THE HONEYMOON SUITE at the legendary Stanmore Hotel in London’s Mayfair was quite possibly the most beautiful room Effie Price had ever seen. It was certainly one of the most expensive, although not as expensive as the Royal Suite upstairs, where one night alone would cost more than half her annual salary.
As a maid.
She glanced down at her neat black uniform dress and white apron. And right now, she was being paid to clean the room, not gawp at it.
But it was hard not to just stand and admire the cream-coloured living room. It was big enough to land a small plane in, and as well as the glittering chandeliers and bespoke handcrafted furniture the suite was a technophile’s dream, with remote-controlled everything.
Was it worth it?
Running her hand across the marble swags on the feature fireplace, she sighed. It was a rhetorical question. Aside from not having the money, she was twenty-two years old and had never had a boyfriend. This might be the closest she was ever going to get to a honeymoon suite.
‘There you are. I’ve been looking for you—’
Picking up a pile of used towels, Effie glanced over her shoulder as Janine and Emily, her friends and fellow chambermaids, put their heads round the door. Actually, according to her job description, they were ‘accommodation assistants’, but nobody except management ever referred to any of them as anything but maids.
Reaching out, Janine grabbed the pile of towels and dumped them firmly in the laundry basket. ‘Shoo!’ She pointed at the door. ‘We can finish up.’
Effie shook her head. ‘It’s okay. I’m nearly done.’
Mentally she ticked off her to-do list.
In the bedroom, the Icelandic down duvet sat plumply on the Christian Liaigre four-poster bed, with the pillowcase folds facing away from the door so the guests didn’t see them when they walked in. All the woodwork was buffed, the mini bar and desk were both restocked, the bath and sink had been cleaned, toiletries replenished, towels and robes replaced, mirrors polished—
‘I just need to vacuum.’
‘I can do that.’ Eyes narrowing, Emily jerked the handle of the vacuum out of reach. ‘Come on, Effie. We’ve got this. You have somewhere to be, remember? This is the big day.’
Effie felt her stomach flip over. The big day.
It sounded like one of those essay-writing prompts you got at school. She breathed out unsteadily. She had loved making up stories in her head, but her dyslexia had made writing them down so hard. Often, she’d chosen to use words she could spell rather than embarrass herself.
Only this big day was not in her head. It was happening in just over an hour.
A wave of part panic, part excitement crested inside her. Ever since she was a little girl, she had dreamed about owning her own perfumery business. Her mother, Sam, had worked from home as a beautician, and every day women would arrive to have a facial or their make-up done. To Effie, watching the lines around their eyes soften, it had seemed to her almost as if her mother was weaving a spell.
And, for her, making perfume had that same transformative magic. Not just the process of turning the raw ingredients into a unique scent, but the alchemy that scent performed on the person wearing it. The people smelling it. Perfume could change your mood...make you feel happy or sexy or strong.
But she didn’t just want to change the lives of strangers. She wanted to get her mother out of a situation where she had to constantly worry about money.
Today, finally, she would be able to make that happen.
She felt her skin prickle with nerves and excitement. She still couldn’t quite believe it, but if this meeting went well, and the bank agreed to the loan, the money would be in her account in forty-eight hours. And then her life would change too. Finally, she would stop living in a minor key.
That was her dream—her promise to herself.
And if she kept that promise then all of this—emptying bins, picking up other people’s dirty laundry—would be over. She looked over at her friends, her throat tightening. There were some plus points to her job, though.
Two minutes later she was making her way along the corridor.
Her glasses were hurting a little, and she had just slipped them off and was rubbing the place on her face where they had made a small indentation when a man stepped out of the lift, a woman tottering beside him, clutching his arm as if it were a lifebelt. Her footsteps faltered. The guests in this part of the hotel were either wealthy, famous, or wealthy and famous, but either way eye contact and conversation were discouraged and, lowering her gaze, she edged closer to the wall as she walked.
‘This doesn’t look right.’
The man’s voice made her head jerk up. More than that: it made goosebumps break out on her arms.
She didn’t usually notice voices, mainly because she experienced the world through other senses—how things smelled and tasted. But this man’s voice was impossible to ignore. It was rich and deep, with a teasing, shifting accent.
If it was a scent, she thought, it would be a mix of lavender and sun-warmed tobacco, with just a hint of tonka bean.
Make that burnt caramel, she thought, as her eyes fluttered upwards to his face and took in thick, dark hair that gleamed like polished jet beneath the recessed downlights. Sculpted bones beneath smooth gold skin. A dangerous, curving mouth and blue eyes—the bluest eyes she had ever seen. Blue eyes she wanted to high-dive into.
