Excerpt

ARISTIDE ROMANOS, BILLIONAIRE ENTREPRENEUR, was relieved when his senior PA, Georgio, contrived to give him a slight smile from his hospital bed. ‘Only one more scan to go and I’ll be free to leave, sir.’

Aristide winced. He wasn’t always the most considerate employer but even he was not about to drag an employee with a broken ankle straight out of hospital. ‘No, you won’t be. You’ll stay here until a medic tells you to leave and then only to return to the hotel where you will rest.’

A car crash in the airport car park had taken out Aristide’s entire personal team of six. Three were down with concussion, one with a broken arm and another with a mix of injuries. Currently, Georgio was the only member of his staff to remain in full possession of his wits.

‘But, sir…what will you—?’

‘I will proceed to Traxis.’ Aristide paused to enjoy Georgio’s look of disbelief. ‘I can work alone. I will do a tour and meet senior personnel. Another team will arrive to assist me tomorrow. Relax, Georgio, you’re on sick leave.’

Aristide knew that his PA didn’t find it any easier to relax than he did. Georgio, like Aristide, was a driven type-A personality. Ignoring the attention that his six-foot-four-inch, well-built frame and sleek, dark good looks garnered from the female staff, he strode out of the private hospital and back into his limo, directing his driver to his destination. Another takeover, another day, he reflected wryly, but, undeniably, work was the spice of life to him.

He scanned a text from a former lover and without hesitation asked her to lose his number. He was only twenty-eight but he didn’t do repeats with women, never had, never would. Sex was just sex, a necessity for a male of his appetites, but it could still be controlled within certain boundaries. An entire weekend was as close as Aristide got to commitment. He was a shameless playboy, fashioned that way from growing up with a father who couldn’t resist women. Ex-wives, ex-partners and discarded lovers and children had littered his father’s life.

That kind of background left scars that Aristide was fully aware of having. But, even so, he simply didn’t want female drama in his life: no broken hearts, no accusations of infidelity, no jealous scenes, no betrayals, no lies. Aristide could not imagine having only one woman in his life and he was even less keen on the option of ever fathering a child of his own. Without a doubt, his last will and testament would spread his wealth across the best of his many relatives.

One month later

Tabby checked the test and imagined her eyes shooting out wide on stalks like a cartoon character telegraphing fear and alarm. Her blood ran cold in her veins, shock rippling through her. She was pregnant. She sucked in a deep breath to ward off the dizziness assailing her. How on earth could she have been so stupid? So reckless? She, who prided herself on her intelligence and self-discipline, had just utterly messed up her life and her poor sister’s. At the eleventh hour, she would have to back out of the business marriage she had contracted to complete and her twin, Violet, would have to take her place.

And that was only the first of the mistakes she had made, she acknowledged wretchedly. She had messed up so badly that she was horribly ashamed of herself.

Furthermore, now she would have a child to raise alone, a baby who would be totally dependent on her currently useless self!

How on earth had she contrived to sink so low, so fast?

And the memories began to flutter back in a series of episodes like some ghastly soap opera…

It had started with their mother, Lucia’s illness, persistent cancer, which had dogged her for many years and right then their beloved mum had been at her last post. Her sole hope for survival was a new experimental drug on a clinical trial in the USA. But it cost money to get a place on such trials and one thing Lucia and her two daughters had never had was surplus cash.

Indeed the only wealthy person they even knew, and they scarcely knew him, was their grandfather, Tomaso Barone, he of the hard heart who had cast off their mother when she was a teenager who chose to marry the wrong man. And regrettably, Sam Blessington, their father, had been very much the wrong man, a feckless artist with a taste for booze, violence and other women and no interest at all in his twin daughters. Throughout their childhood there had been sobering experiences like bailiffs, homelessness and hunger and, on several occasions, Lucia had begged her father to help them. But not once had he come through for his estranged only child. So, when Violet and Tabby had made an appointment to meet Tomaso and ask for his financial assistance to enable their mother to get on that trial, they had not been optimistic.
It had been a huge shock when Tomaso had looked across his giant office desk and said, ‘Yes, I will help your mother this time…if in turn one of you does something for me.’

‘Anything!’ she and Violet had promised simultaneously with no idea whatsoever of what he had been about to propose: a marriage with the heir to his rival competitor’s company to cement a business deal.

‘As your sister has a child, it will obviously be you, Viola, who takes up this wonderful opportunity,’ her grandfather had insisted. He wasn’t even aware that she was called Tabitha because her drunken father had bungled registering their birth names. On paper she was Viola Tabitha but in actuality she had always gone by her middle name.

Of course, there had been no choice but to agree, not when he had been dangling the bait of that all-important cash for their mother’s benefit. The very belief that his grandchild would get to wed the super-rich heir to Renzetti Pharmaceuticals and carry on what he somehow deemed to be his legacy had delighted the older man. Neither Violet nor Tabitha had guessed that, when it came to actually handing over the money, he would welch on the deal with the excuse that they had to wait longer for it.

Only they hadn’t had time to wait when their mother was so frail and instead Tabby had had to ask her future husband’s lawyers for the sum as conditional on her signing the pre-nup before the wedding. And in return, she had been asked to reduce the five-year marital term to three instead and of course she had agreed, not wanting to have her own life derailed for any longer than necessary.

Consenting to marry a male who couldn’t even be bothered to meet her prior to the wedding had freaked Tabby out. It had felt as though every one of her personal choices was being stolen from her: she was to marry a stranger and live in his home and put up with whatever he chose to throw at her for three long endless years. A prison camp had sounded more appealing than that, especially after she had read the clause relating to her personal behaviour, which barred her from meeting any men or consorting with them in any way.

