If the money hadn’t been so good, Lucy wouldn’t have done it but back then she had lived on a budget where no tips meant stale bread and going hungry. Their boss didn’t feed them for free and they had no cooking facilities in their mean little attic room, which had been hot as hell up under the eaves above the restaurant kitchen. Any extra cash was deeply welcome in those days.
The party had been full of blowhard bellicose men talking themselves up in Antonakos’s company and drinking too much. One of them had cornered Lucy when she was sent to a lower deck to restock the bar from the supplies stored there. She had been trying to fight him off when Jax had intervened. Jax, blue-black glossy hair brushing his shoulders, green eyes glittering like shards of glass, who had dragged the guy off her with punishing hands and hit him hard without hesitation.
‘Are you OK?’ the most gorgeous guy she had ever seen had asked, pulling her off the wall she had slumped against, smoothing down the skirt the creep had been trying to wrench up. ‘Diavolos, you’re so tiny. Did he hurt you?’
‘Only a little,’ she had said shakily, trembling like a leaf and in absolutely no doubt that Jax had saved her from a serious assault because, with the noisy party taking place on the deck above, the lower deck had been deserted and nobody would have heard her crying out.
‘Take a moment to recover,’ Jax had urged, guiding her into an opulent saloon to push her down into a seat where her cotton-wool legs had collapsed under her as if he had flipped a switch. ‘What were you doing down here on this deck?’
He had issued instructions on the phone to a crew member to have the bar supplies refreshed. And the whole time she had just been staring at him like a brainless idiot, utterly intimidated by everything about him from the expensive quality of his lightweight grey suit and hand-stitched shoes to the sheer beauty of his perfect features from his edgy cheekbones to his sculpted mouth. It was the eyes that had got to her the most, the tender concern she’d seen there and then the budding all-male appreciation. He had the most stunning eyes and his rare smile had been like the sun coming out on a dark day.
‘Are you OK?’ he repeated.
Well, no, in fact from that moment she had never been OK again. Something she’d needed to survive had lurched into strange territory and softened to let him in, no matter that it had gone against sense and practicality and her life experience. She had truly never been the same since.
CHAPTER THREE
LUCY WAS RIVEN with extreme guilt by the time she finally climbed on the bus that would take her down to the marina.
She had had to lie to Iola simply to get out. She had pretended that she was joining a couple of the other waitresses for a few drinks. To weigh down her conscience even more, Iola had been delighted to believe that her stepdaughter was finally going out and about. Her stepmother had hovered helpfully, urging her to put on make-up and wear the pretty white sundress that Iola had bought for her a few weeks earlier. But how could Lucy have admitted that she was heading out to meet Bella’s father? After all, she had already lied on that subject by declaring that she had no way of getting in touch with the man who had fathered her daughter. Kreon and Iola had averted their eyes in dismay and embarrassment at that claim, clearly assuming that she did not know the man’s name.
Indeed, one lie only led to more lies, Lucy conceded shamefacedly, annoyed that she had found it impossible to be more honest. But Kreon would raise the roof if he discovered that Jax was Bella’s father and she didn’t want to put Kreon in the potential firing line of Antonakos displeasure.
And why was she off to meet Jax when she had sworn she would not do so?
Obviously she was thinking about her daughter’s needs, wondering if there was any chance that Jax could have changed his outlook on children and could possibly be willing to embrace the news that he was a parent. It was definitely her duty to check out that possibility and finally tell him that he had a child, she told herself staunchly even while her heart hammered and her breath caught in her throat at the prospect of seeing Jax again.
You’re pathetic, she scolded herself angrily as she marched past crowded bars, ignoring the men who called out to her. He’s a very good-looking guy and of course you still notice that but that’s all, leave it there. You are not a silly impulsive teenager any more, she coached herself, you know what he is and what he’s like and you know better.
Jax lounged outside the bar with Zenas close by, the rest of his security detail settled within hailing distance. He didn’t know why he had come until he saw Lucy, her dress flowing and dancing round her slender knees, the pristine white lighting up below the street lights, her strawberry-blonde ringlets a vivid fall round her narrow shoulders. And then he knew why he had come and he hated that surge of absolute primal lust, raw distaste flaming through him even as his jeans became uncomfortably tight. A wave of male heads slowly turned to check her out as she passed by. Jax gritted his even white teeth at that familiar display.
