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‘How can I help you?’ she asked in a frozen voice as he approached the bar.
‘Have you blocked me on your phone?’
‘Of course I have. Why would I want to hear from you?’ Cleo asked, genuinely surprised by that question as she bent down to rub her aching ankle.
‘Did you hurt yourself?’ her boss, Sam, asked from the other end of the bar. ‘I warned you about getting up on that stool... It’s dangerous—’
‘I’m fine,’ Cleo insisted with hot cheeks as she limped away to put the stool back.
‘Take a break,’ Sam urged her across the counter. ‘Give the leg a rest for a few minutes.’
‘I’ll have coffee with you,’ Ari murmured very quietly, watching her like a hawk and marvelling at the rapidity of the changing expressions on her heart-shaped face. She had given her boss a genuine smile, but the one she had given him had been fake. That infuriated him. Yet she still looked astonishingly pretty, her halo of curls burnished by the low lighting, her eyes blue as violets against her pale porcelain skin, her sexy little mouth tight with constraint.
She had blocked his calls as if he were a nuisance caller, Ari reflected bleakly. That hadneverhappened to him before with a woman. Nor had the attempt to apologise with flowers got him anywhere as he’d waited in vain for her to contact him. Of course, he had never got in deep enough with any woman to the extent that he was having arguments with her and trying to apologise, he acknowledged impatiently. He was disturbed by the suspicion that he was behaving clumsily because he had absolutely no experience of ever being in such a position. There was something to be said for sticking to one-night stands, only no one-night stand had ever had the effect on him that Cleo had. And it was Cleo and Cleo alone whom he wanted.
Ari breathed in slow and deep. Hunger slivered through him and bit deep enough to make him wince as his pants tightened across his groin. He couldn’t sleep for thinking about her. She had got him obsessed. He didn’t know how, he didn’t know why, he only knew that she tied him up in knots and her absence took every spark of excitement and anticipation out of his life. And now that he needed a favour from her, he didn’t know how the hell he could persuade her into helping him out of a tight corner.
Cleo’s head flew up, angry words on her tongue until she realised that Sam was watching and that, as far as he was concerned, Ari was a customer to be served. She gave Ari a bright meaningless smile. ‘No problem, sir,’ she said and watched his beautiful face tense at her formality.
As she made the coffee she tried to eradicate that image of his beautiful face and wilful, wonderfully sensual mouth from her mind, but it was too big a challenge. She saw Ari and a sharp little arrow of hot, desperate craving shot through her, scrambling her brain and ensuring that she just wanted to rip his clothes off and climb him like a vine. There was nothing mature or controlled about that reaction. It was a primitive urge that she struggled to suppress every time she met his extraordinary eyes.
‘I’m trying very hard to apologise,’ Ari proffered when she brought the coffee to the table. ‘Why won’t you listen?’
‘You hurt my self-respect. I can’t forgive that,’ Cleo advanced as she sat down opposite him, eyes very bright and level, her chin at a challenging angle. ‘I thought you knew me. I trusted you. Then I find out that just because I’m a nobody without money, I was your one andonlysuspect. That tells me all I need to know about the way you think and about exactly where I stand with you.’
‘It wasn’t like that... I flew off the handle—’
‘You have a short fuse,’ Cleo condemned. ‘And this isn’t the first time we’ve been at odds. We don’t match, Ari. You live in a different world—’
‘I made assumptions, assumptions I had no good reason to make. I think I’ve tracked down where the leak came from—’
Cleo waved a dismissive hand, which set his even white teeth on edge. ‘No need to explain...as long as you know it wasn’t me. I wouldn’t have betrayed your trust in me like that. I do have standards and you trusted me with secrets, and I haven’t shared a word of them with anyone!’
‘I was uneasy about the confidential matters which I had shared with you because I don’t make a habit of confiding in people,’ Ari bit out tautly.
‘I guessed that, but I still don’t understand why you’re approaching me again.’
‘I’m in a bind,’ Ari admitted grimly. ‘I may have somehow given social services the impression that you live with me and, now that I’ve expressed an interest in adopting Lucinda, they want to come out and interview us together in my house.’
Cleo stared back at him with parted lips of dismay. ‘How on earth could you have given them the impression that we live together?’
‘I think the lady simply assumed, when you came with me to see the baby the first time, that we were a couple—’
‘But we’re not,’ Cleo cut in, sharp as a knife.
‘That’s not to say that we couldn’t be,’ Ari sliced back at her with determination. ‘I will do literallyanythingto be considered as my niece’s adoptive parent. If that means doing whatever I have to do to gain your willing participation, Iwilldo it.’
Ari was thinking about the echoing emptiness of the giant house in Athens where he had grown up with his parents. He had been a lonely child, only making friends at school. There had been no family circle of relatives aside of a few remote cousins whom his parents had not encouraged to visit. He had visited Lucinda only the day before, but he had felt constrained without Cleo’s soothing presence, although he had been ridiculously thrilled when he had managed to get his niece to smile at him. He had realised then that he was more ready to have a family than he had ever suspected.
Surprise engulfed Cleo because she had not appreciated that he was already prepared to make such a serious commitment to the little girl.
‘Giving my niece a home means that much to me,’ Ari admitted in a driven undertone. ‘Her parents were unable to take care of her and do what was best for her. Until I can track down my half-sisters, there’s nobody else in the world likely to be as interested in that little girl as I am. I can’t let her down the way her parents did. I can’t turn my back on her just because I’m single and inexperienced with children. I can rise to a challenge as well as any other man. Bringing her up as a Stefanos is the only thing I can do now for the little brother I never had the chance to meet.’
Involuntarily, Cleo was impressed. Ari had thought the situation through in depth and acknowledged the difficulties ahead, but he was still keen to give his niece the advantages that his own father had chosen not to offer the children born of his second family.
‘If you move into the house, I promise not to try and take advantage of the situation,’ Ari declared. ‘Andyou knowI want you and that it will be a battle to keep my distance...’
Cleo flushed to the roots of her hair, awareness shimmering through her in a heady swell, but she was shocked by the suggestion that she actuallymoveinto his house. She understood why he was asking, because if she lived under the same roof nobody in authority was likely to question the veracity of their relationship. Even so, it was a huge ask for him to make. Her nipples prickled and tightened and, as she connected with his spectacular tawny eyes, her heartbeat thundered and a bolt of sensual heat surged between her taut slender thighs. The wanting, she was painfully conscious, wasnotone-sided. Unfortunately for her, being angry with Ari didn’t stifle her desire for him. It never had. He made her angry, but he still inflamed her.
