“No.” She swallowed. “I’m using a love for my brother as a defence.”
He pushed aside the selfless explanation. “You must have been eighteen when your mother died?”
“Not quite. I was seventeen.”
“So young. Still a child, really,” he murmured, feeling a pang of pity. “Your father?”
“Not in the picture.” Her cheeks flamed at the admission. “I told you, my mother had a thing for bad choices.”
He wanted to reach across and place his hand over hers, but the gesture would be a lie. It would speak of intimacy and affection and those qualities were not on offer.
“What do you know of him?”
Her smile was wry. “He was a musician. So I guess that’s something I should be grateful for.”
“And?”
She shook her head. “It was a drunken one-night stand.” She clamped her lips together to stop from confiding the rest of the sordid mess to him. The way her mother had tried to get money from him; not simply child support but a fortune.
“I see. I spot a pattern.”
She nodded. “Did you …” she hesitated and he nodded to encourage her. “Did you have any idea that your dad …”
She let the question fade off into the air. It was a very sensitive issue, and she was conscious of being an instrument of pain to him.
“No.” He leaned forward, his elbows pressed on the table. “He loved my mother. Adored her. And it was mutual. If she ever found out about your brother …”
“I have no plans to tell her,” she said seriously. And now she was the one who reached over and pressed her hand over his. The gesture did everything it was intended to: he felt the comfort of her touch and it terrified him. He pulled away.
Chastened and rejected, she spoke with a quiet dignity. “My brother and your mother, they are the innocents in this. They haven’t done anything wrong. Only a masochist would want to inflict pain on them.”
He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “What if hurting my mother was the only way to help your brother?”
“I would hate to make that choice,” she said honestly. “But if you knew my brother, you’d know that he’d make any sacrifice necessary to avoid paining anyone. He wouldn’t want to stay at Fjord Academy if he thought the only way he was there was because some woman was being made miserable. Your dad should have cleaned this up while he was alive to do so.” Her expression was gentle but the words rang with judgement. “But he didn’t have any intention of doing that.”
He didn’t like hearing her condemnation of his father. “You spoke to him?” He urged, interested in the details of her meeting with his father.
“Yes.” She pressed her lips together.
“And?”
“I’ve told you,” she shied away from throwing the truth at him, though she knew how satisfying it would be. “He made sure the same rules applied to me. Just as they had my mother.”
“That’s not an answer and you know it.”
Her discretion was an attempt to save him pain, though he couldn’t have known it. “What do you want me to say?”
“What did he say to you? Did he indicate that he wished he had told my mother the truth?”
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right. That’s exactly what I took it to mean when he basically stonewalled me into signing an updated confidentiality agreement.”
Christos compressed his lips angrily. It wasn’t Elle’s fault. She was repeating facts he’d hounded out of her. But her stories cast neither his father nor her mother in flattering lights.
“He would have done anything to spare my mother pain.”
She knew it wasn’t wise, but she couldn’t help remarking tartly, “Except to refrain from cheating on her?”
He didn’t react visibly. “If your mother looked anything like you, I imagine he found her irresistible.”
“No, that’s not fair,” she said with a shake of her head. “I don’t condone my mother’s behaviour but she wasn’t the one who had a duty of fidelity to your mother. My mom didn’t cheat. Your dad did.”
“Isos. Perhaps.” His smile was transitory.
“Not perhaps. Definitely.” She sighed. “But I doubt we’ll ever agree.”
“So your brother goes to one of the best academies in America. And you?”
“Nothing so exceptional, I assure you.” Elle thought back to her high school days with a shudder. “We were more metal detectors at the gates than Olympic length swimming pools in the gym.”
“This didn’t strike you as unfair?”
Her cheeks flushed. “No.”
“You didn’t resent your brother even a tiny bit.”
“No.” She stood up, signalling that the conversation was at an end. “Do you mind if I go to bed?”
He looked at his watch. “It’s eight o’clock.”
“I know.”
“You don’t have to ask my permission,” he said darkly.
“Good to know.” She smiled in his general direction and then walked numbly through the downstairs living area, weaving through the expensive furniture. He caught her at the bottom of the stairs. And because Elle hadn’t been expecting him to follow, her expression showed her consternation. He read it easily before she masked her feelings behind a bland look of curiosity.
“I’ll come with you.”
And damn her traitorous heart; it began to shred in her chest as the prospect of the only thing that pushed thought and worry away loomed in front of her.
“Sure.”
And so a pattern emerged from the ruins of their agreement. When they were in bed, there was nothing to consider but how they craved one another. There was no enmity, no family hatred, no secretive contract, no confidentiality agreement and certainly no money being given in exchange for what they shared.
In bed, they were equals.
Two people as dominated by passion as each other.
But when dawn pierced the magic of the night, there was such a monumental shift that Elle was left feeling winded for hours.
When morning broke, he went for a run. Then, he had taken to showering downstairs. She tried not to be offended; the bedroom he usually used was on the first floor and his clothes were in the wardrobe there. It simply made sense. She tried not to see it as a rejection of intimacy.
