Female Novel
Chapter 2
There had been a time not so many years ago that her fondest hopes included being in thatexasperated mother’s place. Those dreams had died along with her marriage and she had acceptedthat. She had. Yet as much as she wished they didn’t, those old hopes still caused a small pang in theregion of her heart in moments like this.
But dreams of children definitely had no chance of resurrection in her current situation.
Trying to let the low-level background hum created by the plane’s engines soothe nerves alreadystretched taut, Piper leaned back in her seat and looked away from the domestic tableau.
It didn’t work. Despite her best efforts, her heart rate increased as anticipation of her arrival in Athensthrummed through her. She couldn’t stop herself looking out the window, her eyes eagerly seekingevidence of the airport.novelbin
For hours it had been nothing but a blanket of cloud with the occasional break where the peaks of theAlps crept through. It had been a while since she spotted the last peak and she knew they were almostto their Athens destination. Less than an hour from seeing him. Zephyr Nikos. Her current boss andpart-time bed partner.
She was more than a little keen to see the man and the place of his birth. Besides, who didn’t want tovisit paradise?
For that’s where they were ultimately headed, a small Greek island that at one time had been thevacation home of a fabulously wealthy Greek family. Not so flush now, the patriarch had sold the islandto Stamos & Nikos Enterprises. Zephyr and his partner, Neo Stamos, planned to develop it as an all-inclusive spa resort. And she’d been given the interior design contract for the entire facility, with abudget large enough to bring in whatever kind of help she needed to see it to completion.
She was beyond excited about being brought in at the ground level on such an expansive project. Itwould be an amazing coup for her business, but satisfying personally on a creative level as well. Evenso, her current heightened sense of anticipation was predominantly for the man who waited for herthere.
She had spent the last six weeks missing Zephyr with an ache that scared her when she let herselfthink about it. She should not be so emotionally dependent on a man who was only sort of her lover.
She bit her lip on a sigh.
They were involved sexually, but not romantically. They weren’t anything as simple as casual sexpartners. That would be too easy. She’d know exactly how to handle her one-sided emotionalentanglement then. But they were friends, too. Good friends. The kind of friends that hung out at leastonce a week before the sex benefits started and that increased to multiple times a week when theywere in the same city.
To complicate things even more, he was also her boss.
Again…sort of. His company had hired her personal design firm for several projects over the past two-plus years, though this new development was by far the biggest and most far-reaching for her. Hewould be her boss in actual fact if she’d let him, too.
He’d offered her a staff job with salary and benefits she’d had a hard time turning down, but Piper hadno desire to work for someone else. Not again. Not after losing both her husband and her job in one fellswoop only six months before she took on her first project with Zephyr’s company.
She’d vowed then that she would not allow herself to ever be that vulnerable to upheaval again.
She’d thought marrying Arthur Bellingham would give her the stability she craved, among other things—like that family she’d dreamed about. It had turned out just the opposite, though. Art had shreddedher emotions before tearing her life apart piece by piece until all she had left was her talent and herdetermination. She would never be in that place again.
Not even for Zephyr. Not that the sexy Greek real estate tycoon was offering her marriage, or evencommitment. He’d offered her a salaried job. That was all.
If she wanted more, she certainly wasn’t saying so. Up until the past weeks’ long separation, she hadn’teven admitted it to herself. Telling him wasn’t in the cards she planned to play. Not when doing sowould spell the immediate end to this whole friends-who-are-sexually-intimate situation.
And maybe their friendship as well.
Zephyr waited for Piper near the luggage carousel. He hadn’t seen her in six weeks. She had been ona job in the Midwest and he’d known if he didn’t offer her the Greek job, he probably wouldn’t see heragain for another two months, or more.
Not that she wasn’t the best interior designer for the job, but this project was bigger than anything she’dtaken on before. He knew she could do it, though. And it wasn’t as if he needed to explain his choice toanyone. That was one of the benefits to being the boss. The only person who might have something tosay about it, and only because they were both working together on this development for the first time inyears, was his best friend and business partner, Neo Stamos.