Even though in reality she couldn’t actually swim.
He was the most astonishingly, conspicuously beautiful man she had ever seen.
Her throat felt dry and tight, and suddenly it was difficult to catch her breath. She reached out, touching the wall to steady herself. It was that or fall over.
The man was looking down at the woman beside him, and for that she couldn’t blame him. Whoever she was, she was his equal in beauty. All long limbs and a mane of glossy blonde hair. Like the horses her father used to watch on the television, walking around the paddock before the race started.
The memory pounded through her like their thundering hooves and suddenly she was shaking inside. She didn’t want to think about her father. Thinking about him would just make her feel crushed and powerless, and right now she needed to be strong. Or at least to appear strong.
Only that was hard to do if, like her, you were small and ordinary. And forgettable.
‘This is the wrong floor.’
The man stepped backwards, pulling the woman into the lift with him. Turning to hit the button, his eyes met Effie’s and she blinked as his blue gaze slammed into hers with the force of a wave.
She felt her feet slide sideways. Around her the walls shuddered and fell and everything she knew or thought she knew was swept away. She was standing in a place she didn’t recognise, her body quivering with a wild, dizzying, nameless yearning for—
The lift doors closed.
For what?
Slipping her glasses back on, she stared at her reflection in the polished steel doors, panic and confusion banging inside her. She had no idea how to answer that question. How could she? She had nothing to compare the feeling to.
Not that she minded being a virgin. In fact, when her friends wept over their latest break-up she felt relieved. Her parents’ unhappy, lopsided marriage had made her nervous about trusting in big things like love and devotion. As for sex—she simply hadn’t met the right person.
Or even the wrong one.
It wasn’t just that she was quiet and reserved. Being her mother’s carer had meant there was little opportunity for a normal teenage social life. Sex, intimacy and relationships had bypassed her completely, so that aside from a few clumsy kisses on New Year’s Eve she had never touched a man or been touched. And this man—this stranger—hadn’t touched her, only his gaze had felt like a touch. It had felt real, intimate.
Shaking her head, Effie backed away from the lift and hurried along the corridor.
It made no sense. She was making no sense. Obviously she was nervous about the meeting. That was why her head was spinning. And why her body felt taut and jittery.
On the ground floor, she checked her watch. She had left plenty of time to get changed, but as usual when she walked through the main part of the hotel in her uniform several people stopped her to ask for directions to the restaurant or the lift and it took another twenty minutes before she finally got downstairs.
She needed to get a move on. Sidestepping the clusters of guests, she headed towards one of the side entrances, undoing her apron as she walked and pulling her hair out of its bun into a ponytail.
It was too late to get changed now, although it didn’t really matter. The bank knew what she did and she wasn’t ashamed of her job. But there were still some people who couldn’t see past the uniform, and she didn’t want to be defined by any prejudice that might provoke.
Her pulse twitched.
What would be wonderful would be to look like the woman from the lift. Smooth and glossily sophisticated. Instead, she was thin, with boring brown hair and boring brown eyes beneath boring brown-rimmed glasses.
But maybe if she’d been smooth and sophisticated, she would have been too enchanted by her own appearance to think about making perfume. And she loved making perfume. For her, scent was so much more than just a finishing touch to an outfit. It was a ticket to a life far beyond the four walls of her tiny bedsit.
She felt a rush of excitement as exhilarating and potent as any of the perfumes she created, and a faint smile pulled at her mouth as she stepped into the bright spring morning. She should definitely add that into her proposal. Maybe she should just put a note on her phone—
Her phone!
She stumbled forward, her foot catching on the thought as if it was a crack in the pavement and, yanking open her bag, fumbled inside. But her phone wasn’t there. It was sitting in her locker. Without it she would never be able to find her way to the bank. She had no sense of direction, and it was a waste of time asking people for help in London. They almost always turned out to be tourists.
She was just going to have to go back and get it.
Spinning round, she began swiftly retracing her steps, her skin prickling with anxiety.
It would be all right, she told herself. It was only two stops on the underground plus a short walk, and she still had twenty minutes until her appointment.
She hurried down the street to the side entrance of the hotel, jumping out of her skin as a huge black SUV glided past her noiselessly and slid to a stop beside the kerb. It would be okay. All she had to do was go to her locker—
The door to the hotel swung open and a man erupted into the daylight, flanked by two heavily built men in black suits. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of sleek sunglasses, his attention fixed on the phone in his hand. But she didn’t need to see them to know they were blue.
It was the man from the lift, and he was heading straight for her.
