The Greek Tycoon's Secret Child

‘Mattie,’ Mattie muttered. ‘Everyone calls me Mattie. I hate the name Matilda.’ She blushed at this unnecessary volunteering of information, even though it was hardly a state secret.

‘Why?’

She shrugged, as he knew she would, just as he knew that she hated having let slip the innocuous detail because it was of a personal nature.

‘Well, Mattie,’ he stretched out one arm to hail a taxi, and as it slowed down to pull up to them he said with deadly seriousness, ‘we’re going to have to get in a cab together to go to this hotel…’

‘Hotel? Oh, no. No, no.’ She began backing away and Dominic clicked his tongue in impatience.

‘I said hotel. I didn’t say hotel room. We’re going to a hotel in Covent Garden that I often use when I’m working late. There’s a bar downstairs and it’s guaranteed to be full.’ But her big green eyes were still watching him warily, and he had to fight the urge to just reach out and smooth her ruffled feathers.

He, who had never had to try when it came to the opposite sex, could scarcely believe that he was now willing, at some ungodly time of the evening, to bide his time.

‘Now, are you going to come with me or not? If not, then you can rest assured that you won’t see me again. If you do decide to come, then you’ll just have to swallow your misgivings and climb into this taxi with me. Make your mind up.’

He saw the debate flitting across her face and wondered what he would do if she walked away. Wondered what had brought him to this juncture in the first place.

Fate? A certain boredom with the women he was used to? A need to erase Rosalind by having an affair with someone dramatically different from her in every possible way? Something else? No, nothing else, he told himself.

But whatever the outcome of her internal debate, he wasn’t going to chase after her. He had already behaved out of character as far as she was concerned, and he wasn’t going to do it again.

‘OK.’ Mattie shrugged and, when she reached out to open the door, found that he was there before her, opening it for her. It was a gesture to which she wasn’t accustomed. Frankie was not an opening-car-doors-for-women kind of man.

Still, she made sure to wriggle up to the furthest side of the seat when he stooped to join her, and was immediately glad of it because, even at this distance, she still felt chokingly aware of him.

‘I don’t know your name,’ she said, as the taxi pulled away.

He noticed the way she was huddled against the door, as if scared that he might do something unexpected at any given moment, and he, in turn, made sure to keep a safe distance between them.

‘Dominic Drecos.’

‘Dominic Drecos,’ Mattie repeated, thinking hard. ‘And you’re something important in the City, are you?’

‘Something important, yes.’ She didn’t sound overly impressed with that and he found himself giving in to a childish desire to expand. ‘I deal in corporate finance. We handle mergers and acquisitions. In addition, I speculate in property. Buy to renovate to sell.’

‘Right.’ She turned to gaze out of the window. In this part of London, it was never dark. Too many lights and billboards. It was a rolling scenery she was familiar with, but for some reason she found it easier to stare at the images moving past than at the man sitting on the seat next to her.

He was the first man she had had a proper conversation with in a very long time. She attended her courses during the day but did none of the student socialising that most of the others did and talking to the customers at the nightclub was strictly out of the question. There had just been Frankie. And she and Frankie no longer conversed on any meaningful level.

‘So you don’t live here, then, I take it?’ She reluctantly looked at him and, for one crazy moment, wondered what he looked like underneath the expensive suit and that crisp striped shirt he was wearing under it. Then she blinked and she was back in the taxi, a nightclub waitress with a boyfriend, sitting next to someone important in the City.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Well, if you did, then why would you go to a hotel when you happened to be working late?’

‘I have an apartment in Chelsea. But this particular hotel does very late suppers and occasionally we might come across here to wind up a deal and eat at the same time.’

‘We?’

‘My people.’

‘Your people.’

‘Accountants, lawyers, whoever happens to be needed. Sometimes, I come here on my own to have a late meal and finish business without the distraction of telephones and fax machines.’ No point telling her that he had been responsible for buying and renovating this particular building and, as a stipulation, had a penthouse suite on the top floor which he sometimes used if he simply couldn’t be bothered to get George to drive him back to his own apartment. That little titbit would have her running for cover.

And he was discovering that the last thing he wanted was to have her running for cover.

For someone who had always had total control over every aspect of his life, this in itself puzzled the hell out of him. It also energised him in equal measure.

‘And what about your wife? Does she enjoy your late suppers at expensive hotels when you’re working late with your people?’ Whether he was married or not was immaterial to her. She had no intention of doing anything with him. But she still found that she was curious.

Was he married?

‘If I were married, I wouldn’t be here.’ There was a flat coolness to his voice that made her want to retract the question. ‘Don’t you find it impossible to work somewhere where your opinion of your customers is so low?’

She was spared the difficulty of finding an answer to that one by the taxi slowing down in front of an elegant building sandwiched between an expensive men’s clothing shop and a furniture shop that sported chic, very modern, unpriced handmade furniture.

But somehow she got the feeling that the question would be repeated the minute they were on their own.

In the meantime, she would take some time to get her thoughts together and try to still the fluttery feeling in the pit of her stomach that definitely should not be there.

‘Not the sort of place for a girl in jeans,’ she whispered with a nervous laugh as they walked into the foyer. Stark colours, one or two abstract paintings on the walls, plants that seemed to make a statement.

And he had been right. There were people even in the foyer, even at this hour of the night. Expensive, sophisticated, arty-looking people.

The man behind the desk smiled at him, which just made Mattie feel even more nervous. She clenched her fists in the pockets of her jacket and trudged alongside him as he strode towards some stairs and down into the basement bar.

What was she doing here? she wondered a little wildly.

‘People come here dressed in anything they choose,’ Dominic murmured down to her. ‘No need to feel out of place.’

‘I wasn’t feeling out of place.’

‘No?’ He paused to raise one eyebrow at her, and she smiled reluctantly.

‘Well, a little.’

It was the smile, he thought. Something about it gave the lie to her air of cynicism, revealed a wealth of vulnerability and spoke volumes about the wit, the humour, the intelligence lying there just below the surface. Waiting.

Waiting, he thought, for me to unearth it.

‘Grab a table,’ he said. ‘I’ll get drinks. What will you have?’

‘Not champagne. I see enough of that at work to be immune to its charm. Not that I’ve ever been a champagne girl anyway,’ she added quickly, just in case he thought that she was going to take advantage of his wealth to order herself the most expensive drink on the menu. ‘I’ll have some coffee, please. Decaffeinated, if they do it.’

‘They do everything here.’

Mattie took a seat at one of the smooth circular granite tables. The chairs were oddly shaped, very comfortable even though they didn’t look it, and, as in the foyer, there were people here. A whole world of night birds, exotic, young night birds, drinking and having a good time.