Doukakis's Apprentice (15 page)

For a moment she just lay there, slightly dazed.

And then the terror returned.

Emerging from a sex-induced coma, Damon woke to find himself alone in the bed.

As the morning light poured into the bedroom, it took him a moment to orientate himself. Turning his head slowly, he eyed the tangled sheets and found himself struggling with emotions entirely foreign to him.

He’d spent a wild night with Polly Prince.

Covering his eyes with his forearm, he swore long and fluently. It didn’t help to acknowledge that it had started with him trying to prove his ability to control his decisions and actions.

Control?

Where had control been during their marathon sex session? The irony slapped him in the face. In trying to prove control, he’d disproved it. And he’d done it again and again, until she’d been limp and pliant and had finally fallen asleep on his shoulder, those incredible limbs wrapped around him.

Just thinking about it made him hard again and he gave an
exclamation of frustration and sprang from the bed, trying to dispel the image of a smouldering Polly letting her coat slip to the floor.

That whole striptease had been his undoing.

Striding into the bathroom, he stepped into the shower, hoping that a blast of freezing water would cool his body and his brain.

He needed to stop feeling and
think
.

As if his life wasn’t already complicated enough, he’d now complicated it still further. It wasn’t just the situation between his sister and her father, or even the fact that she now worked for him and he made a point of never becoming involved with an employee. No, the real complication was that he didn’t want a serious relationship. There was no way he wanted to be responsible for yet another human being’s happiness. It was enough to have the burden of thousands of employees and one wayward sister. He didn’t need anyone else added into the mix.

Damon turned the jets of the shower to full blast, knowing that the only way to deal with the situation was to be blunt. Honest.

The question was whether it was better to do it immediately, and risk subjecting himself to the company of an emotional female for the journey home, or whether to delay that conversation until they reached London and he could extricate himself from the fall-out with greater ease.

It was going to make it impossible to work with her, and it was clear to him that, despite his previous thoughts, she was a key player in the business. He suspected that Gérard’s devotion to her was as much due to her creative imagination as her long legs.

Postponing the moment when he had to shatter Polly’s romantic illusions, he shaved, dressed and dealt with his urgent
calls. By the time he’d returned calls to people in London and Athens there was still no sign of her.

After the intimacies they’d shared the night before, he was surprised.

His jaw tightened and he tried to free himself of the uncomfortable suspicion that she’d been a virgin. Twenty-four-year-old virgins didn’t exist, did they? Especially not virgins who seduced a man with a striptease and then proceeded to indulge in hot, steamy sex without a single blush or bat of an eyelash.

Dismissing the thought, he strode through the apartment in search of her.

Theé mou
, he wasn’t a man who avoided awkward situations. He just did what needed to be done, so why was he dragging his feet?

Even though he reminded himself that she’d been a more than willing partner, he still felt a sense of responsibility. He’d started it, hadn’t he? By kissing her.

It was time to put an end to something he never should have started.

He found her seated on the balcony, talking to someone on the phone while she plugged numbers into a spreadsheet on her laptop.

Damon studied her face for evidence of distress but she looked animated and energised as she negotiated a price with someone on the end of the phone.

When she finally ended the call she was so absorbed in the work she was doing she didn’t immediately notice him. Looking at her now, he wondered how he could ever have accused her of being lazy. It was obvious she’d been working for hours.

‘Don’t you ever sleep?’

She glanced up then, her cheeks dimpling into a warm
smile. ‘You’re a fine one to talk. I hear your average working day is twenty hours.’

‘I’m the boss.’

‘So you’re setting an example? Never mind that. I’m glad you’re here because I really need to talk to you.’ She hit ‘save’ and Damon drew in a breath, bracing himself for the inevitable conversation.

She looked so happy. Lit up inside.

It was obvious she’d succumbed to that dizzy, crazy feeling that came at the beginning of a new relationship.

No doubt she was plotting out their future as women always did. And he was about to take those plans and shatter them.
This
was why he avoided responsibilities. He never forgot that the fear of letting down the people close to him was what had driven his father over the edge of despair.

