Forgiven but not Forgotten?. ABBY GREEN
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to hide her disgust and hatred, Siena had given the only answer she could. She’d nodded and felt sick. ‘Yes, he’s lying. I would never allow someone like him to touch me.’
Thinking of the unpalatable past made Siena feel trembly and light-headed. She didn’t want to contemplate the very uncomfortable fact that he still had such a profound effect on her.
Once again, though, she marvelled at how far removed he was from the man who had once presided over servers in a hotel. In all honesty she was surprised he’d recognised her at all from his lofty position. She knew how easy it was to see only the hand that served you, not the person. Siena recalled her father’s blistering anger when he’d berated her once for aiding a waiter who’d dropped a tray at one of his legendary parties. He’d hauled her into his offce and gripped her arm painfully.
‘Don’t you know who we are? You step over people like him. You do not stop to help them.’
Siena had bitten back the angry retort on her lips. Just like you stepped over your own illegitimate son in the street? Our own brother? That audacious comment alone would have merited her sister a severe beating. That was his preferred twisted form of torture—if Siena provoked him, Serena would be punished.
Siena saw the bus stop in the distance and breathed a sigh of relief. Tomorrow she would have forgotten all about bad memories and running into Andreas Xenakis. Her insides lurched, mocking her assertion. For one second earlier, when she’d first seen Andreas, she’d imagined she was dreaming.
She’d never forgotten what she had done to that man by falsely accusing him. More often than she cared to admit she remembered that night and how, with just a look and a touch, he’d made her lose any sense of rationality and sanity. On some level, when she’d read about his stellar success in the newspapers, she’d been relieved; to see him flourishing far better than she would have ever expected assuaged some tiny part of the guilt she felt.
Resolutely Siena pushed down her incendiary thoughts. Familiar nagging anxiety took their place. She wondered now, as she approached the bus stop, if the two jobs she had would be enough to help her sister. But she knew with a leaden feeling that nothing short of a miracle could do that.
Siena had just arrived under the shelter of the bus stop when she noticed a sleek silver sports car pulling up alongside where she stood. Even before the electric window lowered on the passenger side Siena’s heart-rate had increased.
The starkly handsome features of Andreas Xenakis looked out and Siena backed away instinctively. His presence was evidence that he wasn’t about to let her off so easily. He wanted to torture her and make the most out of her changed circumstances. In a second he’d jumped out of the car and was lightly holding her elbow.
‘Please.’ He smiled urbanely, as if stopping to pick up women at bus stops resplendent in a tuxedo was entirely normal for him. ‘Let me give you a lift.’
Siena was so tense she felt as if she might crack in two. Very aware of her ill-fitting thin denim jacket in the biting early spring breeze, and the fatigue that made her bones ache, she bit out, ‘I’m fine, thank you. The bus will be along shortly.’
Andreas shook his head. He had that same incredulous expression that he’d worn when she’d spoken to him before. ‘Are your co-workers aware you could probably have conversed with every foreign guest in that room in their own tongue?’
Hurt at this back-handed compliment, and his all too banal but accurate assessment of her misery Siena pulled her arm free. She acted instinctively, wanting to say something to prick his pride and hopefully push him away. ‘I said I’m fine, thank you very much. I’m sure you have better things to do than follow me around like some besotted puppy dog.’
His eyes flashed dangerously at that, and Siena hated herself for those words. They reminded her of the poison that had dropped from her lips that night in Paris. They were the kind of words Andreas would expect her to say. But they weren’t having the desired effect at all. She should have realised that he wasn’t like other men—she remembered the way he’d stood up to her father with such innate pride. One of the very few people who hadn’t cowered.
He merely looked even more dangerous now, and grabbed her arm again. ‘Let’s go, Signorina DePiero. The bus is coming and I’m blocking the lane.’
Siena looked past Andreas and saw the double-decker bus bearing down. A sharp blast of the horn made her flinch. She could see the others waiting at the bus stop shooting them dirty looks because their journey home was being held up.
Siena looked at Andreas and he said ominously, ‘Don’t test me, Siena. I’ll leave the car there if I have to.’
Another blast of the horn had someone saying with irritation, ‘Oh, just take the lift, will you? We want to get home.’
For a second Siena felt nothing but excoriating isolation. And then Andreas had led her to the car and was handing her into the low seat before shutting the door. He slid smoothly into the other side.
‘Do up your belt,’ he instructed curtly, before adding acidly, ‘Or are you used to having even that done for you?’
His words cut through the fog of shock clouding her brain and she fumbled to secure the belt with hands that were all fingers and thumbs.
She retaliated in a sharp voice. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
Andreas expertly negotiated the car into the stream of traffic. It was so smooth it felt as if they were gliding above the ground. It had been long months since Siena had been in such luxurious confines, and the soft leather seat moulded around her body, cupping it in a way that was almost sensual. Her hands curled into fists on her lap against the sensation and her jaw was taut.
She unclenched it. ‘Stop the car and let me out, please. I can make my own way home. I got in purely to stop you causing a scene.’
‘I’ve spent six months looking for you, Siena, so I’m not about to let you go that easily.’
Six months ago her father had disappeared, leaving his entire fortune in tatters, and leaving Siena and Serena to stand among the ashes and take the opprobrium that had come their way in their father’s cowardly absence. Siena looked at Andreas with horror on her face and something much more ambiguous in her belly. Tonight hadn’t been an awful coincidence?
Shakily she said, ‘You’ve been looking for me?’
His mouth tightened and he confirmed it. ‘Since the news of your father’s disappearance and the collapse of your fortune.’
He glanced at her and she held herself tightly, wanting to shiver at the thought of his determination to find her again. To punish her? Why else? a small voice crowed.
Softly, lethally, he said, ‘We have unfinished business, wouldn’t you agree?’
Panic constricted Siena’s throat. She wasn’t ready for a reckoning with this man. ‘No, I wouldn’t. Now, why don’t you just stop the car and let me out?’
Andreas ignored her entreaty and drawled easily, ‘Your address, Siena…or we’ll spend the night driving around London.’
Siena’s jaw clenched again. She saw the way his long-fingered hand rested on the steering wheel. For all of his nonchalance she suddenly had the impression that he was actually far more intractable than her father had ever been. He’d certainly proved that he had a ruthless nose when it came to business.
Siena had on more than one occasion closeted herself in her father’s study to follow Andreas’s progress online. She’d read about him shutting down ailing hotels with impunity, his refusing to comment on rumours that he didn’t care about putting hundreds out of work just to increase his own growing portfolio. In the same searches she’d seen acres of newsprint devoted to his love-life, which appeared to be hectic and peopled with only the most beautiful women in the world. Siena didn’t like to admit how she’d noticed that they were all lustrous brunettes or redheads. Evidently blondes weren’t his