She put her hands on her hips, drawing his attention to the narrowness of her waist that served to emphasise the rounded curves of her breasts. ‘I understand that the temp I arranged to cover my absence only lasted a week, and HR organised three more replacements but you dismissed them after a few days.’
‘They were all useless,’ he snapped. Glancing at his watch, Alekos discovered that he had wasted ten minutes ogling his PA, who normally did not warrant more than a five second glance. He felt unsettled by his awareness of Sara as an attractive woman and was annoyed with himself for his physical response to her. ‘I hope you are prepared for the fact that we have a ton of work to catch up on.’
‘I guessed you’d have me tied to my desk when I came back to work,’ she said airily.
Alekos’s eyes narrowed on her serene expression, and he was thrown by the idea that she knew the effect she was having on him. His mental vision of her tied, face down, across her desk made his blood sizzle. He felt confused by his inability to control his response to her.
This was dull, drab Sara—although, admittedly, he had never found her dull when she’d made it clear, soon after he’d promoted her from a secretary in the accounts department to his PA, that she wasn’t going to worship him like most women did. But her frumpy appearance had been one reason why he had chosen her. His position as chairman of GE demanded his absolute focus and there was no risk of him being distracted by Miss Mouse.
Alekos had become chairman of the company, which specialised in building luxury superyachts, two years ago, following the death of his father, and he had decided that Sara’s unexciting appearance, exemplary secretarial skills and excellent work ethic would make her his ideal PA.
He walked around his desk, lowered his long frame into his chair and took a sip of coffee before he glanced at her. ‘I need to make a few phone calls and no doubt you will have plenty of stuff to catch up on, so come back in half an hour and bring the Viceroy file with you.’
‘Aren’t you forgetting something? The word please,’ Sara reminded him crisply when he raised his brows questioningly. ‘Honestly, Alekos, no wonder you frightened off four temps in as many weeks if you were as surly with them as you’re behaving this morning. I suppose you’ve got woman trouble? That’s the usual reason when you come to work with a face like thunder.’
‘You must know by now that I never allow my relationships to last long enough for women to become troublesome,’ Alekos said smoothly. He leaned back in his chair and gave her a hard stare. ‘Remind me again, Sara, why I tolerate your insolence?’
Across the room he saw her eyes sparkle and her mouth curve into a smile that inexplicably made Alekos feel as if he’d been punched in his gut. ‘Because I’m good at my job and you don’t want to sleep with me. That’s what you told me at my interview and I assume nothing has changed?’
She stepped out of his office and closed the door behind her before he could think of a suitably cutting retort. He glared at the space where she had been standing seconds earlier. Theos, sometimes she overstepped the mark. His nostrils flared with annoyance. He could not explain the odd sensation in the pit of his stomach when he caught the drift of her perfume that still lingered in the room.
He felt rattled by Sara’s startling physical transformation from frump to sexpot. But he reminded himself that her honesty was one of the things he admired about her. He doubted that any of the three hundred employees at Gionakis Enterprises’ London offices, and probably none of the three thousand staff employed by the company worldwide, would dream of speaking to him as bluntly as Sara did. It made a refreshing change to have someone challenge him when most people, especially women, always said yes to him.
He briefly wondered what she would say if he told her that he had changed his mind and wanted to take her to bed. Would she be willing to have sex with him, or would Sara be the only woman to refuse him? Alekos was almost tempted to find out. But practicality outweighed his inconvenient and, he confidently assumed, fleeting attraction to her, when he reminded himself that there were any number of women who would be happy to help him relieve his sexual frustration but a good PA was worth her weight in gold.
The day’s schedule was packed. Alekos opened his laptop but, unusually for him, he could not summon any enthusiasm for work. He swivelled his chair round to the window and stared down at the busy street five floors below, where red London buses, black taxis and kamikaze cyclists competed for road space.
He liked living in England’s capital city, although he much preferred the current June sunshine to the dank drizzle and short days of the winter. After his father’s death it had been expected by the members of the board, and his family, that Alekos would move back to Greece permanently and run the company from GE’s offices in Athens. His father, Kostas Gionakis, and before him Alekos’s grandfather, the founder of the company, had both done so.
His decision to move the company’s headquarters to London had been mainly for business reasons. London was closer to GE’s growing client list in Florida and the Bahamas, and the cosmopolitan capital was ideally suited to entertain a clientele made up exclusively of millionaires and billionaires, who were prepared to spend eye-watering amounts of cash on a superyacht—the ultimate status symbol.
On a personal front, Alekos had been determined to establish himself as the new company chairman away from his father’s power base in Greece. The grand building in Athens which had been GE’s headquarters looked like a palace and Kostas Gionakis had been king. Alekos never forgot that he was the usurper to the throne.
His jaw clenched. Dimitri should have been chairman, not him. But his brother was dead—killed twenty years ago, supposedly in a tragic accident. Alekos’s parents had been devastated and he had never told them of his suspicions about the nature of Dimitri’s death.
Alekos had been fourteen at the time, the youngest in the family, born six years after Dimitri and after their three sisters. He had idolised his brother. Everyone had admired the Gionakis heir. Dimitri was handsome, athletic and clever and had been groomed from boyhood to take over running the family business. Alekos was the spare heir should the unthinkable happen to Dimitri.
But the unthinkable had happened. Dimitri had died and Alekos had suddenly become the future of the company—a fact that his father had never allowed him to forget.
Had Kostas believed that his youngest son would make as good a chairman of GE as his firstborn son? Alekos doubted it. He had felt that he was second best in his father’s eyes. He knew that was still the opinion of some of the board members who disapproved of his playboy lifestyle.
But he would prove those who doubted his abilities wrong. In the two years that he had been chairman the company’s profits had increased and they were expanding into new markets around the globe. Perhaps his father would have been proud of him. Alekos would never know. But what he knew for sure was that he could not allow himself to be distracted by his PA simply because her sexy new look had stirred his desire.
Turning away from the window, he opened a document on his laptop and resolutely focused on work. He had inherited the company by default. He owed it to Dimitri’s memory to ensure that Gionakis Enterprises continued to be as successful as it had been when his father was chairman, and as Alekos was sure it would have been under his brother’s leadership.
* * *
Sara ignored a stab of guilt as she passed her desk, piled with paperwork that required her attention, and hurried into the bathroom. The mirror above the sink confirmed her fears. Her flushed cheeks and dilated pupils betrayed her reaction to Alekos that she had been unable to control.
She felt as though she had been holding her breath the entire time she had been in his office. Why was it that she’d managed to hide her awareness of him for two years but when she had set eyes on him this morning after she hadn’t seen him for a month her pulse-rate had rocketed and her mouth had felt dry?
The sensation of her heart slamming against her ribcage whenever she was in close proximity to Alekos wasn’t new, but she had perfected the art of hiding her emotions behind a cool smile, aware