Sweat broke out on the back of his neck. ‘Polly—’

‘Can you take a quick look at this?’ She turned the laptop so that he could see the screen. Her hair was pinned haphazardly on top of her head and she was wearing a dress in a wild shade of purple. Her pink notebook lay face-down on the table. ‘I’ve prepared two proposals—one for a massive budget and one for a shockingly massive budget.’ She gave a wicked smile. ‘I’m hoping that Gérard will be so impressed by the ideas he won’t look at how much they’re costing. What do you think? You know him better than me—if you think I’ve gone over the top then just say so. I suddenly decided that we might be able to do something in Fashion Week so I’ve made a few calls.’

Her focus on work threw him. ‘You want me to look at the budget? That’s what you wanted to talk about?’

‘Yes.’ Her eyes were back on the screen as she reached for the glass of water she’d placed on the table. ‘Ideally I’d like to e-mail this today while he’s still excited about everything we discussed. I don’t want him to back down on that figure he
mentioned last night. If this piece of business is going to be worth that much to the company, there’s no way you’ll have to make the staff redundant.’

Braced for an entirely different conversation, Damon couldn’t focus. ‘I’ll take a look at your proposal later.’

‘Do you think you could do it now? When I get back to the office I want to be able to gather the team together and give them a morale-boosting talk. I thought after last night you’d find it impossible to justify doing something so mean as letting anyone go.’

‘After last night?’ He repeated her words, shocked by the raw emotion that rushed through him. ‘You think the fact that we had sex will affect my business decisions?’

Her jaw dropped. ‘I was talking about the meeting with Gérard.’

Of course. The meeting. Damon pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose, realising that he was in serious trouble. ‘We are having two different conversations here.’

‘I think we must be.’ She looked genuinely astonished. ‘I’m having a conversation about the staff. I can’t concentrate on anything or enjoy my work when I’m watching my back and worrying about job losses. I just want that sorted. What are you having a conversation about?’

His eyes dropped to her mouth and his body tightened as he remembered how she tasted. The fact that she was thinking about her staff and not the night they’d spent threw him. Normally after a night of steamy sex women wanted to know what was going to happen next. They went into full planning mode. Polly appeared to have skipped that ritual and was just making the assumption that they were already a couple.

‘You’re very chirpy for someone who had virtually no sleep,’ he said cautiously. ‘I thought you weren’t a morning person.’

‘I didn’t think I was either.’ She leaned forward and changed
a figure on the spreadsheet. ‘But apparently a night of crazy sex does wonders to wake me up. I wish I’d known sooner. I would have done it years ago. It’s probably better for you than strong coffee.’

Digesting the implication of those words, Damon breathed deeply. ‘So it
was
your first time.’ Her confession intensified the suffocating feeling that had begun from the moment he’d woken up. ‘Polly—’

‘It’s hard for me to work out how to staff this account until I know what your plans are.’

‘
Theé mou
, will you
stop
talking about work?’

Startled, she looked up at him. ‘Sorry, but this account is really important. It’s worth loads to the company …’ Her voice trailed off as she looked at his face. ‘You’re behaving really weirdly, if you don’t mind me saying. Just a couple of days ago you were telling me to take my lazy self and do some work and now you’re telling me to stop thinking about work. It’s very confusing.’

She couldn’t possibly be more confused than him. ‘I was wrong to say that. I was wrong about
you
,’ Damon breathed. ‘I’ve already apologised, but I apologise again.’

‘Well, I was pretty wrong about you, too. I thought you were a demented workaholic with an unhealthy focus on the bottom line. But right now, when I
really
need you to talk about work, you seem incapable of focusing. It’s very frustrating.’

‘Why were you a virgin?’

‘What sort of a question is that?!’ Her face turned scarlet. ‘Because no man ever wanted to take me to bed before, I suppose. Thanks for pointing that out. And now can we end this conversation? I don’t know much about morning-after etiquette but I’m pretty sure that embarrassing your partner isn’t on the list.’

