The Greek Tycoon's Secret Child Read online

  Mattie swung around instantly. It was after midnight and, although the streets were still busy, so were all the muggers. This was their time of night, when people were scurrying to catch cabs and buses, very likely with wallets poking out like beacons from jacket pockets and a bit too much drink in their blood for them to do much about a running assault.

  ‘You!’ Her eyes widened, then narrowed in angry suspicion.

  An understandable reaction, Dominic thought belatedly, releasing her and drawing back.

  ‘What the hell are you doing? Following me?’ She had only seen him sitting down. Now she realised just how tall he was. Well over six feet. Much taller than she was, and she was no shortie at five feet eight. He was also a lot more powerful close up. Under the well-cut jacket, she could sense a finely honed, muscular body.

  ‘If I told Harry about this, he would have your head for breakfast!’ She didn’t think that anyone, including any of Harry’s very efficient bouncers, could have this man’s head for breakfast, and he obviously was of the same opinion, because he shot her a look of frank disbelief.

  ‘I accept tips from the punters, mister, but that is all you’re entitled to!’ She whipped back around to discover that he was still following her. Although following would have been the wrong word. More like accommodating his long stride to match hers, to keep up perfectly at her level, until they had both crossed the road, at which point she turned to him again, eyes blazing, letting him know in no uncertain terms that he could take his arrogant and more than likely drunken self up some different road, any road that was not the one she happened to be on!

  ‘I’ve seen your type before, let me tell you, and you disgust me!’

  ‘My type?’ Dominic was finding, to his own bemusement, that his instinctive ability to control conversations was being very thoroughly flattened by the spitting blonde in front of him. She had her hands stuck angrily in the pockets of her jacket, only removing one to shove some of that fabulous fair hair away from her face.

  He had pursued her because something about her had turned him on. A lot. And he had wanted to apologise for the uncultured oaf he had been inside the nightclub, looking at her with a suggestiveness he knew she had recognised and been repulsed by. Quite rightly.

  However, her attack on him was taking its toll on his temper, never that long at the best of times.

  ‘My type?’ he repeated, in a voice that had sent many a high-powered business rival ducking for cover. On her, however, it appeared to have less than zero effect.

  ‘Yes, your type!’ Surprisingly, Mattie found that she was enjoying this. Actually enjoying this! The initial shock of seeing him, the passing fear that he had followed her for a purpose, had somehow retreated. Obnoxious, patronising, arrogant boor he might very well be, but somehow she knew that he was not going to shove her down a dark alley so that he could have his wicked way with her.

  She felt absolutely free to yell her lungs out at him and it was feeling very good to do just that. She hadn’t yelled like this in a very long time and she should have. Instead of just accepting what had been going on in her personal life, instead of just submitting to the worse kind of emotional abuse at the hands of Frankie King, she should have released her pent-up rage and misery in a good old screaming match. It helped that she was doing it now. Wrong person but right sentiment.

  ‘Sad losers with too much money who get a kick out of looking at pretty young girls. Oh, yes, I know your type. We all know your type! You don’t want to do anything, you just want to look, give yourselves a little fantasy to take back to your miserable homes with your miserable wives and your unfortunate children!’

  ‘What?’ Dominic was fast discovering that he hadn’t been quite so prepared for a tongue like a whip. She glared ferociously at him, every inch of her bewitching face pouring scorn, and he began to laugh, a real, genuine belly laugh that only made her face tighten in further rage.

  She turned on her heel, began to walk away, knowing that he would catch up with her, expecting it.

  ‘You don’t take the underground back to your house at this hour, do you?’ he asked as he saw where she was heading.

  ‘Go away, you pervert.’

  That, for him, was not acceptable. He moved ahead of her and then swung around so that he was barring her path, and he watched as she debated whether she should try and shoot past him, then obviously decide that she wouldn’t be able to make it.

  ‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ he said coldly.

