The Millionaires' Cinderellas: Playing the Greek's Game / The Forbidden Innocent / Too Proud to be Bought
things which aren’t strictly legal?’ he speculated.
‘No, I have not!’
‘And does Nat know about your past?’
‘Of course he does.’
‘So why not tell me, too?’
Emma drank down an angry mouthful of wine. Because Nat hadn’t judged her as she suspected this man would judge her. Because she didn’t fancy being dissected by those cold grey eyes and made to feel like some animal in a laboratory, which was vulnerable to the cruel scalpel of the scientist.
Yet she wasn’t supposed to be ashamed of her upbringing, was she? Not any more. Not when she had coped with it as well as she could. Was it her fault that she’d been given a vacuous and man-hungry mother who had always put her little girl second? Who had taught her daughter all the wrong lessons in life, which had taken a while to unlearn.
‘You know I’m illegitimate?’ she questioned bluntly.
Her candour took him by surprise and, to his astonishment, something in the darkening of her eyes made him want to offer an unlikely chunk of reassurance. ‘That’s no longer the stigma it was.’
‘In theory it isn’t,’ she contradicted. ‘In practice it isn’t so good if everyone knows that you’ve never even seen your father—or that you don’t have a clue who he is. Or that your mother seeks the comfort of strangers to warm her bed at night.’
Zak’s mouth tightened, all sympathy now fled. ‘Your mother was a—’
Emma shook her head. ‘Oh, she wasn’t a prostitute—if that’s what you’re thinking. She was just very …’ she swallowed ‘… fond of men. And not very good at choosing men. Something she seems to have passed on to me.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘Really?’
‘Oh, I’m not talking about Nat,’ she amended hastily, remembering a little too late that she was supposed to be masquerading as the lovelorn girlfriend of his brother. ‘Nat has been the best thing that ever happened to me.’
‘I’m not here to talk about my brother,’ he bit back, his blood growing heated with what he suspected was more than a feeling of sibling protectiveness. ‘I asked you about Patterson. How did you meet him?’
For a moment Emma said nothing, because it was still painful to relive it. To remember her naivety—a naivety which had been almost laughable in view of the bizarre nature of her upbringing.
‘How did I meet Louis?’ she repeated. ‘Circumstance, I guess.’
‘Circumstance?’ he echoed.
‘That’s right. You could never have planned for what happened.’
‘Oh?’
There was a moment of silence. ‘My mother was a brilliant dancer,’ she said at last. ‘In another life, she might have done it professionally, but that was almost impossible as a single mother with very little in the way of regular income. Her life was one of constant frustration. Domesticity bored her—she saw it as drudgery—and so did motherhood. So she didn’t play board games or read me any bedtime stories, or any of the normal stuff that children get—but she did have a great sense of style, and colour, which I did inherit. And, as I say—she was a great dancer.’
Zak nodded as her incredible posture suddenly made sense. The way she had seemed almost to float out of his office. ‘She taught you to dance?’ he guessed.
‘Yes,’ said Emma simply, leaning back as the waiter deposited elegant layers of aubergine and pasta before her and trying not to shudder at the sight of Zak’s bloody rib-eye steak. ‘They were the best times I ever had with her. She’d put the music on really high—sometimes the neighbours would bang on the ceiling with a broom—and we’d wrap ourselves up in floaty shawls, and just dance.’
‘And Patterson saw you dancing?’ he guessed.
Unwillingly, she gave a nod to his perception. ‘Yes, he did. I was exactly eighteen when I met him and had gone to the most fashionable nightclub in London. It was my birthday present from Mum—she’d been saving up for it for ages. She said that every girl on the brink of womanhood should get a glimpse of what the world could offer—that there was glamour out there if only you looked for it. I’d never been anywhere like it before.’
‘Never?’
She shook her head. ‘It was dark with flashing lights, and the music was thumping out. I didn’t really like it. It felt false … unreal. There was a big podium at the front—all silver and sparkling—and my favourite song came on. I was feeling a bit out of my depth but that was something familiar. One of my friends egged me on, so I got up and danced my heart out and Louis was sitting in a corner, watching. He said afterwards that—’
‘Don’t tell me. It was love at first sight?’ he questioned cynically, imagining the tawdry chat-up lines which must have ensued.
She shrugged. ‘That’s what he said.’
Hearing the defensiveness in her voice, Zak pushed his plate away. He could imagine just what an arresting sight she must have been. Young. Blonde. Presumably virginal. He felt the jerk of some dark emotion he didn’t want to analyse. ‘You inspired him?’ he asked slowly.
‘I guess so. He wrote “Fairy Dancer” that same night. When it hit the top of the charts, he decided that I was his number-one muse and he couldn’t live without me. That kind of thing can easily go to a young girl’s head.’ Especially when your mother was egging you on and telling you that you’d never get another chance quite like this one.
Louis had showered her with gifts and attention—and, more importantly, he hadn’t leapt on her. He told her he respected her virginal status and that he would gladly wait until after they were married. And Emma had agreed, carried along on that unreal wave she was riding—as well as her mother’s excitement. By the time her doubts had set in on the night before the wedding, it was too late. Her mother told her it was nothing but ‘nerves’ and to pull herself together.
‘So I married him. And the rest of the story is well documented. I found him dead a year later from a combination of drink and drugs. It’s not something I care to dwell on. Anything else you want to know, Mr Constantinides?’
Unexpectedly, he said, ‘I thought I told you to call me Zak.’
She stared at him, shaken by the emotional catharsis of recounting a story which she’d buried deeply, wanting to tell him that calling him by his first name seemed ridiculously intimate. That she wanted to keep as much distance between them as possible. Because something about him was making her feel stuff. The sort of stuff she was scared to feel because it was what had made her mother’s life such a mess. Desire and lust and a yearning to be kissed. A longing to be loved and cherished and made to feel the centre of someone’s world. And yet, if she told him that—wouldn’t she look hopelessly vulnerable as well as a hopeless judge of men?
‘I’m very tired, Zak. How’s that?’
‘Better.’
‘And I think I want to go to bed now.’
‘But you haven’t touched your meal.’
‘Neither have you.’
‘No.’ Once again, Zak stared at his plate. Never had a steak seemed more unappetizing, but then he’d never found himself in a situation such as this. Parts of her story had aroused in him an unwilling empathy and yet that didn’t change the fundamental problem. It didn’t matter that she had turned her life around—she had done that mainly because she aroused fierce passions in very rich men. Bottom line was that she was still the wrong kind of woman for Nat and she always would be.
‘I’ll see you up to your room,’ he said abruptly.
‘There’s no need.’
‘There’s