Greek Mavericks: His Christmas Conquest

Chapter Five

WHEN Theo thought about Elena, he thought about everything that was delicate and feminine. The minute he had laid eyes on her, he had been drawn by her soft girlish beauty and her quiet charm. For the first time in his life his motives had been free of lust and the driving urge to get a woman into bed. Yes, he had been physically attracted to her, but bigger and more overwhelming than that attraction had been his urge to take care of her.

Elena, coming at a time in his life when he had been subconsciously thinking of settling down, had fulfilled every fantasy he had ever nurtured about the perfect woman.

She had been almost excessively pretty—blonde hair, blue eyes and none of the raunchy glamour associated with the mixture. Raunchy had always been fine for Theo when it came to women he slept with, but when it came to a prospective wife there was no way that that look was going to do. Despite his savvy, Theo had a very defined traditionalist streak. What was acceptable to wine and dine and eventually disengage from, was not acceptable when it came to sharing his life.

Elena, with her angelic good looks, had been eminently suitable wife material.

And she’d been deferential without being characterless. Of course, he had never been attracted to the argumentative type, but Elena had been deferential in the most charmingly attractive way. He could remember sitting across from her at the dinner table in one of those wildly expensive restaurants which he usually avoided but which seemed appropriate given his desire to impress her, could remember the way she had gazed at him with a soft smile on her lips, the way she had listened with her head cocked to one side and her eyes shining with appreciation. He had known from the very beginning that she would never criticise. She would be the soothing balm and, for Theo, that was a compelling aspect of her personality.

Throw into the mixture the fact that he would have been making a desirable match as far as both families were concerned, and the pedestal on which he had placed her became unassailable.

Theo wondered whether he would have continued mourning her disappearance from his life forever if he had remained in London. He knew now and had known for a while that he had allowed, indeed encouraged, his emotions to go into deep freeze. To start with, it had been a protective mechanism but then he had become accustomed to the freeze. In the end, it had felt good not to feel.

Lying in bed now, with a half-read business manual next to him and the prospect of a morning without the use of his computer, Theo contemplated the vagary of fate that had brought him to this pass.

He folded his hands behind his head and stared up at the ceiling.

What was it about this woman that had managed to get under his skin?

She was disagreeable and prickly a lot of the time. He doubted that she had a sweetly submissive bone in her body. Theo, used to viewing all problems in life as soluble, could not for the hell of him work out why he was bothering with a woman who rattled him when, without too much effort, he could easily find one who didn’t. Considering things logically, why would he voluntarily put himself into a situation that had the potential to give him a headache? Women, he firmly believed, should never give men headaches. They were the gentle sex and their duty was to calm.

He muttered an oath under his breath, snatched up the manual and attempted to get his brain round the concepts of global business protocol.

Sophie Scott was not calming. She had also rejected his advances. Theo scowled and snapped shut the business book. The laptop computer was right there, next to him, ready and waiting for him to bring it to life, but the thought of reading through yet more urgent emails bored him.

He switched off the light and let his thoughts roam freely over selected snippets of the conversation they had had earlier, dwelling on the way she had firmly but politely warned him off making a pass at her. Obviously she had never been told that to warn a man off something was to wave a red flag under his nose. Or at least that was the way it worked with Theo.

What was the point of a challenge if you didn’t rise to it? Theo always rose to a challenge. He savoured the prospect of having her, of overwhelming her prudish concerns, of releasing the fire he knew was there inside her.

He woke up the following morning with an uncomfortable sensation of coldness and realised that there was no heating in the cottage. The fact that he slept without pyjamas didn’t help matters. His mind was racing, though, and the cold was almost a welcome spur to the well-spring of energy he could feel inside him. He had a very quick and very cold shower and by nine-thirty he was on the way to her office.

Sitting on the floor and wrapped up in various layers of thick clothing because there was no way that Sophie was going to sit around in her coat, she was barely aware of Theo pushing open the office door.

In fact, she was not at all aware of his presence until he was looming over her; then his shadow alerted her to the fact that she was no longer alone.

With a little yelp of shock, she stumbled to her feet, sending various sheets of paper shooting off her lap on to the ground.

‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded, dusting herself down and glaring at him.

‘Where’s the rest of your motley crew?’

‘You haven’t answered my question.’ She had pretty much given up trying to remember that she was his landlady and obliged to display good manners, even though she might not feel like it. She had been sitting on that wretched floor for the best part of an hour, simply because it had seemed easier to get down to the level of the boxes rather than continually drag them up to her level. Her jeans were dusty, her hands were dusty, her hair was probably dusty too and her clothes were a shambolic assortment of things that should really have been binned years ago but had somehow managed to slip through the net. She felt a mess and she looked a mess and there he stood, outrageously sexy in a pair of cords, a thick cream sweater and a battered leather jacket that screamed casual style.

‘I thought I would drop in, maybe give you a hand with some of this paperwork, seeing that I can’t do any work myself because of the power cut.’

‘You can still write without a computer,’ Sophie felt constrained to point out. She hoped that it wasn’t part of his game plan to spend the morning under her feet just because his computer was out of action for a few hours. ‘I mean, aren’t you writers supposed to be inventive?’