‘You were excluded from school at fourteen because you had three boys in your room,’ he said thickly. ‘So we both
know you’re not some blushing innocent.’ The error in his thinking blazed in front of his eyes. She might not have been blushing, but she
had
been innocent. He’d suspected it at the time but he’d been too carried away by the whole erotic experience to act on that suspicion. ‘What the hell transformed you from vamp to virgin?’

‘I never said I was a vamp. You made that assumption. Along with a few others.’

‘I made that assumption based on the evidence.’

‘Mmm. Good job you’re not a lawyer.’ She gave a tiny shrug and fiddled with her pen. ‘So—Arianna obviously never talked to you about that episode?’

The tension was like a layer of steel in his back. ‘I didn’t ask for details. I decided it was safer to put the whole thing behind us.’

‘Right. Probably wise.’

Exasperation rose in him. ‘I remember that day very clearly and you didn’t make a single excuse. You just stood there with a defiant look on your face and let them throw you out of the school. Permanently. Not
once
did you defend yourself or try and stop it happening.’

‘I didn’t want to stop it happening.’

Far beneath them the sound of horns blared as the impatient French negotiated the Paris traffic but Damon was oblivious. ‘You
wanted
to be excluded?’

‘Yes. That was the plan.’

‘Plan?’
He breathed slowly. ‘You’re telling me that you engineered the whole thing so that you’d be asked to leave the school? Why would you want that?’

‘Because I was being bullied. Badly bullied.’ Her tone was matter-of-fact. ‘I tried other ways to sort it out but none of them worked. So I decided I had to leave the school.’

‘
You
decided—?’ Digesting the implications of the statement,
Damon struggled to focus. ‘And your father didn’t have anything to say about that?’

‘I didn’t ask him. It was my problem. I sorted it.’

‘If I have a problem, I’m expected to sort it out myself.’

‘Did you talk to the teachers?’

‘Yes.’ She looked at him as if he were clearly stupid. ‘They spoke to the bullies, who were so angry that I’d told on them they set fire to my hair. Fortunately Arianna walked into the room and we managed to put it out, which was a relief because burnt hair is
not
a good look.’

Damon gritted his teeth. ‘What happened then?’

‘We trimmed the ends. It was fine. It actually suited me shorter.’

‘Not your hair, the bullying. Why didn’t you tell your father?’

‘Why would I tell my father?’

‘Well, because—’ Damon found himself at a loss for words. ‘You were fourteen years old. It was his responsibility to come down to the school and sort it out.’

‘That isn’t his style. He prefers me to sort things out myself and that’s fine with me. I’m grateful to him. I’m quite independent as a result of it. But I did feel guilty that Arianna got drawn into the whole episode.’

‘So you didn’t invite the boys to your room because you wanted to party?’

‘No. I paid them to come and hang out while I danced in my underwear with a bottle of whisky in my hand. Someone tipped off the head teacher who promptly caught me. Which was as we’d planned, obviously. I thought it was an extremely creative solution. Anyway, it did the trick and the boys didn’t seem to mind helping us out.’

Mind?
Damon tried to obliterate the image of Polly writhing
in her underwear with the express purpose of getting herself thrown out of school. ‘Why did the other girls bully you?’

She wrinkled her nose. ‘Mostly because of my dad, I suppose. As I said to you last night, it was social suicide having a parent turning up in a sports car with a young blonde in the front seat. I suppose if it hadn’t been that it probably would have been something else. They just pick on whatever suits them—red hair, glasses, fat thighs—you know what bullies are like.’

He didn’t, but she obviously did. ‘What about your next school.’

‘Oh, that worked out really well. I picked a nice day school close to my house.’

‘
You
picked it?’

‘Yes. I went to see a couple and chose one that did a lot of art and creative stuff. I thought it would suit me perfectly.’

‘You—’ Damon broke off, unable to believe what he was hearing. ‘You’re saying that you picked the school by yourself? That your father didn’t go with you?’

‘Why would he? I got myself kicked out of school. It was my job to find myself another one, which turned out great,’ she added cheerfully. ‘I don’t see why you’re so shocked about the whole thing.’