, and made her feel as if she didn’t know Bastien Zikos at all. She had asked herself then if she had imagined that dark fury in his eyes.

But now Lilah knew for a fact that she had not imagined Bastien’s rage, and she suspected that what she was being subjected to was ‘payback time’ in his parlance.


CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_b24adad2-6351-5719-93de-124cf48e9779)

IN THE MIDDLE of the night, tossing and turning without sleep, Lilah crept out of bed and went downstairs to make herself a cup of tea.

Vickie was already there, seated at the kitchen table. ‘Great minds, eh?’ she framed round a huge yawn.

‘You couldn’t sleep either?’ Lilah stated the obvious.

‘It’s the constant worrying that keeps me awake,’ her father’s wife opined ruefully while Lilah boiled the kettle. ‘Some of the parents I was talking to at Ben’s school said Bastien Zikos was at Moore Components today... I was surprised you hadn’t mentioned it.’

Lilah stiffened defensively. ‘I didn’t see the point.’

‘I hate asking you this...but I was thinking...maybe if you get the chance you could ask Bastien if he has an opening for your father anywhere?’ Vickie said hopefully.

Lilah reddened. ‘If I get the chance,’ she echoed, feeling incredibly guilty for not telling the truth.

Bastien had been right on that score. No one would thank her for telling a truth that no one wanted to hear. And the truth was that she could wave a magic wand and fix everything for everybody. How could she live with that knowledge and stand by doing nothing? How could she live with seeing her father slumped in a chair, staring into space? It was all very well to be furious with Bastien, to take offence and walk out. but at the end of the day she had to be practical. He had, after all, offered her a miracle.

Everything back the way it was.

Hanging on to her virginity at all costs seemed a little pathetic in such dire circumstances, didn’t it? And, whether she liked it or not, she had always been attracted to Bastien. How could she hold out and justify herself when so many positive outcomes would result from her agreement? Bastien’s interest in her would be short-lived as well: his past history spoke for him. He never stayed long with a woman. She would get her life back again quickly and probably never come back home, she acknowledged unhappily. When Bastien got bored with her she would look for a job in London and make a fresh start.

* * *

Lilah dressed for work with more care than usual, braiding her black mane of hair into submission and choosing a black pencil skirt and a silky cream blouse to wear.

The mere thought of finding herself in bed with Bastien brought her out in a cold sweat and turned her tummy over, so she refused to think about it. Sex was a rite of passage, she told herself impatiently. She was no different from any other woman and would soon become accustomed to it. No doubt practise had made Bastien most proficient in that department, and it was probably safe to assume that she wouldn’t find sharing a bed with him too unpleasant. Of course she wasn’t going to enjoy any of it either. Sex shorn of any finer feelings was a physical rather than mental exercise and she would detach herself from the whole experience, she told herself soothingly.

Detachment, after all, would hardly be a challenge when she hated Bastien with every fibre of her being. His options had taught her to hate him. Before yesterday he had simply been the womaniser who had once bruised her tender heart and whom she couldn’t ever have. Now he was the ruthless lowlife forcing her to seal a bargain with her body as if she was a whore.

A little shudder racked her at that view and she breathed in slow and deep, strengthening herself for what lay ahead. She was about to make a devil’s bargain, but she was darned if she would show an ounce of weakness in front of Bastien.

When she walked into the office, Julie gave her a curious appraisal. ‘Mr Zikos has phoned down to ask for you already. I explained that you’re never in before nine because you leave your kid brother at nursery on the way.’

‘Thanks,’ Lilah breathed, hanging up her coat with a nervous hand.

Bastien had said ten o’clock, but he was clearly jumping the gun. Of course he had no patience whatsoever, she reflected ruefully. He tapped his feet and drummed his fingers when forced to be inactive for any length of time. He was edgy, bursting with frenetic energy, always in need of occupation.

She smoothed her skirt down over her hips as she mounted the stairs. Her hands weren’t quite steady and she studied them in dismay. Why was she getting herself into a state? Hadn’t she already decided that sex would be no big deal and not worth making a silly fuss over? It wasn’t as though Bastien was going to spread her across the office desk and have his wicked way with her this very day...was it?

Her face burned, her stomach performing a somersault at that X-rated image. She wanted Bastien to do the deed in pitch-darkness and complete silence. She didn’t want to have to look at him or speak to him. She wished there was some way of having sex remotely, without any need for physical contact, and it was on that crazy thought that she entered what had once been her father’s office.

With a single gesture Bastien dismissed the team hovering attentively round him and set down the tablet he had been studying.

‘You’ve asked for me but it’s not ten yet,’ Lilah pointed out thinly. ‘It’s only ten minutes past nine.’

Bastien straightened, brilliant dark golden eyes lancing into hers in direct challenge. ‘My internal clock says it’s ten,’ he contradicted without hesitation.

‘Your clock’s wrong.’

‘I’m never wrong, Delilah,’ Bastien traded thickly, his long-lashed gaze roaming over her as intently as a physical caress. ‘Lesson one on how to be a mistress: I keep you around to stroke my ego, not dent it.’

Lilah froze where she stood, wide sapphire eyes travelling over him with a hunger she couldn’t control. She scanned the exquisitely tailored designer suit that delineated every muscular line of Bastien’s broad-shouldered, lean-hipped frame as he stood there facing her, with his long, powerful legs braced. Something clenched low in her body when she clashed with his gaze and her legs felt strangely hollow.

Her attention welded to his darkly handsome face, she stopped breathing, reacting with dismay to the treacherous stirrings of her own body. Her breasts swelled, constrained by the confines of her bra, while the sensation at her feminine core made her press her thighs together hard.

‘I’m no good at stroking egos, Bastien,’ she warned him.

Bastien dealt her an unholy grin. ‘I’ve got enough ego to survive a few dents,’ he asserted. ‘Where do you think your true talents will lie?’

‘You’ve taken my answer for granted, haven’t you?’ Lilah exclaimed. ‘I haven’t said yes yet, but you’re convinced I will.’

‘And am I wrong?’ Bastien traded.

Her teeth gritted together. ‘No, you’re not.’

‘So, are you going for option two or option three?’ Bastien enquired lazily, leaning back against his desk in an attitude of relaxation that infuriated her.

* * *

Option three, option three, Bastien willed Delilah to tell him. That would be the most profitable option for him. He would sell the current site, relocate the factory to the outskirts of town and in doing so take advantage of several lucrative government grants aimed at persuading companies to open up in areas of high unemployment. For him it would be a win-win situation, because he would gain Lilah, an immediate profit to cover all outlay and





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