His heartbeat slowed to a normal pace.
A brown paper bag in hand, she was smiling at a customer.
Her hair was combed back from her forehead in that poufy way. The three silver earrings on her left ear glinted in the morning sunlight as she turned this way and that. A green apron hung loosely on her slender frame.
She thanked the customer and ran her hands over her face. He could see the pink marks her fingers left on her skin even from the distance. And that was when Nikos noticed it—the tremble in her fingers, the slight sway of her body as she turned.
He tugged his gaze to her face and took in the dark shadows under her stunning blue eyes. She blinked slowly, as though struggling to keep her eyes open and smiled that dazzling smile at the next customer.
Memories pounded through him, a fierce knot clawing his gut tight. He didn’t want to remember, yet the sight of her, tired and ready to drop on her feet, punched him, knocking the breath out of him.
He hadn’t felt that bone-deep desolation in a long time, because as hard as Savas had made him work for the past fourteen years, Nikos had known there would be food at the end of it. But before Savas had plucked them both from their old house, every day after his mother had died had been a lesson in survival.
The memory of it—the smell of grease at the garage, combined with the clawing hunger in his gut while the lack of sleep threatened to knuckle him down—was as potent as though it was just yesterday.
The bitter memory on top of his present exhaustion tipped him over the edge.
A red haze descending on him, he stormed through the crowd and navigated around the counter.
With a gasp, Lexi stepped back, blinking furiously. “Mr. Demakis,” she said, sounding squeaky, “you can’t be back—”
He didn’t give her a chance to finish. Ignoring the gasps and audible whispers of the busy crowd, he moved closer, picked her up and walked out of the café.
Crimson rushed into her pale cheeks, and her mouth fell open. “What are you doing?”
She wriggled in his hold and he tightened his grip. “Seeing dots and shapes, Ms. Nelson? I’m carrying you out.”
Weighing next to nothing, she squirmed again. The nonexistent curves he had mocked her about rubbed against his chest, teasing shocking arousal out of his tired body.
For the first time in his life, he clamped down the sensation. It wasn’t easy. “Stop wiggling around, Lexi, or I will drop you.” To match his words, he slackened his hold on her.
With a gasp, she wrapped herself tighter around him. Her breath teased his neck. He let fly a curse. As rigid as a tightly tuned chassis in his arms, she glared at him. “Put me down, Nikos.”
His limo appeared at the curb and he waited while the chauffeur opened the door. Bending slightly, he rolled her onto the leather seat. She scrambled on her knees for a few seconds, giving him a perfect view of her pert bottom in denim shorts before scooting to the far side of the opposite seat.
He got into the limo, settled back into the seat and stretched his legs. Perverse anger flew hotly in his veins. He shouldn’t care but he couldn’t control it. “A bartender at night, a barista by day. Christos, are you trying to kill yourself?”
Lexi had never been more shocked in her entire life. And that was big, seeing that she had run away from a foster home when she was fifteen, had stolen by sixteen and had been working at a high-class bar in Manhattan, where shocking was the norm rather than the exception, since she had been nineteen.
She clumsily sat up from the leather seat. The jitteriness in her limbs intensified just as the limo pulled away from the curb. “I can’t just leave,” she said loudly, her words echoing around them. The arrogant man beside her didn’t even bat an eyelid. “Order your minion to turn around. Faith will lose her job and I can’t—”
He leaned forward and extended his arm. Her words froze on her lips and she pressed back into her seat. The scent of the leather and him morphed into something that teased her ragged senses. The intensity of his presence tugged at her as if he were extending a force field on some fundamental level. Outside the limo, the world was bustling with crazy New York energy, and inside...inside it felt as if time and space had come to a standstill.
He reached behind her neck and undid the knot of her apron. She dug her nails into the denim of her shorts, her heart stuck in her throat. The pad of his fingers dragged against her skin and she fought to remain still. The long sweep of his lashes hid his expression but that thrumming energy of his pervaded the interior. Bunching the apron in his hands, he threw it aside with a casual flick of his wrist.