It had been a hard decision to make. It had been her friends Tony and Linda who had helped her make it.
‘But why is he doing this?’ she’d asked them, for the dozenth time. ‘He’s up to something and I don’t know what—and that worries me!’
‘Maybe he just wants to get to know you, Andy,’ said Linda peaceably. ‘Maybe he’s old, and ill, and wants to make up for how he treated you.’
‘Oh, so that’s why I’ve been getting letters just about ordering me to go and dance attendance on him! And not a dickey-bird about Mum, either! No, if he’d really wanted to make up he’d have written more politely—and to Mum, not me.’
‘If you want my advice I think you should go out there,’ said Linda’s husband, Tony. ‘Like Linda said, he might be after a reconciliation, but even if he isn’t, suppose he wants to use you for his own nefarious ends in some way? That, you know, puts you in a strong position. Have you thought of that?’
Andrea frowned.
Tony went on. ‘Look, if he does want you for something, then if he doesn’t want you to refuse he’s going to have to do something you want.’
‘Like what?’ Andrea snorted. ‘He doesn’t have a thing I want!’
‘He’s got money, Andy,’ Tony said quietly. ‘Shed-loads of it.’
Andrea’s eyes narrowed to angry slits. ‘He can choke on it for all I care! I don’t want a penny from him!’
‘But what about your mum, Andy?’ said Tony, even more quietly.
Andrea stilled. Tony pressed on, leaning forward. ‘What if he forked out enough for her to clear her debts—and move to Spain?’
Andrea’s breath seemed tight in her chest. As tight as her mother’s breath was, day in, day out. Instantly in her mind she heard her mother’s dry, asthmatic cough, saw her pause by the sink, breathing slowly and painfully, her frail body hunched.
‘I can’t,’ she answered faintly. ‘I can’t take that man’s money!’
‘Think it through,’ urged Tony. ‘You wouldn’t be taking his money for yourself, but for your mum. He owes her—you’ve always said that and it’s true! She’s raised you single-handed with nothing from him except insults and abuse! He lives in the lap of luxury, worth hundreds of millions, and his granddaughter lives in a council flat. Do it for her, Andy.’
And that, in the end, had been the decider. Though every fibre of her being wanted never, ever to have anything to do with the man who had treated her mother so callously, the moment Tony had said ‘Spain’ a vista had opened up in Andrea’s mind so wonderful she knew she could not refuse. If she could just get her grandfather to buy her mother a small apartment somewhere it was warm and dry all year round…
It was for that very reason that Andrea was now standing on the terrace of her grandfather’s palatial property in Athens.
She would get her mother the dues owed her.
She gave a smile as she looked again at the impressive man who stood before her. A small, tight, defiant—dismissive—smile. So, he knew who she was, did he, Mr Mega-Cool? He looked so sleek, screaming ‘money’ in his superbly tailored suit, with his immaculately cut dark hair, the gleam of gold at his wrist as he paused in the action of checking his watch—oh, he must be one of her grandfather’s entourage. No doubt. One of his business associates, partners—whatever rich men called each other in their gilded world where the price of electricity was an irrelevance and there was never green mould on the bathroom walls…
So much, she thought with self-mocking acknowledgement, for the shopping spree she’d been on with Linda and Tony in that ultra-posh London department store, courtesy of its gold store card! She’d thought the outrageously priced trouser suit she’d bought, shouting its designer label, would do the trick—fool anyone who saw her that the last thing she could possibly be was a common-as-muck London girl off a housing estate! And Linda had even done her hair and make-up that morning, before she’d set out for the airport, making her look svelte and expensive to go with the fantastic new outfit she’d travelled in. Obviously she need not have bothered!
The man looking at her so disdainfully out of those cold steel-grey eyes knew perfectly well what she was—who she was. Yiorgos Coustakis’s cheap-and-nasty bastard granddaughter!
Her chin went up. Well, what did she care? She had her own opinions of Yiorgos Coustakis—and they were not generous. So if this man standing here on her grandfather’s mile-long terrace, looking down his strong, straight nose at her, his mouth tight with disdain, thought she wasn’t fit for a palatial place like this, what was it to her? Zilch. Just as Yiorgos Coustakis was nothing to her—nothing except the price of some small, modest reparation to the woman he had treated like dirt…
Her eyes hardened. Nikos saw their expression change, saw the derisive smile, the insolent tilt of the woman’s chin. Clearly the female was shameless about her trade! The distaste he felt about Old Man Coustakis keeping a mistress at his age filtered into distaste for the woman herself. It checked the stirring of his own body, busy responding the way nature liked it to do when in the presence of a sexually alluring female.
So when the woman strolled towards him, the smile on her face unable to compensate for the hardness in her eyes, he responded in kind.
Andrea saw the withdrawal in his eyes, and suddenly, like a cloud passing in front of the sun, she felt a chill emanate from him. Suddenly he wasn’t just a breath-catchingly, heart-stoppingly handsome man, looking a million dollars, tall and lean—he was an icily formidable, hard-eyed, patrician-born captain of industry who looked on the rest of humanity as his inferior minions…
Well, tough! She tilted her head, almost coquettishly, letting her glorious hair riot over her shoulders. An intense desire to annoy him came over her.
‘Hi,’ she breathed huskily. ‘We haven’t met, have we? I’d remember, I know!’ She let a gleam of appreciation enter her glowing eyes. That would annoy him even more; she instinctively knew.
She held her hand out. It was looking beautiful—Linda had given her a manicure the night before, smoothing the work-roughened skin and putting on nail extensions and a rich nail-varnish whose colour matched her hair.
Nikos ignored the hand. A revulsion against touching flesh that had caressed, for money, a rich old man, filled him. It didn’t matter that half his body was registering renewed arousal at the sound of that breathy voice, the heady fragrance of her body as she approached him. He subdued it ruthlessly.
Besides, it had just registered with him that the woman was English. That would account for the auburn colouring. Presumably, he found himself thinking, for a woman of her profession hair that colour would command a premium in lands where dark hair was the norm.
The man’s rejection of her outstretched hand made Andrea falter. She let her hand fall to her side. But still, despite the shut-out, she refused to be intimidated. After all, if she failed at the first test—being sneered at by a complete stranger for being the bastard Coustakis granddaughter—then she would be doomed to fail in her mission. Intimidation was, she knew from the painfully extracted reminiscences of her mother’s abrupt expulsion from Greece twenty-four years ago, the forte of the man who had summoned her here like a servant. She must not, above all, be intimidated by Yiorgos Coustakis as her mother had been. She must stand up to him—give him as good as she got. Tony’s words echoed in her mind—if he had summoned her here, he wanted something. And that made her position powerful.
She had to remember that. Must remember that.
She was in enemy territory. Confidence was everything.
So now, in the face of the obvious disdain of this stunning stranger, she refused to be cowed. Instead, she gave that derisive little smile again, deliberately tossed her head and, shooting him a mocking glance, strolled right past him to take in the view over the grounds. She leant her palms on the stone balustrade, taking some of the weight off her legs. They were aching slightly, probably tension more than anything, because she’d been sitting down most of the day—first in the luxurious airline seat and then in the luxurious chauffeur-driven car. Still, she must do her exercises tonight—right after she’d phoned Tony, as they’d arranged.