‘The waitress...really?’ Zenas teased from the shadows.
‘I need to have this conversation in private,’ Jax warned his old school friend quietly, relieved that Zenas had only joined the team the year before and had no idea of his prior acquaintance with Lucy.
Zenas strolled obediently across the street and plonked himself down on a bench. Jax lifted his newspaper, refusing to continue watching Lucy walk towards him, perturbed by the level of his own interest. He would get answers from her, satisfy his curiosity and leave. There would be nothing more personal and absolutely no sex.
Lucy saw Jax outside the bar, arrogant dark head bent, the bold cut of his chiselled profile golden beneath the lights, his black hair still long enough to tousle in the light breeze. And her heart bounced inside her like a rubber ball because she was helplessly reliving the excitement he had always induced in her. There were flutters in her tummy, crazy tingles pinching the tips of her breasts taut and a dangerous hot, liquid awareness pulsing into being between her legs. Just as quickly her entire body felt overheated and she was seriously embarrassed for herself.
As she took a seat Jax glanced up at her from below his ridiculously long lashes, crescents of uncompromising green running assessingly across her flushed face. ‘At least you’re on time for once... I assume you hurried.’
Lucy blinked and bit down on her tongue hard. Her poor timekeeping had always infuriated Jax because he hated being kept waiting and never, ever understood how time could sometimes run away from her. He had always contended that being late was rude and indefensible. But then Jax, who was relentlessly practical and full of ferocious initiative in tough scenarios, had probably never had a weakness for daydreaming.
Daydreaming, however, had always been Lucy’s escape from challenging experiences. When she didn’t fit in at the many different schools she had attended she had floated away on a fluffy cloud inside her own mind. When life was especially difficult, fantasies had become her consolation and she would dream of a world in which she had love and security and happiness.
In the smouldering silence that had now fallen, Lucy forced herself out of her abstraction and registered that Jax was watching her with impatient green eyes as if he had guessed that she had momentarily drifted away with the fairies. In receipt of that aggravated look, she felt her mouth run dry as a bone. In desperation she spun his newspaper round, her attention falling on a recent custody case that had attracted a lot of media coverage. ‘Oh, my goodness...’ she muttered as she slowly traced the headline with a fingertip while she carefully translated it. ‘The father got the kid? How could they take a child away from his mother?’
Jax shrugged an uninterested shoulder as he signalled the waiter. ‘Why not? Life has moved on. Fathers are now equal to mothers—’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Read it and you’ll see why the family court reached that decision,’ Jax said drily.
‘I can’t read Greek well enough yet,’ she admitted grudgingly.
‘The father is willing to work at home to be with the child while the mother would be leaving him in a nursery all day. Why are we talking about this anyway?’ Jax demanded impatiently.
‘It’s an interesting case,’ Lucy proffered stiffly. ‘The mother’s a paramedic who doesn’t have the option of working at home.’
‘While the father wants his child and what’s best for his child, which is as it should be,’ Jax interposed as a bottle of wine and glasses arrived at the table.
A cold skitter of fear pierced Lucy’s tense body as a glass of wine appeared in front of her. ‘Is that how you would feel?’
‘We’re not talking about me. I won’t be fathering any children,’ Jax declared with a cynical twist of his expressive mouth. ‘Don’t need the hassle or the responsibility. But if I did have a child I certainly wouldn’t sit back and allow a woman to take my child away from me...in fact that is the very last thing I would do.’
A quiver of sheer fright rippled down Lucy’s taut spine as she reached for her wine. That risk, that particular fear of losing her child, had never once crossed her mind as a possibility. And why hadn’t it? Jax might not want children but he was a very possessive guy. What was his was very much his, not to be shared or touched or even looked at by anyone else. Once he had treated Lucy like that, enraging her with his determination to own her body and soul and control her every move. Suppose she told him about Bella and he felt the same way about his daughter?