The Demetrios Virgin (6 page)

‘He abandoned you?' Andreas asked her, frowning.

‘They both did,' Saskia told him tersely. ‘If it hadn't been for my grandmother I would have ended up in a children's home.'

Soberly Andreas watched her. Was
that
why she went trawling bars for men? Was she searching for the male love she felt she had been denied by her father? His desire to exonerate her from her behaviour irritated him.
Why
was he trying to make excuses for her? Surely he hadn't actually been taken in by those tears earlier.

‘It's time for us to leave,' he told her brusquely.

I
F SOMEONE
had told her two weeks ago that she would be leaving behind her everything that was familiar to fly to an unknown Greek island in the company of an equally unknown man to whom she was supposed to be engaged Saskia would have shaken her head in denial and amusement—which just went to show!

Which just went to show what a combination of male arrogance, self-belief and determination could do, especially when it was allied to the kind of control that one particular male had over her, Saskia fretted darkly.

In less than fifteen minutes' time Andreas would be picking her up in his Mercedes for the first leg of their journey to Aphrodite, the island Andreas's grandfather had bought for his wife and named after the goddess of love.

‘Theirs was a love match but one that had the approval of both families,' Andreas had told Saskia when he had been briefing her about his background.

A love match…unlike
their
bogus engagement. Just being a party to that kind of deceit, even though it was against her will, made Saskia feel uncomfortable, but nowhere near as uncomfortable as she had felt when she had had to telephone her grandmother and lie to her, saying that she was going away on business.

Andreas had tried to insist that she inform her grandmother of their engagement, but Saskia had refused.

‘You
may be happy to lie to your family about our supposed “relationship”,' she had told him with a look of smoky-eyed despair. ‘But I
can't
lie to my grandmother about something so…' She hadn't been able to go on, unwilling to betray herself by admitting to Andreas that her grandmother would never believe that Saskia had committed herself and her future to a man without loving him.

Once the fall-out from the news of her ‘engagement' had subsided at work, her colleagues had treated her with both wary caution and distance. She was now the boss's fiancée and as such no longer really ‘one of them'.

All in all Saskia had spent the week feeling increasingly isolated and frightened, but she was too proud to say anything to anyone—a hang-up, she suspected, from the days of her childhood, when the fact that her parents' story was so widely known, coupled with the way she had been dumped on her grandmother, had made her feel different, distanced from her schoolmates, who had all seemed to have proper mummies and daddies.

Not that anyone could have loved her more than her grandmother had done, as Saskia was the first to acknowledge now. Her home background had in reality been just as loving and stable, if not more so, than that of the majority of her peers.

She gave a small surreptitious look at her watch. Less than five minutes to go. Her heart thumped heavily. Her packed suitcase was ready and waiting
in the hall. She had agonised over what she ought to take and in the end had compromised with a mixture of the summer holiday clothes she had bought three years previously, when she and Megan had gone to Portugal together, plus some of her lightweight office outfits.

She hadn't seen Andreas since he had taken her out for lunch—not that she had minded
that!
No indeed! He had been attending a gruelling schedule of business meetings—dealing, if the trickles of gossip that had filtered through the grapevine were anything to go by, heroically with the problems posed by the challenging situation the hotels had fallen into prior to the takeover.

‘He's visited every single one of our hotels,' Saskia had heard from one admiring source. ‘And he's been through every single aspect of the way they're being run—and guess what?'

Saskia, who had been on the edge of the group who'd been listening eagerly to this story, had swallowed uncomfortably, expecting to hear that Andreas had instituted a programme of mass sackings in order to halt the flood of unprofitable expenses, but to her astonishment instead she had heard, ‘He's told everyone that their job is safe, provided they can meet the targets he's going to be setting. Everywhere he's been he's given the staff a pep talk, told them how much he values the acquisition his group has made and how he personally is going to be held responsible by the board of directors if he can't turn it into a profit-making asset.'

The gossip was that Andreas had a way with him that had his new employees not only swearing alle
giance but apparently praising him to the skies as well.

Well, they obviously hadn't witnessed the side to his character she had done, was all that Saskia had been able to think as she listened a little bitterly to everyone's almost euphoric praise of him.

It was ten-thirty now, and he wasn't…Saskia tensed as she suddenly saw the large Mercedes pulling up outside her grandmother's house. Right on time! But of course Andreas would not waste a precious second of his time unless he had to, especially not on her!

By the time he had reached the front door she had opened it and was standing waiting for him, her suitcase in one hand and her door key in the other.

‘What's that?'

She could see the way he was frowning as he looked down at her inexpensive case and immediately pride flared through her sharpening her own voice as she answered him with a curt, ‘My suitcase.'

‘Give it to me,' he instructed her briefly.

‘I can carry it myself,' Saskia informed him grittily.

‘I'm sure you can,' Andreas agreed, equally grimly. ‘But…'

‘But what?' Saskia challenged him angrily. ‘But Greek men do not allow women to carry their own luggage nor to be independent from them in any way?'

Saskia could see from the way Andreas's mouth tightened that he did not like what she had said. For some perverse reason she felt driven to challenge
him, even though a part of her shrank from the storm signals she could see flashing in his eyes.

‘I'm afraid in this instance you should perhaps blame my English father rather than my Greek mother,' he told her icily. ‘The English public school he insisted I was sent to believed in what is now considered to be an outdated code of good manners for its pupils.' He gave her a thin, unfriendly look. ‘One word of warning to you. My grandfather is inclined to be old-fashioned about such things. He will not understand your modern insistence on politically correct behaviour, and whilst you are on the island…'

‘I have to do as
you
tell me,' Saskia finished bitterly for him.

