his questions. And more than once, he’d stopped listening as his mind formed fantasies in which her soft, full mouth with her sweet pink lips was a main feature.
At the time, he’d attributed his distractions down to the long working hours he’d been putting in. But as his tiny, adorable, sexy Helen started working that first week, his mind discovered what his body had already known. He wanted Helen in his bed, not in his office. Getting her there would take some work. She was one of the shyest females he’d ever encountered and no more aware of her beauty and femininity than a lobster was aware of the sand on a beach. He’d slowly been working towards getting her to think of him in terms of a man, but it had been a painfully slow battle. Hell, she still called him Mr. Theopolis despite the hundred or so times he’d ordered her to call him by his first name. He, on the other hand, had no problem calling her by her first name. Each time he thought about Helen, it was in personal terms.
Grimacing, he knew that, six months ago, he’d never realized getting her into his bed would take quite so much of his energy. He’d never had this much trouble with a woman before.
He walked around to the other side of his desk and had to smile at the surface. Everything was laid out on his desk in very precise order with yellow sticky notes summarizing each document. In the center was a list. Helen loved lists. He had to chuckle as he read through the list. She had given him a list of people he should talk to and in the order of priority.
Dimitri sighed heavily and picked up the phone, dialing the first number. Helen might be a little dictator, but she was also usually right when it came to organizing business priorities. It was only when she didn’t know what was going on that she was wrong so Dimitri made sure she was included on anything she wanted. He trusted her more than he trusted his executives and she worked harder that most of them. That’s one reason he paid her about the same amount as some of his vice presidents.
By lunch time, he walked out and found her staring at her computer listlessly which only alarmed him further. He could count on one hand the number of times he’d seen Helen not moving about the office efficiently and they had been times when she was deeply worried about something. “What’s wrong?” he asked softly, bending over her desk, hands propped flat on the surface, to look into her pretty, blue eyes that revealed so much about her inner feelings. Seeing the clouds pass over their crystal blue depths, he knew something was troubling her.
Helen jumped when his face came into view and her cheeks immediately turned a soft shade of red. “Oh, Mr. Theopolis, I’m sorry. I’m afraid I was day dreaming.” She quickly pushed back from the desk and stood up, placing several feet between the two of them. She had trouble breathing when he was so close. Good grief, she forgot to breathe most of the time when he was close.
“What were you day dreaming about?” he asked, standing up as she did.
“Nothing,” she said and started stacking the files on her desk that were already perfectly stacked in some sort of order.
“Of course it was something,” he countered grimly, frustrated that she wouldn’t open up to him this time. The last time she’d been this upset, her landlord had been pressuring her on the rent, wanting to increase it by several hundred dollars. It hadn’t been that Helen couldn’t afford the additional rent. It was only that his little Helen, the penny pinching, coupon cutting darling didn’t think the rent increase had been ethical. His initial reaction had been to buy the damn apartment complex and let her live there for free. But he knew she’d balk at that idea. So he’d done the next best thing. He’d bought a small house he knew she’d like, then sold it back to her anonymously at a price he knew she couldn’t resist. When her mother had been in an accident and couldn’t live alone anymore, he’d made a quick phone call to a private retirement home and ensured a place for Helen’s mother at a price that wouldn’t burden Helen’s cash flow situation. He knew some might call it subsidizing but