she would take this arrogant Greek down. One way or the other, Christos Giatrakos’s reign would be short and sweet, a footnote in the history of the hotel chain. It still stung that her father had chosen this stranger over her, but she could not let her wounded feelings get in the way of what she had to do to win.
Yes, she should have kept her mouth shut. But she hadn’t, and now there was nothing to do but own it. Lucilla tilted her chin up. “I have indeed. You might be congratulating yourself on dispersing my siblings on your errands, but don’t think you’ll handle me quite so easily.”
His eyes slid over her then, and her stomach clenched. “I wouldn’t dream of handling you, Lucilla. But if I did, rest assured you would do as I wished. And you would enjoy every moment of it.”
Her heart lodged in her throat. Were they still talking about the hotel? Or about something else?
“You are a deluded man, Christos. I will never enjoy a moment with you. I despise you and wish you would crawl back into whatever hole you crawled out of.”
His expression changed then, went from coolly amused and arrogant to hard and cold and … resentful? Lucilla blinked. She had the impression she’d hurt him, but that could not be possible. Christos Giatrakos had no heart to wound.
His next words proved it. “I care not what you think of me, Lucilla mou. You are as spoiled and useless as the rest of your kind.” He held up a hand to stop any protests. “Oh, you play at working, and you do a good enough job in your duties as the director of guest services. You are correct that I need you, but make no mistake—if I have to fire you, I will. No one is indispensable to the running of this company, Lucilla. Not even you.”
“Or you,” she threw back at him.
One eyebrow lifted. “Or me. And that is as it should be. Any company that is so invested in the talents of a single person and cannot recover should that person die or leave is a very stupid company indeed. My goal is to make the Chatsfield number one in the luxury field again. But I do not expect that this company will not ever run without me, nor would I want it to. That, I believe, is the difference between us. You would see it fail out of spite. I would see it succeed.”
There was a pinch in her chest as she pulled in a sharp breath. Of all the arrogant assumptions. Yes, she wanted the Chatsfield to be number one again—but she didn’t think it took Christos to do it. She could have done it if her father had given her the chance. She still could. She would.
“I do not wish to see us fail at all. And I resent that you would think so.”
“Then grow up and act like it.” He flicked his hand. “And now if you will get out of my office, I have important work to do.”
Lucilla clutched her tablet tight to stop her from flinging it at his head. “As you command, O Lord of Everything.” She took two steps, then whirled back around to find him still watching her. “You won’t always be here, Christos. Enjoy the big corner office while you can.”
He lowered himself into the plush leather chair with a smile. Then the arrogant bastard had the nerve to lean back and put his feet on the ancient cherry desk.
“I am enjoying it very much, thank you. Now be a good girl and get to work.”
Lucilla stalked out of his office with her head held high. But she could feel the blood pounding in her veins, feel the hate coursing through her. She wanted to scream. And, perversely, she wanted to kiss the bastard. She marched past Jessie—her able assistant—and into her own, much smaller office, slamming the door satisfyingly before throwing herself into her chair and closing her eyes while she fought for calm.
Why on earth could she not face the damn man without thinking about how his lips must taste? It was getting worse, not better. Every time she was with him, she thought of how he might taste, of how those muscles would feel beneath her hands. It was just her perverse nature, going left when she wanted to go right. She’d always been this way. Tell her she couldn’t do something and she set out to prove she could.
Like run the hotel chain. She’d spent years proving she was the rightful heir to the CEO position, and what did her father do? He hired a smoldering Greek with a bad attitude and a sexier-than-sin body to do the job she’d been training for all her life. She’d put her dreams aside at the age of fourteen, when her mother had walked out and left her and Antonio, her older brother, to be the surrogate parents for their siblings. Her father had been useless after Liliana left and so it had fallen to her and Antonio.
Well, dammit, she’d done what she was supposed to do. She’d been a good girl and played by rules that should never have been imposed on her at such a young age. She’d done her time and she wanted her due. She wanted control of the Chatsfield empire. The hotels were in her blood. They were not in Christos’s. He was not a Chatsfield and he didn’t care, other than where dollars, pounds and euros were concerned.
Lucilla chewed her lip, thinking. She’d researched Christos thoroughly when he’d arrived, but there was one thing she couldn’t find out. He didn’t seem to come from anywhere. He didn’t have a family. He was Greek, he claimed Athens as his hometown, and that was it. There’d been no record of his life before he was about twenty-five and burst onto the scene as the man who’d turned around a very old and venerable shipping company.
Then he’d moved on to another company, and another. He was good at what he did—and ruthless beyond belief. He slashed and burned and what emerged from the ashes was always better and brighter than before.
Yes, he was pretty good. But she didn’t trust him. And she damn sure didn’t like him. She couldn’t believe that her father had turned over control to this man they knew so little about. Gene Chatsfield had handed over the keys to the kingdom and then flown back to the U.S. to be with his new fiancée as if he hadn’t just turned Lucilla’s world—and her siblings’ worlds—upside down in the process.
Lucilla wanted to know more. She wanted to know who Christos Giatrakos really was, where he came from and why he thought he could be so cold and ruthless with everyone. And then she wanted him gone.
That, really, was the deciding factor. Lucilla wanted him gone, no matter how sexy or smoldering he was. And she was willing to do just about anything to achieve that goal. She picked up the phone. It was time to call in every last favor she was owed in exchange for information.
The Chatsfield was hosting a gala tonight in the main ballroom. An art auction for charity that would bring out the richest members of London society. As CEO, it was Christos’s duty to be there as the new public face of the company. Whatever the Chatsfield children had done to tarnish the venerable name, Christos was determined to erase those memories from the public consciousness. Yes, it would take time, but he would turn the company around. Of that he had no doubt.
He frowned as he thought of Lucilla Chatsfield standing in his office and glaring at him. She didn’t like him; that much was plain. He didn’t like her, either. She was utterly spoiled, though perhaps not quite as useless as most of her siblings.
Yet he found her oddly compelling and he did not like it. For instance, her brown eyes were flecked with gold. Why did he know this detail? He had no idea, but he did. And whenever she came into his office, he found himself watching those gold flecks and wondering if they might change with passion. What would staid Lucilla look like mussed? Her hair was always sleek and smooth, either twisted up on her head or slicked back into a thick ponytail. Her suits were crisp and tailored. Not too conservative, not too sexy.
He should not notice her at all, really. She was not a classically beautiful woman. Her cheeks were a little too plump and her hips a little too curvy to be stylish. She was too serious and frowned entirely too much.
And yet he found himself wondering what she would look like naked and sprawled across his bed. A clear sign he’d been working too much and not getting enough sex if he was thinking of uptight Lucilla Chatsfield this way.
Tonight, that would change. He had a date to the gala, and she’d hinted more than once that she was available all night long.