The Greek's Christmas Bride. Lynne Graham

sniffed and wiped her eyes, knowing she was messing up her eyeliner and not even caring. She wanted to go home and hug Hector. Pulling on her jacket, she walked back through the salon, trying not to be self-conscious about the fact that the customers who had witnessed the little drama were all staring at her. A couple who knew her called out encouraging things but Pixie’s entire attention was welded to the very tall male she could see waiting outside on the pavement. Why was Apollo still hanging around?

      Of course, he wanted to apologise, she assumed. Why else would he be waiting? She stalked out of the door.

      ‘Pixie?’

      ‘You bastard!’ she hissed at him in a raw undertone. ‘Leave me alone!’

      ‘I came here to speak to you—’

      ‘Well, you’ve spoken to me and now you can...’ Pixie swore at him, colliding with his scorching green eyes and almost reeling back from the anger she saw there.

      ‘Get in the car. I’ll take you home,’ he said curtly.

      Pixie swore at him again and, with a spluttering Greek curse and before she could even guess his intention, Apollo stooped and snatched her off her feet to carry her across the street.

      Pixie thumped him so hard with her clenched fist, she hurt her knuckles.

      ‘You’re a violent little thing, aren’t you?’ Apollo framed rawly as he stuffed her in the back seat of the waiting limo.

      ‘Let me out of this car!’ Pixie gasped, flinging herself at the door on the opposite side as he slid in beside her.

      ‘I’m taking you home,’ Apollo countered, rubbing his cheekbone where it was turning slightly pink from her punch.

      ‘I hope you get a black eye!’ Pixie spat. ‘Stop the car...let me out! This is kidnapping!’

      ‘Do you really want to walk down the street with your make-up smeared all over your face?’

      ‘Yes, if the alternative is getting a lift from you!’

      But the limousine was already turning a corner to draw up outside the shabby building where she lived, so the argument was academic. As the doors unlocked, Pixie leapt out onto the pavement.

      She might be petite in appearance but she was wiry and strong, Apollo acknowledged, and, not only did she know how to land a good punch, she also moved like greased lightning. He climbed out of the car at a more relaxed pace.

      Breathing rapidly, Pixie paused in the hall with the door she had unlocked ajar. ‘How did you know that about my background?’

      ‘I’ll tell you if you invite me in.’

      ‘Why would I invite you in? I don’t like you.’

      ‘You know I can only be here to see you and you have to be curious,’ Apollo responded with confidence.

      ‘I can live with being curious,’ Pixie told him, stepping into her room and starting to snap the door shut.

      ‘But evidently you don’t think you can live without your foolish little brother...do you?’ Apollo drawled and the door stopped an inch off closing and slowing opened up again.

      ‘What do you know about Patrick?’ Pixie asked angrily.

      Apollo strode in. ‘I know everything there is to know about you, your brother, your background and your friend Holly. I had you both privately investigated when Holly first appeared out of nowhere with baby Angelo.’

      Pixie studied him in shock and backed away several feet, which took her to the side of her bed. Even with the bed pushed up against one wall it was a small room. She had sold off much of the surplus stuff she had gathered up over the years before moving in. ‘Why would you have us both investigated?’ she exclaimed.

      ‘I’m more cautious than Vito. I wanted to know who he was dealing with so that if necessary I could advise and protect him,’ Apollo retorted with a slight shrug of a broad shoulder as he peered into a dark corner where something pale with glimmering eyes was trying to shrink into the wall.

      ‘Just ignore Hector. Visitors, particularly male ones, freak him out,’ Pixie told him thinly. ‘I should think that Vito is old enough to protect himself.’

      ‘Vito doesn’t know much about the dark side of life.’

      It was no surprise that Apollo considered himself superior in that regard, Pixie conceded. From childhood, scandal had illuminated Apollo’s life to the outside world: his family’s wealth, his father’s many marriages to beautiful women half his age, the break-ups, the divorces and the court battles that had followed. Apollo’s whole life had been lived in a histrionic headline-grabbing storm of publicity.

      And there he stood in her little room, the perfect figurehead for a Greek billionaire, a living legend of a playboy with a yacht known to attract an exceptional number of gorgeous half-naked women. It seemed unfair that a male with such wealth and possessed of such undoubted intelligence should also have been blessed with such intense good looks. Apollo, like his namesake the sun god, was breathtakingly handsome. And he had undeniably taken Pixie’s breath away the first time she’d seen him at Holly’s wedding.

      Apollo might be a toxic personality but when he was around he would always be the centre of attention. He had sleek dark brows, glorious green eyes, a classic nose and a stubborn, wilful mouth that could only be described as sensual. His sex appeal was electrifying and it was a sex appeal that Pixie would very much have liked to be impervious to. Sadly, however, she was a normal living, breathing woman with the usual healthy dose of hormones. And that was all it was...the breathlessness, the crazy race of her heartbeat, the tight fullness of her breasts and that strange squirmy, sensitive feeling low in her pelvis. It was all hormonal and as reflexive and trivial in Apollo’s radius as her liking for chocolate, not something she needed to beat herself up about.

      A faint little pleading whine emanated from the shadows and recalled Pixie to rationality. As she realised she had been standing dumbly gaping at Apollo while she thought about him an angry flush crept up her face. In a sudden move, she reached for Hector’s leash. ‘Look, I don’t know what you’re doing here but right now I have to take my dog out for a walk.’

      Apollo watched her drag...literally drag...a tattered-looking and clearly terrified little dog out of the corner to clip it onto a leash and lift it into her arms, where she rubbed her chin over the crown of its head and muttered soothingly to it as if it were a baby.

      ‘I have to talk to you. I’ll come with you.’

      ‘I don’t want you with me and if you have to talk to me about anything I have to say that accusing me of theft and utterly humiliating me where I work wasn’t a good opening.’

      ‘I know how desperate you must be for money. That’s why I assumed—’

      Pixie spun angrily, her little pearly teeth gripped tightly together. ‘That’s why it doesn’t pay to assume anything about someone you don’t know!’

      ‘Are you always this argumentative? This ready to take offence?’

      ‘Only around you,’ Pixie told him truthfully. ‘Look, you can wait here while I’m out. I’ll be about fifteen minutes,’ she said briskly and walked out of the door.

      Two steps along the pavement she couldn’t quite believe she had had the nerve. After all, the way he talked he knew about Patrick’s gambling debts and the threat against his continuing health. She broke out in a cold sweat just thinking about that reality because she really did love her little brother. Patrick didn’t have a bad bone in his body. He had made a mistake. He had tried too hard to be one of the boys when he took up playing cards and instead of stopping the habit when he lost money he had gone on gambling in the foolish belief that he could not continue on a losing streak for ever. By the time he had realised his mistake, he had built up a huge debt. But Patrick was working very hard to try and stay on top of that debt. He was an electrician during the day and a bartender at night.