‘You literally have three minutes or you’ll miss your flight,’ Zenas warned Jax outside the door.
Jax strode into the room, absently wondering if there was actual truth in the idea that human beings needed closure following certain experiences because he could not imagine any other reason why he should still feel driven to confront Lucy. Two years ago, he had never wanted to see or speak to her again. But possibly curiosity provided more motivation than he was willing to admit, he reasoned impatiently, angry tension tightening his lean, darkly handsome features.
‘What the hell are you doing in Athens?’ Jax demanded.
Lucy spun round from the window to face him, inwardly reeling from the shock of Jax in the flesh standing close enough to touch. He was so tall and he radiated restive energy and dominant vibes in waves. Tensing, she lifted her head up but she still had to tip it back to actually see any part of him above chest level. Not for the first time her diminutive height struck her as an embarrassing flaw. Being almost child-sized often meant that people didn’t take her seriously or treat her like an adult. ‘What’s that got to do with you?’ she slung back sharply, her tone similar to his own.
Jax drew himself up to his full six-foot-three-inch height and glowered down at her, green eyes luminescent with rage because it had been two years since anyone but his father had challenged him. ‘Answer me,’ he ground out impatiently.
‘I don’t owe you any answers... I don’t owe you the time of day,’ Lucy traded with the kind of provocation that struck a deep and unwelcome note of familiarity with Jax.
‘You will answer me,’ Jax raked back at her in a raw undertone, watching as she angled her head back and struck an attitude, hand on hip. Strawberry golden curls slid round her shoulders, her hair falling round her heart-shaped face, accentuating the defiant blue of her eyes and the lush fullness of her rosy lips.
And that fast, that urgently, Jax wanted to throw her down on the desk and control her the only way he had ever really controlled her, with the seething passion that was the mainstay of his character. For the briefest of moments he allowed himself to imagine the hot, wet tightness of her and the pulse at his groin reacted with unbridled enthusiasm. He reminded himself that it had been a toxic relationship and that she had played him like a con artist with her stories, her fake innocence and her lies. A dizzy surge of rage ignited inside him like a threatening fireball.
‘If you don’t answer me you will live to regret it,’ Jax threatened in a wrathful undertone, every drop of his merciless Antonakos blood burning through him and hungry for a fight.
An angry spurt of fear made Lucy’s stomach turn over sickly. He was too influential to challenge as even her boss had reminded her. She knew Jax could cause trouble for her, maybe even for her father as well if she wasn’t careful. She might hate Jax but it would be insane to risk such penalties. ‘What am I doing in Athens?’ she repeated flatly. ‘I finally looked up my birth father and he lives here—’
‘But that was all lies,’ Jax breathed in momentary bewilderment. ‘You don’t have a Greek father.’
Her smooth brow furrowed with genuine confusion. ‘Lies? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I believe my birth certificate is as accurate as anyone else’s. At the moment I’m living with my father and his wife.’
‘That’s not possible,’ Jax told her, stiffening as a light knock on the door warned him that their time was up if he planned to make it to the airport. His long, lean frame swivelled as he half turned towards the door to leave, common sense and practicality powering him.
‘I just want you to know that I hate you and I’ll never forgive you for what you did to me,’ Lucy confided in a belated rush of angry frustration that she could not tell him what she really thought of him any more bluntly than that. In truth she wanted to scream at him, she wanted to throw herself at him and hammer him with angry fists for hurting her.
‘I didn’t do anything to you,’ Jax parried with complete cool.
‘It was vicious...what you did, unnecessary!’ Lucy condemned chokily, bitterness almost overpowering her along with a very human need to hit back. ‘Having me sacked? Leaving me penniless and homeless and forced to go back to the UK when I had nothing there!’
An ebony brow elevated at that improbable accusation of bullying behaviour on his part, Jax swung back to her just as another knock sounded on the door. Whatever else he might be, Jax prided himself on never having treated a woman badly. ‘I don’t have time for this and I shouldn’t make time for it either,’ he acknowledged grimly. ‘You’re a liar and a cheat—’
‘Of course you’re going to say stuff like that, rewrite history, because you’re so up yourself now,’ Lucy shot back at him in disgust as she thought about her innocent, trusting little daughter. ‘But I never lied to you or cheated on you and you never once thought about consequences, did you?’