But when he emerged in his suits, looking immaculate and untouchable, she had to box away every instinct that ran through her. She could no longer touch. She could no longer kiss. She barely dared to smile. They were strangers sharing a space, that was all.
While he was at work, she existed in a dream-like state, floating around the house in a haze of perpetual boredom and frustration, unless she was at the piano. Then, everything briefly shifted back into focus. She was herself again.
One evening, a week after meeting Christos Rakanti, Elle was sitting at the piano, but not playing it. She heard him enter and stood, guilty somehow.
He eyed her from the entrance to the kitchen, and said nothing. His look was intense; spikes of awareness hummed across her back.
“Hi.” She swallowed. Butterflies were partying inside her belly.
He stepped towards her and she noticed, then, that he held a bag in his hand. “Here.” The single word made her insides clench.
“What is it?”
His smile was tight. “Have a look.”
She took the bag with a strange sense. Inside was tissue paper. She lifted it and pulled out the fabric. “A dress?” She blinked up at him in confusion. “I have clothes.”
“I thought you’d like to come back to the scene of the almost-crime.”
She shook her head. “kómma?”
“Yeah. Call it going full-circle.” He took the fabric and laid it over the piano, then began to lift her summery dress over her head. She wore only a pair of cotton briefs. He groaned softly as he skimmed his hands across her sides before lifting the new dress in place. It was a soft grey, low at the front to reveal her cleavage and bias-cut to about three
inches above the knee.
“This dress is showing way more skin than I usually do,” she said uncertainly, checking her reflection in one of the windows.
His laugh was mocking. “Have you forgotten the ensemble you wore the night we met?”
“That was Hannah’s idea. Hannah’s jeans.”
“And you wore them brilliantly,” he pointed out dismissively. “Come on.”
He waited with a slightly impatient air as she slipped the only pair of heels she’d brought onto her feet and fluffed her hair away from her face. She was wearing a bare minimum of makeup but she suspected that a request to go upstairs and decorate her face would be met with abrupt disapproval and so she simply scooped up her handbag, knowing she had some lipgloss and blush in there.
His car was parked out front and as they reached it he opened the front passenger door. She paused to thank him but their eyes met and she almost lost her footing. He reached for her, putting his hand under her elbow.
She was shivering inexplicably. It felt like a date. And that was a ludicrous idea, because they were nothing beyond the bedroom. This was just a convenient arrangement for him, and sooner or later he would tire of her. He had bullied her into staying because it suited him. He was sticking to his routine: going to his nightclub. That she was accompanying him was incidental. Had she not, he would have found another woman to pass the night with.
The idea filled her with a sense of suffocating dread.
“You look beautiful,” he said, his tone deep.
“Thank you. So do you.” She blinked up at him and wished she could remember all the reasons she had to loathe him.
As he drove back into the heart of the city, she took in the dazzling scenery by night. The merging of ancient and modern, crumbling and stately. “Did you grow up in Athens?”
He shook his head, changing gears expertly. “No. Our property is down south.” He regarded her thoughtfully, shifted gears, then put his hand on her leg, squeezing her thigh. Instant awareness zinged through her. “On the edge of a small city overlooking the ocean. It is very idyllic. Different to Athens.”
“I think Athens is spectacular.”
“Yes. But it is … grimy. Gritty. Voula is filled with white washed buildings, red terracotta roofs, olive trees in pots and stray cats sunning themselves on every footpath. The ocean is clean and inviting.” He removed his hand and she was instantly cold. “I used to swim every morning.”
“For pleasure?”
“Is there something wrong with that?”
She tried to bite back the smile but it burst across her face like sunshine. “I just don’t see you as the frolicking in the ocean kind-of-guy.”
He laughed and the sound sent warmth running down her spine. He hadn’t laughed like that since the first night they’d met. Feeling the happiness in his voice made her realise how perfect everything had been then. At least, how perfect it had seemed.
“It was exercise,” he said almost shame-facedly. “And competition. A few of the other boys from town and I would see who could reach the yacht fastest.”
“The yacht?”
He slanted her a look. “My father’s. It was permanently moored off the coast.”
It was cold water to the warm flame of sweetness that had been settling around her. “I see.” Yachts. Villas. Billion-dollar empires. When she thought of how she had been reduced to looking under the sofa cushions, searching for every last penny, it made their circumstances seem like worlds apart.
“It sounds like a beautiful place to grow up,” she observed softly.
He heard the reserve she was trying to conceal and focussed his eyes straight ahead. But his mind was ticking over the problem of Elle. And she was a problem. A beautiful, sexy, distracting-as-hell problem that he needed to solve.
He couldn’t keep her at his villa indefinitely.
If his mother knew that he was sleeping with the daughter of the whore American who had seduced Filip, it would destroy her. She would find it impossible to ever look Elle in the face. Her presence would be a constant thorn in Xanthe Rakanti’s side and Christos had no intention of causing his mother that kind of heartbreak.
