LITMIR.BIZ

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weakly. He merely moved with her, crowding her. She felt intensely vulnerable.

      Anatolios’s blue eyes followed where her gaze had just been and he said, ‘Beautiful, isn’t she?’

      Lucy flushed. ‘I’m not sure I know what you mean.’

      She looked at Anatolios reluctantly. She guessed she couldn’t be much older than her own twenty-three years, and hoped the revulsion she felt didn’t show on her face.

      He smiled sleazily, and then, shockingly, ran a fleshy finger up and down Lucy’s bare arm. She flinched, but couldn’t move, hemmed in as she was.

      He gestured with his head. ‘That’s Pia Kyriapoulos. She used to be a famous model, and now she’s famous for being wealthy and divorced and looking for a new husband.’

      Lucy swallowed painfully and looked across the room. They did look amazing together—blonde contrasting with dark. Pia had her hand resting on Ari’s arm, and he certainly didn’t look in a hurry to move it. At that moment he looked up and straight at Lucy. Feeling inordinately exposed, Lucy smiled brilliantly and looked back at Anatolios as if he’d said something funny. Not as if he’d said something to make her heart feel as if it was being ripped, still beating, out of her chest.

      When she felt Ari’s gaze move again Lucy ripped her arm away from Anatolios, who glowered sulkily at her. His eyes dropped to her cleavage and Lucy screamed inwardly. The guy was a total creep.

      Just then Helen swept into the room and said something to Ari who, after a moment’s hesitation, followed her from the room, his face hard. Sensing a chance to escape, Lucy mumbled something about needing the bathroom and fled, vowing to get out of there even if she had to leave on her own.

      Wherever I go, you go. Ari’s words resounded mockingly in her head. At least until the next available, infinitely more beautiful woman came along, she surmised grimly.

      She was coming back from the bathroom and passing a partially opened door when she heard raised voices. Ari and Helen.

      Without being conscious of what she was doing, she slowed down and heard Ari say, a low and blistering voice, ‘I’ll never marry someone like her; she’s completely inappropriate. And anyway, don’t you think it’s a little late to be doing the concerned mother act?’

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      LUCY’s heart froze like ice in her chest as the words registered. Was Helen afraid that their affair was more than just a fling? She had to swallow back a semi-hysterical cry, putting a hand to her mouth. Well, Ari had certainly reassured her of that.

      The next words from Helen were indistinctly shrill, and then Ari’s voice came again. Lucy stood rooted to the spot in some kind of sick, paralysed fascination, and heard him say something along the lines of, ‘… useless waste of space of a brother …’

      There was an awful silence, and then the sharp crack of what could only be a hand across a cheek.

      Knowing that it wouldn’t have been Ari, and acting on a surge of adrenalin that was pure primal instinct, Lucy pushed open the door and flew into the room, aiming herself straight at Helen, who still had her hand raised, her eyes glittering almost feverishly.

      Lucy was unaware of their shocked looks. She saw only Ari’s proud stance, the livid handprint and the trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth. She saw red, and for the first and only time in her life considered striking another person. It was only Ari’s quick reflex action, pulling her back behind him, that stopped her.

      Helen lowered her hand and her eyes took on a malevolent glow. She smiled cruelly. ‘Well, well—if it isn’t the quiet little secretary, come to save her lover.’ The woman’s obsidian eyes flicked up and down and she added cuttingly, ‘Or perhaps I shouldn’t say little.’

      Lucy made to move again and Ari held her firm, glancing back with a hard expression, ‘Leave it, Lucy.’

      He turned back, and Lucy could feel the ice in his gaze even though he wasn’t looking at her.

      ‘She wouldn’t balk at striking you too. After all, you never had any qualms about striking a five-year-old—did you, Helen?’

      Helen’s focus moved back to Ari, and Lucy could see the older woman’s face grow mottled with anger. Abruptly Ari turned and pulled Lucy with him, and within a blur of minutes they were sitting in the back of his car, leaving the house behind.

      Lucy was still shaking, a mixture of powerful anger and shock coursing through her. She glanced at Ari. He was looking resolutely out of the window. When she saw his mouth her heart lurched painfully.

      ‘You … you’re bleeding.’

      He turned abruptly, and the dead look in his eyes scared her. He smiled harshly. ‘Want to kiss it better for me, Lucy?’

      He flicked out a handkerchief nevertheless, and dabbed at the blood. Overcome with an emotion she couldn’t name, Lucy reached out and put her hand to his cheek, where it still felt warm.

      ‘How could she have hit you when you were so small?’

      A surge of emotion so powerful that it made him tremble caused black spots to dance before Ari’s eyes. His breathing grew shallow. The feel of Lucy’s hand like a cooling balm on his hot cheek, the look on her face … He’d never, ever had someone rush to his defence so unreservedly. He’d felt the fine vibrating tremors of her anger as he’d held her back, and he didn’t doubt that if he hadn’t stopped her she might very well have struck Helen. The realisation was cataclysmic, earth-shattering.

      A hardness entered him. He certainly wasn’t going to shatter along with it. Everyone wanted something out of him—especially women. Lucy was just taking advantage of a vulnerable moment.

      Lucy’s wrist was gripped and pulled down. Ari’s eyes glittered at her, but at least some life had come back into them. ‘Quite easily,’ he bit out. ‘I was an easier target then.’

      He kept hold of her wrist, almost painfully, but Lucy didn’t say anything.

      ‘Don’t pity me, Lucy Proctor. I don’t need anyone’s pity.’

      The fierce pride on his face nearly made Lucy weep. She shook her head and managed to pull her hand back, cradling it with her other one. He saw the movement and sighed deeply, raking his hair with barely concealed anger.

      Lucy looked away for a long moment. The rest of the evening was coming back—what had happened just before she’d gone to the bathroom, and then the words she’d heard. What was wrong with her? Sitting here mooning over a man who quite patently needed no one and was biding his time with her until he flitted to the next woman.

      She started hesitantly, ‘I didn’t mean to … I was just passing and heard her …’

      ‘How did you know it wasn’t me hitting her?’ came the sardonically amused question.

      Lucy turned around, a fierce expression on her face. ‘Because I know you would never do anything like that.’

      His belly clenched. It was harder not to touch her than to touch her and risk that emotion rising again, so Ari reached out and tugged a resisting Lucy onto his lap. He felt an unusual peace steal over him. He buried his head in her neck and after a moment felt her relax, her curves softening into him with delicious inevitability.

      But then he felt her tense again, and he looked up and said with a growl, ‘Stop it. Relax, Lucy, mou.’

      She was biting her lip and avoiding his eye. He turned her jaw so that she had to face him, and she said, almost defiantly, ‘I saw you with that woman. I won’t … won’t be some substitute. If you’d prefer to be with her, then please … just go back.’

      The thought of going back to that house made Ari shudder. He’d known it would be a mistake to go at all, and hated the fact that he had done so. Hated the fact that after all these years there

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