Reluctant Mistress, Blackmailed Wife
‘Your grandparents…’
The reminder was sufficient to halt Alexandros in his tracks. Pelias and Calliope Christakis would be very distressed if an unsavoury scandal engulfed their grandson. The older couple were not of an age where their continuing good health could be taken for granted either. In the short term, Alexandros grudgingly accepted that a discreet and cautious course would be wisest.
Katie was intercepted before she could climb the stairs to her room.
‘Miss Fletcher?’
It was the same thin fair man she had seen watching her in the foyer of CTK bank. ‘Yes?’
He handed her his card as an introduction. ‘I’m Trev. I work for the Daily Globe. Mind me asking what your connection to Alexandros Christakis is?’
Taken aback, Katie muttered, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about—’
‘But you do. You just got out of the bloke’s limo!’
‘You saw me? Did you follow me all the way from the bank? And to my friend’s as well?’ Katie was unnerved by that awareness, and turned towards the stairs again.
The reporter was in her way. ‘I hear you have a couple of kids…’
‘What’s that got to do with you?’
‘Christakis is a very interesting guy. If you have anything to tell us about him it could be well worth your while,’ he told her with a meaningful look. ‘People don’t talk about him. He lives in a world most of us can only envy. So anything of an exciting personal nature would have a very high cash value.’
Katie hesitated, distaste filling her. She wanted to tell him to get lost and leave her alone. If only Alexandros had given her a more concrete promise of support than a phone number! Leanne had said that she should be prepared to do anything to give Toby and Connor a better start in life. But talking to a newspaper in return for money struck her as sleazy, and she wanted to think that she was above doing that sort of thing. And yet she was also painfully aware that it was her job to provide her children with a decent home, and achieving that would require cold hard cash.
‘We’re on your trail now, so if there’s any dirt to dig we’ll find it anyway.’ Threat and warning were linked in Trev’s hopeful appraisal. ‘So why don’t you make it easier for us and turn a profit too?’
‘I’m not interested.’ Even as she spoke, Katie did not know whether or not she was making the right decision.
An hour later she went back to Leanne’s, to pick up Toby and Connor. While her friend saw her mother out of the flat, Katie scooped up her sons, one at a time out of the buggy, and hugged them tight. After a busy morning of occupation, Toby gave her a huge sunny smile, and Connor laughed.
‘So, tell…’ Leanne urged impatiently. ‘What happened? Did you get to see Alexandros?’
Katie explained, while her friend listened with avid interest and made her describe the limo in detail.
‘Alexandros is obviously stinking rich.’ A calculating expression formed on Leanne’s pretty face. ‘And the best offer he can make you is a DNA test?’ she sneered. ‘He’ll need to do a lot better than that!’
‘He was shocked…I’ll give him a couple of days and see what happens.’ Katie displayed the card she had been given by the journalist to the brunette.
‘Whoopy-do!’ Leanne snatched the card to study it, more impressed by the interest of the Daily Globe than by anything else. ‘This Trev took the trouble to follow you? Hey, Alexandros must be a real celebrity! And you turned the reporter’s offer down? Are you out of your tiny mind?’
‘I have to give Alexandros a chance to help us first.’
‘But if the press find out whose kids Toby and Connor are without your input, you won’t make any money at all!’
Katie was beginning to feel uncomfortable. ‘I know, but I don’t think anyone will work out what my relationship was with Alexandros any time soon. I mean, nobody knows about us—’
‘You could make pots of money out of this, Katie. Haven’t you got the guts to go for it?’ her friend demanded
‘Alexandros would hate that kind of publicity, and he’d never forgive me for it.’
‘So what? What’s he to you?’
‘He’ll always be the twins’ father. I don’t want to make an enemy of him. Flogging our story to the newspapers has to be a last resort for me.’
Leanne gave her a scornful look. ‘You’re being really stupid about this. There’s money to be made. Your problem is that you’ve still got feelings for that bastard—’
Katie was affronted by that suggestion. ‘No, I haven’t!’
‘Much good it’ll do you. He doesn’t want to know now, does he?’ Leanne sniped, and soon after that Katie thought it wisest to thank the brunette for looking after the twins and go.
Mid-morning the following day, a young man in casual clothing came to her door. ‘Are you Katie Fletcher?’
At her nod of confirmation, he extended a mobile phone to her.
‘I’m a solicitor, engaged to represent a certain person’s interests, Miss Fletcher,’ the brisk voice on the phone informed her. ‘I’m sure you’ll understand the need for discretion in this case. Are you willing to undergo DNA testing?’
