LITMIR.BIZ

      Maddie set down his coffee with a hand that was shaking so badly he put out his own to steady her wrist and ensure there was not an accident.

      ‘Be careful,’ Giannis admonished.

      It was only necessary to maintain the contact for seconds, but it was long enough for the faint floral scent of her fair skin to flare his nostrils. And that fast he got hot and hard again. In the startled quick upward glance she gave him he registered just how vulnerable she was. So close to him, she scarcely dared to breathe, and he found that knowledge incredibly exciting. He imagined tugging her down on to his lap, opening the shirt stretched to capacity over her ripe breasts and using his mouth and his hands to toy with the prominent crests that made faint indentations through the fine cotton. The strength of that erotic imagery surprised him, and he suppressed the fantasy with fierce disdain. Since when had he hit on the equivalent of a tea lady? He took a sip of the strong sweet brew in his cup, but the tension in his aroused body stubbornly refused to subside.

      Warm all over, and trembling, Maddie backed away. What a clown she felt! What must he think of her for staring at him like that? Naturally he had noticed her gaping at him like a silly schoolgirl. How could he not have? He had braced her wrist with his fingers when he saw the cup wobbling on the saucer and told her off. A sidewise glance reassured her that nobody else appeared to have noticed his intervention, or his reproof. Relieved, but mortified by the poor showing she had made, she mustered her wits and hurried to serve the rest of the table.

      ‘This coffee is undrinkable,’ a man complained with a grimace, and was speedily backed up by his neighbour.

      Consternation assailed Maddie.

      ‘On the contrary—it’s the first decent coffee I’ve had in this office,’ Giannis said in an impatient tone of dismissal. ‘Let’s get on with the presentation.’

      More flustered than ever by the critical comments, Maddie was quick to respond to a harried signal from Annabel Holmes that urged her to speed up the delivery of refreshments. In her eagerness to do that, and to contrive an escape from the conference room, Maddie caught her foot on an exposed wire. Stumbling, she pitched forward on to the carpet, and the laptop computer that had been jerked off the table when she tripped crashed down with her.

      For split second there was total silence. Giannis studied the prone redhead with sardonic disbelief. She looked like an exquisite work of art but, being human, she had a fatal flaw: on the move, she was an accident waiting to happen.

      ‘Why didn’t you look where you were going?’ one of the executives demanded in a tone of anguish.

      ‘I’m so sorry,’ Maddie gasped, staring in dismay at the computer.

      ‘The USB memory stick has broken in half,’ the man groaned, crouching down to assess the damage. ‘I’ll have to get another copy of the presentation e-mailed over, sir.’

      Raw impatience filled Giannis, because he was on a very tight schedule. Not content with almost scalding him with the coffee, the redhead had just single-handedly wrecked the entire meeting. ‘How could you be so incredibly clumsy?’ he murmured in icy wonderment.

      Horrified by the damage she had caused, and devastated by that personal rebuke, Maddie scrambled hurriedly upright and said tautly, ‘I really am sorry, sir. I didn’t see the wire.’

      At that moment Giannis wondered what it was about her pale, delicate features that struck an eerie chord of familiarity with him. Whatever—a hint of tears had given her green eyes a soft radiance. An identification tag dangled from her shirt, but Giannis couldn’t read it. He studied her from below the black screen of his dense lashes, his brilliant dark eyes glittering. Her pouting mouth reminded him of a crushed strawberry. ‘And you are…?’ he queried drily.

      ‘Maddie…er…Madeleine Conway, sir.’ Catching an urgent, dismissive jerk of the head from Annabel, who clearly wanted her to get out, and fast, she retreated back to the trolley and made a hasty exit.

      Maddie felt so hot and flustered and furious with herself that she had to splash her face with cold water to cool down. Having actually got to meet Giannis Petrakos, she had contrived to make the worst possible impression on him. Her nerves had made her inexcusably ham-fisted. She winced at the suspicion that he might have seen the involuntary tears of dismay that had briefly filled her eyes when she’d realised the extent of the damage she had caused. How professional was that?

      She felt even more uncomfortable about the way she had behaved around him. Being a touch naïve and inexperienced when it came to men now struck her as being a hanging offence. However, she had had little opportunity to be anything else when, from her teenage years right through to her early twenties, she had been restricted by her responsibilities at home. A social life had been impossible, school-friends had fallen away because she had never been free to go out. Though in some ways she had grown up older than her years, because she had spent so much time with her grandparents, when she’d moved to London to find work, after her grandmother had passed away, she had discovered that she was uncomfortably out of step with her peers. Sex as casual as a takeaway meal and heavy drinking ran contrary to the mores she had been taught to respect.

      But Maddie was also honest enough to admit that until the moment she had looked across that conference room and seen Giannis Petrakos she had genuinely not known what it was to be strongly attracted to a man. In that instant her brain had turned to mush and her body to an alien entity that reacted with responses she had not known she had. The strength of that physical pull had taken her by surprise, and even in retrospect it shocked her. That disturbing awareness of the more private parts of her body still lingered like a secret taunt, to remind her that she had sexual responses that paid little heed to common sense or self-control. Could he have guessed why she was staring at him? The suspicion made her cringe. While he had to be accustomed to attracting female attention, he was entitled to expect more prudent behaviour from an employee.

      ‘Miss Conway?’ Annabel Holmes murmured from the doorway. ‘A word, if you please.’

      Maddie paled and turned obediently away from the trolley she had been clearing to face the manager.

      ‘Are you sure you’re all right? That was quite a fall you had,’ the other woman remarked rather stiffly.

      ‘I’m great—only my dignity dented,’ Maddie asserted awkwardly. ‘Were you able to hold the presentation?’

      ‘I’m afraid not. There was a delay, and Mr Petrakos had another appointment. He’s never here for long, and when he is his schedule is packed. Mistakes are an inconvenience and an annoyance that he doesn’t forget,’ Annabel breathed tautly. ‘I messed up by asking you to do the refreshments—’

      ‘No, I’m the one who messed up!’ Maddie protested in dismay.

      ‘I’m afraid Mr Petrakos has a low tolerance threshold for screw-ups. I’m pretty sure I’ll be forever associated with that ruined presentation in his mind.’

      Guilt assailed Maddie in an even more powerful wave. ‘Surely not…I mean, I’m sure he’s a reasonable guy.’

      A humourless laugh fell from Annabel’s lips. ‘You’re suffering from the Petrakos effect, aren’t you? All our hearts beat a lot faster the first time or so, but now mine just goes into panic mode when he’s around,’ she confided heavily. ‘He may be drop-dead gorgeous, but he’s cold as ice below the surface and he expects perfection. If you don’t shape up, he ships you out fast.’

      Initially ready to argue with that hard assessment of Giannis Petrakos, Maddie bit down on her tongue—because she had already learned for herself that he did not suffer fools in silence. She apologised again, for she could see that the brunette was sincerely worried

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