Page 8 of The Billionaire's Demand

She knew she ought to check who it was first, but the intercom had never worked, and she lacked the energy to trudge down to the main door. It was probably for a different apartment anyway.

She took another mouthful of coffee and then, moments later, there was a knock on her own door. The safety catch was on so, setting down her coffee again, she opened it cautiously—and froze in total shock.

CHAPTER THREE

LEANDROS WAS STILL in shock himself. Eliana lived here? In this run-down apartment block in the back end of the city? Had she really been reduced to this?

Disbelief had hit him when the airport taxi had dropped him off in this street, and he’d stared around, questioning whether he had possibly got the wrong address. But no, he had not. And that was definitely Eliana standing there, her face ashen, in the narrow gap of the safety chained doorway.

He watched her fumble with the safety chain, as though her hands wouldn’t work properly, and as the door opened more widely he stepped forward. She stepped away, as if automatically, and then he was inside, casting a still half-disbelieving look around him at the tiny studio, with its shabby furniture, worn floor, cramped kitchenette and totally depressing air of chronic poverty.

Eliana had not just gone down in the world—she had reached the bottom.

Her face was still ashen, her eyes distended.

‘What—? What—? I don’t understand... Why—?’

The disconnected words fell from her lips, uncomprehending, as filled with shock as her expression. Leandros’s gaze snapped back from surveying her unlovely living quarters to her face. Not just ashen, but with lines of tiredness etched into it. She did not look good...

But that was to his advantage. Just as seeing the daughter of Aristides Georgiades, whose forebears had hobnobbed with the long-gone kings of Greece, now the widow of the son of one of Greece’s richest men, reduced to living in a dump like this was to his advantage.

She will do anything to get out of here.

‘You really live here?’ he heard himself ask.

Something changed in her face. ‘As you can see,’ she answered tightly.

She crossed her arms across her chest, chin going up. She took a breath, kept talking, her voice less faint now.

‘Leandros, what is this? What are you doing here?’

There was blank incomprehension in her tone, but a demand as well.

His own expression altered in response. ‘I thought you might like to come out to dinner with me,’ he said.

She stared. ‘Are you mad?’

He ignored the voice that was telling him that, yes, he was in fact mad to be doing what he was doing. ‘I have something I want to speak to you about,’ he said instead.

Her face closed. ‘So, speak.’

‘Not here,’ he said dismissively. ‘I’ll tell you over dinner. It could be...’ his voice became silky ‘...to your advantage.’ His gaze flicked around the dump she lived in—had been reduced to living in. ‘I could get you out of here,’ he said.

Something moved in her eyes—a longing so intense it overrode everything else in her tired face. For a moment he felt pity for her—then he pushed it aside. It wasn’t the emotion he intended to feel. As for love—she had killed that six years ago. Now all he wanted from her was something else. Something that had nothing to do with love.

He saw her handbag—a cheap one—on the table, and handed it to her, along with the apartment keys beside it.

‘Let’s go,’ he said.

She seemed totally dazed, and he took advantage of it, guiding her out of the apartment, ushering her downstairs, and into the waiting taxi, which promptly drove off. She sank into her seat, still looking blitzed. But then, he was blitzed too.

All the way up to Thessaloniki a voice inside him had told him that what he was doing was madness. But he was doing it all the same...

He stole a glance at her, sitting silent and immobile, staring ahead blankly. He felt something move within him that was confirming of his mad impulse to come to Thessaloniki like this. For all the tiredness in her eyes, the cheapness of her clothes, her face with not a scrap of make-up, her hair caught back in a straggling knot, her beauty was undimmed.

He let his gaze rest lingeringly on her. She might be beaten down by her new poverty, but she was unbowed.

An air of unreality hit him—was he really sitting here in a taxi with Eliana? Or would he blink and wake up? Find it was only a dream after all?

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