  ‘You’re in my way, and if you don’t clear off I’m going to scream so loudly that I’ll have every policeman within a ten-mile radius racing over to see what’s going on!’

  ‘Is that another threat along the lines of telling your Harry, whoever he might be, that I’ve followed you so that he can send one of his hit men to teach me a lesson?’

  ‘Get out of my way.’ She found that she could barely breathe properly with him standing there like that, towering over her, his hard, good-looking face a study in angles and shadows.

  ‘I don’t take very kindly to being labelled a pervert.’

  ‘Do I look as though I care what you do or don’t take kindly to?’ But she uneasily felt a stab of guilt at the insult she had flung at him. Then she reminded herself that he was nothing but a good-looking face with a squalid mind, or why else would he have followed her out of the nightclub and cornered her on her way to the underground?

  ‘So you label all the men you see in your line of work as perverts, do you?’

  ‘I want to get home. It’s late and I don’t need to spend time having this conversation with you. Now, excuse me.’

  ‘Why don’t you take a taxi to your house?’

  ‘Because, not that it’s any of your business, I can’t afford the luxury. If I could afford to catch cabs here, there and everywhere, then I wouldn’t be working at a nightclub, would I?’

  ‘We’re not talking here, there and everywhere. We’re talking at this hour in central London. The underground isn’t a very safe place to be.’ Or so he imagined. He, personally, seldom travelled on the underground. He had a driver so that he could work in the back of the car, and when he didn’t want to use George he drove himself.

  ‘You would know, would you?’ Mattie snapped, reading his mind with staggering accuracy. ‘When was the last time you went anywhere on the tube?’ She gave a little grunt of pure scorn, at which point his mind told him to just leave the woman alone, to get a grip on himself.

  ‘I was on my way to the underground myself, as it happens,’ he heard himself saying, beyond all common sense.

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘So now I’m a liar and a pervert, am I?’

  Mattie glared at him for a further few seconds and then dodged around him and began striding towards the illuminated underground entrance.

  Dominic fell in line.

  What the hell was he doing? he asked himself. What did it matter what a waitress in a nightclub thought of him? So what if she was exciting to look at? At the grand old age of thirty-four he should be over all that by now.

  But still he found that he was walking alongside her, feeling her impotent anger simmering from every pore of her body, surreptitiously watching the proud tilt of her head, hands still resolutely thrust into her pockets, her bag, which was no more than a weathered knapsack, casually slung over one shoulder.

  ‘Well, goodbye.’ Mattie turned to face him as soon as they were in the station, virtually a ghost town at this time in the morning.

  It was the first time she was seeing him in light and what she had taken for a good-looking face, not dissimilar to the one that was probably lying, mouth open, empty whisky bottle at the side, waiting for her on the tired sofa in the sitting room, she now realised far exceeded that.

  This man, whose name he had not even bothered to tell her because he was, of course, far too high and mighty for such niceties, especially when it came to the fact that he was just out for a good time with a woman he imagined would be an
easy lay, went beyond good-looking. He was very firmly placed in the higher regions of staggering.

  Faintly olive-skinned, short black hair, eyes that were as dark as midnight and a bone-structure that seemed to have been chiselled lovingly with perfection in mind.

  ‘What stop are you getting off at?’

  ‘Not the same as yours,’ Mattie answered smoothly, turning away and slotting her coins into the ticket machine. She always made sure that her change was ready for when she got to the ticket machine. No fumbling in bags. Not very safe.

  ‘How would you know that?’

  ‘Because I have eyes in my head.’ To prove her point, she insolently raked her eyes over his immaculately tailored suit, his handmade shoes, the gold watch on his wrist.

  ‘I’m delivering you to your door,’ Dominic said flatly. There was something about this girl that made him concerned for her safety—her insurgency, perhaps. ‘So we do happen to be travelling to the same stop after all. And you needn’t fear that I shall try and take advantage of you on the way.’

  ‘I don’t need an escort.’

