Matteo shrugged. ‘There is a...a loneliness about you. Like a mist.’
I looked away, hating the fact that my eyes were stinging at his surprisingly compassionate and yet brutally honest assessment. A loneliness like a mist? Yes, I felt that—cloaking me in its sadness even though I didn’t want to be sad. I’d always tried to see the sunny side of life, to be optimistic even when there was little reason to be so. Sometimes it felt like the only good thing I had, but too many experiences lately had robbed me of my hope. My joy. And now this...
‘So please,’ Matteo continued, ‘let me reassure you that this offer is entirely above board. I will draw up an agreement that will protect your rights as well as my own. If you come to the courthouse in an hour you can read and sign that agreement, and then I’ll deposit the money in your bank account and arrange your travel to Athens. I can have someone meet you there, or you can arrange your own travel, if that makes you feel safer. Let someone know where you are going if you need a safeguard. Whatever you want. You’ll be in control of everything, with zero risk.’
His mouth curved, his teeth flashing white as he read the name badge on my waitress uniform.
‘Trust me, Daisy, this is your lucky day.’
And so it was—although I felt more anxious than excited when I met him at the courthouse an hour later.
We went over the contract in painstaking detail, although the numbers and words all blurred in my mind.
‘Are you sure about this?’ Matteo asked me seriously.
Again that surprising compassion warmed his eyes, making me do the one thing I’d been sure, right up until that moment, I wouldn’t. I said yes.
Triumph blazed in his eyes then, and I wondered if I was crazy. Was I throwing my life away? My freedom and even my safety? I didn’t know this man.
And yet something about him, despite his hard ruthlessness and innate arrogance, made me trust him. Stupidly, because I’d already learned not to trust people, and yet some stubborn part of me still kept wanting to.
Besides, I told myself, as Matteo had said, I would be in control. I watched him wire the money to my bank account. I saw him book the first-class ticket to Athens. He did both just minutes after the marriage ceremony, which was so fast I could have blinked and missed it. We exchanged no rings. We didn’t even touch. It felt completely soulless, and yet it was legally binding.
Afterwards Matteo took my hands in his own, which were warm and dry and strangely comforting. He stared into my eyes, a smile curving his mouth, making him seem softer somehow. Kinder.
‘Thank you, Daisy,’ he said, and his voice was full of warmth.
Foolish me, my heart fluttered.
Foolish because the next words out of his mouth were, ‘Hopefully we’ll never have to see each other again.’
CHAPTER THREE
‘I STILL DON’T understand why you want an annulment.’
Daisy Campbell—no, Daisy Dias—had surprised me a few too many times this evening, and this surprise was the most unwelcome one of all. I’d given her everything she could possibly want. Why would she want to hand it all back? It was the last thing I expected. The last thing I wanted.
I married Daisy Campbell both to satisfy and to spite my grandfather, and it was so very sweet to experience both when I tossed the marriage certificate on Bastian Arides’s desk and informed him of my new status.
‘You made a condition and it has now been met.’
‘And your wife?’ he asked, looking stunned by my bloodless coup.
I laughed as I told him the truth. ‘A dumpy nobody of a waitress I picked up from a diner in New York. She’s currently residing on Amanos, in case you feel the need to check.’
Bastian’s mouth dropped open; he’d expected me to marry some suitable socialite he could add to the family pedigree—some way, perhaps, to justify my place in his life, bastard grandson that I was. Little did he know me. Little did he realise how deep my need for vengeance, for justice ran.
‘I think you’ll find I’ve won, old man,’ I said as I strolled out of his office. ‘The condition you made to the board has been met in full.’
Bastian shook his head, his expression one of both defeat and fury. ‘That is not what I meant, Matteo, and you know it.’
‘Too bad you weren’t more specific, then.’
The clause in the agreement to transfer his shares to me had been clear—marry, and stay married, in order to get his shares and sixty percent of the stock in Arides Enterprises, and therefore complete control of the company. The board had agreed; everyone had signed. And I’d done what he asked.
I had what I wanted and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. I was now in control of Arides Enterprises—the company his father had built from scratch, the company he’d wanted to hand on to his legitimate grandson, Andreas.
But of course that was impossible. Instead he’d had to hand it to me, his only heir and the only person in the company capable of running a multimillion-dollar enterprise. The person who had taken the lagging sales and outdated practices and dragged them into the twenty-first century—and into the black.