Claiming His Hidden Heir. Carol Marinelli

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       CHAPTER ONE

      LUKA, AFTER CAREFUL consideration I’ve decided...

      Waking just before her alarm went off, Cecelia lay listening to the hiss of bus doors opening on the street outside her London flat and working out how best to resign.

      And when to do it?

      Did she get it over and done with in the morning? Or wait until the end of the day to tell him that she would not be renewing her contract?

      Most people would say she was mad to quit.

      The pay was amazing, the travel wonderful, if exhausting, but in the eleven months she had worked for Luka, Cecelia had hit the limit on her primness radar.

      He was a playboy in the extreme.

      And that wasn’t some vague, unsourced opinion.

      It was fact.

      Cecelia ran his diary after all!

      Quite simply, she couldn’t do it any more and so on Friday, as Luka had headed to the rooftop to swan off in his chopper for a debauched weekend in France, Cecelia had reached for her phone and accepted a six-month contract as personal assistant to an esteemed and elderly foreign diplomat.

      While the money and perks would be worse in her new job, the peace of mind it would bring was, to Cecelia, worth its weight in gold.

      Only as she reached for her phone to check the time did Cecelia see the date and remember that it was her birthday.

      There was never much fuss made of it and she had long since told herself to get over that fact. Her aunt and uncle, who had raised her since the age of eight, simply didn’t bother with such things and before she had died, neither had her mother.

      She saw that a message had come in overnight from Luka.

      Shan’t be in today, Cece. Cancel my meetings and I’ll call you later.

      Cecelia ground her teeth at the annoying shortening of her name that she had repeatedly asked him to stop using. But then she frowned, because in the eleven months that she had worked for Luka he had never taken a day off. Luka had a phenomenal workload yet never missed a beat. But now, on the one day she really needed to speak to him, he wasn’t going to be there.

      Cecelia wanted her resignation handed in and sorted, and for her time with Luka to be over. As well as that he had an important meeting with Mr Garcia and his entourage in NYC later today. Although it was an online meeting, it had been incredibly hard to set up and it was going to be extremely messy to cancel.

      Despite the absence of her boss—in fact, because of the absence of her boss—today was shaping up to be an exceptionally busy one, and so Cecelia forced herself up and out of bed.

      She showered quickly and began to get ready.

      Her routines were set in stone and, despite the extensive travel and odd hours required by her job, there were certain things that never changed. She could be in Florence, New York, or home in London but these things remained—her clothes were set out the night before, as was her breakfast, which she ate before tackling her hair.

      Routines were vital to Cecelia’s sense of well-being, for during the first eight years of her life, when she had lived with her mother, chaos had been the only certainty.

      The reddish fire to Cecelia’s strawberry blonde mane had, courtesy of foils, been dimmed to a neutral blonde. She smoothed and sleeked out her long curls and then tied them back into a neat, low ponytail.

      Next, Cecelia applied her make-up.

      She didn’t wear much, but as Luka’s PA it was expected that she was always well turned out.

      It wasn’t always the case. A famous actress she had once worked for had insisted that Cecelia wear no make-up whatsoever as well as extremely plain clothing. With another employer, for practical reasons, her wardrobe had mainly consisted of boots and jeans.

      Cecelia’s skin was pale and needed just a dash of blusher to liven it up. She added a coat of mascara to her lashes, which enhanced her deep green eyes, but, as she did so, a rather bitchy voice coming from the radio caught her attention.

       ‘What on earth did she expect, getting mixed up with Luka Kargas?’

      Cecelia stabbed herself in the eye with the mascara wand at the sound of her boss’s name.

      It wasn’t so much that it was a surprise to hear Luka mentioned, more an annoyance that even at seven a.m. and alone in her bedroom still there was no escape from him.

      Luka was extremely prominent and, although his name often graced the finance reports, his antics and bad-boy ways were regularly discussed in the tabloids and on the news.

      They were having a field day discussing him now!

      It would seem that he had used every last second of the weekend to create his own particular brand of havoc. A wild party had taken place aboard his yacht, currently moored off the coast of Nice, on Friday.

      Cecelia sat at her dressing table, lips pursed as she heard that the raucous celebrations had continued on to Paris, where Luka and selected guests had hit the casinos. Now it was a case of tears after bedtime for some supermodel who had hoped that things might be different between herself and Luka.

      Well, more fool her, then, Cecelia thought.

      Everyone knew Luka’s track record with women.

      But they didn’t really know Luka—there was a private side to him that no one, and certainly not his PA, had access to.

      From what Cecelia could glean, Luka had led a very privileged life. His father owned a luxurious resort in Xanero. The famed Kargas restaurant there was now the flagship venue of its own very exclusive brand in several countries. Luka, though, focused more on expanding the hotel side of things and lived life very much in the fast lane. He dated at whim and discarded with ease and all too often it was Cecelia mopping up the tears or fielding calls from scorned lovers.

      Yes, he was a playboy in the extreme.

      And he unsettled her so.

      Cecelia had once glimpsed that life.

      Her mother Harriet’s death СКАЧАТЬ