Katie was taken by surprise, but recognised that such speed of action was essentially an Alexandros Christakis trait. ‘Yes…’
‘Then sign the consent form and the matter will be taken care of immediately, with the minimum of disruption.’
An envelope and a pen were passed to her, the phone returned. Her caller departed. She drew out a brief document, scanned it with strained eyes and then scrawled her signature. Alexandros was doing what came naturally to him. It was insulting and humiliating, but also a necessary evil if she was to prove her claim. Within half an hour a doctor arrived with a medical bag. He explained that the test consisted of painless mouth swabs being taken from her and the twins. In a matter of minutes he had carried out the procedure and smoothly taken his leave again.
She walked the floor that evening, trying to soothe Toby. Although it was barely nine o’clock, someone banged on the wall to complain, and a man knocked at the door and asked her to keep her kids quiet because he was a shift worker trying to get some sleep. Tears were tracking down Katie’s weary face while she struggled to quieten Toby, who seemed to have no more notion of sleeping at night than an owl. It was impossible for her not to look back and wonder how her life had drifted so far off the course she had assumed it would follow…
After Katie’s English father had died, her mother had taken her daughter back to Ireland to live. Katie had enjoyed a happy childhood in a small town where everyone had known everyone else. Armed with an honours degree in Economics, she had been ecstatic when she’d got her first job as a PA in London. But when her mother had fallen ill she had had to resign and return home.
In spite of her ill health, Maura Fletcher had insisted on keeping up a couple of part-time jobs. Fearful of losing her livelihood, the older woman had only been persuaded to take the doctor’s advice and rest when Katie had agreed to stand in for her until she regained her strength.
Maura had acted as caretaker and occasional housekeeper at a superb contemporary house which overlooked a sea inlet a few miles from their home. Owned by a German industrialist and rarely occupied, the property lay down a long gated track and enjoyed an incredibly private and beautiful setting. Katie had one day prepared the house for the occupation of a single mystery guest. A car accident had put the two domestic staff travelling with Alexandros out of commission and the rental agency, unaware that Katie was doing her mother’s job for her, had recommended her parent as temporary cook and cleaner.
A fax had followed, detailing more exact requirements, and Katie had been staggered by the number of rules she was expected to observe, ranging from meals to be served at rigid hours and a duty on her part to being both invisible and silent. On the other hand, the salary offered had been generous enough to bring a delighted smile to her mother’s anxious face, and the cutting-edge equipment being installed in the office with a sea view and a balcony had suggested that the guest would be much too busy to pay heed to the amateur level of the household help. Of course, accustomed as Alexandros was to perfection in every field, he had refused to settle for less, and Katie, secretly resenting the role of servant, had refused to be suitably humble. That they should clash had been inevitable.
No passage of time could eradicate Katie’s memory of her first glimpse of Alexandros. After he had arrived by helicopter, he had gone straight down to the seashore. From about twenty yards away she had watched him, dumbstruck by his sleek, dark, masculine magnificence. Clad in jeans and a husky grey cashmere sweater, and even with his black hair tousled by the breeze and designer stubble obscuring his stubborn jawline, he had bewitched her. She had never known a man could be that physically beautiful, or seem so alone and isolated. Wanton desire and longing had leapt up in her that very first moment, and she had never been able to overcome it…
Someone rapped at the door and she studied it in dismay, fearing another complaint just when Toby had mercifully subsided to the occasional long-drawn-out whimper of dissatisfaction. Tiptoeing over, she eased the door open a crack, for she was dressed in her pyjamas, and then fell back in complete confusion.
‘May I come in?’ Alexandros asked grimly, his dignity having been severely ruffled by Cyrus’s insistence that it was necessary for his employer to enter the building in a clandestine manner and via an alley full of dustbins. An instant later Alexandros’ irritation had vanished into the ether—a triviality when set next to the cold shock of his surroundings…
CHAPTER THREE
ALEXANDROS was a man of action, and playing a waiting game when Katie had asked for help ran contrary to his masculine code of ethics. Ignoring legal advice and doing what he felt had to be done came much more naturally to his dominant nature.
But Alexandros had never before come into personal contact with the kind of poverty that now confronted him. The room was tiny, cramped and shabby. A clothes airer stacked with damp washing, a pram and a bed were crammed up against a cot from which he swiftly averted his attention. In the single patch of space between the battered wardrobe and a sink stacked with baby bottles stood Katie. His golden gaze arrowed in on her like a laser. Against the riot of copper curls tumbling round her startled face her eyes shimmered green as emeralds, and, that fast, his body responded with a testosterone-charged surge of sexual hunger.
