Page 67 of Modern Romance Collection December 2024 Books 1-4

Apparently, though, he didn’t need her to say anything, because he checked the heavy-looking watch on his left wrist then reached for his phone, plucking it out of her hand. He glanced down at the screen and began to type one-handed, his thumb moving deftly.

‘I will have you examined by my doctor. It will be quicker,’ he said, still typing. ‘It is pointless to wait further here.’

Nell opened her mouth in an automatic protest, but then he lifted the phone and spoke into it in a language that wasn’t English. Maybe Greek, given his last name? He was short, to the point and devastatingly authoritative, before ending the call abruptly. ‘Come,’ he ordered, holding out a hand to her. ‘I have my doctor waiting.’

The air of authority with which he spoke, as if the world were his to command, shocked her. She’d never met anyone with such a sense of their own importance.

Well. He might be a very famous, very rich, very powerful billionaire, while she was only a preschool teacher who was neither rich, famous nor particularly powerful, but she still wasn’t going to go with him just because he said so.

‘I don’t care who you have waiting,’ Nell said with the same gentle firmness she used with particularly recalcitrant children. ‘But I’m not going with you and that’s final. As I keep saying, I have a neighbour who can—’

‘I don’t care about your neighbour.’ He didn’t take his gaze from hers. ‘Do you know how serious a head injury can be, Miss Underwood? The paramedic explained it to me on the way to hospital. You might feel fine now, but you could have a blood clot or any one of a number of serious complications. He was very clear that someone needs to be with you for the next twenty-four hours. So unless you fancy a hospital stay, in which case you’ll be taking a bed from someone who might need it more than you do, I suggest coming with me now.’

CHAPTER TWO

ARISTOPHANESWASVERYconscious of the seconds ticking by, of the further rearrangements in his schedule he might need to make. He’d already wasted hours at the hospital and he did not want to waste any more. His assistants had organised his doctor and his doctor had begun the process of handling the hospital bureaucracy. She would meet him at the penthouse apartment. Everything was being handled. There was nothing money and power couldn’t arrange for him if he required it.

However, apparently the one thing his money and power couldn’t arrange was Miss Underwood’s consent to go with him, and she was currently being difficult. It was annoying. While he hadn’t expected her to fall in with his wishes immediately, he’d thought she might take one look at his Wikipedia page andthengraciously agree.

But she had not. What she’d given him was a look of brief shock, then, to his surprise, had doubled down on her refusal.

He found that inconceivable.

He wasn’t a household name, it was true, but most people, in his experience, knew who he was. Knew the story of the company he’d started building when he was a teenager, already playing the stock market with his frugal earnings from a job in an Athens fast-food outlet.

He hadn’t gone to university. He’d found school dull and had left as soon as he could, which had been at fourteen. Numbers had been his delight, his music, and he’d created symphonies with them. He made money obey his every wish, doubling, tripling, moving from place to place, fluid as water. Sometimes he lost it, but that didn’t matter, because he could always make more and he did. Effortlessly.

People called him a genius, but for him that was merely the way he was. As long as he kept to his schedule. Time was money. Seconds were euros that he poured into something productive, because if he wasn’t productive, he was nothing. And he couldn’t be nothing. He’d been nothing once before, to the woman who’d called herself his mother and yet who’d never been any kind of mother to him. She’d taken him to church with her when he was eight, and then after the service she’d told him to sit still and be quiet and then she’d left. Without him.

He’d still been sitting there an hour later when the priest had found him. They’d searched for his mother for days, but she was long gone by then. That had been the beginning of his climb from the nothingness of being abandoned, and he would never allow anything like that to happen to him again.

Now this lovely little woman was sitting up in the hospital bed, staring at him with those dark, dark eyes, her delicate features set in stubborn lines, and she seemed to be hell-bent on wasting his time with her arguments. Yet all he could think about was not his wasted hours, minutes and seconds, but how beautiful she was. How she irritated him with her refusals and how mystified he was that he cared so much about them.

Possibly he was irritated because of the constant ache of physical lust that dragged at him whenever he looked at her, which had never happened to him before. Not without a meeting of minds first. He resented it. She was a complete stranger to him, he knew nothing of her mind and how it worked, and that was not the usual order of things for him. It further irritated him that he couldn’t understand why he felt that way, either.

A fascinating mind was of the utmost importance to him, and then physical attraction. The chemistry of bodies was nothing compared to the intrigue of how a woman thought. But he had no idea how Nell Underwood thought. What he wanted was her body.

Annoyed with himself and his physical feelings, he stared stonily back at her. He just couldn’t understand why she was protesting. She’d read his history; it was all there in black and white on the Internet. He wasn’t a serial killer or an axe murderer. She had nothing to fear from him, so why was she arguing? Yes, he was a stranger, but he was hardly some random passer-by.

He was Aristophanes Katsaros. One of the richest men in the world. Some would argue that rich men weren’t exactly pure as the driven snow and that maybe she was right to be apprehensive of him. But he’d never hurt a woman in his entire life and he wasn’t about to start. That wouldn’t be a productive use of his time anyway.

Tonight, his body had expected sex and that was still his plan—Angelina had some work to do and she hadn’t minded waiting—but he needed to make sure Miss Nell Underwood was taken care of. His doctor would keep her under observation for the requisite number of hours. It would not be a problem.

Her cheeks had flushed prettily and he found his gaze drawn yet again to the deliciously feminine lines of her body. There were no bra lines, no panty lines showing under the cheap, clinging black jersey. She wasn’t wearing a stitch beneath it, and he was inexplicably intrigued by that. Where had she been going wearing no underwear? Was she a sex worker? A high-end escort? Had she been going to meet a lover?

He didn’t understand why he wanted to know. He didn’t understand why her body fascinated him. Because it wasn’t as if he didn’t know what a woman looked like naked. He knew very well about breasts and hips and the soft, wet, hot place between a woman’s legs.

Yet it seemed to him as if he was intrigued bythiswoman andherbody, and he wasn’t sure why. All bodies were the same and they all worked the same, too, but it was the mind that was different. It was the mind that fascinated him.

‘No,’ she said, calm yet firm. ‘I don’t think so. Your doctor can come to me instead.’

Her voice was huskier than expected and it stroked over his skin in a velvet caress. He wanted to hear it again. He wanted to hear it moaning his name as he made her come, as he—

Aristophanes gritted his teeth, dragging his thoughts away from that particular track.

No wasn’t acceptable. He didn’t like. He didn’t like being unable to fathom why his body wanted her so very badly. And hereallydidn’t like that a part of him didn’t want to let her go. A part of him felt that she was his obligation now, his responsibility. Absurd to liken a woman to the kitten he’d once rescued, but still, that was how he felt. He’d witnessed her getting hurt and he’d looked after her until the ambulance came. She’d reached for his hand, had held it as if she hadn’t wanted to let him go and yet apparently now his doctor was preferable to him.

Logically it made sense, so why was he feeling the need to argue with her? His doctor would be there, his sense of obligation duly discharged. He didn’t need to be there himself, and besides, the longer he stayed, the more the seconds poured through his fingers, becoming minutes, turning to hours, time sliding away into nothing.

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