  Green eyes. The purest green he had ever seen. The suggestive lighting in the nightclub had only given him a glimpse of her. Here, her face crystallised into huge, almond-shaped eyes, a nose sprinkled with freckles and a full mouth that was currently down-turned in an expression of fierce disdain.

  ‘This place is deserted. Or maybe not. Maybe there’ll be a few junkies and drunks waiting to get into the same carriage as you. Am I right?’

  ‘I’m touched that you care so much about my welfare, but I do happen to do this particular route four nights a week. I think it’s fair to say that I can take care of myself.’ She gave him another scornful once-over. ‘Probably more than you can take care of yourself.’

  ‘More typecasting?’

  ‘Look, it’s late,’ Mattie said carefully, meeting his eyes and holding them with difficulty. ‘I didn’t appreciate the way you were looking at me in the nightclub and I don’t appreciate the way you followed me out. Can I make myself any clearer? I need to grab some sleep if I’m not to pass out tomorrow.’

  ‘Don’t you have all day to catch up on your sleep?’ The dark eyes narrowed speculatively on her face and Mattie felt herself blushing. Blushing like a teenager when in fact she was twenty-three years old and had had enough sobering experiences in her life for a cynical outer shell to be well and truly in place.

  ‘I happen to have things to do,’ she muttered. ‘The world doesn’t cater for people who sleep by day and work by night, in case it’s missed you. Now, go away.’

  ‘Fine. But I’ll be waiting for you tomorrow at the club.’

  ‘Why?’

  This was something that was genuinely puzzling her. She had become experienced in a very short space of time in reading the men who patronised the nightclub. They were usually middle-aged, married but not so married that they didn’t still lick their lips at the sight of a pretty girl in next to nothing. Harmless men. Then there were the groups of young, rich yuppies. She personally found them a lot more threatening because there was no wife at home waiting, no kiddies tugging on their consciences.

  The man standing in front of her didn’t seem to fall into either category.

  In fact, he struck her as the sort who didn’t need to trail behind waitresses in nightclubs or anywhere else for that matter because whatever woman he wanted would come to him with a click of his fingers.

  ‘Because I don’t particularly like being categorised without an explanation.’ Which beggared the question of why he should give a damn in the first place, but he could tell that that train of thought hadn’t occurred to her from the small frown.

  ‘Look at it this way,’ he pointed out smoothly, jumping into whatever she had been thinking so that she once more raised her eyes to his. ‘How would you feel if I insulted you by implying that since you were a waitress in a nightclub, willing to dress in next to nothing because the less the clothes, presumably the bigger the tips, you were therefore—’

  ‘A cheap tart?’ Mattie snapped, interrupting him before he could voice what he had obviously been thinking. ‘A woman of easy virtue? Or maybe a woman of no virtue altogether? A sad loser who has nothing better to do with her life than whistle it down the drain working for tips in a nightclub?’ Yes, they all thought that. All the men who ogled her as she waited their tables. It still got her back up, though.

  Not just with him, but with herself because she knew where she was going. She knew why she was doing what she was doing. What did it matter what one passing stranger out of the hundreds thought of her?

  ‘Like it?’ Dominic murmured lazily. ‘Think you might want to refute it?’

  ‘I don’t have to refute anything to you, but let me just tell you that I’m not an easy lay.’ Understatement of the century, she was honest enough to think. One lover in all her years. Frankie King, whom she had known since she was sixteen. And she hadn’t even slept with him for…how many months now?

  ‘So if that’s why you followed me, then you can forget it. I won’t be climbing into your bed, not now, not ever.’

  A mixed group of merry teenagers, drunk but too wrapped up in each other to be threatening to her, jostled past and Dominic took hold of her arm and led her away from the ticket machines to the side.

  ‘I’ll take you home in a taxi.’

  ‘Oh, suddenly a little bit scared of our great British transport system, are you?’ she sneered, not much liking the way she sounded. Hard and jaded and cynical, but this was the best way she knew of protecting herself.

