He dragged in a breath, trying to cool his rapidly heating groin, and forced his eyes away. Sto kalo, she was a cleaner. A cleaner with a drinking problem if how she’d appeared earlier was any indication. Petra must really be getting to him if he was getting hot under the collar over a cleaner. ‘You’re mad at me,’ he said, reluctantly dragging his attention back to her face, ‘because you’ve spent all day cleaning? Isn’t that your job?’
She choked back a sob. Yes, she probably sounded irrational, hysterical, but what did he expect—that she would turn around and calmly thank him for his bombshell? ‘You try being a cleaner in a dump like this. I’ve just had the worst day of my life. How would you like it if you were a cleaner and someone booby-trapped their rubbish? How would you like it if you ended up smelling like a brewery and wearing someone else’s dried pizza crusts and then somebody else told you that you hadn’t had to clean it up at all, that you needn’t have bothered?’
His ears pricked up. Maybe not a cleaner with a drinking problem after all. Maybe he wasn’t quite so crazy…‘You don’t drink beer? I thought you were an Australian.’
‘So that makes me a drinker? No, for the record, I don’t drink beer. I can’t abide the taste of it. And,’ she continued, without missing a beat, ‘then I get hauled from my bed and told that my job is over and that I have to leave. And that you want to throw me out in that!’ She pointed to the window, where the rain distorted the light from the streetlamps and turned it into crazy zigzags. ‘What kind of man are you?’
He wanted to growl. This was supposed to be the most successful day of his life, a day he’d dreamed about for what seemed like for ever. And here he was, being challenged by the likes of this scrap of a woman, a mere cleaner. He ground out his answer between his teeth. ‘A businessman.’
‘Well, bully for you. What kind of business is it that throws innocent women out onto the street in the middle of the storm from hell?’
He’d heard enough. He turned and flicked an imaginary piece of lint from his sleeve. ‘You must have somewhere else to go.’
‘Yes. And it’s twelve thousand miles away. Shall I start walking now, do you think?’
‘Then why don’t you just buy yourself a ticket home?’
‘And you think that if I could afford my fare home, I’d be working in a dump like this?’
‘Do you need to be so melodramatic?’
‘No. I don’t need to. I’m just doing it for laughs.’ She dragged in a breath and threw her arms out by her sides. ‘Look, why can’t I stay here? Just for tonight. I’ll go tomorrow morning, first thing. I promise. Maybe it will have stopped raining by then.’
‘The hotel is closing,’ he reiterated. ‘It will be locked down tonight in preparation for the builders and redecorators coming in tomorrow. The deal was the hotel would be delivered empty.’
‘Nobody made a deal with me!’
‘I’m making it now.’
It didn’t sound like much of a deal to her. ‘So where are the guests going? Why can’t I go there?’ She held up her hand to stop his objection. ‘Not as a guest. Surely they could do with a cleaner, with this sudden influx of additional guests.’
He uttered something in Greek, something that sounded to her dangerously like a curse. ‘I’ll call and ask. No guarantees. Meanwhile you get your things together. I assume that won’t take long.’
She sniffed. ‘And if they don’t have a job?’
‘Then you’re on your own.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Just like that.’
She put her hands on top of her head and sighed, locking her fingers together, and turning her head up high, as if to think about it.
But Andreas couldn’t think about it. He was too busy following the perfect shape of her breasts, her nipples pulled up high, their shape so lovingly recreated by the thin cotton layer that was all that separated him from them. Her waist looked even smaller now. Almost tiny in comparison as she pulled her arms high, the flare of her hips mirroring the curve above. His mouth went dry.
Damn it all! He yanked his eyes away, rubbing them with his fingers. Anyone would think he’d never had a woman. She was a cleaner. It wouldn’t work. Clearly the day had taken more out of him than he’d realised.
‘And what about my wages?’ She was looking at him, her eyes wide, her arms unhooking. ‘Demetrius owes me for more than a week! And surely I’m entitled to some kind of severance pay, even if he was paying me cash, seeing you’re the one to terminate my job!’
Silently he cursed Darius again, along with his own team that had failed to pick up this stray employee. ‘How much are you owed?’
Cleo did some rapid sums in her head. Math had never been her strong point, so the calculations were a bit rough, but an entire week and a half, less board, that was a considerable sum. ‘Fifty quid,’ she said, rounding it off, hoping he wouldn’t balk.
He pulled a money clip from his pocket, withdrew a handful of notes and then added a fistful more before handing the bundle to her.
Her eyes opened wide as she took in the high-denomination notes and the number of them. Her math was still lousy, but it was more than clear he’d given her way too much. ‘I can’t take this! There’s heaps more than that here.’
‘Then consider it a bonus for doing what I ask and getting out of here. Call it your redundancy package, if you like, with enough for your accommodation tonight and probably for an entire week if you play your cards right. Now, it’s time you started packing.’
She looked as if she’d rather stay and keep arguing, her mouth poised open and ready to deliver another salvo, but she must have thought better of it. She jammed her lips shut and wheeled around, marching purposefully towards the door, shoving the wad of notes into her jeans pocket as she went. Not that it was any distraction. He was already looking there, admiring the way her denim jeans lovingly caressed the cheeks of her behind as she went. But she stopped before the door and turned, and he was forced to raise his eyes to meet hers.
‘I’ll go and pack,’ she said, colour in her cheeks and fire spitting from her eyes, ‘and I’d like to say it’s been a pleasure meeting you, but I’m afraid that isn’t possible. I’ll leave my key in the door. Not that you need it, apparently.’
And then she swept out with her head held high like the princess on her eye mask rather than a redundant cleaner.
There was no need for him to stay. But he sat there, leaning against the desk, thinking that he’d been wrong. She wasn’t pretty by any measure, she wasn’t tall and elegant like his usual choice of woman, but there was something about her, a fire in her eyes as she’d protested his closure of the hotel, something that had almost burned bright in the seedy air between them. Would she be as passionate in the bedroom, or would she go back to being the bedraggled mouse he’d seen lurking in the corridor?
Damn! Trust Darius to leave him to clean up his rubbish. But he should have expected it.
He rubbed the bridge of his nose, hating the way his thoughts were going. The woman had a point. He, more than anyone, knew what it was like to be left with nothing and without even a roof over his head. He wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
He slid open his cell phone, found the direct number for the manager of the hotel the guests here were being transferred to and hit ‘call’. It answered within a moment. ‘It’s Andreas. Have you a position for another cleaner or kitchen hand? There is one here who requires a position, preferably live-in.’
There was a moment’s hesitation, but no argument, no question as to qualifications or referees from the manager. That Andreas himself had enquired was all the assurance the manager required, the moment’s hesitation all the time