Alexandros shrugged negligently. ‘I hear he’s having some difficulties…’
Guilt flooded Kallie. She suddenly remembered her uncle’s words from the other night, how he’d mentioned he’d had to get in touch with Alexandros. It hadn’t occurred to her to question him, she’d been so distracted.
‘What kind of difficulties?’ she bit out. Hating Alexandros with passion at that moment. He was milking every single moment of this dinner. Her nerves were on a knife edge of sensation so acute that she thought she might break in two.
‘The kind that would be solved with a cash injection of a few million euros.’
Kallie tried not to let shock show on her face. She had a sudden very acute fear that they could be vulnerable to Alexandros, who was clearly out for some kind of revenge now.
‘You don’t even have your shares, do you?’
How did he know that?
She shook her head warily.
‘Apparently you couldn’t even wait until your parents were cold in the grave before you cashed them in…’
She gasped at the cruelty of his words. It had been nothing like that. She’d handed them over to Alexei and he’d cashed them in, giving her the small amount she’d needed to set up her business. She hadn’t wanted anything else to do with them and her uncle had needed them.
She leant forward, unaware of how it gave Alexandros a tantalising view of her cleavage beneath her shirt. She quivered with rage and injustice.
‘What I did or didn’t do with my shares is none of your business, Alexandros.’
He shrugged like he didn’t much care and Kallie felt impotent, wanted to walk around and slap the look of smug superiority off his face. It held all the arrogance of his forebears.
‘The fact of the matter is that your uncle has come to me for help…for a loan, if you will.’
Kallie sagged back against her chair. Oh, Alexei, what have you done? Her uncle had never been the brains behind Demarchis Shipping. That had been her father, until…Her mind slammed down on painful memories.
‘Look, Alexandros, what do you want? Surely…surely this can’t be because of what happened all those years ago?’
‘Why not, Kallie? Do you think that what you did wasn’t so bad after all? That time might have diminished it? You tried to seduce me and when it didn’t go your way, in a fit of spoilt pique you lashed out. You singlehandedly stopped a marriage from taking place—’
‘But, Alexandros.’ Panic was making her insides liquefy. ‘Surely Pia would have given you the benefit of the doubt, let you explain? I’m sure you could have convinced her that it meant nothing, was nothing…’ she had to stop for a second when her heart clenched in remembered pain ‘…if she loved you…’
Her remark caught him on the raw, caught him in a place he’d shut off long ago.
‘You’re priceless. Love? It was never about love, Kallie, it was a business arrangement. A merger between two families. Needless to say the merger never happened as soon as they lost faith in my ability to do the job. Thanks to your revealing titbits…’ The rage rose up again. ‘Theos, Kallie…’
She was speechless. She’d always assumed that he had loved Pia. And even though she hadn’t leaked the kiss-and-tell story to the paper, and had had nothing to do with the damning photo, she’d always felt guilty for trying to seduce Alexandros when he’d only wanted to be friends.
Her vulnerability and pathetic weakness for this man still made her blood boil. She opened her mouth, about to proclaim her innocence, and stopped. Eleni. And it wasn’t just Eleni. Even if he knew, Kallie was still in her own way responsible, too. She couldn’t say a thing…angrily impotent at the way she was trapped, she put down her napkin and went to stand but he reached across the table and caught her hand.
The feel of her smooth warm skin, the frantic pulse beating like a trapped bird, called to Alexandros, scrambled his brain for a second. He had to fight for control and remember what he was there to do.
‘I’m not finished with you, Kallie. In fact, we haven’t even started.’
She pulled her hand away, uncaring if people were looking. ‘There’s nothing starting here, Alexandros. I’m leaving.’
His voice was low and lethal. ‘No. You’re not. If you stand up, so help me, I will pick you up and carry you out of here over my shoulder. Don’t think that I won’t. So we can do this here and now, or we can cause a furore of interest, give the paparazzi outside something to photograph and do it back in my apartment.’
She had been in the act of standing and sat down again slowly. She knew without a doubt that she didn’t want to be alone with him and that he wouldn’t hesitate to do exactly what he’d said.
When she had sat back down he continued agreeably, as though discussing the weather. ‘As I was saying, your uncle is in need of a substantial loan. A loan to keep Demarchis Shipping afloat…literally. This puts me in an interesting position, wouldn’t you say?’ He didn’t wait for her answer. ‘I was quite prepared to do business with Alexei, as it suits my needs, too, but now things are intriguingly different. Needless to say, it won’t make the slightest bit of difference to me should I choose not to help him. But it would make all the difference in the world to him…and your family.’
The lines in his face were unbearably harsh and Kallie quailed at how time and circumstances had turned this man into such a lethal combination of sheer ruthlessness and icy cool. And at the part she had unwittingly played.
He continued unflinchingly, ‘He’s a tough old dog, but he’s exhausted every other avenue and, as he told me himself, I’m his last hope…’
Kallie was stung with guilt that she hadn’t known, that her uncle hadn’t confided in her. That she could somehow be instrumental in potentially doing damage to her family hurt her unbearably. Yet still, even through this, she was so aware of Alexandros across the table that she felt dizzy with his presence.
‘How have they not told me—I mean, how is this possible?’
She suddenly looked very young and lost and alone to Alexandros. Her eyes were huge, shimmering, blue and green. And he felt something twist in his chest before he ruthlessly quashed it back down.
‘Who knows? By selling your shares so promptly, by coming here to Paris, moving away from the UK—your mother’s own home, and your father’s adopted home—perhaps Alexei and your family thought you were taking a stand away from them, weren’t interested in their problems.’
It killed her that he could deduce this, but she hadn’t. And the familiar wave of grief washed through her. She lifted pain-filled eyes to his, speaking without thinking. ‘It wasn’t like that. It just became too much. After the funeral, the business was all they could talk about. All they ever talked about. My father had as good as taken his own life, and my mother’s with him and no one wanted to talk about that. It was Demarchis Shipping this, Demarchis Shipping that…’ She broke off when her voice caught and she desperately blinked back the sting of tears, hating that he might see any hint of vulnerability.
She strenuously fought to hide the brightness from his narrowed gaze and only looked back when she felt more under control. He had an intense look on his face. And then it was gone. Replaced with that implacability again. She hardened her own jaw.
The emotion that had softened her features could have been a figment of Alexandros’s imagination and he felt himself flounder slightly. This wasn’t going exactly how he’d imagined it. He wanted to reach over and run the pad of his thumb across her cheeks, down to her lips…cup her delicate jaw. He was fast losing the thread of why they were there. All he wanted was to stop talking and take her to bed. Spread her underneath him. The speed with which this woman had taken over his senses shocked him.
Kallie