  ‘Oh, don’t be such a damned little fool.’

  ‘Well, it might interest you to know that I’d rather take my chances with that little lot that just waltzed past than cooped up in a taxi with you.’

  ‘Then I’ll just put you in the damned cab and pay the man to take you wherever it is you live!’

  ‘Ah. Not so keen on my company now that you know I won’t be sleeping with you.’ Mattie shook her head with an expression of mock disappointment. ‘Now, why am I not falling down in surprise?’

  ‘Come on.’ He had never met a more suspicious, cynical woman in his life, but did she have spirit! Was that why he was now hailing a taxi for her rather than letting her take the first tube of the morning home? Not liking the thought of her stepping into a carriage with a mob of drunks, even though she was right and was probably more accustomed to dealing with situations like that than he was?

  ‘You, mister, are the last word in arrogance!’

  ‘Watch out. I might start getting used to your line of compliments.’

  ‘Hardly.’ The black cab had slowed down for her and she knew better than to kick up her heels at his insistence. ‘Unless fate decides to behave in a freakish way, this is the last we’ll be seeing of each other.’

  Dominic didn’t say anything. Just opened the taxi door for her, handed the driver some notes, sufficient, he was assured, to cover the trip, before turning to her briefly.

  His large, powerful frame was draped suffocatingly by her open door, and when he looked down at her his presence seemed to fill the entire back of the taxi like a drug.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ he said in a low, silky voice, and Mattie felt a disturbing thread of excitement race up her spine. ‘After all, I have yet to refute your accusations, do I not?’

  ‘I apologise,’ she said quickly. ‘There. Will that do?’

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll never sleep with you,’ she hissed fiercely. ‘You’ve got the wrong measure of me!’

  ‘In life, I’ve learnt that never is the most fickle word in the English language.’ With which he stood up and slammed the car door.

  What he didn’t tell her was that it was also the most challenging word in the English language. Especially in this context and especially for a man like him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘DUNNO know why you bother wasting your time on that rubbish.’

&
nbsp; Mattie glanced across the room to Frankie. He was sprawled on the chair in front of the television, his feet propped up on the coffee-table he had dragged over, and he was staring at her in a way that she was all too familiar with.

  So she ignored him and returned to the books in front of her. ‘Told you, love, there’s no way you’ve got the brains to do anything in any company anywhere. Left school at sixteen, or you forgotten already?’

  He was on the beer. For that she was grateful. If he had been on the whisky, he would be targeting his comments with a lot more venom. And he would be gone in a little while. It was Saturday, after all. Not a night for a man like Frankie to stay in. Not when his mates would be down at the local, eyes glued to whatever sport happened to be showing on the massive overhead screen that The Lamb and Eagle proudly sported.

  ‘That doesn’t mean I can’t do this,’ Mattie said quietly, knowing that there was no point going down this road but doing it anyway.

  ‘Sure it does. Big shots in companies ain’t looking for a girl like you, Mats. Pretty you might be but let’s not forget the background.’ He gave a cruel little chuckle and her fingers tightened on the pen she was holding. ‘Anyway, what time you off tonight, then?’

  ‘Does it matter? You won’t be here anyway.’

  ‘True, true. Go and fetch us another beer, would you, Mats?’

  ‘You’ll be drinking at the pub, Frankie.’

  ‘Oh not another of your little preachy sermons. Don’t think I can stand it. Any wonder I want to clear out of this place whenever you’re around? A right little Miss Prim and Proper you’ve become ever since you started filling your head with ideas about high-flying jobs in marketing. You should ’ave just stuck it out as secretary in that poxy little company you were at before.’

  Pushed to the limit, Mattie snapped shut the book she had been studying and fixed him with a cold stare.

  ‘But I couldn’t, could I, Frankie? And we both know why!’

  He staggered to his feet, raked his fingers through his hair and headed towards the kitchen with a thunderous scowl on his face. But this time she wasn’t going to let him get away with his jibe.