'Is it not?' agreed Nikos. The irony was back in his voice.
Disbelief washed over Andrea, wave after wave. Total disbelief at what she had heard. She felt quite faint with it. Then, deep, deep inside, she felt the waves break upon some hard, immovable bedrock.
'Excuse me—'
She moved past Nikos Vassilis. The man who had just told her that her grandfather—her dear, kind grandfather, who had ignore
d her existence all her life—had plans for her. Marriage plans.
Marriage!
She had thought Nikos Vassilis insane, and assumed he was just chancing it. But his assumptions were based on something much, much more solid than a soft, seductive kiss...
As she walked across the dining room she could feel the rage mounting. Misting over her eyes like a red miasma. She marched through the double doors into the wide, marble-floored hallway and strode across, flinging open the doors to the library.
At her entrance her grandfather looked up from the bank of computer screens flickering on the console drawn up beside his mahogany desk.
'Out!'
The order was given imperiously. She ignored it. She surged forward.
'This man,' she burst out, gesturing wildly behind her to where Nikos had paused in the doorway, following her dramatic entrance, 'has announced that he will be marrying me! I want you to tell him right now that it's not going to happen!'
Her grandfather's face had hardened.
'You heard him correctly. Why else would I send for you? Now, leave—you are disturbing me.'
The sick hollowness caverned in Andrea's stomach.
'Are you completely out of your mind?' Her voice was hard—hard, and trembling with fury. 'Are you completely insane—to bring me here, spring this on me and think I'd go along with it? What the hell do you think you're playing at?'
Yiorgos Coustakis got to his feet. He was no taller than his granddaughter, but his bulk was considerable.
And suddenly very, very formidable.
Almost she faltered. Almost she quailed beneath the look of excoriation on his lined, powerful face. But rage carried her forward.
'You must be mad to think you can do this! You must be completely ma—'
Her denunciation was cut short. A look of blinding fury flashed across Yiorgos Coustakis's face.
'Be silent!' he snarled. 'You will not speak in such a fashion! Go to your room! I will deal with you in the morning!'
She stopped dead.
'Excuse me?' Her eyes were wide with disbelief. 'You think you can give me orders? I am not one of your hapless lackeys!'
'No, you are my granddaughter, and as such I demand obedience!'
Andrea's mouth fell open.
'Demand away,' she told him scornfully. 'Obedience isn't a word in my vocabulary.'
Behind her, Nikos's eyes narrowed. He was witnessing, he knew, something that very few people had ever seen—someone standing up to the vicious, domineering and totally ruthless head of Coustakis Industries.
For a brief, fleeting second Andrea could see by the expression in her grandfather's heavy hooded eyes that he had never been spoken to in such a fashion. Then, swiftly, his face hardened into implacable fury at her defiance of him.
'You will leave this room now or I will have you removed! Do you understand?*