He wanted her phone number but he wouldn’t ask for it, wouldn’t allow himself to ask for it. He knew what she was. He didn’t want anything to do with her. So, having reached that decision and feeling invigorated by it, he could not explain why he then turned back like a man with a split personality and told her to meet him for a drink the following evening at a little bar he patronised on the marina, a haunt of his for quiet moments, which the paparazzi had yet to discover. Even as he walked back out again, he was questioning the decision and regretting it, lean brown hands clenching into impatient fists. What the hell had he done that for?
But what had she meant by ‘consequences’? And how come she did have a Greek father when according to that file she did not?
He was simply curious, nothing wrong or surprising about that. His libido was not in the driver’s seat, he assured himself with solid conviction. Stray memories had briefly aroused him when he saw her again, nothing more meaningful. All men remembered incredibly good sex. Furthermore, he had a little black book of phonebook proportions to turn to when he felt like sex, hot and cold running women on tap wherever he travelled. That was the world he lived in. There was no way he could ever be tempted to revisit a manipulative little cheat like Lucy Dixon, he reflected with satisfaction.
Naturally, becoming the Antonakos heir had ensured that Jax became significantly more cynical about women. He didn’t listen to sob stories any more, he didn’t let his inherently dangerous streak of chivalry rule him. Indeed the sight of a woman in need of rescue was more like aversion therapy to him now. He knew from experience that that kind of woman was likely to be far more trouble than she was worth.
After all, how many times had he felt he had no choice but to race to his mother’s rescue? When the men she betrayed became violent as her lies were exposed? When she needed another spell in some discreet rehabilitation facility before she could be seen in public again? When he was forced to lie to protect her?
And yet at heart he had always known that his mother was a deeply disturbed and egocentric human being, undeserving of his care and respect. That was why his little sister, Tina, had died, he reminded himself bitterly. Mariana’s self-centred neglect of her younger child had directly led to the incident in which the toddler had drowned. But he had only been fourteen, so what could he possibly have done when so many adults had witnessed the insanity of his mother’s lifestyle and yet failed to act to protect either of her children?
Lucy walked home in a pensive mood. Of course she wouldn’t meet him, she told herself firmly. What would be the point? Bella! Jax was a father whether he liked it or not but she knew he wouldn’t like that news any more than he liked her. And why was her being in Greece such a big deal? What was it to him? It was not as though they were likely to bump into each other again in normal life. Jax lived against a backdrop of massive yachts, private jets and private islands. He didn’t rub shoulders with ordinary working people.
Yet a giant ball of despair was threatening to swallow Lucy up and she didn’t know why. Seeing Jax again, she recognised, had hurt and hurt much more than she had expected. It had brought back memories she didn’t want. She had loved him and had given her trust to a man for the first time ever. His sudden volte-face had almost destroyed her because she had given him so much she had felt bare to the world without him.
And yet he still wasn’t married. She had thought for sure that he would marry the wealthy heiress his father kept pushing in his direction, the very lovely but very bitchy Kat Valtinos. But then Jax was bone-deep stubborn. You could take a horse to water but you couldn’t make it drink and getting Jax to do anything he didn’t want to do was like trying to push a boulder up a steep hill.
Kat Valtinos had organised the party the night Lucy had met Jax on his father’s enormous yacht. Lucy’s memory wafted her back two years into the past. Back then, Jax had been in Spain setting up a new resort on the coast. When the caterers had mucked up with a double booking, Kat had personally trawled through the local bars seeking waitresses for the event.
‘You two will do,’ she had said to Lucy and Tara, looking them up and down as though they were auditioning as strippers. ‘You’re young and pretty and sexy. Just what men like. You put your make-up on with a trowel,’ she had told Tara critically and to Lucy she had said, ‘You need to show more leg and cleavage.’