For a few half-seconds she hesitated, one foot hovering above the step, her brain telling her to move, her body frozen. Finally, she made a last-minute attempt to sidestep him, but it was too late. She had a fleeting impression of a broad, masculine chest in a blue shirt, topped by a dark-stubbled scowl, and then her bag tumbled from her shoulder and she let out a gasp as her body collided with a solid wall of muscle.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’ she apologised automatically—guests were always right. But her words were cut off as the man from the lift reached out and caught her elbow to steady them both. His grip didn’t hurt, but his beauty did. Her heartbeat stumbled. Up close, his face was arresting, extraordinary. But it wasn’t just his face making her head feel light.
Beneath that impeccable dark suit there was a barely concealed animal vitality, a power and a ferocity that filled her with a prickling kind of panic, so that she was suddenly and acutely conscious of the rise and fall of her breath beneath her too-tight skin.
‘You wouldn’t need to be sorry if you’d been looking where you’re going,’ he said curtly, staring down at her in a way that made her body feel taut and loose at the same time. He took a step closer and tapped the lens of her glasses. ‘Maybe these need replacing.’
Effie stared up at him, her cheeks colouring—not just at the injustice of his remark but at the intimacy of his action.
She slipped her arm free. ‘Actually, you walked into me, Mr...’ She hesitated, waiting for him to provide his name.
‘Kane,’ he said finally. ‘Achileas Kane.’
The name hovered between them like one of the glittering dragonflies she sometimes saw by the Serpentine when she went to Hyde Park after work. She shivered inside. Achileas...from Achilles, the greatest warrior of Ancient Greece, legendary hero of Troy. Formidable. Ruthless. Remorseless.
And the current occupant of the Stanmore Hotel’s Royal Suite.
‘And you are...?’
His voice was soft, but there was a hard undercurrent in it that made her shake inside.
‘Effie Price.’ Feeling the shimmering, dismissive never-heard-of-you sweep of his blue gaze, she said quickly, ‘And, like I was saying, you walked into me, Mr Kane. So maybe I’m not the only one who needs glasses.’
She felt her breath catch, and something stirred inside her as his pupils flared like twin lighthouse beams across a darkening sea. Behind her the noise from the main road seemed to fade and she was aware of nothing beyond the beating of her heart.
Skin prickling, needing to escape from his penetrating blue gaze, she reached down to pick up her bag. But he beat her to it, and as they straightened up he held it just out of her grasp. Stray beams of sunlight added tiger stripes to the mitred planes of his mesmerising face.
‘Is that right?’ he said smoothly.
She felt a rush of irritation. The sun might seek him out, burnishing him with celestial golden light like a mythical hero, but nothing could gild his arrogance.
‘Yes, it is. Oh, and while we’re on the subject I’m taking back my apology,’ she added, when she could breathe again. Just because he looked like a Greek god, didn’t mean he could act like one. Throwing down thunderbolts with his eyes and looming over her in his dark suit so that he took over the entire world—or at least the bit she was standing in.
‘Excuse me?’
Now he was looking at her as if seeing her for the first time.
Probably he was. She had spent most of her life being ignored and side-lined—why should this moment be any different? Or perhaps he was just stunned that anyone, particularly someone like her, should question his world view.
‘Taking it back?’ His voice had dropped another notch, but it was his mouth that caught her attention, curling up at the corner into a sensual question mark that seemed to tug her upwards like a fish on a hook.
Suddenly, instead of feeling side-lined, she felt sideswiped by the fierce intensity of his focus, but she just about managed to hold his gaze. ‘I’m not sorry,’ she said shakily. ‘How can I be sorry for something I didn’t do? I was just being polite,’ she said quickly, answering her own question as his eyes narrowed on her face. ‘In fact, you should be apologising to me.’
Seriously?
Achileas Kane gazed down at the woman tapping one small foot in front of him, his fury vying with wordless disbelief.
To say that he was in a bad mood would be something of an understatement. The day had started on a wrong note when they had finally left the party at Nico’s house this morning.
They. His jaw tightened. He hadn’t arrived with Tamara, and he certainly hadn’t been planning on leaving with her. Their nine-week relationship had been a purely physical and mutually satisfying affair that he had brought to a close a good six months ago.
But for some reason last night Tamara had decided that, far from being over, their relationship needed rekindling, and on a more serious footing. She’d got horribly drunk and then been horribly sick. Afterwards she’d refused to let go of his arm, clinging on to him as tenaciously as the ivy on Nico’s Georgian mansion, so that in the end it had been easier just to bring her back to his hotel room and let her sleep it off.
