Czytaj książkę: «Sold For The Greek's Heir»

CHAPTER ONE

IN THE PIT, Jax Antonakos climbed out of the low-slung car, adrenalin still pumping fiercely from the excitement of the race. Only a show race for charity, though, he reminded himself wryly, bracing himself as he was engulfed by a large, noisy crowd of people.

He yanked off his helmet, revealing tousled black hair and eyes as strikingly green as emeralds, and the usual collective female gasp of appreciation sounded. While he stripped off his track regalia, photographers flashed cameras, journalists demanded quotes and shot questions at him and beautiful women tried to sidle closer to him, but then all of that was the norm in Jax’s goldfish bowl of a world.

Jax, however, ignored all of them to stride over and congratulate the winner of the race and the reigning world champion.

‘You gave me a good run for a man who hasn’t been behind a wheel in years!’ Dirk conceded cheerfully. ‘Maybe you shouldn’t be pushing numbers behind a desk, maybe you should still be racing.’

‘No, Jax is a business genius,’ a female voice crowed from Jax’s other side, and before he could react the bubbly brunette wrapped her arms round him with enthusiasm. ‘Thank you so much for stepping in last minute to do this when Stefan had to let me down. You know how grateful I am.’

‘Kat,’ Jax acknowledged, frowning as the photographers predictably went for a shot of them as a couple. But he and Kat Valtinos weren’t a couple, no matter how much the media and their families wanted them to be, both of them being conveniently young, single and very rich.

Jax stepped back from Kat with a guarded smile. He liked Kat, he had always liked her but his father was in for a disappointment if he was still hoping for a dynastic marriage that would unite their parents’ massive business empires. Unfortunately the photos would only encourage him in that delusion.

‘Let’s get you a drink,’ Kat urged, closing a possessive arm round his spine. ‘I really appreciate you flying out here and doing this for me today at such short notice—’

‘It was for a good cause,’ Jax pointed out. ‘And you’re a friend—’

‘A friend who could be so much more,’ Kat whispered with laden intent in his ear.

‘I enjoyed the race,’ Jax admitted, choosing to be tactful and sidestep her leading comment. After all, there was no kind way of telling her why she was wasting her time chasing him and, with his reputation for womanising, it would be sheer hypocrisy for him to do so. Even now he retained fond memories of Kat’s raunchy wildness when they were teenagers and he had been on the outskirts of the same social set but he still wasn’t willing to marry a woman who had slept with every one of his friends. If that was a double standard, so be it, he acknowledged grimly.

In any case, he didn’t want a wife, any kind of wife. Nor was he prepared to deliver the grandchildren his father, Heracles Antonakos, was so eager to have. Parenting was a minefield: Jax knew that better than anyone because he had stumbled through his own very unhappy childhood, filled as it had been with constant change and even more constant emotional drama.

His parents had gone through a bitter divorce when he was only a toddler and for the following twenty-five years his father had pretty much ignored his younger son’s existence. Heracles’s elder son, Argo, had been born from his first marriage. Widowed, Heracles had plunged into his second marriage far too quickly and he had never forgiven his second wife, Jax’s mother, for her subsequent infidelity. Jax had paid the price for his mother’s extra-marital affair in more ways than one. He had had no safe harbour from which to escape the fallout of his mother’s broken relationships, nor any paternal support. He had struggled alone through Mariana’s divorces, suicide attempts and regular stays in rehabilitation facilities.

And one of his earliest memories was of hiding in terror in a cupboard from one of his mother’s druggie meltdowns. He must have been about three years old, he mused, old enough and wise enough to know that he would be kicked and punched if she found him before the rage wore off. His mother, a gorgeous, much-adored film star on the public stage and a drug-addled monster behind closed doors. That was the woman whose tender mercies his father had left him to rely on as a defenceless child.