Why? Tabby had never had a man in her life or particularly wanted one. Her father had for ever soured her on the male sex but, even so, she still hadn’t liked being a virgin at almost twenty-two. She’d seen that as a rite of passage into adulthood that she hadn’t wished to wait another three years to experience. A mere physical thing, a bodily thing, and not something to make a big deal about, she had decided, in her innocence.

And that decision, Tabby recognised, and that rash attitude had brought her to her current crisis of having conceived an unplanned child. It should have been something she could celebrate and she blamed him for the fact she couldn’t because he had already accused her of trying to set him up when the condom failed. What kind of madness had possessed her when she’d thought that she could have a simple one-night stand as other women did? Well, for her, it had gone badly wrong and she blamed inexperience and her ignorance in bedding such a dreadful choice of a guy for the consequences.

Certainly, the day it had happened, she had had no idea of what lay ahead. It had begun as a normal shift in her office temp job in a large insurance company where she worked for Ed Stokes, a harmlessly inefficient middle manager, who was, nonetheless, related to the CEO, who absolutely never showed his face in the building.

‘Julian…’ aka, the CEO of Traxis ‘…suggested that I look after this senior audit chap coming in,’ Ed had explained. ‘But I want you to do it instead because you have a degree in accounting and I work in sales.’

There had been no point reminding Ed that Tabby hated accounting and had learned that any day she preferred general office admin to perusing profit and loss figures. Ed was the boss and she had an easy job as long as she took care of all the many things that intimidated mild-mannered, socially awkward Ed, like meeting new people or dealing with senior staff. He shunted off everything he disliked onto Tabby and he got away with it too because he was on first-name terms with the big boss.

Tabby had hung about Reception awaiting the arrival of the VIP accountant with nothing but the name of the company he worked for in terms of information: Millwright and Sons.

A very tall, commanding male with a shock of cropped black curls had entered and the receptionist had greeted him while Tabby had hovered uncertainly by her side, sheltering behind the desk the more she noticed about the new arrival. The fabulous custom fit of his black suit, the unusual formality of the silk tie and closed collar on his shirt, the reality that he was so tall she had to crane her neck and tip her head back even to steal a look at his lean, bronzed face.

‘Mr Millwright?’ the receptionist asked hesitantly.

The reference to his London audit team, who wouldn’t be arriving until the next day, relaxed Aristide into the belief that he was expected.

‘No, I’m Aristide Romanos,’ he announced.

‘I’m Tabitha Blessington, Mr Romanos…’ another voice interposed and he turned his proud dark head to look at her. ‘My boss asked that I show you around.’

Aristide was taken aback that the CEO was not in place to greet him but, as a male, he was immediately captured by the angelic fairness of the speaker. Aristide liked blondes, he always had, but rarely had he met one quite so beautiful, who had not plundered every cosmetic trick in the box. This one had flawless translucent skin like fine china and not even a trace of lipstick on her sensually plump lips. Not to mention huge blue eyes, perfect features and a mane of pale blonde hair that looked as natural as a child’s. She had an unspoilt look new to his experience and it grabbed his interest, which would at best be…fleeting, he assumed without a doubt of that in his handsome head. An arrogance taught by countless very willing ladies in his past.

He didn’t view her as an employee. He owned dozens of companies. He took them over and sorted out their issues before installing trusted executives. He might well never visit Traxis Insurance again, so he didn’t consider himself bound by any rules of the workplace.

‘Miss Blessington,’ Aristide returned as she extended a slender hand to his much bigger paw, the size differential between them making his shapely mouth quirk with amusement. She was small and unexpectedly slight with fewer curves than was usually his preference but his interest abated not a jot.

‘Tabitha…or, er…Tabby will do,’ she heard herself say like a woman in a dream because he was truly the most gorgeous male she had ever met and she felt overwhelmed by his presence. As if that were not bad enough, a sensation like an electric shock tremored down her arm as their fingers barely brushed. Static electricity, she gathered, but that unnerved her even more. Her hand retreated, fingers curling back in on themselves to drop to her side.

‘Where would you like to start, Mr Romanos?’ she asked shakily, refusing to look back up at him again, eager to get moving, to do anything other than be forced to concentrate her eyes on him a second time.

First off, she had collided with dark eyes as impenetrable as black glass and then he had tipped his strong jaw a little as she looked and those eyes had flashed to glittering gold in the sunlight. After that, brain power had kind of receded while he stood there, perfectly at ease and assured, and simply studied her in brooding silence from beneath straight ebony brows and lush black thick lashes. She had worried that she had greeted him wrong or somehow done something he took amiss and nervous tension had almost eaten her alive

‘Top floor…obviously,’ Aristide told her somewhat drily as he took the lead in heading for the lift, punching the button with an impatient air. ‘Tell me about yourself…’

‘I’m a temp,’ Tabby admitted, hoping that any mistakes she made would be excused on that basis because this male struck her as unlike any accountant she had ever met and she had met a lot while studying and training. ‘I work as a PA for Mr Stokes in the sales department—’

‘Why am I being welcomed by a temp?’ Aristide enquired, watching a flush of colour wash her dainty cheekbones, wondering if she coloured up like that as she came and wholly resolved to find out. It was an instant attraction, he reckoned, an attraction stronger than anything he had felt in quite a few years. He didn’t want to recall the last occasion it had happened to him and he blocked off the recollection fast, determined not to revisit that time when he had been young and trusting and really pretty naïve about women and how manipulative they could be when the prize was big enough.

‘I don’t know, Mr Romanos. I was just asked to come down here. I think it was a request from our CEO—’

‘And what’s he like?’

‘I’ve never met him,’ she said honestly. ‘But I think he goes on holiday a lot because he sends photos to my boss…you know the sort of thing. Skiing in the Alps, deep sea diving in the Caribbean, so I assume he’s one of those men’s men, who like to get physical.’