Though it could not, she reflected dourly, be the first time he had reduced anyone to tears in the workplace. He did not exactly ooze empathy. As for tolerance! If she had been able, Beth would have laughed at the idea; Theo Kyriakis had definitely not been at the head of the queue when they’d handed out that one, though on other occasions he had obviously been first in line!
She blew her nose loudly and risked a surreptitious look up at his bronzed patrician profile through her damp lashes. Even she had to admit, in her more objective moments, that Theo Kyriakis was not most people’s idea of unhandsome and the overt in-your-face bold sexuality that he exuded, no matter what the occasion, it seemed to her, had probably never done him much harm.
It wasn’t just that people looked at him and thought gorgeous and sexy—not intrinsically bad in itself and you couldn’t blame a man for genetics—it was the fact that he obviously didn’t give a damn what people thought about him that really got under her skin. The man’s assurance and self-confident poise was utterly impregnable.
He walked into a room and conversations stopped, heads turned and eyes followed him, and it wasn’t the immaculate tailoring and stunning good looks they stared at; the man literally oozed animal magnetism from every perfect pore.
Perfection was the problem. Theo Kyriakis put the cool into cool. The wretched man never had a hair out of place. Raised by a grandmother who valued such things, Beth, who had not been a naturally tidy child and still struggled to present a neat appearance, doubted that neat was an adjective that sprang to most people’s minds as they followed his effortlessly elegant progression across a room.
It might make her strange but, to Beth’s way of thinking, a man needed a few flaws, if only to make him halfway human! And he didn’t have any. A take-me-or-leave-me attitude, she reflected with a resentful sniff, was easy when you knew people would always take you!
The underlying vulnerability she sensed in his brother was one of the things that had first attracted her to Andreas—well, maybe second after his extremely cute smile. The thing Andreas had that his brother lacked was empathy.
If he had found her crying, Andreas would have hugged her, then made a teasing remark to make her laugh. He would not have stared at her with those spooky penetrating eyes. The thought of Theo Kyriakis hugging her should have been funny, but it wasn’t. The idea of those muscular arms closing around her, drawing her against a body that was as hard as his eyes were cold made Beth’s stomach muscles quiver with utter horror. Yes, that was definitely horror that she was feeling; what else could it be?
Looking down at the top of her glossy head, Theo winced as she blew her pink-tipped nose again—loudly. For a small nose, it made a lot of noise.
‘Go home; I’ll clear it with Andreas.’ His offer, he told himself, was motivated by practicality, not kindness. It was not good business practice to have clients greeted by a hysterical female.
The casual offer brought Beth’s head up, though her thoughts were still actively involved in creating a scene where she was locked in Theo Kyriakis’s embrace—less fantasy and more waking nightmare.
‘I couldn’t possibly!’ she protested, annoyed by the suggestion, she didn’t work for him, but that didn’t stop him flinging around his orders.
Her glance slid with dislike across his lean autocratic features; he never let anyone forget he was in charge for a second. Watching him undermine Andreas’s authority, Beth had been forced to bite her tongue on more than one occasion but Andreas never complained. He was just too easy-going and nice-natured to complain.
Knowing how much Andreas hated making waves and enemies—his brother was a walking six feet five tidal wave—Beth frequently complained on his behalf, giving her a certain reputation for being what the polite within the building termed overzealous and the less polite called hostile and scary.
Scary did not earn her many friends, but it did grant her a certain amount of grudging respect; grudging respect and unrequited love meant her Friday nights were generally not wild affairs.
Theo’s sable brows lifted at the vehemence of her response; he felt his attitude shift rapidly from mild sympathy to irritation.
‘It’s never good to bring personal problems to work.’
If he could maintain this discipline, even on the occasion some years earlier when his engagement had been broken off and his supposed broken heart had been the red-hot topic in numerous websites and his photo had been plastered over the covers of numerous trashy papers and magazines—not the best time in his life—it did not seem unreasonable to him to expect similar restraint from those in his employ.
The icy reproach made her eyes fly wide in indignation. ‘I don’t have a personal life!’
Theo arched a sardonic brow and watched the hot colour wash over her fair skin.
‘You amaze me,’ he murmured. It also amazed him that he was actually prolonging this conversation, but seeing someone as uptight as his brother’s colourless robot secretary show her claws had a strange fascination—but then so did a car wreck for someone with nothing better to do—and he did.
Beth, her eyes glowing with dislike behind the lenses of her slightly misted spectacles, glared at him. Sarcastic rat!
‘I have a great deal of work to do.’
‘Few of us are indispensable, Miss Farley.’
Coded warning, threat…?
For once, Beth knew she would not be going to sleep trying to decipher the dark hidden meaning in one of Theo Kyriakis’s sardonic throwaway comments, which might all be perfectly innocent, though it was hard to tell when he had a dark chocolate, deep accented voice that could make a shopping list sound deliciously sinister and lingered weirdly in your head for hours after a conversation.
Well, no more! In a year’s time she would have forgotten what he sounded like. Yes, upbeat was good.
Yes, and being unemployed was really upbeat, especially with her overdraft situation!
Cutting off the inner dialogue abruptly, Beth lifted her chin. As an ex-employee, she no longer had to pander to this man’s enormous ego, unlike the rest of the world!
‘You can’t sack me because I quit.’
Theo’s brows rose as he looked from the handwritten envelope being held in a shaking hand towards him to the angry antagonistic eyes sparking green levelled at his face.
‘Sack you?’ he wondered, shaking his head in a mystified manner. ‘Did I miss something?’
Aware that she might have overreacted slightly, Beth’s eyes fell from his. ‘You said I wasn’t indispensable,’ she reminded him with a cranky sniff.
‘And you think you are?’
‘Of course not.’
Ignoring the interruption, he spoke across her. ‘So you keep a resignation letter to hand for just such a moment?’
‘Of course not. I—’
He turned his head to scan the envelope. ‘And the name on that envelope does not appear to be mine. You do recall that you do not work for me?’
Beth rolled her eyes.
On paper, Andreas might be the boss in this office and, while he did have a degree of autonomy, Beth had learnt early on that all the major policy decisions were made by Theo Kyriakis. He was Kyriakis Inc, and nobody who knew anything about the company’s meteoric rise under his management could question that.
Where his brother was concerned,