“Not there.” Nikos sighed wearily. “He can see you there. Sit on the couch.”
She didn’t move. “He who? What are you talking about?”
Nikos didn’t answer. He just stood, teeth gritted, and looked from her to the couch expectantly. He didn’t move away from the door either. Couldn’t if he wanted to remain upright. God, his head hurt!
“I don’t know why you’re doing this,” she muttered ungraciously. But at last she got up and moved to the couch.
“Thank you,” Nikos said tightly. He waited until she was settled, then lowered himself gingerly into the armchair across from her. He adjusted the towel. She looked at it, the color rising in her cheeks. Quickly she glanced away, her gaze going toward the door again.
“Don’t even think about it.”
She looked at him, startled, but she didn’t try it.
And thank God for that, because the truth was, he didn’t think he had the strength to stop her.
Fortunately she didn’t move. She sat right where she was, hands folded in her lap like some proper Sunday school teacher, looking at him with a combination of wariness and expectancy. There was nothing sultry or seductive about her—except the way she’d kissed him.
“You haven’t been doing this long, have you?”
“Four years.”
“Four years?” He couldn’t imagine.
“I started while I was working on my master’s degree. I have excellent qualifications. I’m very good at what I do,” she told him firmly. “I have references.”
Nikos bit back a grin. “I’d like to see them.”
Her eyes flashed green fire at him. “I don’t have to show them to the likes of you! I don’t understand why you’re keeping me here,” she said fretfully. “I must have made a mistake and got the wrong cottage. Please! I need to talk to Mr. Costanides.”
Nikos stuck his casted leg out in front of him and settled back into the chair. “You’re talking to him.”
“You’re not Mr. Costanides! I’ve met Mr. Costanides! He’s much older. He has a mustache. He‘s—”
Nikos sat bolt upright. She’d met his father? Bloody hell!
He couldn’t believe it. The old man might have had his profligate tendencies over the years, but Nikos had never thought they’d ever extended to bringing home women of the evening! Stavros had always had too much respect for family. That was, in fact, precisely why Nikos was throwing this woman in the old man’s face now.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
“My name is Mari Lewis,” she said stiffly.
Which meant precisely nothing. “The dolly?” he prompted.
“Dolly?” Her brow furrowed. “No. What dolly? I’m the nanny.”
The nanny?
Nikos gaped. And then, replaying the whole scene in his mind, he began to understand what had happened. And with understanding came not consternation, but an even greater satisfaction. An unbelievable satisfaction. The grin spread all over his face.
He’d kissed the new nanny? He’d swaggered out dressed in only a towel and, before his father’s eyes, had swept his half-brother, Alex’s, brand-new nanny off her feet?
No wonder the old man was looking apoplectic.
It was even better than he’d dared hope!
No matter how badly he wanted to strongarm Nikos into the company, Stavros would never let him stay here after he’d sullied darling Alexander’s new nanny.
Let him stay, hell! Rigid, strait-laced Stavros would throw his philandering firstborn out on his ear!
He might even go so far as to make his secondborn his heir. And why not?
As far as Nikos could see, Alexander, the four-year-old result of his father’s second marriage, was the center of the old man’s universe, anyway. Alexander was the sun around which Stavros Costanides spun, the darling doted-upon child that his elder son had never been—which didn’t bother Nikos a bit.
In fact it made him feel a little sorry for the kid.
Not that he’d ever had much to do with the boy. He barely even knew his half-brother. Stavros did his best to keep his younger son away from his disreputable older one.
He’d never exactly told Nikos to stay away, had never come right out and said Nikos was a bad influence on the boy, but Nikos didn’t have to be told.
Nothing he did had ever pleased the old man.
He’d long ago stopped trying to. It was a hell of a lot more interesting—and rewarding—to be the thorn in Stavros Costanides’s side. As long as he could leave when things got unbearable.
Since the accident Nikos hadn’t been able to leave. As if the cast wasn’t impediment enough, the head injury he’d received in the car accident required him to be on medication. He couldn’t drive until he was through with it. And Stavros wasn’t allowing anyone else to drive him.
“You’re keeping me prisoner!” Nikos had accused him.
“I am looking out for your well-being,” his father had replied. “Besides,” he’d added scornfully, “it’s not as if you have any pressing demands on your time. Work, for example?” A bitter smile had touched Stavros’s features. “God forbid.”
Nikos hadn’t replied. There was no point. Stavros had long ago decided that he was a good-for-nothing. It was Nikos’s greatest joy to do his best to confirm his father’s estimation.
“It’s time you settled down,” his father had gone on implacably. “Until you are able to drive away under your own power, you will stay here.”
And there was no arguing with him. No going around him. No convincing anybody to spirit him away. He was stuck until he could drive—with his father and his father’s notion of how things ought to be done.
It was exactly what his father had been angling for. It had been the subject of their quarrel right before Nikos’s accident. It had been the subject of the quarrel they’d had last week.
Stavros had come to the cottage to try to badger Nikos into studying the company prospectus. “Learn about your inheritance,” he’d demanded.
“I know all about my inheritance,” Nikos had retorted bitterly, and he’d tossed the prospectus aside.
“I’ll shape you up if it’s the last thing I do,” his father had vowed, glowering down at Nikos who had stared insolently back.
Nikos’s jaw tightened. “I’d like to see you try!”
“Would you?” Stavros went very quiet. “Fine. Count on it.” He’d turned on his heel and stalked out. The door shut quietly, ominously, behind him.
Nikos had ignored it, ignored him. He’d been enormously pleased that, for the last five days, the old man had been avoiding him completely. So he wasn’t counting on Stavros being able to “shape him up.”
He was counting on getting out of here—away from his father, away from all the demands and distrust, away from the bitterness and the battles and the disappointment they’d been to each other for all of Nikos’s thirty-two years. He didn’t need it, God knew.
Let Alex have it—all of it—and the grief that went with it.
He looked at the woman sitting primly on the sofa now. She did look like a nanny. Or a nun.
Poor Alex.
She must have impeccable credentials, Nikos thought. He paused and corrected himself—must have had