Sold for the Greek's Heir(7)

Sobered by that fear, Lucy decided there and then to continue keeping Bella a secret until she had, at least, taken legal advice. In fact maybe the legal route would be the best way to go when it came to breaking that news, she thought cravenly. It would be more impersonal and less likely to lead to confrontation and bad feeling. Just at that moment Lucy could not face telling Jax that he was the father of her child and that because of his behaviour after their breakup she had had no way of telling him that she was pregnant. That was not her fault, she reminded herself. That was unquestionably his fault.

‘When did you move to Athens?’ Jax prompted.

‘Six months ago... I was struggling to make ends meet in London,’ she confided, almost rolling her eyes at that severe understatement before taking several fortifying swallows of wine.

‘When we talked in Spain, you had no plans to track your father down,’ he reminded her with a frown. ‘You thought he had deserted your mother and you said—’

‘I was wrong. When I needed help, my father came through for me,’ Lucy admitted. ‘Why did you ask me to meet you?’

Jax watched her sip at the wine, one little finger rubbing back and forth over the stem of the glass, her lush mouth rosy and moist. Like a sex-starved adolescent, he remembered the feel of her mouth, the flick of her teasing little tongue and he went rigid.

‘Jax?’ she pressed, setting down the glass.

Lean, dark features taut, Jax topped up the wine. He had tried to teach her about wine once: how to select it, savour it, how to truly taste it, and she was still knocking it back as if it were cheap plonk. That had been another lesson that had inexplicably ended up between the sheets. But then nothing had ever gone to plan with Lucy. His self-discipline had vanished. When he had taken her shopping he had taken her in the changing cubicle up against the wall, stifling her frantic cries with his hand. Yes, she had definitely earned that red dress he had later seen her wearing while she gave her body to another man.

‘Why?’ Lucy prompted in growing frustration at his brooding silence.

Jax inclined his head to Zenas and spoke to him soft and low when he approached. ‘We’ll go somewhere more private—’

Lucy collided with smouldering green eyes like highly polished emeralds and stiffened in instant rejection of that idea. ‘No.’

‘I don’t know what I was thinking of. This is not the place to talk.’ Or fight, Jax reflected, in no doubt that angry words were likely to be exchanged when he challenged her.

Lucy gulped down more wine in an effort to steady herself and think carefully before she spoke. ‘I don’t want to go anywhere else with you,’ she argued.

‘Don’t lie,’ Jax advised in the driest of tones. ‘I could have you on your back in five minutes if that’s what I wanted...but it’s not.’

A tide of outraged colour slowly dappled Lucy’s creamy skin as she gazed back at him, aghast at his crudity. ‘I can’t believe you said that.’

Jax shrugged again, a knowing look in his stunning eyes. ‘It’s only what we’re both thinking about.’

Lucy bristled like a cat stroked the wrong way and threw her shoulders back. ‘No, it’s not. Speak for yourself.’

‘I fell for the virgin ploy once. Don’t push your luck, koukla mou,’ Jax advised as he thrust back his chair and began to rise. ‘Born-again virgins push the wrong buttons with me.’

‘Don’t call me that... I’m not anyone’s doll!’ Lucy protested, aware of the meaning of those words because her father used them around Bella.

‘Don’t push your luck, Tinker Bell,’ Jax stabbed instead.

And the sound of that once familiar pet name hurt like the unexpected swipe of a knife across tender skin. It turned her pale because it took her back to a place she didn’t want to go, to a period when she had fondly believed herself to be loved and safe and cherished. But it had all been a lie and a seriously cruel lie at that. It hurt even more that she had adored that lie and longed for it to last for ever and ever, just like in the fairy tales.

‘You still haven’t told me what this is about,’ Lucy argued as she drank down her wine with desperate little swallows that pained her throat. ‘I’m staying here.’

A long silver limousine purred along the kerb. They were in a pedestrian zone and the car shouldn’t have been there but the two police officers lounging across the street did nothing to interfere with its progress.

‘Get in the car or I’ll throw you in it!’ Jax bit out in a driven undertone, what little patience he had taxed by her obstinacy.