Even the notion was a red herring that should have served more as a red-light.
He had never introduced a woman to his mother. Not in a romantic sense. Why was the idea even occurring to him? And about Elle?
Because he was fighting with fire; playing chicken with a freight train and he didn’t know how to get out of the path of it. How many mornings had he woken up, determined that it would be the day he told her to go? How many days had he sat in his office, thinking of her, smelling her lingering scent on his skin, aching physically to get back to his home and see her once more? How many times had he been mid-conversation with an employee and let his words trail into nothingness as he recalled something amusing she had said, or felt a pang of remorse over the expression of hurt that seemed to permanently haunt her expression?
Yet every day he told himself there was still time.
“And were you always destined to step into your father’s shoes?” She pondered, her eyes focussed on the Maserati emblem of the steering wheel.
“Nai,” he nodded. “But my father’s enterprises are managed by George Papado, an old family friend. With the exception of his shipping interests which I took over several years ago.”
“Took over?”
“Bought.”
A frown creased a little line between her brows. “Why would you have to buy them?”
He pulled the car to a stop in front of the nightclub. “Because, beautiful Elle, I wanted them.”
She swallowed, feeling like a bug being examined beneath a microscope. “Couldn’t you just … have them?”
He laughed. “No. It doesn’t work like that.”
“Of course.” She shook her head, feeling like a naïve twit.
He cupped her cheek in the palm of his hand and she had a sense that he was going to say something. Something that he was weighing his words carefully for. Please don’t end this, she thought and the silent incantation shocked her.
She must be crazy! Her life was waiting for her. Didn’t she want to get back to it? She’d done what she had set out to achieve. Filip’s education was taken care of.
In the end, he said nothing. He dropped his hand and stepped from the vehicle, crossing to her door with his athletic stride. “Let’s go.”
She followed him with a sinking heart.
What had been left of her free-will seemed to have blown out to sea; stolen, perhaps, by the ancient mythological figures who haunted the streets of modern-day Athens. She was a subject of his will alone.
She fell into step beside him and stared straight ahead. Whatever happened, she was ready for it.
kómma was heaving. As they walked in the doors, the crowds seemed to part, as they had the first time. Now, not distracted by determination and brazen, she considered that Christos Rakanti had caused that parting. He was a powerful man, instantly recognisable, and there was an air of respect and reverence as he strode through the revellers. Elle faltered, slowing to watch the Christos Effect in action. People looked at him as though he was a God. Women whispered behind their hands; others blinked their lashes and pouted their lips. Men seemed transfixed by envy and admiration.
Elle’s heart was racing.
The chasm was growing.
He paused, realising she wasn’t keeping up with him, and backtracked to her. She was frozen to the spot, her eyes like enormous pools of lead in her face, shimmering and deep. “Are you okay?” He scanned her face with apparent concern and she nodded jerkily.
“Yeah. I’m fine.” She was so far from fine she couldn’t believe it. But what could she say to him?
He laced his fingers through hers and brought her with him, keeping her close as he picked a line towards the booths that seemed exclusive and elite somehow. A waiter appeared instantly. “My usual,” he said, his gaze pulled to Elle as though she were magnetic.
“And mineral water.”
Her heart turned over in her chest as he took the seat beside her.
The place was absolutely humming. “Is it always this busy?” She asked, having to lean closer to be sure he heard.
He nodded. “At the moment.”
“I’m surprised …” Her observation was cut off by the appearance of two men at their table. Dressed casually, one man reached over and shook Christos’s hand while the other pressed a kiss to either side of Elle’s cheeks, before they switched.
Christos spoke in Greek and Elle could only sit in bemusement as conversation swirled enthusiastically around her.
“I’m Paolo.” The younger of the two said, sliding in to sit beside her.
“Hi. Elle.”
“Elle.” The way he said her name was accented, turning it into ‘Ell-eh’. She smiled at him, but she was distracted by the sound of Christos speaking in his natural language. “How do you know my cousin?”
“Your cousin?” She appraised the man with renewed interest. Was he related by blood to her half-brother? She studied his face for similarities but beyond their tanned complexions saw nothing similar.
“Yeah. He hasn’t mentioned me? I’m offended.”
She laughed, as he’d intended her to. “We hardly know each other,” she demurred, not wanting to hurt his feelings. She felt something beneath the table and lifted her head sharply. Christos was squeezing her leg, his eyes probing hers.
She frowned quizzically before turning her attention back to Paolo. “Do you live in Athens?”
“Hell, no. I find Athens too crowded.”
“Do you? It’s a lovely city, from what I’ve seen.” She wrinkled her nose. “Admittedly that’s not much though.”
“It has its charms. The history is unique. The food excellent.” She thought of the meals Christos brought home with him each night and nodded. Nothing would ever taste better, surely, than food enjoyed by the pool, opposite Christos Rakanti.
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“Eh? Christos. You haven’t been taking this beautiful woman to the best restaurants in town? That’s not like you.”