And then, when he was twenty-six years old, everything had suddenly and quite miraculously changed. His half-brother, Argo, had died in a bungled mugging in a city street and without the smallest warning Heracles Antonakos had moved on surprisingly fast from his grief and had begun to take a passionate interest in the younger son he had snubbed for years. Of course, Jax’s mother had been gone by then, Jax reminded himself ruefully, but he still could not adequately explain or understand the very abruptness of his father’s change in attitude. Even so, the paternal recognition and support he had craved from his earliest years had unexpectedly and finally become his. Naturally he still wondered if his father’s change of heart would last and life being what it was, of course, he had discovered a whole new set of challenges because life as the Antonakos heir was not all peaches and cream.

As the only son of one of the richest men in the world Jax had more money than he knew what to do with. Everywhere he went in Europe he was photographed and treated like a celebrity. Bands of adoring, manipulative and rapacious women tracked and hunted him much as if he were big game. But in the business field, he reminded himself with determined positivity, he had countless stimulating projects to command his interest and engage his brilliant mind.

One of Jax’s bodyguards brought a phone to him, his expression dour and apologetic. Jax compressed his lips and accepted the predictable call from his father. Heracles ranted and raved in a rage about the risk Jax had taken by going on the race track and driving at breakneck speeds. Jax said nothing because over the past two years he had learned that arguing or trying to soothe only extended such frenzied sermons. Since Argo’s shocking death, Heracles had developed a morbid and excessive fear of Jax participating in any activity that could possibly harm him and if he could have got away with wrapping his only surviving son in cotton wool and packing him away safely in a box he would have done so. While Jax valued his father’s new apparent attachment to him even if he didn’t quite trust it, he loathed the restrictive and interfering trappings of expectation that came with it.

Only for the sake of peace had Jax accepted the five heavily armed bodyguards he didn’t need and who accompanied him everywhere he went. But he remained every bit as stubborn and fiercely independent as he had always been and when he felt the need to relieve stress he still went deep-sea diving, mountain climbing and flying. He still slept with unsuitable women as well...the sort of women even his father couldn’t expect him to marry.

And why not? He loved being single and free as the air because he hated anyone trying to tell him what to do. On the only occasions he had strayed from that practical stance he had ended up in disastrous relationships, so now he didn’t ever do relationships, he only did sex and uncomplicated sex at that. Once he had run off with another man’s fiancée and barely lived to tell the tale, he recalled darkly.

Franca had crept into his bed one night when he was drunk and the deed of betrayal had been done before he’d even recognised who he was doing it with. Franca, of course, had simply used him to escape a life that had no longer suited her but he hadn’t grasped that little fact. He had fallen hook, line and sinker for her ‘damsel in distress’ vibe long before he’d appreciated that he was dealing with a highly manipulative and destructive alcoholic. He had betrayed his friendship with his former business partner, Rio, but in the end he had more than paid his dues sorting Franca out. But had he learned? Had he hell. After Franca had come his second biggest mistake...

Yet another female-shaped mistake. So, he didn’t want a wife and he didn’t want children either and nothing, certainly not any dormant desire to please his long-absent father, was going to change that, he reflected cynically as Kat Valtinos approached him bearing drinks and a winning smile...

* * *

‘I hate you doing work like this,’ Kreon Thiarkis hissed under his breath as his daughter brought him a drink. ‘It’s demeaning—’

‘Hard work is never demeaning, Dad,’ Lucy declared, her dimples flashing as she smiled down soothingly at him. ‘Don’t be a snob. I’m not half as posh as you are and I never will be.’

Kreon bit back tart words of disagreement because he didn’t want to hurt his daughter’s feelings, most particularly because she had only been in his life for the last six months and he was afraid of driving her away by acting like a heavy-handed parent. After all, Lucy had never had a proper parent to look out for her, he acknowledged guiltily. But fiercely independent and proud as she was at twenty-one years old, she had been very much down on her luck when she’d finally approached Kreon, toting his baby granddaughter in her arms, both of them shabbily dressed and half starved. The older man’s heart softened at the thought of little Bella, who was the most adorable toddler and the light of his life and his wife, Iola’s, for he and Iola had met and married too late in life to have a family. He loved having the two of them in his home but he was firmly convinced that his daughter and her child still very much needed a husband to look after them when he himself was no longer around.

