Taken by the Greek Billionaire(4)

“What to do,” he muttered to himself as he opened the car door.

He had the whole evening stretched before him. The house was empty, because as Gosta had said, for the last five years he’d attended Lady Williams’ function and the staff were always given the evening off and they weren’t live in staff anyway—he couldn’t bear to have his privacy compromised in that way—so would not be returning at all until tomorrow.

Sebastian stood up, stretching his long frame out, almost excited at the idea of some time to himself. A Friday night with nothing to do but whatever he fancied. He had several books he’d been meaning to read, a number of DVD box sets to watch. Hell, he could even do some work if he wanted to. Not the day to day stuff that made him so rich, the other projects he liked to do, the things that required he actually use his hands and not just his brain. He never got bored when he was doing them.

He nodded to himself, opened the door to his underground parking lot and strode toward the stairs that would lead him to the ground floor of his London home. He’d change out of his suit into jeans and a tee, he decided. Then he’d get started on the bookcase that needed varnishing. He could probably get most of it done tonight if he worked through until the early hours of the morning….

Something made him pause as he pushed open the concealed door to the lot. What was that? Sebastian frowned and tilted his head. There was a scrape across the floor, some sort of movement. The sound seemed a long way off but there all the same.

Was one of his staff working late? Had a relative turned up unannounced and somehow gotten inside? Or…Sebastian exhaled slowly. Had someone dared to enter his home uninvited? He made to turn to call his security men—who sat in their office at the end of the underground space—but changed his mind. It could be nothing after all and he was in no mood for company. Instead he clenched his fists, closed his eyes, and tried to pinpoint the exact position of the noises.

Another occurred in that exact moment, helping him. It was a tinkle, like something breaking. His eyes shot open; he lifted his head and glared upwards. Two floors up at least, almost exactly above him.

The room that held his smallest safe.





Chapter Three





Penny was in trouble. Not only had the safe, hidden behind a nude portrait, been surrounded by a bunch of equally nude glass figurines that she’d had to move one by bloody one, but the software was taking longer than she’d anticipated to hunt down the pin code. She tried to stay as still as possible as the tablet churned through combinations, discarding some, pushing forward others, but it wasn’t easy.

The house was silent as a grave, except for the beating of her own heart, which seemed so loud Penny thought she was damn lucky Demetrious wasn’t home, or surely he’d hear it, too. But then hadn’t she picked this night for that very reason? Every year without fail Demetrious attended some posh ball for some obscure charity Penny had never heard of. It was a fashionable charity of course. People like Demetrious never seemed to give money to those who really needed—like abandoned foster kids. She’d read, in her research, that people spent thousands on all sorts of nonsense once there, no doubt whilst quaffing champagne and eating quail’s eggs or something of the like.

“Rich people food,” Lyra had said when Penny asked her what the hell a quail’s egg was. They’d eaten pot noodles for dinner that night.

Regardless of what Demetrious was eating, Penny had a good few hours before he returned, and another twenty minutes or so before his ridiculously predictable security people did another sweep. Of course they’d be far less predictable if their boss, Max, was around. But he had the same night off every week and they’d found out in their research that the old adage, when the cat’s away held firm. Still, time was ticking on and already thirty-five minutes had passed since she slipped in the back door.

Come on, she told the tablet. Come the hell on. The progress bar on the bottom of the screen hit the ninety percent mark, meaning the software was down to the last handful of combinations. Another few minutes and it would tell her exactly what code she needed to plug into the safe.

Penny exhaled carefully and unzipped the front pocket of her waist bag. The moment the tablet gave her the software she could…. The progress bar hit one hundred before disappearing to be replaced with a string of numbers. Excitement shot through Penny and she grinned. She carefully unplugged the cable she’d run from the tablet to the now open key pad on the safe, winding it up against the back of the tablet. The pin code was a string of sixteen numbers long and Penny wondered how the hell Demetrious remembered it. No matter.