Unworldly Secretary, Untamed Greek

‘I couldn’t possibly!’ she protested, annoyed by the suggestion, she didn’t work for him, but that didn’t stop him flinging around his orders.

Her glance slid with dislike across his lean autocratic features; he never let anyone forget he was in charge for a second. Watching him undermine Andreas’s authority, Beth had been forced to bite her tongue on more than one occasion but Andreas never complained. He was just too easy-going and nice-natured to complain.

Knowing how much Andreas hated making waves and enemies—his brother was a walking six feet five tidal wave—Beth frequently complained on his behalf, giving her a certain reputation for being what the polite within the building termed overzealous and the less polite called hostile and scary.

Scary did not earn her many friends, but it did grant her a certain amount of grudging respect; grudging respect and unrequited love meant her Friday nights were generally not wild affairs.

Theo’s sable brows lifted at the vehemence of her response; he felt his attitude shift rapidly from mild sympathy to irritation.

‘It’s never good to bring personal problems to work.’

If he could maintain this discipline, even on the occasion some years earlier when his engagement had been broken off and his supposed broken heart had been the red-hot topic in numerous websites and his photo had been plastered over the covers of numerous trashy papers and magazines—not the best time in his life—it did not seem unreasonable to him to expect similar restraint from those in his employ.

The icy reproach made her eyes fly wide in indignation. ‘I don’t have a personal life!’

Theo arched a sardonic brow and watched the hot colour wash over her fair skin.

‘You amaze me,’ he murmured. It also amazed him that he was actually prolonging this conversation, but seeing someone as uptight as his brother’s colourless robot secretary show her claws had a strange fascination—but then so did a car wreck for someone with nothing better to do—and he did.

Beth, her eyes glowing with dislike behind the lenses of her slightly misted spectacles, glared at him. Sarcastic rat!

‘I have a great deal of work to do.’

‘Few of us are indispensable, Miss Farley.’

Coded warning, threat…?

For once, Beth knew she would not be going to sleep trying to decipher the dark hidden meaning in one of Theo Kyriakis’s sardonic throwaway comments, which might all be perfectly innocent, though it was hard to tell when he had a dark chocolate, deep accented voice that could make a shopping list sound deliciously sinister and lingered weirdly in your head for hours after a conversation.

Well, no more! In a year’s time she would have forgotten what he sounded like. Yes, upbeat was good.

Yes, and being unemployed was really upbeat, especially with her overdraft situation!

Cutting off the inner dialogue abruptly, Beth lifted her chin. As an ex-employee, she no longer had to pander to this man’s enormous ego, unlike the rest of the world!

‘You can’t sack me because I quit.’

Theo’s brows rose as he looked from the handwritten envelope being held in a shaking hand towards him to the angry antagonistic eyes sparking green levelled at his face.

‘Sack you?’ he wondered, shaking his head in a mystified manner. ‘Did I miss something?’

Aware that she might have overreacted slightly, Beth’s eyes fell from his. ‘You said I wasn’t indispensable,’ she reminded him with a cranky sniff.

‘And you think you are?’

‘Of course not.’

Ignoring the interruption, he spoke across her. ‘So you keep a resignation letter to hand for just such a moment?’

‘Of course not. I—’

He turned his head to scan the envelope. ‘And the name on that envelope does not appear to be mine. You do recall that you do not work for me?’

Beth rolled her eyes.

On paper, Andreas might be the boss in this office and, while he did have a degree of autonomy, Beth had learnt early on that all the major policy decisions were made by Theo Kyriakis. He was Kyriakis Inc, and nobody who knew anything about the company’s meteoric rise under his management could question that.

Where his brother was concerned, Andreas did not do confrontation; he always took the route of least resistance.

‘If you wanted me sacked, I’d be sacked.’

Theo tipped his head in acknowledgement of the challenging comment and drawled, ‘What, and miss the possibility of future delightful discussions?’ He stopped; he could actually hear her teeth grate. ‘Look, I have no idea what has happened to upset you.’

And Theo had actually no idea why he was concerning himself with the question, beyond the fact that the efficiency of this office had a knock-on effect within the company.

And the smooth-running of Kyriakis Inc was always his concern.

‘You happened!’ Beth felt a twinge of guilt. No wonder he looked astonished by the comment; he hadn’t actually done anything to earn her indignation—on this occasion.

Also she was guessing that he had limited experience of people, especially lowly secretaries like her, yelling at him.

She wasn’t totally sure why she had made him the target of all her pent-up anger and frustration; the only thing he had done was notice she was miserable—he was the only person to notice.

It was Beth’s turn to look astonished when, after a long pause, instead of blasting back with one of his legendary icy put-downs, he simply suggested, ‘It might be an idea if you slept on this decision.’

Had his brother slept with her? Theo’s expression froze and he didn’t breathe for a full thirty seconds.

This rather startling explanation for the tears and tantrums fitted. How many times had he told Andreas that mixing romance and the workplace was the perfect recipe for disaster?

An expletive was an expletive in any language and Beth, who had never seen anything make a dint in this ultra-controlled man’s composure, dropped her jaw as Theo swore, twitched the letter from her fingers and, after ripping it in half, tossed it in a waste paper basket.

‘While you are not indispensable—’ His sardonic smile flashed, the muscles in his jaw relaxing as he realised there was no way that Andreas would sleep with a woman who did not wear lipstick.

And Elizabeth Farley did not.

As Theo studied the surprisingly lush outline of her generous lips, he decided this was not a bad thing. Had she decided to highlight this particular natural asset, she might have proved a distraction for his easily distracted sibling, who might even have started wondering—this would have been a natural direction for any man’s thoughts to take—what other assets she might be hiding beneath her buttoned collars and frumpy A-line skirts.

‘—I think you are good at what you do,’ he observed, continuing to study her lips.

For the second time in minutes Beth was stunned into silence; she had not imagined he had noticed her any more than he noticed the office furniture and now he was expressing a grudging appreciation—or was he?

She still wasn’t sure.

Reluctantly, she met his eyes. ‘You do?’

‘Am I wrong?’

Normally self-deprecating, Beth responded to the challenge glittering in his dark, heavy-lidded stare. ‘I am good at what I do.’