ACHILLES CASILIERIS REQUIRED PERFECTION.
In himself, certainly. He prided himself on it, knowing all too well how easy it was to fall far, far short. And in his employees, absolutely—or they would quickly find themselves on the other side of their noncompete agreements with indelible black marks against their names.
He did not play around. He had built everything he had from nothing, step by painstaking step, and he hadn’t succeeded the way he had—building the recession-proof Casilieris Company and making his first million by the age of twenty-five, then expanding both his business and his personal fortune into the billions—by accepting anything less than 100 percent perfection in all things. Always.
Achilles was tough, tyrannical when necessary, and refused to accept what one short-lived personal assistant had foolishly called “human limitations” to his face.
He was a man who knew the monster in himself. He’d seen its face in his own mirror. He did not allow for “human limitations.”
Natalie Monette was his current executive assistant and had held the position for a record five years because she had never once asserted that she was human as some kind of excuse. In point of fact, Achilles thought of her as a remarkably efficient robot—the highest praise he could think to bestow on anyone, as it removed the possibility of human error from the equation.
Achilles had no patience for human error.
Which was why his assistant’s behavior on this flight today was so alarming.
The day had started out normally enough. When Achilles had risen at his usual early hour, it had been to find Natalie already hard at work in the study of his Belgravia town house. She’d set up a few calls to his associates in France, outlined his schedule for the day and his upcoming meetings in New York. They’d swung by his corporate offices in the City, where Achilles had handled a fire he thought she should have put out before he’d learned of it, but then she’d accompanied him in his car to the private airfield he preferred without appearing the least bit bothered that he’d dressed her down for her failure. And why should she be bothered? She knew he expected perfection and had failed to deliver it. Besides, Natalie was never bothered. She’d acquitted herself with her usual cool competence and attitude-free demeanor, the way she always did or she never would have lasted five minutes with him. Much less five years.
And then she’d gone into the bathroom at the airfield, stayed in there long enough that he’d had to go find her himself, and come out changed.
Achilles couldn’t put his finger on how she’d changed, only that she had.
She still looked the part of the closest assistant to a man as feared and lauded as Achilles had been for years now. She looked like his public face the way she always did. He appreciated that and always had. It wasn’t enough that she was capable of handling the complications of his personal and company business without breaking a sweat, that she never seemed to sleep, that she could protect him from the intrusive paparazzi and hold off his equally demanding board members in the same breath—it was necessary that she also look like the sort of woman who belonged in his exalted orbit for the rare occasions when he needed to escort someone to this or that function and couldn’t trouble himself to expend the modicum of charm necessary to squire one of his mistresses. Today she wore one of her usual outfits, a pencil skirt and soft blouse and a feminine sort of sweater that wrapped around her torso and was no different from any other outfit she’d worn a million times before.
Natalie dressed to disappear in plain sight. But for some reason, she caught his eye this odd afternoon. He couldn’t quite figure it out. It was as if he had never seen her before. It was as if she’d gone into the bathroom in the airport lounge and come out a completely different person.
Achilles sat back in his remarkably comfortable leather chair on the jet and watched her as she took her seat opposite him. Did he imagine that she hesitated? Was he making up the strange look he’d seen in her eyes before she sat down? Almost as if she was looking for clues instead of taking her seat as she always did?
“What took you so long in that bathroom?” he asked, not bothering to keep his tone particularly polite. “I should not have to chase down my own assistant, surely.”
Natalie blinked. He didn’t know why the green of her eyes behind the glasses he knew she didn’t need for sight seemed...too bright, somehow. Or brighter, anyway, than they’d been before. In fact, now that he thought about it, everything about her was brighter. And he couldn’t understand how anyone could walk into a regular lavatory and come out...gleaming.
“I apologize,” she said quietly. Simply. And there was something about her voice then. It was almost...musical.
It occurred to Achilles that he had certainly never thought of Natalie’s voice as anything approaching musical before. It had always been a voice, pure and simple. And she had certainly never gleamed.
And that, he thought with impatience, was one of the reasons that he had prized Natalie so much for all these years. Because he had never, ever noticed her as anything but his executive assistant, who was reasonably attractive because it was good business to give his Neanderthal cronies something worth gazing at while they were trying to ignore Achilles’s dominance. But there was a difference between noting that a woman was attractive and being attracted to that woman. Achilles would not have hired Natalie if he’d been attracted to her. He never had been. Not ever.
But to his utter astonishment that was what seemed to be happening. Right here. Right now. His body was sending him unambiguous signals. He wasn’t simply attracted to his assistant. What he felt roll in him as she crossed her legs at the ankle and smiled at him was far more than attraction.
It was need.
Blinding and impossible and incredibly, astonishingly inconvenient.
Achilles Casilieris did not do inconvenience, and he was violently opposed to need. It had been beaten into him as an unwanted child that it was the height of foolishness to want something he couldn’t have. That meant he’d dedicated his adult life to never allowing himself to need anything at all when he could buy whatever took his fancy, and he hadn’t.
And yet there was no denying that dark thread that wound in him, pulling tight and succeeding in surprising him—something else that happened very, very rarely.
Achilles knew the shadows that lived in him. He had no intention of revisiting them. Ever.
Whatever his assistant was doing, she needed to stop. Now.
“That is all you wish to say?” He sounded edgy. Dangerous. He didn’t like that, either.
But Natalie hardly seemed to notice. “If you would like me to expand on my apology, Mr. Casilieris, you need only tell me how.”
He thought there was a subtle rebuke in that, no matter how softly she’d said it, and that, too, was new. And unacceptable no matter how prettily she’d voiced it.
Her copper-colored hair gleamed. Her skin glowed as she moved her hands in her lap, which struck him as odd, because Natalie never sat there with her hands folded in her lap like some kind of diffident Catholic schoolgirl. She was always in motion,