“If you wanted to prove that I want you,” she said, her breath still ragged, her face flushed, “and that you’d offer great sex in the new bargain, as I told you last night, you shouldn’t have bothered. We both already know that.” She picked up the dossier she’d gathered earlier, started to walk to her office door. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a meeting.”
He prowled toward her, trying to keep his approach, his stance, unthreatening as he blocked her way. “I was only bringing up benefits both of us were overlooking while we analyzed what I have to bring to the table.”
She swept away the bangs his passion had spilled into her eyes, looked up at him with something that chilled him. An emptiness he’d never seen.
“So you’re combining yesterday’s offer and today’s—no-strings sex merged with a legal union for damage control?”
He didn’t know what to say when she put it that way. It was what he was offering, but stripped of any humanity and stated in the stark terms only a lawyer could reduce it to.
But she was waiting for him to say something. So he did. “This is far more than what most so-called couples have.”
Her gaze lengthened for seconds before she nodded.
His heart lurched in his rib cage. Did she agree?
Before he could think of anything more to say, she circumvented him wordlessly, resumed her path to the door.
Once she opened it, she turned to him. “As a businesswoman, I enter only into ventures where the pros outweigh the cons. In your case, Sarantos, all the pros in the world don’t counter your cons. So my answer to your proposition is no. And I demand you take this no as final and nonnegotiable.”
Aris watched as the door closed behind her with muted finality, and wondered.
What the hell had he done?
“You did what?”
Selene winced at the sharpness of her best friend’s cry of disbelief.
Worse than disbelief. Kassandra Stavros’s sea-green eyes were explicit with the conviction that Selene had gone mad.
Kassandra was the only one she’d told her secret. But that wasn’t why she’d told her what had happened with Aristedes. Kassandra had just happened to walk in on her at her most distraught after he’d left a couple hours ago.
Not that she’d told her everything. Just the bare bones of the two climactic confrontations they’d had since yesterday. She certainly hadn’t mentioned the temporary insanity that assailed her every time Aristedes touched her….
Now she wished she had a rewind-and-erase function. She would have wiped Kassandra’s memory. She would have wiped hers, of the meetings with Aristedes. Of Aristedes himself.
“You’d be nuts if you turned him down down.” Kassandra spelled out her view of Selene’s mental stability. “And since you’re the most un-nuts person I know, you didn’t, right?”
“Down down?” Selene huffed. “As opposed to down up?”
Not picking up on Selene’s dejection, but only the derision, Kassandra made a face at her. “You know what I mean. Down for real. You’re making him sweat it, right? I won’t say he doesn’t deserve it, ’cause he does, big-time, for walking away without a look back and staying gone that long.”
“Don’t forget coming back for business then tossing me an incidental proposition to be his sporadic sex stop in the States.”
Now that Selene was being sarcastic, Kassandra took her words seriously, nodded in all earnestness, her dainty nose crinkling in disgust. “Sure, for that, too. That actually deserves some creative grovel-inducing punishment. The nerve of that man.” Suddenly Kassandra’s lips twisted as she sighed. “But what a man. You have to admit, if anyone can get away with arrogant bullshit like that, it’s him.”
A spark of sick electricity quivered behind Selene’s breastbone.
She’d always seen that glazed look come into women’s eyes at the mention of Aristedes. And even if Kassandra was just indulging in the indiscriminate drooling most women did over hunky strangers, that it bothered her, and so much, made her mad. And sure that she’d done the right thing by turning Aristedes down down.
She didn’t do jealousy, would have hated herself and her life if she’d ended up with a man every woman lusted after. A man whom she knew could never be hers, with whom she’d suffer that soul-destroying sickness, never sure if he was lusting back, or worse.
She now found herself imagining how Aristedes would react to her childhood friend. Kassandra, the rebel who’d gone against her strict Greek family’s will and become a top model and rising fashion designer, was a golden goddess. Aristedes, like all other men, would no doubt pant after the willowy grace and screaming femininity of her friend’s body, the masses of incredible sun-streaked hair and those Mediterranean green eyes. But contrary to her reaction to most other men, once she knew Aristedes wasn’t Selene’s territory, Kassandra would pant back, and more.
Unaware of the disturbing thoughts spreading their hated tentacles through Selene’s mind, and bent on concluding her train of thought, Kassandra went on excitedly, “So, how long will you make him suffer? I say at least a day for each month. And maybe another week for that last transgression.”
“Kass, I’m not going to make him sweat or salivate or anything else. I turned him down down.”
After gaping at her for a long moment, Kassandra shook her head. “A knee-jerk reaction. Understandable. But definitely not the right one.” Her focus sharpened on Selene. “So marriage was never on your agenda after that so-called engagement fiasco with Steve, no matter how much your family pushed you. I think they contributed to your eternal self-sufficiency with that constant stream of eligible and terminally boring bachelors. But you’re almost thirty years old, you aren’t saving yourself for a man you fancy more, since you fancy the hide off that one—so much so you broke your vow of celibacy for him and had a son with him, for chrissake! And since he offered marriage, who better to marry?”
“Who worse,” Selene muttered. “This man is my family’s enemy. My enemy. Until proven otherwise. And even that proof is something he can—and did in the past—negate in a heartbeat if he thought he’d make a million dollars more by turning against us.”
Kassandra shook her head. “That’s business.”
“And personally he cares nothing for me,” she said, trying to strip her voice of any emotional charge. “Or for Alex. Whatever he’s offering, he’s doing it for sterile reasons with no human factor involved. One of my father’s biggest objections to him was the way he treated his family. Six younger brothers and sisters he plied with checks in lieu of affection and services instead of having an actual role in their lives. Even when his youngest brother died, he didn’t stay with his family to console them for a single night. And I won’t let what happened to his siblings happen to Alex. It’s better for him not to know his father than to have a father who’ll make him feel alienated and worse than fatherless.”