And that would have been so easy to achieve if only Lucy weren’t so defensive and insecure, Kreon reflected in frustration, because his daughter was an extraordinarily beautiful girl. In the bar where she worked men stopped in their tracks simply to stare at her. With a mane of strawberry-blonde curls reaching halfway down her back, creamy skin and big blue eyes, she was a classic beauty and dainty as a doll. She made more on tips than any other waitress in the hotel and was, he had been reliably assured by the owner, who was a friend, a terrific asset to business.

Lucy went about her work, ruefully aware that the job she had insisted on taking only annoyed her father. Unfortunately, being a single parent was an expensive challenge even with the wonderful support her father and stepmother had given her in recent months. She was very grateful that she had come to Greece to finally meet her long-lost father for he and his wife had freely given both her and her daughter love, kindness and acceptance. Her father was the son of a Greek who had married an Englishwoman and he had grown up in London. Kreon was a wonderfully supportive parent and grandparent. Without a word of protest or reproach he had taken in Lucy and her child even though she hadn’t warned him about Bella when he’d first invited her out to Greece.

But while Lucy was willing to accept free accommodation as well as her stepmother Iola’s help as a sitter with Bella, she was determined not to become a permanent burden or to take too much advantage of the older couple’s generosity. She was willing to admit that she had desperately needed help when she’d first arrived in Athens but she was trying very hard now to stand on her own two feet. Her earnings might be small but that salary meant she could pay for the necessities like clothing for herself and her child and for the moment that was enough to ease her pride.

As she stepped away from a customer, her boss and the hotel owner, Andreus, signalled to her. ‘We’re hosting an important business meeting here in the rear conference room tomorrow morning at eleven,’ he informed her. ‘I’d like you to serve the drinks and snacks. I only need you for a couple of hours but I’ll pay you for a full shift.’

‘I’ll check with Iola but that should be fine because she doesn’t usually go out in the morning,’ Lucy said, before taking off to serve a customer waving his hand in the air to get her attention.

The customer tried to chat her up and get her phone number but Lucy simply smiled politely and ignored his efforts because she wasn’t even slightly interested in dating, or indeed in anything more physical, being well aware that the very fact she already had a child encouraged most men to assume that she would be a good bet for a casual encounter. She had been there, done that, lost the tee shirt and got a baby for her pains. Unhappily, as a green-as-grass nineteen-year-old virgin she hadn’t grasped that she was involved in a casual fling until it was far too late to protect herself and she had been ditched. In fact, having been treated with such devastating contempt and dismissal by Bella’s father, that final humiliation was still etched into her soul like a burn of shame that refused to heal whenever she thought about it...which was why she didn’t allow herself to think about it or him very often.

In any case, what was the point in agonising over past mistakes and misjudgements, not to mention the most painful and cruel rejections she had suffered? Agonising never did change anything. Lucy had learned that the hard way time and time again when she was a vulnerable child growing up in care, subject to the whims of others and unable to control where she lived or even who she lived with. Now it meant that she found it hard to trust people and if she didn’t have a certain amount of independence and choice she tended to feel horribly trapped and powerless.

But life, she reminded herself with dogged positivity, was getting better because for the first time in years she was daring to start putting down roots. She was happier than she had been in years and hoping to come up with a plan to improve her career prospects for Bella’s sake. Very probably she would accept her father’s offer to pay for some sort of job training or further education that would enable her to move out of low-paid employment. Perhaps it was finally time to start making some long-term decisions and think like a responsible adult, she told herself firmly.

‘You’re worth so much more than this kind of grunt work...’ Bella’s father had told Lucy two years earlier in Spain.

Well, look just how badly daring to have dreams and believe in them had turned out for her then, Lucy reflected, rigid with regret and pain as she stood at the bar to collect an order. Her friend at the time, another waitress called Tara, had been far more realistic about that relationship.

‘He’ll sleep with you and dump you and move on the minute he gets bored,’ Tara had forecast, although the words she had used had been much earthier. ‘Guys like that don’t stick with girls like us. We’re only good enough to party with for a few nights.’

