The Greek's Christmas Bride(8)

Pixie hovered, her small heart-shaped face pale and stiff. ‘I don’t want to be involved. I realise that you think I’m an easy mark but I couldn’t do it. I won’t discuss this with anyone either. I should think anyone I told would threaten to lock me up and throw away the key because they’d think I was crazy!’

Apollo rose slowly to his feet, dominating the room with his height and breadth. ‘You’re not thinking this through.’ Reaching into his pocket, he withdrew a card and set it down on the table. ‘My private number if you change your mind.’

‘I’m not going to change my mind,’ Pixie told him stonily.

Apollo said nothing. He paused at the door, looking at that soft ripe mouth of hers, his body hardening in response to the imagery flashing through his inventive mind. ‘It would’ve been good in bed. I find you surprisingly attractive.’

‘Can’t say the same,’ Pixie retorted as she yanked open the door with a shaking hand. ‘I don’t like you. You’re arrogant and insensitive and completely ruthless when it comes to getting what you want.’

‘But I still make you hot, which infuriates you,’ Apollo murmured huskily. ‘You’re not very good at faking disinterest.’

Her grey eyes sparkled with anger. ‘You’re not irresistible, Apollo!’

He lifted a lean-fingered hand and tilted up her chin. ‘Are you sure of that?’ he asked thickly, a Greek accent he rarely revealed roughening and lowering his dark drawl to a pitch that vibrated like a storm warning down her stiff spine.

‘One hundred per cent certain,’ she was mumbling as his breath fanned her cheek and the scent of him flared her nostrils and her mouth ran dry while her heartbeat raced into the danger zone.

‘I bet I could get you to break the law,’ Apollo murmured soft and low, all untamed masculinity and dominance. ‘I bet I could get you to do just about anything I wanted you to. I even bet that I could make you enjoy breaking the rules...’

Her knees were trembling, her feet welded to the floor by the mesmeric effect of those stunning green eyes firing down into her own. ‘You’d like to think so.’

Her pupils were fully dilated, her breathing was audible. Her nipples were making tiny indentations in her top and Apollo was hard as a rock. He bent his head a fraction more and traced her stubborn little mouth with his. She jerked almost off balance and his arms snapped round her to steady her. She couldn’t breathe then for excitement. It was the most extraordinary sensation. Suddenly she wanted what she hadn’t wanted until that moment. She wanted to stretch up on tiptoe and claim the kiss he had teased her with and refused to give.

Apollo bit out a laugh, perceptive eyes mocking her. ‘Stubborn and proud. That’s dangerous in my vicinity because I’m stubborn and proud as hell too. We’d clash but we’d also have fireworks, not something I usually look for with a woman but I’d make an exception for you, koukla mou. I would enjoy making you eat every word of your defiance and your denial...’

Her blood ran cold in her veins because she believed him. Below the bed Hector uttered a soft little growl that she had never heard from him before.

Apollo laughed again with genuine appreciation. ‘Aw, stop kidding yourself, dog! You’re not going to attack. You’re too scared even to come out from under the bed. What do you call him?’ he asked, disconcerting her with that sudden change of subject.

‘Hector.’

‘Hector was a Trojan prince and a great army commander in Greek mythology. Did you know that?’ he enquired lazily as he strolled out of the door.

‘No, I didn’t. I just thought the name suited him,’ she mumbled weakly.

She didn’t breathe again until she had closed the door and she rested back against it with eyes shut and the strangest sense of disappointment filtering through her. In the most disturbing way Apollo Metraxis had energised her. The threat gone, Hector scampered joyously out from below the bed and danced at her feet. She lifted him up, stroking what remained of his ragged little ears, and cuddled him. ‘A Trojan prince, not just an ordinary dog, Hector. I named you well,’ she whispered, burying her face in his tousled fur, feeling her lips tingle as she thought of that almost-but-not-quite kiss that had left her foolishly, mindlessly craving more.

Patrick Skyped her that evening, his thin face worn, eyes shadowed. ‘I’ve got bad news,’ he told her heavily. ‘Maria’s pregnant and she’s not well.’

‘Pregnant?’ Pixie gasped in dismay.