Even as the unreasoning shock of that lust hit, the darker side of him revelled in its resurgence. Instantly memories he had buried so deep he only dreamt about them surfaced. Katie up against the kitchen wall, tumbled in a pile of white linen, in a bubble bath with a ring of candles round her. The candles had been snuffed out by the overflowing water when he had hauled her up into his arms. Time after time he had discovered that he could never get enough of her, and that lack of control so foreign to his temperament had gone very much against the grain.
‘I wasn’t expecting you…’ Katie could feel the tension in the air leaping and crackling round her like mini-lightning bolts, and she could not dredge her attention from him. He had always had that effect on her. He walked into room and owned it and the occupants until he chose to release them from the power of his potent presence and forceful personality.
‘If I hadn’t had a dinner engagement I would have called earlier.’ Belatedly registering the brief camisole and shorts she wore, Alexandros was striving not to notice the milky pale swell of her round breasts above and below the worn fabric. His even white teeth gritted while he tried to work out why she should have such a dramatic effect on his libido.
‘I’m glad you’re here,’ Katie admitted, feeling that her faith in him had been justified. She was pleased and proud that he had not lived down to Leanne’s low expectations.
A little snuffling whimper drifted from the cot. Alexandros went rigid. A tiny hand curled round a bar in the cot and a small face appeared behind the bars. Gripped by the most excruciating curiosity, in spite of his resistance to the very idea of parenthood, Alexandros slowly moved closer. Katie’s acquiescence to the demand for DNA testing without a single objection had convinced him that she was very probably telling him the truth.
‘Boys?’ Alexandros almost whispered, looking down at the two curly dark heads.
‘Yes.’
‘But not identical.’ The cynosure of two pairs of curious dark brown eyes, Alexandros was frozen to the spot. They were his. One observant glance was sufficient to persuade him of that reality. For both small faces bore compelling evidence of their Christakis lineage: straight brows that were a light baby version of his own, an early hint of the family cleft chin that even his grandfather carried, skin and eyes a little paler than his, but hair as blue-black. The curls were their mother’s, and the only proof that he could see of her input into their gene pool. His level regard was being returned by the babies without fear. He was a father, he registered in shock, whether he liked it or not.
‘No,’ she agreed in a taut rush, for she was desperate to know what he was thinking. ‘But well-spotted! At first glance most people do think the twins are identical.’
Unaffected by that hint of a compliment, Alexandros continued to survey the two little boys with brooding force. There they were, sharing the same cot, like orphans in some squalid children’s home. His sons, his responsibility. Life as he knew it was over, he conceded bleakly. His freedom had just been imprisoned and was awaiting sentence to be hung drawn and quartered. There would be no escape from the agonies ahead. He would have to offer her marriage. It was his own fault. He had brought this punishment on himself. What a mess. What a bloody mess!
One of the babies cried, and she bent over the side of the cot to lift the child, treating Alexandros to a provocative view of her apple-shaped derriere. Tiny and slight she might be, but she was still one hundred per cent woman in the places that mattered, he found himself thinking—until he cracked down on that inappropriate reflection.
‘I think you should get some clothes on,’ Alexandros told her, with the censorious air of a Puritan being tempted by a loose woman.
Only then registering that she was hardly dressed for visitors, Katie straightened, clutching Connor, her face pink with embarrassment. ‘For goodness’ sake, I’m wearing my pyjamas.’
‘It’s barely nine-thirty in the evening—’
‘So? I sleep whenever I get the chance!’ She stuffed her son into Alexandros’s arms without even thinking about what she was doing, and turned away in a hurry to snatch up her dressing gown. Her cheeks were burning. Had he told her to cover up because he believed she was trying to tempt him with her body? Did she look that desperate? Perhaps she did, she thought painfully.
As Katie thrust Connor into his arms, Alexandros turned to stone. Connor also froze. The little boy then reacted to his father’s extreme tension by opening his mouth and howling like a burglar alarm. Aghast, Alexandros studied the screaming child and put him straight down on the carpet. ‘No more,’ he told his son in reproving Greek, as if he was a misbehaving seven-year-old.
As Connor’s ear-splitting cry mounted to a shriek, Katie scooped him up and hugged his squirming little body protectively close. ‘How could you just put him down like that? Don’t you think he has feelings?’
Alexandros winced as Toby loosed a first warning squeal from the cot. ‘I’m a stranger to him. I thought I had frightened him. I have never held a child before.’
‘Neither had I when the twins were born. But I had no choice but to learn!’
‘I don’t need to learn,’ Alexandros drawled, sardonic in tone and equally dry. ‘I can afford a nanny.’
‘I’m thrilled for you.’