Perspiration broke on Lucy’s short upper lip and she wanted to punch herself hard for letting herself drift even momentarily down that bad memory lane, because hindsight only made her more ashamed of how stupid and naïve she had been. It was not as if she hadn’t known what men were like, not as if she had grown up in some little princess castle, always protected and loved. She should have known better and she had yet to forgive herself for her rashness.

But at the end of her shift, when she got home to her father’s very comfortable small town house and crept into the bedroom she shared with her daughter, she realised that nothing was quite that cut and dried. Bella slept nestled in her cot, curly black hair dark against the bedding, her olive skin flushed by sleep, long lashes screening her bright green eyes. Bella was gorgeous, like a little angel, Lucy thought with her eyes stinging and, although she could be sorry for everything else, she could not find it in her heart to regret Bella’s existence in any way.

‘Come with us to this dinner on Saturday night,’ Iola urged over breakfast the next morning. She was a curvy brunette in her late forties with smiling dark eyes. ‘It would please your father so much.’

Lucy went pink as she washed her daughter’s face clean of breakfast debris. She knew that her dining out with them would please Kreon, but she also knew it would entail fending off the advances of at least two handpicked young men because her father’s current main aim in life seemed to centre on finding her an eligible boyfriend. In that line Kreon was old-fashioned because he refused to credit that Lucy choosing to remain a single parent could be a viable plan for the future.

‘Mum... Mum,’ Bella carolled cheerfully as she was released from the high chair and set down to toddle somewhat clumsily round the room.

Lucy steadied her daughter as she almost fell over the toy box and ruffled her untidy curls. Curls, aside of the colour, just like her own, frizzy and ungovernable in humid weather, explosive when washed. Lucy looked back at her stepmother uncomfortably. She felt like an ungrateful brat for her reluctance to do what her father wanted her to do. ‘I’m just not interested in meeting anyone at present...maybe in a few months I’ll feel differently,’ she added without much conviction.

‘You had a bad breakup and you went through a lot alone afterwards,’ Iola acknowledged gently. ‘But your father’s a man and he doesn’t get it. I did try to explain to him that this is more of a healing time for you—’

‘Yes, that’s it, that’s exactly it!’ Lucy exclaimed, giving the older woman a sudden impulsive and appreciative hug. ‘I’m not ready right now, not sure if I’ll ever be though...’

‘Not all men are like Bella’s father. There are decent caring men out there,’ Iola reminded her quietly. ‘Nobody knows that better than me. I kissed a lot of frogs before I met Kreon.’

Lucy grinned and then laughed because her stepmother really did understand her viewpoint. A few minutes later, she left the town house and set out to walk to the small select Hotel Palati where she worked. Sited in an exclusive district in Athens, the hotel catered mainly to a business clientele.

Her father had met Iola when he’d engaged her as a PA in a property rental business that had eventually gone bust. But then Kreon had led a chequered ‘boom to bust and back again’ life and had been divorced once for infidelity. Lucy had respected his honesty with her. Even on the subject of her late mother, Kreon had proved to be painfully frank. Kreon hadn’t once whitewashed his own failings or hidden the fact that he had gained a criminal record over some pyramid selling scheme he had got involved with as a younger man. Yet in spite of that honesty, Lucy still wasn’t quite sure what actually funded her father’s comfortable lifestyle.

She knew that Kreon gambled and took bets on a near professional basis and that he was always enthusiastically involved in some hopefully lucrative business scheme of one kind or another. Whatever he did, he seemed to be successful at it. Even so, she would not have been entirely surprised to learn that some of his ventures skated a little too close to the edge of breaking the law. But basically because he and Iola had given Lucy and her daughter both the home and the love Lucy had never known before, she closed her eyes to that suspicion and minded her own business the best she could.

