‘Go away,’ she spat. ‘Or I’ll call Security.’ Her fury was fed by the fact the receptionist was automatically obeying him despite her loud protest.
‘I’m taking you home; it is what Tom would expect.’
This struck Katie as the height of hypocrisy. ‘The same way he’d expect you to insult me every chance you get.’ If he thought she was getting in his car with him he was off his head—or I would be if I did, she thought, recalling uneasily the strange things that happened to her when she was in close physical proximity to him…
Her delicate feathery brows drew together. Something as shallow and superficial as sexual attraction ought in theory to be easy to control or at least ignore…
‘Is that what I’ve been doing?’
Katie lifted confused eyes to his. ‘I don’t know what you’ve been doing,’ she revealed shakily. She bit her lower lip and added in a hard, contemptuous voice, ‘I should have known you’d be the sort of man who’d drink and drive.’
Katie watched in reluctant fascination as the handsome face above her grew taut and forbidding… My Lord, he really is formidable, she thought, unable to tear her gaze free.
‘If you were half as observant as you like to think yourself you’d have noticed that, unlike you, I barely had a mouthful of wine,’ he announced austerely.
‘Are you calling me drunk?’ she demanded spikily.
Nikos muttered something inaudible but definitely not English or polite under his breath. ‘That at least would be some excuse,’ he gritted. ‘But I think your unreasonable behaviour is a result of an intractable, obstinate and shrewish disposition, not inebriation.’
‘I hate to disillusion you but not agreeing with you is not actually the accepted litmus test for pigheadedness. Just because women fall in with your wishes doesn’t mean they actually agree with you, or even think that pearls of wisdom fall from your tongue.’ Pausing to catch her breath, she delivered a breathless, snide laugh. ‘It just means you’ve got more money than they have. Privately they probably think you’re just as much of a pain as I do.’
Incredulity—maybe people didn’t speak to him that way?—metamorphosed into sizzled anger in his dramatic eyes and Katie wondered with a strange sense of objectivity if she might not have gone too far. It was almost as if she had a compulsion to push him, test him to his limits.
‘I can only assume,’ he replied in a voice with a chill factor straight from Siberia, ‘that Tom has been kept in ignorance of this charming aspect of your personality—he never struck me as a stupid man, but then I suppose a beautiful face will make the wisest man foolish,’ he concluded cynically.
It wasn’t the attack alone that made her eyes open wide in amazement, it was the inference that he thought she had a beautiful face… Her preoccupation with this discovery struck her as unhealthy. She’d never counted vanity as one of her sins…now pride and obstinacy were quite another matter!
‘Now be a good girl and let me take you home.’
His patronising drawl fanned the embers of her temper into hot flame. ‘Go jump in the lake!’ she bawled childishly up at him. As she was tall, Katie wasn’t accustomed to being forced to tilt her head back to look a man in the face. She silently seethed with discontent. It wasn’t fair, she reflected resentfully, that simply because the gene pool had made him so damned tall he immediately had an unfair advantage in any argument…
‘If you are still concerned that I have been drinking, don’t be,’ he continued sombrely. ‘I am very conscious that cars can be a lethal weapon—my elder brother was killed by a drunk driver.’
His frosty manner was not one that invited sympathy; despite this, Katie’s attitude tumbled abruptly from extreme hostility to aching pity. Notwithstanding his terse tone, she was convinced that behind that stony façade he was hurting.
She knew of course it was probable that the Peter factor had something to do with her response—up to this point they’d had nothing in common, but now she knew that they’d both lost their brothers in motor accidents. Though the circumstances were very different, she felt, quite illogically, that some tenuous link had sprung up between them—not enough to make them inseparable friends, but maybe it just made him seem a little more human, more fragile. Fragile…? She glanced up at his tough profile and shook her head; maybe that was taking it too far.
It was ironic, considering that she’d been trying to discover a weak spot in his defences all evening, that now she had actually found one all she wanted to do was kiss him better. Kiss…don’t go there, Katie. But of course she did.
Her active imagination had rapidly progressed beyond the kissing scene; by now things had got a lot further! Katie stopped herself; she was sure Nikos Lakis was the person in the universe least likely to need to be kissed better.
‘I’m sorry about your brother.’ I suppose I just don’t have the killer instinct.
Nikos’s dark, well-defined brows drew together as he watched those extraordinary sapphire-blue eyes fill until they glistened luminously with unshed tears. It struck him as bizarre that someone so hard-nosed and single-minded should have tears to spare for someone she had never even met.
This unexpected display of empathy was totally incompatible with the character of the woman that he had in his mental file marked ‘Katerina Forsythe’. Nikos scowled; he didn’t want her to be more complex than the two-dimensional character he had imagined. Mostly he considered himself pretty flexible and open to new ideas, but in this instance he was extremely resistant to revision.
‘And I’m sure you’re an excellent driver,’ she added generously. ‘But I’ve no intention—’
His deep, strangely abstracted voice cut softly across her rambling rejection. ‘I thought that day I first saw you that you were wearing tinted contact lenses, the colour of your eyes was so…extreme. But the colour is real, isn’t it?’ His expression took on an almost accusing cast as he gazed down into the clear blue of her widely spaced, darkly fringed eyes.
The total unexpectedness of his comment made her blink, or maybe the intensity of his regard had something to do with her need to break the contact? It surprised her that he’d even noticed what colour her eyes were, let alone given the shade any thought.
‘Of course it’s real.’ For some inexplicable reason her heart began to act as if she’d decided to sprint across the lobby.
Nikos cleared his throat and ran a long-fingered hand through his dark glossy hair. ‘It is a very unusual colour—almost violet. Did you inherit your colouring from your mother?’
The tight feeling in her chest made her voice sound unusually breathy when she replied. ‘No, my mother was very dark. It was Peter who inherited her colouring.’ Her expression softened as she thought of Eleri’s glossy jet-black hair and golden skin. ‘Dad was a blue-eyed, redheaded Scot.’
‘Was? Is he dead?’
‘They both are.’
‘So there is just you and…Peter? Or do you have other siblings?’
Katie shook her head. ‘No, it was just us two—and Peter, he died.’
‘Long ago?’
‘Seven years.’
He nodded, but did not comment further on what she’d told him.
Katie wasn’t quite sure why she had told him. Peter wasn’t a subject she discussed with anyone, though sometimes the weight of her secret made her long to share the burden with someone.
‘I know my presence disturbs you, Katerina…’
And then some!