Tara Pammi - A Deal with Demakis

Leaning against the table, he stretched his long legs in front of him. Whatever material those trousers were made of, it hugged his muscular thighs. “I asked you to wait.”

Coloring, Lexi tugged her gaze up. What was she doing, blatantly staring at the man’s thighs? “I walked up nineteen floors for a few minutes of your time,” she finally said, feeling intensely awkward under his scrutiny. He just seemed so big and coordinated and thrumming with power that for the first time in her life, she wished she had been tall and graceful. A more nonsensical thought she had never had. “Tell me how Tyler is and I’ll be on my way.”

He pushed off from the table and she tried not to scuttle sideways like a frightened bird. Hands tucked into the pockets of his trousers, he towered over her, cramming his huge body into her personal space. His gaze swept over her, somehow invasive and dismissive at the same time. The urge to smooth out her hair, straighten her T-shirt, attacked again.

“Did you just roll out of bed, Ms. Nelson?”

Her mouth dropped open; she stared at him for several seconds. The man was a mannerless pig. “As a matter of fact, yes. I was sleeping after an all-nighter when the call came in. So please forgive me if my attire doesn’t match your million-dollar decor.” For some reason, he clearly disliked her. It made her crabby and unusually offensive. “FYI, you might have nothing better to do with your time than loll around with your girlfriend, but I have a job. Some of us actually have to work for a living.”

Amusement inched into his gaze. “You think I don’t work?”

“Then why the sneering attitude as if your time is more precious than mine? You obviously make more money per minute than I do, but mine pays for my food,” she said, shocked at how angry she was getting. Which was really strange. “Now, the sooner you answer my question, the sooner I’ll be out of your hair.”

He shifted closer, unblinking and Lexi’s heart pounded faster. A hint of woodsy cologne settled tantalizingly over her skin. She stood her ground, loath to betray how unsettling she found his proximity. “You’re here for your precious Tyler. No one’s forcing you. You can turn around and walk down the stairs the same way you came up.”

Lexi wanted to do exactly that, but she couldn’t. He had no idea how much it had cost her to come here to his office. “I had a phone call from someone who refused to identify himself that Tyler has been in a car accident along with your sister.” Maybe this was Nikos Demakis’s response to his worry over his sister? Maybe usually, he was a much more human and less-heartless alien? “How is he? Was your sister hurt, too? Are they okay?”

His brows locked together into a formidable frown, he stared down at her. “You’re asking after the woman who, for all intents and purposes, stole your boyfriend of—” he turned and picked up a file from the desk behind him in a casual movement and thumbed through it “—let me see, eleven years?”

There was no winning with the infuriating man. “I thought maybe there was a reason you were being a grouchy, arrogant prig—you know, like worry about your sister. But obviously you’re a natural ass...” Her words stuttered to a halt, the bold letters N-E-L-S-O-N written in red on the flap of the file ramming home what she had missed.

She moved quickly, a lifetime of ducking and evading bred into her muscles, and snatched the file out of his hands. She found little satisfaction that she had surprised him.

Cold dread in her chest, she thumbed through the file. There were pages and pages of information about her and Tyler, their whole lives laid out in cold bare facts, complete with mug shots of both of them.

Spent a year in juvenile detention center at sixteen for a household robbery.

Those words below her picture felt as if they could crawl out of the paper and burn her skin. Sweat trickled down between her shoulder blades even though the office was crisply cool. She dropped the file from her hands. “Those are supposed to be sealed records,” she said, struggling through the waves of shame. She marched right up to him and shoved him with her hands, the crushing unfairness of it all scouring through her. “What’s going on? Why would you collect information on me? I mean, we’ve never even laid eyes on each other until now.”

“Calm down, Ms. Nelson,” he said, his voice gratingly silky, as he held her wrists with a firm grip.

The sight of her small, pale hands in his big brown ones sent a kick to her brain. She jerked her hands back. How dare he toy with her?

“I’ll lose my job if that information gets out.” She clutched her stomach, fear running through her veins. “Do you know what it feels like to live on mere specks of food, Mr. Demakis? To feel as though your stomach will eat itself if you don’t have something to eat soon? To live on the streets, not knowing if you will have a safe place to sleep in? That’s where I will be again.” She looked around herself, at the thick cream carpet, at the million-dollar view out the window, at his designer Italian suit and laughed. The bitter sound pulsed around them. “Of course you don’t. I bet you don’t even know what hunger feels like.”

His mouth tightened, throwing the cruel, severe lines of his face into sharp focus. For an instant, his gaze glowed with a savage intensity as though there was something very primitive beneath the sophistication. “Don’t be so sure of that, Ms. Nelson. You’ll be surprised at how well I understand the urge to survive.” He bent and picked up the file. “I don’t care if you robbed one house or a whole street to feed yourself. Nothing in the file has any relevance to me except your relationship with Tyler.”

His smooth mask was back on as he handed the file to her. “Do what you want with it.”

* * *

Nikos smiled as the slip of a woman snatched the file from him. Clutching the file to her body, she moved to the high-end shredder, ripped the pages with barely controlled vehemence and pushed them in.

With his photographic memory, he didn’t need to refer to the file, though. She was twenty-three years old, grew up in foster care, had little to no education, worked as a bartender at Vibe, a high-end club in Manhattan and had had one boyfriend, the charming Tyler.

Based on the personal history between her and Tyler, and the codependent relationship between them, Nikos had expected someone meek, plain, biddable, easily led, someone with no self-esteem.

The woman standing in front of the shredder, while small and not really a beauty, didn’t fall into any of those categories. The tight set of her shoulders, the straight spine, even her stance, with her legs apart and hands on her hips, brought a smile to his face. The fact that she wasn’t exactly what he had been expecting—really, though, what kind of a woman would be concerned about her lover’s new girlfriend?—meant he would have to alter his strategy.

She turned around, dark satisfaction glittering in her gaze. The hum of the shredder died down leaving the air thick with tension.

He ran his thumb over his jaw. “Are you satisfied now?”

“No,” she said, her mouth set into a straight, uncompromising line. “Whatever you might have read in that file, it should tell you I’m not an idiot. It was one paper copy I shredded. You and your P.I. still have the soft copy.”

He raised a brow as she picked up the paperweight from his desk and tossed it into the air and then caught it. “Then what was the point in shredding it?”

Up went the paperweight again, her blue gaze, alight with defiance, never wavering from him. “A symbolic act, an outlet because as much as I wish it—” she nodded at the shredder behind her and caught the paperweight in a deft movement “—I can’t do that to you.”