A Bride At His Bidding. Michelle Smart

Extract

       CHAPTER ONE

      ANDREAS SAMARAS POKED his head into the adjoining office to his own. Having spent the day on a multinational conference call, he needed to check in with his PA.

      ‘How is everything going?’

      Debbie sighed. ‘The world is going to hell in a handcart.’

      ‘Quite.’ His PA’s theatrical tendencies were infamous throughout Samaras Fund Management. Andreas would find it wearing if she weren’t the best business PA he’d ever had. ‘Apart from that, is there anything I need to know? With regards to the business,’ he hastened to add in case she started harping on about polar bears and Arctic ice melt again.

      ‘Nothing important.’

      ‘Good. How did the interviews go? Have you come up with a shortlist for me?’ Rochelle, his domestic PA, had quit. The smitten fool was getting married and had decided that a job requiring a great deal of travel was not a good fit for domestic bliss. He’d offered to double her wages and increase her holidays but still she had said no. He’d dragged his heels for weeks about finding a replacement for her in the hope she would change her mind. She hadn’t and finally he had accepted defeat.

      Debbie held up a stack of papers. ‘I’ve whittled the candidates down to five.’

      Andreas stepped into the office. Debbie had been tasked with doing the preliminary interviews. She knew exactly what kind of person he was looking for to take on the role that basically entailed organising his domestic life. It was a live-in role that would see the successful candidate travel wherever he went, ensuring his domestic life ran as smoothly as his business. The person needed to be honest, loyal, unobtrusive and flexible, have impeccable references, a clean driving licence and no criminal record.

      He took the papers from her hand and flipped through them. All had a square photograph of the candidate attached to the corner of their applications. It was a requirement he insisted on. Three candidates would make it to the shortlist and he liked to be familiar with their appearance before he met them for the final interview, which he would undertake personally.

      By Debbie’s computer was a stack of the applicants she’d already rejected. The top one caught his eye. There was something familiar about the direct gaze staring back...

      ‘Why have you rejected this one?’ he asked, picking up the form and studying it. Dark hazel eyes stared right back at him. Dark hazel eyes he knew instinctively that he’d seen before.

      Debbie peered at it with a frown. ‘Oh, her. Caroline Dunwoody. She interviewed well but there was something about her I didn’t trust. I don’t know what it was. A feeling, nothing more, but it made me check her references in more detail. One of them checks out okay but I’m suspicious of the other one. She says she worked as Head of Housekeeping at Hargate Manor for two years and has a letter in her file to that effect. I spoke to the gentleman who wrote the reference, the Manor’s butler, and he verified everything.’

      ‘Then what’s the problem?’

      ‘Hargate Manor doesn’t exist.’

      His eyebrows rose. ‘Doesn’t exist?’

      ‘There is no Hargate Manor within fifty miles of this one’s supposed location.’

      If Debbie said it didn’t exist then it didn’t exist. She was the most thorough person Andreas knew.

      He looked more closely at Caroline Dunwoody’s photograph, racking his brain trying to remember where he could have met her. He usually had an excellent recall for faces but on this occasion he couldn’t put a finger on it. She had dark chestnut hair that fell in a neat line to her shoulders and pretty if angular features, a short straight nose, a top lip slightly fuller than the bottom and a cute heart-shaped chin. Yes, a pretty face but not one familiar to him.

      But he had seen those eyes before.

      Just as he opened his mouth to order Debbie to do some more digging into this woman, it suddenly came to him.

      Digging. Journalists did lots of digging.

      Caroline. The extended version of Carrie.

      Carrie Rivers. The journalist sister of his niece’s old best friend.

      The journalist for the Daily Times who had made a name for herself by exposing the illegal and often seedy practices of rich businessmen.

      He doubted he would still remember their tenuous association were it not that her most recent undercover investigation into James Thomas, an old business acquaintance of his, had revealed James’s business to be a cover for drugs, arms and people trafficking. A month ago, Carrie’s meticulous work had seen James sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Andreas had read about the sentencing and silently cheered. He hoped he rotted in his cell.

      With the feeling of a ball bearing pressing down on his guts, Andreas did an Internet search on his phone for her. There were no photographs of Carrie online. He supposed this wasn’t surprising given the nature of her work.

      But it was her. He was certain of it.

      He’d only met Carrie once, three years ago. It had been such a fleeting moment that it was no surprise he’d struggled to remember. Three years ago, she had been blonde with rounded cheeks.

      Her eyes were the only thing about her that hadn’t changed. Their gazes had met as he’d left the headmistress’s office of his niece’s boarding school. Carrie and her sister Violet had been sat in the corridor waiting for their turn to be admitted. Violet had hung her head in shame when she’d seen him. Carrie should have hung her head too.

      Neither had known it would be the last time they would be admitted into the headmistress’s office. Violet was to be expelled with immediate effect.

      Three years on and Carrie was applying for a domestic job with him under a different name and supplying fake references in the process. This did not bode well and his brain groped for reasons as to why she might now be targeting him. Andreas ran a clean business. He paid all his taxes, both personal and corporation, in all the relevant jurisdictions. He followed and exceeded local employment law. His romantic affairs over the years had been consensual and discreet, guilt and responsibility for his family overriding the urge to bed as many beautiful women as possible, something he intended to rectify now all the burdens had been lifted from his shoulders.

      One thing Andreas had learned over his thirty-seven years was that when problems cropped up, the only thing to do was keep a clear head and deal with them immediately, stopping the problems escalating into catastrophe.

      A plan quickly formed in his mind. He inhaled deeply then smiled. ‘Debbie, I want you to call Miss Dunwoody and invite her back for a second interview.’

      Debbie looked at him as if he’d sprouted blossom from his head.

      ‘Back it up with a letter. This is what I want you to say...’

      * * *

      Carrie sat in the spacious reception room of Samaras Fund Management’s London headquarters and tried to get air into lungs that seemed to have forgotten how to breathe. Her heart was beating erratically, the thuds loud in her ears, and she had to keep wiping her clammy palms on her thighs.

      She’d woken from fractured sleep with her stomach churning so hard she’d had to force her coffee down. Food had been unthinkable.

      She had never known nerves like it, although calling this sensation nerves was like calling a river a small trickle of water. Soon she would be taken through to Andreas Samaras’s office and she had to contain these mixed and virulent emotions that threatened to crush her.

      She hadn’t suffered any nerves while going undercover and investigating James Thomas. She’d been ice-cool and focussed as she’d systematically gathered the evidence needed to prove his