If this was a taste of what the next few weeks were going to be like she didn't know how she was going to survive them. Still, at least there would be one benefit of their obvious hostility to one another. No one who would be observing them together would be surprised when they decided to end their ‘engagement'.

‘Our flight leaves Heathrow at nine tomorrow morning, so we will need to leave the apartment early,' Andreas informed Saskia once they were in the car.

‘The
apartment?'
Saskia questioned him warily immediately.

‘Yes,' Andreas confirmed. ‘I have an apartment in London. We shall be staying there tonight. This afternoon we shall spend shopping.'

‘Shopping…?' Saskia began to interrupt, but Andreas overruled her.

‘Yes, shopping,' he told her cautiously. ‘You will need an engagement ring, and…' He paused and gave her a brief skimming look of assessment and dismissal that made her itch to demand that he stop the car immediately. Oh, how she would love to be able to tell him that she had changed her mind…that there was no way she was going to give in to his blackmail. But she knew there was no way she could.

‘You will need more suitable clothes.'

‘If you mean holiday clothes,' Saskia began, ‘they are in my case, and…'

‘No, I do not mean “holiday” clothes.' Andreas stopped her grimly. ‘I am an independently wealthy man, Saskia; you don't need me to tell you that. Your department's investigations prior to our takeover must have informed you to the nearest hundred thousand pounds what my asset value is. My grandfather is a millionaire many times over, and my mother and my sisters are used to buying their clothes from the world's top designers, even though none of them are what could be considered to be fashion victims or shopaholics. Naturally, as my fiancée…'

Without allowing him to finish Saskia took a deep, angry breath and told him dangerously, ‘If you think that I am going to let
you
buy my clothes…'

With only the briefest of pauses Andreas took control of the situation from her by asking smoothly, ‘Why not? After all, you were prepared to let me buy your
body.
Me or indeed any other man who was prepared to pay for it.'

‘No! That's not true,' Saskia denied with a shocked gasp.

‘Very good,' Andreas mocked her. ‘But you can
save the special effects for my family. I know
exactly
what you are—remember. Think of these clothes as a perk of your job.' He gave her a thin, unkind smile. ‘However, having said that, I have to add that I shall want to vet whatever you wish to purchase. The image I want you to convey to my family as my fiancée is one of elegance and good taste.'

‘What are you trying to suggest?' Saskia hissed furiously at him. ‘That left to my own devices I might choose something more suited to a…?' She stopped, unable to bring herself to voice the words burning a painful brand in her thoughts.

To her bemusement, instead of saying them for her Andreas said coolly, ‘You are obviously not used to buying expensive clothes and there is no way I want you indulging in some kind of idiotic unnecessary economy which would negate the whole purpose of the exercise. I don't want you buying clothes more suitable for a young woman on a modest salary than the fiancée of an extremely wealthy man,' he informed her bluntly, in case she had not understood him the first time.

For once Saskia could think of nothing to say, but inside she was a bundle of fury and shame. There was no way she could stop Andreas from carrying out his plans, she knew that, but she fully intended to keep a mental record of everything he spent so that ultimately she could repay him, even if doing so totally depleted the small nest egg she had been carefully saving.

‘No more objections?' Andreas enquired smoothly. ‘Good, because I promise you, Saskia, I mean to have my way—even if that entails dressing
you and undressing you myself to get it. Make no mistake, when we arrive on Aphrodite you will be arriving as my fiancée.'

As he drove down the slipway onto the motorway and the powerful car picked up speed Saskia decided diplomatically that quarrelling with him whilst he was driving at such a speed would be very foolish indeed. It was over half an hour later before she recognised that, in her anxiety to reject Andreas's claimed right to decide what she should wear, she had neglected to deal with the more important issue of her discomfort at the idea of spending the night with him.

But what did she really have to fear? Certainly not any sexual advances from Andreas. He had, after all, made it shamingly plain what he thought of her sexual morals.

She had far too much pride to admit to him that she felt daunted and apprehensive at the thought of sharing the intimacy of an apartment with him. On the island it would be different. There they would be with his family and the staff who ran the large villa complex he said his grandfather had had built on it.

No, she would be wise to grit her teeth and say nothing rather than risk exposing herself to his disbelief and mocking contempt by expressing her anxieties.

 

As she waited for the chauffeur to load her luggage into the boot of her hired limousine Athena tapped one slender expensively shod foot impatiently.

The moment she had heard the news that Andreas was engaged and about to bring his fiancée to
Aphrodite on an official visit to meet his family she had sprung into action. Fortunately an engagement was not a marriage, and she certainly intended to make sure that
this
engagement never made it as far as a wedding.

She knew why Andreas had done it, of course. He was, after all, Greek to the very marrow of his bones—even if he chose to insist on everyone acknowledging his British blood—and like any Greek man, indeed any
man
he had an inborn need to be the one in control.

His claim to be in love with this other woman was simply his way of showing that control, rejecting the marriage to her which was so very dear to his grandfather's heart and to her own.

As the limousine sped away from the kerb she leaned forward and gave the driver the address of a prestigious apartment block overlooking the river. She herself did not maintain a home in London; she preferred New York's social life and the Paris shops.

Andreas might think he had outmanoeuvred her by announcing his engagement to this undoubtedly cold and sexless English fiancée. Well, she would soon bring an end to that, and make sure that he knew where his real interests lay. After all, how could he possibly resist
her?
She had everything he could want, and he certainly had everything
she
wanted.

It was a pity he had managed to prevent her from outbidding him for this latest acquisition. Ownership of the hotels themselves meant nothing to her
per se
, but it would have been an excellent bait to dangle in front of him since he obviously set a great deal of store by them. Why, she could not understand. But
then in many ways there were a considerable number of things about Andreas that she did not understand. It was one of the things that made him so desirable to her. Athena had always coveted that which seemed to be out of reach.