“This is completely unprofessional,” Melissa snapped. “And none of your business.”
“You coming here is unprofessional.”
“I am merely doing a favor for an old friend.”
She placed a deliberate emphasis on the word friend and Lyra’s heart slowed slightly. She wasn’t even sure when it had begun to race. Maybe when the image of Andros fucking her personal shopper came to mind? But no, it was fine; in fact it had backfired completely. Though Melissa had tried to suggest a closeness with that word, Lyra was a whole lot more perceptive than many people were. It was a trick she’d picked up in the dark days, when judging an adult’s mood was necessary to ensure she and her sisters were safe or fed. Melissa may have fucked the Sicilian once but it was nothing that had meant anything or lasted. That fact was written in the stiff line of her skinny body, the frown on her lips, even the way she held herself.
“Friend?” Lyra asked, allowing herself one small smile.
“That was what I said,” Melissa replied, her teeth practically grinding against one another.
“That’s debatable.”
The other woman glared, gestured to the binders, then glared some more. “Have you made your choices?”
Lyra shook her head, and grabbed the binder with the shoes in. A couple of ticks later she passed it back across. “He’s mine right now. You should accept that.”
“Andros is never anyone’s,” Melissa hissed. “If you knew him at all you would know that.”
“But he’s never sent a personal shopper to buy for a woman before has he? Which is exactly why you came yourself.”
Bingo. The other woman flushed as she gathered up her folders.
“You won’t hang on to him for long. Andros is incapable of sticking to one woman at a time.”#p#分页标题#e#
Lyra shrugged and stood too, purposefully walking forward so that Melissa had no choice but to make her way to the door. “I don’t want him for long, but for now this is how it is.”
“We’ll see.”
“That we will.” She opened the door as wide as it would go, and stood back to let the personal shopper through first. “Oh and, Melissa, don’t send the purple. I’ll send it right back.”
Chapter Twelve
When Andros arrived back at the apartment, he was in a contemplative mood. The background check on Lyra had uncovered some things that unsettled him. Nothing of a criminal nature, nothing to worry that she might be planning anything shady, it matched what she had told him in more ways than one.
She was poor.
Painfully so.
He was not familiar with the area of London that she lived, but some checks on a few government websites had darkened his mood considerably. Lyra lived in an area he doubted he would ever have cause to visit. She was more than poor. She was deprived, and she was doing whatever was necessary to give herself a helping hand out of it.
He admired that.
Had he too not come from extremely humble surroundings? His parents had been poor, his whole family in fact. It was only when he moved to the States in his early teens, on a student visa that he’d worked himself beyond endurance to secure, that he had started to earn any money. He still remembered working fifteen, sometimes twenty-hour days. Investing the little bits of money he made, always on the lookout for an opportunity here an opportunity there. He’d had drive, and he’d had the brains to make that drive into something.
And Lyra? He pulled a key out of his pocket, and opened the door. She had brains, no doubt about that, but for some reason she had chosen not to use them in the same way as he had. Instead, she used her looks and her delectable body to make a better life for herself.
Did he disapprove?
“Andros? Is that you?”
“It is,” he called out, then—almost tripping over a half dozen boxes and bags—he followed her voice into the bedroom. She was not sitting on the bed like he expected, but the heaviness in the air told him all he needed to know. He walked through to the en suite, narrowly avoiding more boxes as he did so.
The sight that greeted him took his breath away.
Lyra was lying in the tub, her hair clipped on top of her head, bubbles covering everything but one bare leg that she was soaping.
Dios.
Up and down she went, her hands running along the skin. As he watched, she travelled up to the top of her thighs, her eyes catching his, locking and teasing.
“Do you need help?” he asked, his own voice sounding unfamiliar to him, low and harsh, and he was so fucking hard already.
“Yes, please.”
She held out a hand with the soap. He took it before kneeling down next to the tub. He seemed to spend a lot of time in her presence on his knees Andros thought, and resolved to flip that situation around at the earliest opportunity.