He had made a mistake, he thought furiously, turning his head and unexpectedly encountering Zenas’s shocked appraisal, registering that the other man had heard that threat.

Incredulous, Lucy giggled. ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ she told him.

And he did. He picked her up off the chair and shoved her into the back seat of the limo as if she were a lost parcel he was retrieving, aware throughout that his bodyguards were watching him as if he had gone insane. But it was entirely Lucy’s fault. She would never ever do as she was told. She would never ever accept that he knew best. And the whole situation was going to hell in a hand basket fast and he could blame himself for that because he should never have arranged to meet her in the first place. Why the hell did what had happened two years ago even matter to him?

So, she had lied to engage his sympathy and ensnare him, pretending to be younger and more innocent than she actually was. He already knew why she had done it. She had lied to impress him because he was rich and there was nothing more complex behind her behaviour back then than greed and a desire to rise in the world. He had been cunningly targeted and chased by hundreds of other women for the same reasons. Why was her deception still raw?

As he swung into the car, radiating blazing tension, his dazzling eyes splintered like green lightning with anger and Lucy stared at him.

‘You still have a terrible temper,’ she complained. ‘And you just kidnapped me and the police did nothing—’

‘Maybe you should’ve tried a little screaming and struggling to demonstrate fear,’ Jax mocked, convinced that she was secretly delighted to be in his limo again and probably already planning a lucrative rehash of their Spanish fling.

No way, he swore to himself, black lashes almost hitting his cheekbones as he glanced studiously away from her, sitting there as she was watching him like a little spider planning an intricate web in which to capture him. On the other hand, he could play her the way she had once played him, he conceded grimly. And while he was doing that he could do whatever he wanted to do with her. That thought, that very idea took him aback because he didn’t usually play games with women. But there was no denying that the concept of playing games with Lucy hugely turned him on.

Lucy breathed in slow and deep to calm herself. She focussed on the strong male thigh next to her own, the fine fabric of his trousers pulled taut across his powerful muscles and across his crotch. Her attention lingered there a split second longer and then hurriedly shifted because it was obvious that he was aroused. Why? Did he ever think of anything but sex? Colour warmed her cheeks because once they had had a very physical relationship. It had lasted six weeks, with them only becoming intimate in the last two, but during it she had realised that sex was unbelievably important to Jax and an unapologetic drive he made no attempt to restrain. Bella, after all, had been conceived in a brazen episode in a changing-room cubicle, she recalled in serious mortification. She had tried to say no but she had never been very good at denying Jax when her own body burned for his like a fire that couldn’t be doused.

‘I hate you,’ she told him truthfully, still thinking about that changing-room cubicle in which the use of precautions hadn’t figured.

‘Because I found you out?’ Jax drawled in a tone of boredom. ‘Or because I dumped you?’

Lucy’s nails bit crescents into the soft skin of her palms. She had told him the truth: she did hate him. In fact the idea of wreaking revenge on Jax energised her. He was so unbearably confident, sure of his every move in a way she had never been. He was clever, successful and rich. He was also worshipped like the Greek god he resembled by women more akin to groupies than anything else.

‘Where are you taking me?’ she demanded curtly. ‘Why do you even want to talk to me? It’s a bit late in the day, isn’t it?’

‘Is it?’ Jax traded unfathomably, leaning forward to press a button that opened a gleaming bar.

‘I don’t understand you!’ Lucy bit out in frustration.

‘Why would you?’

Jax thrust a foaming glass of champagne into her hand, thoroughly disconcerting her. Big blue eyes skimmed up to his in confusion and she looked so lost and bewildered that a momentary pang of conscience pierced his tough hide. Of course it wasn’t real, he recognised angrily.

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

He knew he could trust Lucy to put in an award-winning performance. He would get what he wanted. He would get answers and doubtless tears, self-justification and grovelling into the bargain. He positively warmed to an image of Lucy grovelling and a smile flashed across his forbidding mouth. Lucy on her knees poised to please...just what the doctor would order for a bored billionaire.