Only when he’d told her he was leaving she’d gone nuclear, screaming abuse not just in English but Russian too, and threatening him with all manner of violent and painful acts of retribution.
And when that had failed to change his mind, she’d told him she was going to call her father.
Oleg Ivanov was a Russian oligarch. Immensely wealthy in his own right, he had recently married off one daughter to a tech billionaire and was now actively looking for suitable grooms for her two younger sisters.
Achileas’s spine tensed. And he was going to have to keep on looking. Matrimony was not on his agenda and, given that one in two marriages ended in divorce, he wasn’t exactly sure why it was on anyone else’s.
You could make countless vows in front of an endless stream of witnesses and it wouldn’t change the facts. Fidelity was a social construct, not a biological imperative, and as the unwanted, unacknowledged bastard son of shipping tycoon Andreas Alexios he was living proof of that.
A familiar ache pushed against his ribs. Sometimes it felt like a hollowed-out space inside his chest—an agonisingly silent, still vacuum that nothing could ever quite fill. Other times it throbbed like a bruise. But it was always there, and he’d learned to live with that sense of being incomplete, of being on the outside looking in, surplus to requirements.
Only now he had a chance to change that.
Despite his matrimonial lapse, Andreas was a traditional Greek man. A patriarch from one of Greece’s oldest shipping families. He was also ill and, faced with his own mortality, was looking at his legacy.
A legacy that didn’t include a legitimate male heir with his bloodline.
Which was why he was now ready to welcome his illegitimate son into the Alexios clan.
After thirty-two years, four months and ten days, Andreas had decided he wanted his only son in whatever was left of his life.
The thought rang a single jarring note in his head. As a child he had always known that Richard Kane wasn’t his father, and he had fantasised endlessly about meeting the man who was. Of course, when it had happened, nothing had gone as he’d imagined. It had been like meeting a stranger. A cool-eyed, patrician stranger.
Only now that same stranger was promising him legitimacy and acceptance.
On one condition.
He wanted his only son to settle down and marry. And, although it had been more hinted at than formally discussed, to produce the heirs that would ensure the patrilineal continuation of the house of Alexios.
Achileas felt his breathing stall. If only it was that easy.
He thought back to Tamara’s histrionics.
Maybe it could be. She was wealthy, beautiful, and good in bed. Plus, she wanted things to get more serious. Well, it didn’t get more serious than marriage. If he asked her to be his wife, he knew she would say yes in a heartbeat.
But the truth was he didn’t want to marry Tamara. As for having children... That wasn’t an option. How could a man who had never known his own father possibly know how to be a father himself?
Either way, he was sick and tired of relationships in general, and more specifically relationships with women who thought they could get their own way by yelling and crying and stamping their feet.
His eyes dropped to the woman looking up at him now. Not that this one was yelling or crying.
But apparently Effie Price was expecting him to apologise.
Aware of his bodyguards’ carefully averted gazes, he felt a pulse of anger beat across his skin as he stared down at her.
Just who did she think she was talking to? More importantly, who was she to talk to him in this way?
I mean, look at her, he thought dismissively, his gaze skimming her flat shoes and cheap bag. And as for that dress... It looks like something favoured by early nineteenth-century missionaries.
If she hadn’t walked into him, he would have walked straight past her. His eyes drifted over her small oval face. And yet she seemed familiar for some reason...
The frustration of the last few hours reverberated inside him and he felt something snap. He was tired and hungry and in a hurry. The last thing he needed right now was to be lectured by Little Miss Nobody.
‘That’s not going to happen,’ he said softly.
She blinked owlishly behind the thick lenses of her glasses and there was a moment of silence. Then she lifted her chin, and he felt a sudden, wholly unexpected stirring of lust as his gaze slid down the soft curve of her throat.
‘Then you and I have nothing more to say to one another,’ she said primly. ‘So, if you could just give me back my bag, I have somewhere to be.’
Achileas gritted his teeth. She was dismissing him.
He stared down at her, too stunned to speak, his pulse juddering like a needle across a record. Nothing more to say? No, that wasn’t how this worked. He always had the last word.
‘Excuse me, sir?’
It was Crawford, the head of his security detail.
‘What is it?’ he snarled, without turning.
‘We have a situation, Mr Kane. Apparently, Ms Ivanov has called her brother and he’s heading this way.’
Achileas swore under his breath.
Of course he was.
And, knowing Roman as he did, no doubt he would make a monumental scene.
His mouth thinned. No way: not now and not here.
Normally it wouldn’t bother him in the slightest. He thrived on conflict and confrontation. It was one of the reasons he’d gone from business school graduate to hedge fund billionaire before the age of thirty.
