PROLOGUE
XANDROS LAKARIS TURNED ABRUPTLY, winged brows snapping together over his dark eyes, deepening the lines around his well-shaped mouth.
‘Dammit! Just what do you suggest I do? Storm after her and drag her to the altar?’ he demanded rhetorically.
The man he’d addressed, Stavros Coustakis, sat back in his chair, eyeing his visitor impassively. He had grey-green eyes, unusual for a Greek—but then—unlike Xandros, with his long and illustrious family history—Stavros Coustakis knew little about his antecedents.
‘I’m a nobody,’ he’d readily admitted, with the worldly cynicism Xandros was well used to in this man whose daughter he’d been engaged to marry, ‘but I’ve made myself a very, very rich one.’
Those grey-green eyes hardened now at Xandros’s outburst.
‘No,’ he retorted. ‘It would do you no good. She has defied me and is therefore no longer my daughter.’
Xandros looked at him askance, his frown deepening. He knew Stavros was ruthless—a man few, if any, cared for—yet to hear him disown his daughter so casually was chilling. But he also knew that his own reaction to his former fiancée’s flight was, in fact, predominantly relief.
He had been in no rush to abandon his carefree bachelor lifestyle, indulging in the easy-going short-term affairs which—thanks to his dark good looks, wealth and elevated social position in Athens society—had always come easily to him. Still only in his early thirties, he wanted a few more years of it before he tied himself down in marriage.
It was a preference which he knew warred with the dual responsibility pressing heavily on his shoulders—not only to continue the ancient Lakaris family line, which could trace its heritage back to the imperial nobility of the long-vanished Byzantine empire, but also everything his father had impressed upon him all his life. That old money must continually be replenished with new or risk disappearing completely.
It was that necessity which had dominated Xandros’s childhood. His grandfather had fatally combined lavish spending with rash investments, and the family had come dangerously near the point of complete ruin because of it.
Financial worries had been paramount in his boyhood years, with his father plagued by unpaid creditors and even impending bankruptcy, his mother fearful that their beautiful, gracious family home in the countryside beyond Athens would have to be sold. His father had driven himself relentlessly to restore the Lakaris fortunes and reverse his own father’s unwise profligacy.
He had succeeded more than handsomely, restoring the Lakaris fortunes by the time his son had reached adulthood, but Xandros had grown up indelibly imprinted with the task of continuing his father’s work and ensuring that never again would they want for money—that the family’s wealth would never again be endangered, only enlarged.
An ideal opportunity to do just that—hugely—had presented itself in the prospect of undertaking a highly mutually lucrative merger with the Coustakis empire, its financial lines of business, from venture capital to insurance, that would fit ideally with the Lakaris portfolio.
Xandros’s father, before his untimely death, had been keen to press ahead with it—and not just for financial reasons alone.
Xandros was well aware that his late father had been very keen on pointing out that their ties with Coustakis could, and indeed should, be even closer. And that Stavros’s daughter Ariadne, despite her father’s rough-and-ready self-made origins, would, in all respects, make Xandros a highly suitable wife...
He could see why. Ariadne, though perhaps a little young for him, being only in her early twenties, ticked all the boxes. A striking brunette, intelligent and cultured, she socialised in the same elite circles as he did, and they got on perfectly well together. From his parents’ point of view Ariadne had the added advantage of not only being Stavros Coustakis’s heir, but also the fact that her late mother had come from a very good family and had been best friends with Xandros’s mother.
Moreover, Stavros Coustakis himself had become very keen on making the proposed business deal much more than a corporate merger.
‘I’ve a mind to be father-in-law to a Lakaris and
have a Lakaris grandchild,’ he’d informed Xandros bluntly. ‘Being a nobody myself.’
For all his late father’s enthusiasm, and his mother’s urging, it had still not been an easy decision for Xandros to make, but in the end he’d gone for it.
And so, he’d thought, had Ariadne, who was keen to escape her domineering father as much as having any desire to marry. Okay, so neither of them was in love with the other, but they liked each other well enough, and he’d determined to do his best to be a loyal and supportive husband, and eventually a loving father to their children. That would have been enough, wouldn’t it?
Except the text he’d received that afternoon, making him rush hotfoot here to Stavros’s showy mansion in an exclusive suburb of Athens, had disabused him of that assumption.
Xandros—I can’t marry you after all. I’m leaving Athens. I’m sorry—Ariadne.
The words echoed again in his head now—as did the covert tug of relief that had sprung up in him as he’d taken in the implications of her rejection. With Ariadne removing herself from the frame, he was now free to make what he’d preferred all along—a marriage-free merger with Coustakis Corp.
He’d said as much to the man who was not, after all, going to be his father-in-law.
‘Very well,’ he said coolly now, his voice clipped. ‘Then that is that. Ariadne is no longer in the equation. However, as I have argued from the outset, marrying your daughter was never essential to our merger.’
He kept his eyes levelled on Stavros, seated at his heavily gilded desk, aware that he wanted out of this oppressively over-opulent mansion as soon as possible. His own taste was for minimalism, as in his own city apartment, or better still, the simplicity of his whitewashed, blue-shuttered villa on Kallistris.
Kallistris! The very name could lift his spirits! His own private island—his haven—a helicopter flight from Athens. The place he escaped to whenever his work or social life permitted. He had purchased it on attaining his majority, knowing that it would always be a safe haven for him, whatever life threw at him.
He would fly out there this very evening—spend the weekend, get away from all this. Away from a man he didn’t like, whose daughter he hadn’t really wanted to marry and now didn’t have to, because it seemed she hadn’t wanted to marry him either. Stavros Coustakis could forget about his ambitions for a Lakaris son-in-law and grandchild. It wasn’t going to happen.
But first he wanted a definitive answer on the one thing he did want—the merger he sought. His eyes rested on Stavros Coustakis now, as he waited for his reaction. Was it go or no go with the merger? He disliked being played—and with a party like Coustakis it was essential to meet hardball with hardball.
‘You’ll need to give me an agreement in principle,’ he said now, ‘or not.’
He glanced at his watch—a calculated hustle, as he well knew, and Coustakis would know, too, but that was the way the game was played.
‘I’m flying out to Kallistris this evening.’
He wanted to be there in time to watch the sun set into the bay, the moon rise over the headland...
His mind snapped back to where he was now, and his gaze fixed on Stavros. Something was changing in those pouched grey-green eyes—they held a caustic gleam that Xandros suddenly did not like.
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Stavros was saying. His tone was smooth—too smooth. ‘You see...’
There was a definite challenge in his voice now, which Xandros liked even less.
‘Since you are so keen on this merger to take place, I had hoped that you would be flying to London instead.’
He smiled. Not a nice smile at all. And every particle of Xandros’s consciousness went on high alert.
‘In order to collect...’ Stavros Coustakis’s smile deepened, and the smile was indisputably a taunt, just as the now blatant cynical amusement in his eyes was overwhelmingly provocative ‘...my other daughter.’