Patrick grimaced. ‘It wasn’t planned but we want the baby. We’ve been together three years now,’ he reminded his sister with a weak attempt at a smile. ‘I just wish the pregnancy wasn’t making her so ill because she can’t stand on her feet all day in a shop in her current condition. I’m never here, I’m always working...who’s going to look after her?’

‘Give her my congratulations,’ Pixie urged, concealing her feelings because she very well knew that her brother’s pregnant partner could bring his entire debt repayment scheme tumbling down round their ears because it was a struggle for him to make his monthly payment as it was.

Her brother’s blue eyes glittered. ‘I hate asking but could you manage anything extra this month?’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Pixie said thickly, not wanting him to realise that she could see the tears in his eyes.

A few minutes later the call was complete and Pixie felt as though she had received a punch in the stomach. Patrick and Maria’s financial situation was as fragile as a house built of cards. If one card fell, they would all fall. She groaned out loud. She couldn’t afford to give Patrick any more money and she should have admitted that upfront. Unfortunately her panic-induced thoughts had flown straight to Apollo because she wanted her little brother to stay alive and in one piece and if he couldn’t keep up those payments, he could well pay with his life.

Patrick was under threat and now there was Maria and a new baby on the way to consider as well, Pixie reflected wretchedly. How could she ignore their plight? How could she turn her back on them when Apollo had made it clear that if she did as he asked he would make all the bad things go away? And suddenly she was just desperate for those bad things to go away and for life to return to normal again.

Apollo as saviour? That concept didn’t work. Apollo was more into helping himself than other people. In fact Pixie and her brother were more like chess pieces to be moved strategically on Apollo’s master board. The human cost, the rights and wrongs and emotions didn’t come into it for Apollo and how much simpler that must make his life, she thought enviously. She lifted the card and snatched up her phone.

I will be your Baby Mama if you settle my brother’s debts, she texted with a sinking heart.

Ideals, she was learning, wouldn’t be any comfort if her brother or Maria or the baby got hurt or were left alone in the world. Apollo had found her price and she felt humiliated, and even worse manipulated, for he had made her crave his mouth that afternoon and the memory of that unnerved her. It was one thing to defy Apollo, another thing entirely to contemplate being married to him and wholly within his power.

You won’t regret it. We’ll talk business the next time we meet.

Business, not marriage, she reflected uneasily, but maybe that was the right way to look at it, as an arrangement rather than a relationship. As a deal between two people rather than the intimacy normal between a married couple. He wouldn’t really be her husband and she wouldn’t really be his wife. Mostly they would be faking it...wouldn’t they? Would that make it easier to bear?





CHAPTER FOUR

‘IT’S QUITE SIMPLE,’ Apollo murmured in a cold, dangerous tone. ‘You pack up you and your dog and you’ll be picked up this evening.’

‘I can’t just walk out on my job, and I’m supposed to give notice when I move out.’

‘My staff will organise everything of that nature for you. You don’t need to worry. I want you in London with me tonight, so that we can get on with the preparations.’

‘What preparations?’

‘You’ll have to sign legal papers, see a doctor, buy clothes. There must be a dozen entries on the to-do list I’ve had drawn up for you. You’re going to be very busy.’

Pixie thought about her brother and briefly closed her eyes, digging deep for composure. She had just put her life and her free will in Apollo’s hands and the pressure was on her now. ‘Where will I be staying?’

‘At my apartment. It’ll be more discreet than a hotel would be and I won’t be there for most of the week. I’ll be working in Athens.’

‘OK.’ Pixie forced herself to agree because she knew it was only the first step in another hundred or more steps when she would have to obediently fall in with Apollo’s wishes. Dear heaven, had she ever hated a man so much?

Vito was one of the very few men Pixie had learned to trust. She could see his love for her friend, Holly, every time he looked at his wife and his feelings for his son were equally obvious. But Pixie had had few such role models while she was growing up. Her own father had frequently resorted to domestic violence when he was drunk. He had beaten her mother and Pixie as well, calling her ‘a mouthy little cow’ for trying to interfere. When he wasn’t in prison serving time for his burglaries, he had often taken his bad moods out on his family. Pixie had never had Holly’s cosy, idealistic images of family life because she had experienced family life in the raw. Her father had married her mother when she fell pregnant but she had never seen any love or affection between them. Patrick had been born within a year of his sister’s birth and her mother had found it a challenge to cope with two young kids.