Conveniently His Omnibus(38)

‘I suspect you are the kind of woman, Saskia, who would drive a saint, never mind a mere mortal man, to be driven to subdue you, to master you and then to wish that he had had the strength to master himself instead.’

Saskia shivered as the raw sensuality of what he was saying hit her like a jolt of powerful electricity. What was it about him that made her so acutely aware of him, so nervously on edge?

More to distract herself than anything else she started to eat, unaware of the ruefully amused look Andreas gave her as she did so. If he didn’t know better he would have said that she was as inexperienced as a virgin. The merest allusion to anything sexual was enough to have her trembling with reaction, unable to meet his gaze. It was just as well that he knew it was all an act, otherwise... Otherwise what? Otherwise he might be savagely tempted to put his words into actions, to see if she trembled as deliciously when he touched her as she did when he spoke to her.

To counter what he was feeling he began to speak to her in a crisp, businesslike voice.

‘There are certain things you will need to know about my family background if you are going to convince my grandfather that we are in love.’

He proceeded to give her a breakdown of his immediate family, adding a few cautionary comments about his grandfather’s health.

‘Which does not mean that he is not one hundred and fifty per cent on the ball. If anything, the fact that he is now prevented from working so much means that he is even more ferociously determined to interfere in my life than he was before. He tells my mother that he is afraid he will die before I give him any great-grandchildren. If that is not blackmail I don’t know what is,’ Andreas growled.

‘It’s obviously a family vice,’ Saskia told him mock sweetly, earning herself a look that she refused to allow to make her quake in her shoes.

‘Ultimately, of course, our engagement will have to be broken,’ Andreas told her unnecessarily. ‘No doubt our sojourn on the island will reveal certain aspects of our characters that we shall find mutually unappealing, and on our return to England we shall bring our engagement to an end. But at least I shall have bought myself some time...and hopefully Athena will have decided to accept one of the many suitors my grandfather says are only too willing to become her second husband.’

‘And if she doesn’t?’ Saskia felt impelled to ask.

‘If she doesn’t, we shall just have to delay ending our engagement until either she does or I find an alternative way of convincing my grandfather that one of my sisters can provide him with his great-grandchildren.’

‘You don’t ever want to marry?’ Saskia was startled into asking.

‘Well, let’s just say that since I have reached the age of thirty-five without meeting a woman who has made me feel my life is unliveable without her by my side, I somehow doubt that I am likely to do so now. Falling in love is a young man’s extravagance. In a man past thirty it is more of a vain folly.’

‘My father fell in love with my mother when he was seventeen,’ Saskia couldn’t stop herself from telling him. ‘They ran away together...’ Her eyes clouded. ‘It was a mistake. They fell out of love with one another before I was born. An older man would at least have had some sense of responsibility towards the life he had helped to create. My father was still a child himself.’

‘He abandoned you?’ Andreas asked her, frowning.

‘They both did,’ Saskia told him tersely. ‘If it hadn’t been for my grandmother I would have ended up in a children’s home.’

Soberly Andreas watched her. Was that why she went trawling bars for men? Was she searching for the male love she felt she had been denied by her father? His desire to exonerate her from her behaviour irritated him. Why was he trying to make excuses for her? Surely he hadn’t actually been taken in by those tears earlier.

‘It’s time for us to leave,’ he told her brusquely.





                 CHAPTER FOUR

IF SOMEONE had told her two weeks ago that she would be leaving behind her everything that was familiar to fly to an unknown Greek island in the company of an equally unknown man to whom she was supposed to be engaged, Saskia would have shaken her head in denial and amusement—which just went to show!

Which just went to show what a combination of male arrogance, self-belief and determination could do, especially when it was allied to the kind of control that one particular male had over her, Saskia fretted darkly.

In less than fifteen minutes’ time Andreas would be picking her up in his Mercedes for the first leg of their journey to Aphrodite, the island Andreas’s grandfather had bought for his wife and named after the goddess of love.

‘Theirs was a love match but one that had the approval of both families,’ Andreas had told Saskia when he had been briefing her about his background.

A love match...unlike their bogus engagement. Just being a party to that kind of deceit, even though it was against her will, made Saskia feel uncomfortable, but nowhere near as uncomfortable as she had felt when she had had to telephone her grandmother and lie to her, saying that she was going away on business.

Andreas had tried to insist that she inform her grandmother of their engagement, but Saskia had refused.

‘You may be happy to lie to your family about our supposed “relationship”,’ she had told him with a look of smoky-eyed despair. ‘But I can’t lie to my grandmother about something so...’ She hadn’t been able to go on, unwilling to betray herself by admitting to Andreas that her grandmother would never believe that Saskia had committed herself and her future to a man without loving him.

Once the fall-out from the news of her ‘engagement’ had subsided at work, her colleagues had treated her with both wary caution and distance. She was now the boss’s fiancée and as such no longer really ‘one of them’.

All in all Saskia had spent the week feeling increasingly isolated and frightened, but she was too proud to say anything to anyone—a hang-up, she suspected, from the days of her childhood, when the fact that her parents’ story was so widely known, coupled with the way she had been dumped on her grandmother, had made her feel different, distanced from her schoolmates, who had all seemed to have proper mummies and daddies.

Not that anyone could have loved her more than her grandmother had done, as Saskia was the first to acknowledge now. Her home background had in reality been just as loving and stable, if not more so, than that of the majority of her peers.

She gave a small surreptitious look at her watch. Less than five minutes to go. Her heart thumped heavily. Her packed suitcase was ready and waiting in the hall. She had agonised over what she ought to take and in the end had compromised with a mixture of the summer holiday clothes she had bought three years previously, when she and Megan had gone to Portugal together, plus some of her lightweight office outfits.

She hadn’t seen Andreas since he had taken her out for lunch—not that she had minded that! No indeed! He had been attending a gruelling schedule of business meetings—dealing, if the trickles of gossip that had filtered through the grapevine were anything to go by, heroically with the problems posed by the challenging situation the hotels had fallen into prior to the takeover.

‘He’s visited every single one of our hotels,’ Saskia had heard from one admiring source. ‘And he’s been through every single aspect of the way they’re being run—and guess what?’

Saskia, who had been on the edge of the group who’d been listening eagerly to this story, had swallowed uncomfortably, expecting to hear that Andreas had instituted a programme of mass sackings in order to halt the flood of unprofitable expenses, but to her astonishment instead she had heard, ‘He’s told everyone that their job is safe, provided they can meet the targets he’s going to be setting. Everywhere he’s been he’s given the staff a pep talk, told them how much he values the acquisition his group has made and how he personally is going to be held responsible by the board of directors if he can’t turn it into a profit-making asset.’

The gossip was that Andreas had a way with him that had his new employees not only swearing allegiance, but apparently praising him to the skies as well.

Well, they obviously hadn’t witnessed the side to his character she had done, was all that Saskia had been able to think as she listened a little bitterly to everyone’s almost euphoric praise of him.

It was ten-thirty now, and he wasn’t... Saskia tensed as she suddenly saw the large Mercedes pulling up outside her grandmother’s house. Right on time! But of course Andreas would not waste a precious second of his time unless he had to, especially not on her!

By the time he had reached the front door she had opened it and was standing waiting for him, her suitcase in one hand and her door key in the other.

‘What’s that?’

She could see the way he was frowning as he looked down at her inexpensive case and immediately pride flared through her sharpening her own voice as she answered him with a curt, ‘My suitcase.’

‘Give it to me,’ he instructed her briefly.

‘I can carry it myself,’ Saskia informed him grittily.