There was a blur of movement from behind the desk: Nik rising with startled abruptness at so explosive an interruption.
In the split second that she knew was all she had at her disposal before Damianos intervened again, with greater effect, Olympia parted her lips and breathed rawly, ‘Are you a man or a mouse that you won’t face one woman?’
CHAPTER TWO
FROM behind Olympia, Damianos read Nik’s face and avoided seeing the slight inclination of his employer’s head which signified his own dismissal.
Out of breath, and expecting at any minute to be dragged out again, Olympia focused on Nik Cozakis for the first time in ten long years. Shock shrilled through her. He had got taller, his shoulders wider, and he had been tall and wide even to begin with. Well over six feet, he had towered over his relatives and friends. Now he cast a shadow like an intimidating stone monolith.
Olympia could feel his outrage like a physical entity, churning up the heavy silence, beating down on her in suffocating waves. Man or mouse? A truly insane, derisive opening likely to push the average Greek male to violent response. She marvelled at his self-control, even as she winced at the loss of her own. Had she been a man, Nik would have knocked her through the wall for such an insult.
‘I’m sorry,’ Olympia said, though she wasn’t one bit sorry.
‘Damianos…’ Nik murmured flatly.
The door behind her finally closed.
Olympia stared at him, couldn’t help it. His sheer impact hit her and she reeled back an involuntary step, her tummy full of butterflies, her skin dampening. She took all of him in, all at once, in a single, almost greedy visualising burst. The devastating dark good looks, the raw, earthy force of his sexual aura, the contrasting formal severity of his beautifully cut dark suit. All male, nothing of the boy left but that aching beauty which had once entrapped her foolish heart. And those eyes, amber-gold as a jaguar cat, spectacularly noticeable in that lean, strong face.
‘Why are you humiliating yourself in this way?’ Nik enquired in a drawl as lazy as a hot summer afternoon.
Belatedly, Olympia recognised her disorientation for the weakness it was. Angry dismay trammelled through her. She dredged her dilated pupils from his and stilled a shiver. ‘I haven’t humiliated myself.’
‘Have you not? Were it not for the respect I have for your grandfather, I would have had you forcibly ejected on the first day,’ Nik shared in the same conversational tone.
That dark, deep drawl betrayed no anger, but still a reflexive quiver snaked down Olympia’s taut spinal cord. Colour ran up over her cheekbones. She forced her head high, dared a second collision with those stunning eyes, but was now careful to blank them out. ‘I have a proposition to put to you.’
‘I’m not listening to any proposition,’ Nik asserted drily.
But in spite of that cool intonation the atmosphere sizzled. She could feel goosebumps rising on her arms. She forgot to look through him without focusing and registered that those extraordinary eyes of his were now roaming over her with unconcealed derision. And instantly she became aware of her creased suit, the flyaway tendrils of hair that had dropped round her hot face, indeed of how very, very plain she was. In fact, just plain ugly next to him: Beauty and the Beast with a transfer of sexes.
And it was that harsh, long-accepted reality that hardened Olympia and gave her the backbone she had almost lost. Ten years ago it had broken her heart not to have even a smidgen of the beauty that might have attracted Nik to her. Now, that contemptuous look of his only reminded her of the pain he had caused her.
‘How can you look me in the face?’ Nik growled in sudden disgust.
‘Easily…a clean conscience.’ She flung her head back, challenging him.
‘You’re a little whore,’ Nik contradicted with purring insolence.
Untouched by an accusation so far removed from the truth, Olympia was, however, quite amazed that he still felt a need to abuse her so long after the event. It struck her as almost hilariously ironic that she appeared to have made a bigger impression on Nik with her apparent infidelity than she had ever contrived to make on him as his fiancée.
As a rueful laugh fell from her lips, his darkly handsome features clenched hard. ‘Call me what you like,’ she advised with patent indifference. ‘But I have genuinely come here with the offer of a business deal.’
‘Spyros Manoulis would not employ you as his messenger,’ Nikos derided.
‘Well…in this particular case, of the three of us, it seems that only I have the indelicacy it requires to make this direct approach,’ Olympia informed him in taut and partial apology for what she was about to spring on him. ‘Can’t you just take your mind off what happened ten years ago and listen to me?’
‘No.’
Olympia frowned in honest surprise. ‘Why not?’
Nik studied her with blazing golden eyes full of even greater incredulity.
Refusing to be discouraged, Olympia breathed in very deep. ‘My grandfather still wants you to take over Manoulis Industries. Now, let’s face it…that’s all he ever wanted, and all your father ever wanted was to ensure that you got it. I was just the connecting link…I wasn’t remotely important except as a sort of guarantee of family kinship and mutual trust.’
‘What is this nonsense?’ Nik demanded with raw distaste.
‘I’m stripping matters back to their bones…OK?’
‘No, it is not OK. Get out,’ Nik said flatly.
‘No…no, I am not getting out!’ Olympia’s hands trembled and she clenched them into fierce fists. ‘You’ve had ten years of revenge already—’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ he grated.
‘If you marry me, I’ll sign everything over to you…’ Olympia told him shakily.
She really had Nik’s attention now. His brilliant eyes rested on her with a quality of stunned stillness she had never seen etched there before.
‘Not a proper or normal marriage…just whatever would satisfy my grandfather—and he doesn’t give a damn about me either, so he really wouldn’t be looking for much!’ Olympia pointed out, frantically eager to state her case before Nik emerged from what had to be a rare state of paralysis. ‘I’d stay on here in England…all I’d need is an allowance to live on, and in return you’d have the Manoulis empire all to yourself and not even the annoyance or embarrassment of me being around…’
A dark flush of red had now risen to accentuate the prominence of Nik’s fabulous cheekbones. He grated something in guttural Greek.
‘Nik…try to understand that I’m desperate or I wouldn’t be suggesting this. I know you think—’
‘How dare you approach me with such an offer?’ Nik demanded thunderously.
‘I—’
Striding forward, Nik Cozakis fastened powerful hands to her slim forearms before she could back away. ‘Are you insane?’ he questioned rawly. ‘You must be out of your mind to come to me like this! How could you think for one moment that I would marry an avaricious, brazen little tramp like you?’
‘Think business contract, not marriage.’ Although Olympia was shaking like a leaf in his hold, she was determined not to be sidetracked by meaningless personal insults. After all, she didn’t give two hoots what he thought of her.
His outraged amber-gold gaze raked her pale oval face. ‘A woman who went out to