Page 2 of Contractually Wed

One of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen, Rina Shetty was also demure, had acted as her father’s society hostess for years, and was the kind of woman who would mold herself into whatever Apollo needed her to be.

Apollo had played into Jay’s negotiation because Rina wasn’t a bad choice for a wife for a man like him. A man who didn’t believe in love and all that nonsense, a man who liked order and control in his every day, a man who would eventually need sons to carry on the legacy he was building. And really, who better than the grandchildren of the very man who had destroyed his family, to continue on the Galanis dynasty itself. There was a certain poetic justice in that.

Soon, Jay Shetty’s company would be nothing but a speck absorbed into Galanis Corp, forgotten even by its own disgruntled, unhappy employees who were more than eager to prove their mettle and loyalty to the bigger, meaner predator that was circling their CEO.

And then maybe this hunger in him would appease, Apollo thought, with little faith in his own maybes. Maybe then, after nearly two decades, he could take a moment to celebrate everything he had achieved.

He took off his jacket, undid the buttons on his shirt, poured himself a glass of red wine and walked to his favorite lounger—the only piece of furniture he had restored and brought here from his home in Athens—to enjoy one of his two favorite views in the entire world.

Only to find it already occupied by a woman in a maid’s uniform.

An empty white wine bottle sat on the floor next to the lounger, along with a tray full of empty bowls and forks, all neatly stacked.

He had never invited even his mother or sisters to visit this particular project of his, and to find a member of staff not only breaking her professional code but invading his privacy, was untenable. He understood exhaustion and hard work but still...he paid exorbitantly well for his privacy.

Her white cap was on the floor, and the woman’s gold-threaded dark brown hair fell in thick, lustrous waves, framing her familiarly angular face. He moved closer and turned on the Tiffany lamp, and let out a curse. Recognition came instantly and following it,fury.

Of course this was no maid transgressing his private space. This was a woman he had barely tolerated and he had known that the dislike was completely mutual.

In fact, in all of his thirty-nine years of life, Apollo had never met a woman, or even another person, who rubbed him the wrong way just by existing. Her mere presence had been like rubbing salt into a sunburn.

As if to provoke his ire even further, the sleeping woman let out a loud snore followed by an awful belch. Apollo had had enough. Before he could think better of the juvenile impulse, he was upending the glass of red in his hand over her head. At least it wasn’t cold, he told himself.

She came awake, sputtering and squealing, unfolding like a mangy dog, and then mumbled something incoherent.

He grinned, wondering when he’d had so much fun in recent memory. Not even as a poor undergrad student at Harvard, or later when he’d made his first million, or even when he’d won environmental awards for his designs.

Finally, she stopped mumbling, rubbed her eyes and smeared the wine all over her face. Belatedly, Apollo realized he had just ruined his favorite lounger and the pristine carpet.Christos, not even a minute near her and she’d reduced him to a playground bully.

A grin appeared on her face even as she threaded her fingers through dark, wispy bangs that almost covered her eyes. “Just realized you ruined your own chair, did you?” she said, looking up at him, and running the tip of her tongue against that wide gap between her front teeth.

It was the first thing he had noticed about her—the imperfection of her crooked smile next to the pearly, near-perfect smile of her sister.

The differences between this woman’s tall, boyish figure, with her thick glasses and thicker, untamed hair and her gap-toothed smile and her purple lipstick and her entire forearm covered in colorful tattoos and her skinny jeans and combat boots, against Rina’s full, curvy figure, her polish and perfectly pitched tone when she spoke, her cream-colored jumpsuit, her hair neatly cut into blunt shoulder-length style, and a barely-there pink lip gloss on her lips, and the way she carried herself had nearly...had discombobulated him. Bringing into sharp contrast what he definitely didn’t want in his life.

At the first meeting with Jay Shetty, his useless bag of a son, Rina and this...wild creature who sat next to her sister and asked impertinent questions, even as her father sent her dirty, shushing looks, Apollo had been unable to look away from her.

It was like watching a car crash, he had thought then. But two more meetings with her—where she was supposed to keep her sister company and where she had asked him too many intrusive, invading questions about what their married life was going to look like—Apollo had amended his first impression of her, begrudging it every inch of the way.

She was like a wild sunset, all splashy colors and a warm blaze.

And now when she grinned at him, not even a little effaced by the fact that he had caught her inside his private sanctuary, Apollo admitted what about her provoked him so much.

There was a rough, untamable kind of beauty to her, as if she had been born to be unleashed in the world to create a maximum kind of chaos. And he loathed chaos anywhere near him with a visceral reaction.

Still, even as he acknowledged that she equally attracted and repulsed him, he began to wonder why Jay had never offered her up as the proverbial lamb being led to slaughter. Why it had been his eldest he’d pushed toward Apollo.

“You have two minutes to explain why you’re here, Ms. Shetty. Or it will be the jail for you. Not a big surprise that you will blend in very well with your...” he ran a hand over her form “...colorful persona.”

Standing up, paying no heed to the fact that he was standing close and threatening her with prison, she grabbed a napkin from the tray and started dabbing at her uniform. Which only arrested his attention. The damned dress was short on her, barely covering her upper thighs. When she wrung the hem to get out an extra two drops of wine, it revealed the tops of her lacy tights hugging her lean, muscled thighs.

His gaze went up, noting the tight tuck of her waist and the two buttons that had come undone at her chest, revealing small breasts and gleaming golden-brown skin. The tail end of another tattoo snuck up under the collar of the dress, playing peekaboo with him.

Apollo looked away too late. Lust coursed through him like a sudden bolt of adrenaline shot into his very veins. He let out a shocked curse, something he never did in company, for it revealed too much of his state of mind. No, not this woman.Christos.

Lusting after his fiancée’s sister...smacked too much of that wildness he disliked about this woman. Of being out of control.

Standing too close, she ran her tongue over her teeth. “You have to tell me which vintage that is,” she said, making a rude, smacking noise. “As a rule, I don’t drink reds since they give me horrible headaches. For that one, I might risk it. In fact, maybe you can just gift it to me, seeing that we’re going to become close soon.”

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