Claimed by the Sicilian Tycoon (Criminal Seduction #3)(24)

Lyra shook her head, and grabbed the binder with the shoes in. A couple of ticks later she passed it back across. “He’s mine right now. You should accept that.”

“Andros is never anyone’s,” Melissa hissed. “If you knew him at all you would know that.”

“But he’s never sent a personal shopper to buy for a woman before has he? Which is exactly why you came yourself.”

Bingo. The other woman flushed as she gathered up her folders.

“You won’t hang on to him for long. Andros is incapable of sticking to one woman at a time.”

Lyra shrugged and stood too, purposefully walking forward so that Melissa had no choice but to make her way to the door. “I don’t want him for long, but for now this is how it is.”

“We’ll see.”

“That we will.” She opened the door as wide as it would go, and stood back to let the personal shopper through first. “Oh and, Melissa, don’t send the purple. I’ll send it right back.”






Chapter Twelve



When Andros arrived back at the apartment, he was in a contemplative mood. The background check on Lyra had uncovered some things that unsettled him. Nothing of a criminal nature, nothing to worry that she might be planning anything shady, it matched what she had told him in more ways than one.

She was poor.

Painfully so.

He was not familiar with the area of London that she lived, but some checks on a few government websites had darkened his mood considerably. Lyra lived in an area he doubted he would ever have cause to visit. She was more than poor. She was deprived, and she was doing whatever was necessary to give herself a helping hand out of it.

He admired that.

Had he too not come from extremely humble surroundings? His parents had been poor, his whole family in fact. It was only when he moved to the States in his early teens, on a student visa that he’d worked himself beyond endurance to secure, that he had started to earn any money. He still remembered working fifteen, sometimes twenty-hour days. Investing the little bits of money he made, always on the lookout for an opportunity here an opportunity there. He’d had drive, and he’d had the brains to make that drive into something.

And Lyra? He pulled a key out of his pocket, and opened the door. She had brains, no doubt about that, but for some reason she had chosen not to use them in the same way as he had. Instead, she used her looks and her delectable body to make a better life for herself.

Did he disapprove?

“Andros? Is that you?”

“It is,” he called out, then—almost tripping over a half dozen boxes and bags—he followed her voice into the bedroom. She was not sitting on the bed like he expected, but the heaviness in the air told him all he needed to know. He walked through to the en suite, narrowly avoiding more boxes as he did so.

The sight that greeted him took his breath away.

Lyra was lying in the tub, her hair clipped on top of her head, bubbles covering everything but one bare leg that she was soaping.

Dios.

Up and down she went, her hands running along the skin. As he watched, she travelled up to the top of her thighs, her eyes catching his, locking and teasing.

“Do you need help?” he asked, his own voice sounding unfamiliar to him, low and harsh, and he was so f*cking hard already.

“Yes, please.”

She held out a hand with the soap. He took it before kneeling down next to the tub. He seemed to spend a lot of time in her presence on his knees Andros thought, and resolved to flip that situation around at the earliest opportunity.

He took her other leg, running the soap along it, her skin so warm and soft beneath his hands. How could he disapprove of any action of hers? She was exquisite. No man could resist her charms, least of all him.

“You could join me?” she suggested and though he wanted to Andros shook his head.

“We have no time.”

“We have all night, don’t we?”

“No. You are to accompany me to a dinner.”

She blew some bubbles from her fingers and nodded slowly. “That’s why you sent the woman?”

“Indeed.”

Frowning and lifted one arm for him to wash. “But I thought we agreed we would just…”

“Just?”

She shrugged. “Fuck.”

How he wanted to. “This is unavoidable, a business meeting, and it makes sense for you to come.”

“Why?”

“Because it will be dull, and I can amuse myself by imagining my cock deep in your throat,” Andros admitted. If part of him was hoping to shock her, he was disappointed. She laughed delightedly.

“Ah, I see.”

“I have many such meetings,” he said, “and often I take a woman with me.”

“And do you amuse yourself by throat f*cking them?”

Andros shrugged, sure that Lyra would not want to know the answer to that, since women were often jealous, were they not? And she was fire enough without that added complication. “Sometimes.”

She blew some more bubbles. One settled on his hand. “I bet. You just call them up, huh, and they come running?”

“If needs be,” he said. “And yes, they always do. Only now I have you to accompany me.”

“I’m not your girlfriend, though.”