‘I think you’re thinking of people like your father.’

‘I said inventive not inventors.’

‘Show me what you’ve done already and how your filing system works.’

‘You don’t have to sit and help me with this.’

‘In other words, you’d rather I didn’t.’

‘I’d work a lot faster if I don’t have to stop to explain stuff to you.’

‘I’m a very quick learner. You would be surprised.’

‘You should use this opportunity to see something around here,’ Sophie suggested desperately. ‘I mean, if you really think that you can’t write a chapter or two of your book without a computer.’

‘Why don’t you just accept my offer of help in the manner in which it was intended?’ Theo said with mounting impatience. ‘Especially as there is no one around at the moment to help out anyway. Where is the gang of three? Christmas shopping?’

Sophie guiltily thought of Robert. True to his word, he had not shown up but she had spent the morning half expecting him to telephone her and was relieved that he hadn’t. His proposal, coming out of nowhere as it had, had shaken her to the core. He had been a friend and a helping hand to her when she had needed one but was that any reason to consider developing a relationship with him? On the other hand, she wasn’t getting any younger and they did get along, at least on a superficial level, which was the only level they had previously enjoyed.

What was the harm in just seeing whether there was something there that could be developed further?

‘Don’t tell me the boyfriend has deserted the sinking ship?’ Theo slid open the drawer of one of the metal filing cabinets and began looking at the files.

‘You need a computer,’ he said, as the level of paperwork became ever clearer. ‘It’s the only way you’ll be able to keep track of everything here and, aside from that, it’s a bloody fire hazard.’

‘I’ve got a computer,’ Sophie told him airily.

‘Where is it?’

‘Upstairs. I just haven’t got around to…logging some of this stuff in…It takes time, you know…All that computer work, et cetera…I mean, it’s all right for you. You just have to sit there telling stories and typing away.’

It occurred to Theo that the whole figment of his occupation was becoming a burden, but he quickly reminded himself how much more satisfying it was to be incognito, at least for a short while. Hadn’t he lived his entire life with the weight of expectation on his shoulders? Without any siblings to share the responsibility, he had had little option but to fulfil his duty as son and heir to a shipping empire. Just as well he had found it to his liking. All the same, it was good to be suddenly in this make-believe role, with only himself to please and absolutely no one else.

‘I know a thing or two about computers. I could have a look at what you’ve done so far, see whether it mightn’t require some updating.’

‘You know about computers? How do you know about computers? No! Let me guess! The way you seem to know about everything. Information just wafts into you, through osmosis! Lucky you.’

‘You haven’t logged any of this on to a computer, have you?’

Sophie wanted to ask him how he had the nerve to waltz into her office and begin making assumptions about her approach to the workload. Did he think that it was a walk in the park trying to come to terms with your father’s death and sort out the chaos he had left behind without you ever suspecting a thing at the same time? However, there he was, sitting there and looking as though he knew what he was doing, which, of course, he didn’t, and she just wanted to dump the lot on to him and ask him to deal with it while she went to her bed and slept for a few weeks till it was all cleared up.

‘I’ve been meaning to…’ Sophie admitted sulkily and Theo tut-tutted under his breath.

‘Well, we can’t do anything at the moment but, as soon as the power is back, I suggest we install a simple program so that we can collate all the information scattered in these boxes.’

‘We…?’ Sophie felt obliged to reveal the extent of her ignorance of all things technical. ‘Computers and I have never had much of a friendship.’

‘That being the case, I’m surprised what’s-his-name couldn’t have helped you out there.’

‘I think we were just so busy trying to get the stuff together that…that…’

‘That it never occurred to you that there might be a far quicker way to do it…?’ He grabbed a stack of files and strolled over to her desk, where he proceeded to drag the nearest chair to hers so that he could position himself next to her. ‘Okay. Look at these.’ He pointed to some symbols and picked out various key words, which meant frankly nothing to Sophie’s untrained eyes. ‘We could install a program that would automatically collate information that belongs under the same banner. So, for example, experiments based on certain solutions, where your father was in contact with the same person at roughly the same time, could automatically reach the same file at the click of a button.’

‘You could do that?’ Sophie asked, seriously impressed. She desperately wished that she had paid a bit more attention in IT at school. ‘How?’ she demanded. ‘Did you do a computer course at college?’

Computer course? College?

‘I dabbled in it at university,’ Theo conceded.

‘Oh, right.’

‘Surprised?’ He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his thighs.

‘Oh, no. Not at all. Well, not that you went to university…I’m just surprised that you took an interest in something like computing. Was it part of your creative writing course?’

‘Whoever said anything about creative writing?’ That little white lie by Gloria, delivered for all the right reasons, to protect him because as a high profile name in business he might have attracted unwanted attention, was now beginning to haunt Theo. He refused to enlarge upon it by fabricating a mystery past.

Sophie frowned. ‘Well, what did you do at university?’ she asked.

‘Economics and law.’

‘You’re kidding, right?’

‘Why should I be kidding?’ Theo asked dryly.

‘Because…’ Sophie spluttered, predicting that this would lead right back to his conviction that she had stereotyped him. ‘So…yes, I can see that you might be interested in computers if you liked law and economics…’