Backing off to the door, Alexandros watched her efforts to placate the babies. With two little screeching horrors to look after, it was little wonder that she looked exhausted. He held at bay the knowledge that he had helped to create those screeching horrors now dogging her daily existence, and imposed a strict mental block on the noise of their cries while he watched Katie. He was still fiercely determined to penetrate the mystery of her attraction, since she bore not the smallest resemblance to the women he normally went for. She wasn’t tall, she wasn’t blonde, and she wasn’t ravishingly beautiful.
Tiny and slender though she was, however, there was something about the arrangement of her delicate features and the unexpectedly lush curve of breast and hip that raised her to a seriously appetising level of desirability, Alexandros acknowledged abstractedly. He considered the reality that she had conceived and given birth to his children. All of a sudden that seemed an extraordinarily sexy achievement to him. He imagined sliding his hands under the thin camisole she wore, and the exquisite feel of the silky skin on her narrow ribcage beneath his palms before he curved his fingers up and round…
‘Just what is the matter with you?’ Katie launched at Alexandros in almost sobbing frustration. She could not cope when both the twins cried at once, and was enraged by his supreme detachment from the rising decibel level in the room. ‘Haven’t you got any interest in your own children?’
Unwillingly forced from the realms of erotic fantasy, Alexandros dealt her an enquiring glance from below his luxuriant black lashes, the faintest hint of colour scoring his stunning high cheekbones. ‘I’m here,’ he fielded without expression. ‘That should tell you something.’
‘That you don’t want to be here!’ Katie condemned helplessly, devastated by his failure even to ask the twins’ names. ‘That’s what your attitude is telling me!’
‘How may I help?’ Alexandros ground out, his accent very thick.
‘Lift Toby…’
Alexandros approached the cot, squared his shoulders, reached in and closed his hands round the wriggling baby. He performed that feat with the same enthusiasm with which he might have stuck his hands in a blazing fire. Toby. Alexandros sounded the name under his breath, reading the look of anxious surprise in the child’s brown eyes as he lifted him. He drew Toby awkwardly closer. More able to rate the experience the second time around, he was amazed at how light in weight Toby was—and then transfixed by the big smile that transformed the little boy’s face. That open happy grin reminded Alexandros very much of Pelias, and made Toby feel familiar.
Engaged in soothing Connor, it was a moment or two before Katie registered that peace had fallen again. She glanced up and saw Alexandros smiling at her eldest son. That smile stopped her heart in its tracks, made her chest go all tight, rousing memories so painful that hot tears burned the back of her eyes. Once, and for a very brief period, Alexandros had looked at her like that, and she had wanted to turn somersaults and sing with the sheer joy of living. It had not occurred to her then that losing him would hurt like hell, that the world he had made seem so bright and full of promise could just as swiftly turn grey and threatening. But now, she reminded herself doggedly, she was no longer so naive and trusting. Expecting more from Alexandros Christakis than help with the rent would be asking for trouble.
‘What is his brother called?’ Alexandros enquired.
‘Connor.’
‘We will have to discuss the requirements of this situation.’ Alexandros utilised the business terminology that he was most at ease with.
‘I’m not looking for much from you. I only want us to have somewhere decent to live,’ Katie muttered with low-pitched urgency, as she settled Connor carefully back into the cot and held her arms out for his brother.
Alexandros surrendered Toby. He straightened his broad shoulders, his wide, sensual mouth compressing. Could she really be so clueless? Or was he supposed to be impressed by her pretence of innocence? She could hardly be ignorant of the fact that the simple act of having had his children would turn out to be a highly profitable enterprise.
‘I’ll move you out of here as soon as possible,’ Alexandros responded. ‘Tomorrow, I should think.’
Katie spun back to study him in wide-eyed astonishment. ‘Tomorrow? Are you serious?’
‘I would take you home with me now…’ Dark golden eyes rested on her for a heartbeat, with an intensity that made her mouth run dry and the skin at the nape of her neck prickle. ‘But it would be too unsettling to move the children at this hour.’
An uneasy laugh fell from her lips, for she assumed that that reference to taking her home was a joke—and not one in the best of taste. ‘Luckily for you, I’m not expecting to go home with you. I’ll be more than happy to be placed in a position to afford a small flat for the three of us.’ Her colour heightened, she avoided his gaze and jerked a narrow shoulder in an awkward gesture. ‘My goodness, why is anything involving money so embarrassing to talk about?’
Alexandros, who had never found money a source of embarrassment, and could not imagine ever doing so, was unmoved. ‘Naturally I have no intention of leaving you to raise the twins alone.’
Katie tied the sash on her dressing gown with nervous hands and said nothing. So he was planning to take on some sort of paternal role? A visit once a month? Sandwiched in between business trips and dirty weekends with gorgeous women?
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