Kate Hewitt - Kostas's Convenient Bride

Realization hit Andreas hard. And it was one he did not like. Kayla needed security he, Andreas Kostas, could not give her. She felt threatened by the loss of the company and his marriage happening at the same time. Both were necessary for Andreas’s final plan to prove to his father and the Georgas family that he did not need them in any shape or form.

Had never needed them. Would never need them.

The only way to give Kayla what she needed was to put off one or both of his stratagems and Andreas simply could not do that. He had worked too hard to make his plans a reality. Besides, he was finished with KJ Software. He’d been itching to move on to something bigger and better for the last year.

Kayla knew that, even if she was struggling with accepting it.

It had never occurred to him that she’d want to stay on. That the company itself had taken on a surrogate family role to her. That she considered it her stability factor.

“I wanted you to keep working with me,” he told her baldly.

The look of utter sadness and acceptance in her expressive gray eyes said it all. “You want to keep building bigger and better businesses.”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes, businesses fail.”

“Mine won’t.”

Her pretty lips tilted in a half smile. “You’re so confident.”

“You’ve called me arrogant a time or three in the past.”

“Well, you are,” she teased in the old way.

He shrugged.

“I’m not leaving the company with you.”

She meant it. She really wanted to stay with the company and had every intention of doing so.

“That doesn’t mean we can’t be friends.” Maybe they wouldn’t work together, but they still lived in the same building.

She drank her tea and stared at him for a lot longer than he thought it should take to answer that statement, but finally she set her cup of tea down and nodded. “I guess you’re right about that. Friendship isn’t about always getting what you want. It’s also about being there for the other person. And I suppose in your arrogant, pigheaded way, you need me.”

“Enough with the name-calling.”

“You broke up my date.”

“I was worried about you.”

“You could have been worried about me tomorrow.”

“Stop pretending like you were going to have sex with him.” The idea was an anathema.

“You don’t know what I was going to do. You think you know me, but let’s face it, Andreas, you thought I’d be okay with the bride pimp and I’m so not. You thought I’d be okay with selling the company and I still kind of want to shred your closet of suits over that one. You thought I’d want to leave KJ Software to start a new company and you couldn’t have been more wrong about that. I’m not sure you know me very well at all.”

He couldn’t argue a single one of those sentences.

And something about six years ago had gone down very differently than he’d thought too, or it wouldn’t have come up today. Andreas had the unpleasant sensation that she was right and that he did not know Kayla Jones nearly as well as he thought he did.

And if he didn’t figure her out, he was going to lose the one person he still considered family.

That was not going to happen. Andreas Kostas had lost all the important people in his life he was going to let go of.

Kayla Jones was never going to be one of them.

* * *

Andreas finished answering emails, ignoring yet another text from Genevieve. He’d had no idea she was so demanding when he hired her. She’d acted very accommodating and happy to have him as a client. Her tenacity was well-meaning no doubt, but he had other things on his mind at the moment. Her in-depth questionnaire and business-mogul makeover were going to have to wait.

Why did he need to change his clothes and haircut anyway? He didn’t have any trouble finding companionship dressing like a high-powered businessman. When he’d mentioned that to Genevieve, she’d replied he was looking for a wife, not a hookup.

He was still unconvinced.

He didn’t want a wife who expected some laid-back guy who was going to spend every evening and weekend playing happy families. That wasn’t Andreas.

Dismissing thoughts of his matchmaker, he replied to another text.

Satisfied with his morning’s work, he was considering ordering breakfast and waking Kayla when the second bedroom door in the suite slammed open. She appeared, no wakeup knock necessary, her curls tied up in one of the scarves she wore to bed to keep them tamed. Its bright color at odds with the dark visage of her face. Her glare shot around the sitting room until it landed on him with the weight of a fully locked-and-loaded missile.

Gray eyes narrowing even further, she stomped toward him. Her body moved in ways his couldn’t help taking an interest in, what with the way her peach satin sleep shorts and silky spaghetti-strap sleep top clung to her bouncing curves.

Damn it, he needed to remember that the passion they’d shared had been too consuming for good decisions.

She slammed her beloved smartphone down in front of him. “Fix it.”

The phone beeped, indicating a text.

“Fix what?” They’d long ago established she was the more technically savvy of the two of them.

“That!”

The phone beeped again.

“What?”

She shoved it in his face.

His eyes focused on the screen. The text was from Genevieve. Demanding Kayla get Andreas on the next plane back to Portland.

“You gave your bride pimp my phone number.”

“Yes.” It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

“Call her right now and tell her to stop using it.”

“Just ignore her texts.”

“That’s what you’ve been doing.” Damn, Kayla’s voice could register pissed-off woman when she wanted to, with a heavy dose of disapproval. “And her phone calls, I bet.”

“She’s not on this morning’s agenda.” And Genevieve needed to learn that Andreas dealt with things in his time, not someone else’s.

Kayla’s glare went nuclear. “Well, putting up with her harassment isn’t on my agenda at all. Call her off, Andreas. Right now.”

“You’re in a bad mood this morning.”

“I was woken out of a sound sleep by incessant calls and texts from someone I shouldn’t have to speak to at all.”

“I told you she wanted to talk to you.”

“Andreas, I’m not kidding.”

“You never sleep this late.” Kayla was an early riser, like him.

“I wanted to sleep in. That’s my prerogative. I’m on vacation.” She looked at him like he was the one who was acting entirely out of character and suddenly not making sense.

Andreas didn’t know what Kayla saw in his face, but whatever it was, she got that supremely annoyed, impatient “I’ve had it” look. He’d seen it very rarely, but when she got it, he knew things were about to go pear-shaped. He despised that look.

The one person in the world he actually minded being at odds with was Kayla Jones. “Listen, Kayla—”

She put up her hand, cutting him off. She didn’t say anything, just made a production of turning off her phone and dropping it onto the table in front of him. Then she went back into her bedroom and slammed the door.

Since the day before she’d left her phone in the suite and gone off exploring New York alone, that didn’t bode well. Andreas had been forced to resort to other means of tracking Kayla down. Means he preferred not to rely on today.

Not to mention, he did not like thinking of her being without a means of communication.

He picked up his own phone and dialed Genevieve’s number.

“Finally,” the woman exclaimed. “Andreas, you have to treat this endeavor with more respect than you have done so far.”