The Greek's Blackmailed Mistress

GRAHAM LYNNE

‘No problem. She’s a lovely lady,’ Dmitri told her, walking off again at speed and vanishing into the building while tucking her letter into a pocket.

And Dmitri, whoever he is, doesn’t think Sally Cartwright’s a thief, Elvi realised as she climbed on a bus to get to work and mulled over that surprising encounter. Just as well, considering that she had frozen like an ice sculpture when she saw Xan Ziakis, not that she thought his bodyguards would have allowed her anywhere near him, because someone had told her to get out of the way. Dmitri? One of the other three men?

It didn’t matter, she decided as she stocked shelves of knitting wool at work. The letter might land on Xan’s desk but, as Dmitri had said, that didn’t mean he would actually bother to read it or even more crucially respond to it.

But in that Elvi was mistaken. Xan was so disconcerted by the unexpected sight of his head of security covertly sliding an envelope onto his desk, when Dmitri clearly thought he was unseen, that nothing would have kept him from opening up that letter out of sheer human curiosity. Xan skimmed down to the signature first: Elvi Cartwright. He knew that name well enough and he also knew he should’ve been prepared for the tactic in such a situation. Instantly he wanted to crumple the letter up and bin it without reading it. That would have been the cautious way to deal.

Even so, although Xan was very cautious with women, he couldn’t bring himself to dump the letter unread. A couple of months ago, he had noticed her, well, really, really noticed her, he acknowledged grimly, and he had instructed Dmitri to find out who she was, assuming that she lived in the same apartment block. He had, however, learned that she was his maid’s daughter, which had naturally concluded his interest. Billionaires did not consort with the daughters of their domestic staff. The gulf was too immense, the risk of a messy affair too great.

And yet, all the same...the letter still unread, Xan drifted momentarily into the past, recalling Elvi Cartwright with intense immediacy. The shining pale-as-milk hair, the wonderful blue eyes, the crazy natural glow of her, not to mention the extraordinary fact that she looked very different from the sort of women he usually slept with and yet, inexplicably, one glance at her turned him on harder and faster than any of them.

She was a bit overweight, he supposed abstractedly; hard to tell when he had only ever seen her in a loose black jacket that swamped her. Very short in stature, not his type, absolutely not his type, he told himself sternly as he shook out the letter, more concerned by Dmitri’s bizarre involvement in its delivery than by what it might say. If he couldn’t trust his head of security, who could he trust? Why had Dmitri got personally involved in so tawdry an incident?

Xan had a scientific approach to everything he read. Elvi’s use of English was far superior to what he would have expected and then he began reading and what he read was most educational from his point of view even if, by the end of it, he couldn’t think why she expected him as the victim to want to do anything about Sally Cartwright’s self-induced predicament.

Inevitably he studied the situation from his side of the fence, where all the power lay, and the sort of ideas that had never occurred to Xan Ziakis before when it came to a woman began very slowly to blossom. Xan, who never ever allowed himself to succumb to any kind of unwise temptation. Xan, who usually policed his every thought, suppressing any immoral promptings to concentrate more profitably on work. And once he let those bad ideas out of the box they created a positive riot in his imagination, raising the kind of excitement that only a good financial killing usually gave him...and that was it, Xan Ziakis was seduced by erotic possibilities for the first time in his life.

Xan folded the letter with a dark forbidding smile that his opponents would have recognised as a certain sign of danger and threat. He would give his quarry a couple of days to stew and wonder and then he would get in touch...

CHAPTER TWO

TWO ANXIOUS DAYS in which she never allowed her phone to stray from her pocket passed for Elvi and on the third day, at the point where she had almost given up hope entirely, it finally rang.

One of Xan Ziakis’s staff invited her to a meeting late that afternoon. Distracted by what lay ahead of her, she pleaded a dental appointment with her employer to finish early and worked over her usual lunch break instead. She got through her working hours on autopilot while anxiously rehearsing speeches in the back of her brain, only to discard them again when she tried to picture herself saying such things to a stranger. She would have to be lucid and brief, she told herself, because Xan Ziakis was unlikely to give her more than ten minutes of his time.

Seated in the plush quiet waiting area on the top floor of Ziakis Finance, Elvi was a bundle of nerves. How likely was it that he would even consider dropping the theft charge? Very unlikely, she reckoned, because what would be in that for him? But he could be a really good person, a little voice whispered. What were the chances? her brain scoffed, unimpressed by such wishful thinking. Xan was a merciless financier renowned for his profit margins. Every single thing he did during his working day was focused on gaining an advantage...and what did she have to offer?

She plucked a piece of tapestry wool off a black-trousered knee and shed her jacket to reveal the long-sleeved blue tee below because she was too warm. It was a waste of time approaching the wretched man when she was already virtually drowning in a sense of defeat, she told herself furiously. He was a rich, privileged guy, who lived a life far beyond the imagination of other, more ordinary mortals. He would not understand where she was coming from unless he had a reformed alcoholic in his own family circle. He would not appreciate the challenges Sally Cartwright had already overcome in her efforts to rebuild her life, nor could he even begin to imagine the misery of the ‘lost’ years that Elvi and Daniel had lived through with their mother.

Stop it, stop with the negative inner talk, she urged herself just as the svelte receptionist uttered her name in the same low-pitched tone that everyone who worked on the top floor seemed to use. Elvi rose stiffly from her seat, full of apprehension but struggling to appear composed because she knew that that was necessary. She couldn’t afford to get emotional with such a self-disciplined man.

In his office, Xan was on a high because he was finally getting to meet her. The woman he had wanted, the only woman he had wanted in years that he couldn’t have, but now that her mother was no longer his employee, and that connection was at an end, he no longer had to consider that aspect. That was done, dusted, in the past as far as he was concerned. Now he could move forward freely. Admittedly she was still of much lower status than he or her predecessors in his life had been but did he really have to be so particular about the women he took to his bed? He straightened his jacket and leant back against his designer desk as the door opened.