But Andreas Alexios was pathologically averse to scandal. That was, after all, why he, his bastard son, had grown up with another man’s name.
He felt the ache in his chest spread like an oil spill. It had all been sorted out long before he was born. Pretty much about the time his mother had found out she was pregnant a team of lawyers had arrived with an NDA, and in return for her silence she had received a generous financial settlement.
Of course, he knew now that that amount could have been multiplied tenfold and still not made a dent in the Alexios fortune. But what stung more than that was the fact that his father had sat down with his lawyers and carefully and precisely calculated the cost of abandoning his child. Just enough to ensure his son would always be comfortably provided for, to make him socially acceptable. But not enough so that he could stand on an equal footing with his half-sisters and cousins.
Or course that had changed. He had changed it through hard work and determination. And pushing his ambition, obsessively driving that hunger to succeed, to win, had been an unspoken need to best Andreas so that he no longer needed his father’s wealth.
Nor did he want a relationship with Andreas. The years when he had wanted and needed a father were long gone.
What he wanted was revenge. Retribution for being ignored for so long. A reckoning, in fact. Taking what was his by right. Taking back what he was owed. Besides, the Alexios name would be good for business. His business. And that was all that mattered to him.
Losing his temper with Roman was a luxury he would have to forgo right now. He couldn’t risk giving his father a reason to back off, and if that meant walking away from a fight, then so be it.
But it was galling not to have the last word.
He frowned at the thought, and then Effie Price looked up at him and he saw himself reflected in her glasses. Saw himself as she was seeing him. A narrow-eyed, unshaven surly stranger, looming over her.
Except that he wasn’t in the wrong here.
‘As it happens, I have plenty to say,’ he said, focusing his temper and frustration on the woman in front of him.
There was a beat of silence and then her mouth pulled into a frown. ‘Then perhaps it’s your hearing that needs testing, Mr Kane,’ she said, giving him another glimpse of her throat as her face tilted up to meet his. ‘Because I just told you I have somewhere to be.’
The flush to her cheeks made her look almost pretty, and he gazed down at her, momentarily startled by both that thought and by the ripple of heat that skimmed across his skin in response to it.
‘There’s nothing wrong with my sight or my hearing, Ms Price. In fact, there’s nothing wrong with any part of me.’
‘Apart from your ego.’ One delicate eyebrow arched upwards. ‘That seems a little swollen...bloated, even. You might want to go and see a doctor about it.’
In comparison to the insults and accusations Tamara had flung at him earlier, it was nothing. So why did it sting so much? Why did he feel the need not just to deny her accusation but to prove her wrong?
Not knowing or wanting to know the answer to either question, he glanced away to where his bodyguards stood, waiting at a respectful distance.
This was ridiculous.
Roman could show up at any moment, and if that happened the fallout could easily derail his potential rapprochement with his father. And yet, for some reason he couldn’t explain, he was still reluctant to end the conversation.
From inside the hotel, he heard the thunder of footsteps, and his shoulders tensed as he saw his bodyguards’ heads snap as one towards the doors.
‘Sir—’
Crawford stepped forward again. His head of security was a professional. Ex-Special Forces. His face was smooth and unreadable, but there was no mistaking the note of urgency in his voice now.
‘We need to move.’
He glanced down at Effie Price.
In the dappled London light, she looked soft and small and young. Imagining Roman’s explosive temper ricocheting around her in this quiet side street, Achileas felt a stab of irritation. He couldn’t leave her to face that alone. But if he didn’t leave now, who knew what she would see and hear? And the last thing he needed was a witness.
So, take her with you...
Later he would wonder what had possessed him to follow through on that entirely random thought, but in the heat of the moment it seemed not only rational but imperative that she go with him.
‘You heard the man.’ He turned towards her. ‘We need to move.’
Her eyes flew to his, but she didn’t move. In fact, to his immense irritation, she seemed to dig her small feet into the pavement.
‘Move...?’ Staring up at him, Effie Price repeated the word slowly, almost as if she needed to say it out loud to confirm what she’d heard. ‘What are you talking about?’
Behind him, raised male voices filtered into the street, indistinct but unmistakably Russian, and the footsteps were closer now—purposeful, unwavering.
It was crunch time.
He took a step forward. ‘It’s really quite simple. I need to leave. And you’re coming with me,’ he said firmly.
Her eyes widened cartoonishly and she opened her mouth to protest, but it was too late. He had already tossed her bag onto the back seat and, ignoring her soft gasp of surprise, he ushered her into the car and slid smoothly in beside her.