After all, there truly were shades of grey between the black and white of absolute right and absolute wrong, she ruminated ruefully. Nothing and nobody was perfect. Even at the height of her passionate infatuation with Jax, she had recognised that he was flawed and all too human. He had been moody, controlling, domineering and arrogant and they had fought like cat and dog on a regular basis because, while Lucy might be only five feet tall and undersized, she was no pushover. At heart, she was stubborn and gutsy and quick-tempered. Even if Jax hadn’t let her down so horribly, it would never have worked between them, she reasoned, feeling pleasantly philosophical on that score and firmly stifling the painful little push of heartache that still hollowed out her tummy. So, she’d had her heart broken just as Iola and thousands of other women and men had. It had only made her more resilient and less foolish and naïve, she told herself squarely.

The hotel manager showed her into the lofty-ceilinged back room, which had been comprehensively redecorated only weeks earlier with an opulence that was calculated to appeal to the more discerning customers.

Sometimes when Lucy daydreamed she wondered, if she had come from a more fortunate background, would she have become one of the elegant well-educated young businesswomen she saw round the hotel. Unfortunately she had been handicapped at the outset of life by her birth. Her parents’ marriage had broken down after her mother had had an affair.

‘Annabel always thought some better man was waiting for her round the next corner,’ Kreon had said wryly of Lucy’s mother. ‘I wasn’t rich and I lived by my wits and she had big ideas. We were living in London then where she was struggling to get the finance to set up her nursery business. But my father had returned to Greece after my mother died and he fell ill out here. I had to go to him. When I left London I had no idea Annabel was pregnant and when I contacted her to tell her that I was coming back she told me we were finished because she had met someone else. Now from what you’re telling me, it seems she may have learned that she had this dreadful disease and she didn’t want me around even though she had my child. I can’t understand that, I will never understand that...’

And Lucy couldn’t understand it either because, just listening to Kreon talking, she had recognised that he had loved her mother and had planned to return to London to be with her. But the more Kreon had spoken of her mother’s beauty and her feverish love and need for fresh male attention, the more Lucy had suspected that there definitely had been another man and Annabel had burnt her boats for ever with Kreon shortly before illness had cruelly claimed her future.

Lucy had been two years old when Annabel was hospitalised and her daughter put into care. Her only memory of her mother was of a beautiful redhead lying in bed and shouting at her, so she wasn’t sure that the mother who had surrendered her to the authorities had been that much of a loss in the parent stakes. Kreon had described a flighty, selfish personality, ill-suited to the kind of personal sacrifices a mother was often forced to make. And when, to Lucy’s very great astonishment, Kreon had revealed that Annabel had actually had two other daughters being raised by her own mother somewhere in northern England, Lucy had been silenced by that shattering news.

Apparently she had two half-sisters somewhere, born from her mother’s previous liaisons. Some day Lucy planned to look into that startling discovery but she didn’t even know where you started in such a search because, not only had she no money to pursue enquiries, but also no names even to begin with. Naturally all these years on Kreon didn’t recall such details about Annabel’s background and history. After all, he had never met Annabel’s mother and had been stonewalled by Annabel when he’d asked to do so. All he had remembered was that Annabel never went to visit the two little girls she had left behind her and he had said that even then he had recognised that as a warning sign that Annabel’s attachments were of the shallow sort.

Lucy had counted herself lucky that she was not equally superficial because she adored Bella and would have laid down her life for her child, counting Bella as one of the few good developments in a life that had been far from easy or happy. On the other hand, had she cared less about Jax she would have been less devastated when he disappeared. My goodness, she had fallen apart at the seams and done stupid stuff, she recalled ruefully. She had been thrown off his father’s yacht and warned never to show her face at the marina again while being marched off by security guards. She had been shouted at, called nasty names and utterly humiliated in her fruitless pursuit of Jax. All because she was fundamentally stupid, she conceded with regret.

After all, it had been crazy of her to believe that she meant anything more to Jax than an easily forgettable sexual fling, and when he was done with a woman, he was definitely done. The crewman on the yacht had called her a cheap whore as he’d bodily manhandled her off the polished deck and forced her down the gangway. She had fallen, been hurt and bruised by that brutality and she had been pregnant at the time. That was one reason she had never told her father the whole truth about Bella’s parentage, preferring him to assume that Bella was the result of some one-night stand with a man in Spain. She knew Kreon would seek revenge and restitution if she ever told him the whole story.