Czytaj książkę: «Modern Romance January 2017 Books 5 - 8»

CHAPTER ONE

IF XANDER TRAKAS had thought his week couldn’t get any worse, this was the nail in the coffin to finish him off.

His American lawyer, a thorough man if ever there was one, had confirmed that Xander’s marriage to Elizabeth Young was indeed registered with all the relevant jurisdictions and authorities. However, there was no evidence of their annulment.

They were still married.

He grabbed the back of his neck and rubbed it hard, breathing deeply.

The whole Celebrity Spy! scandal was the mess that just kept giving. What had started as a relatively small teaser promising to reveal the ‘juiciest and most scandalous details’ about the world’s most eligible and debauched bachelors had grown into the scandal of the decade. And to think he had dismissed that initial teaser... Yes, he was considered one of the world’s most eligible bachelors, but debauched? He’d heard plenty of lewd stories about his new brothers in arms over the years. Compared to them he was practically a virgin.

Okay, that might be a notion too far, but a few monogamous affairs throughout the years had nothing on the legendary exploits of Dante Mancini, Benjamin Carter or Sheikh Zayn Al-Ghamdi.

The subsequent articles, not just in Celebrity Spy! but in its rival tabloids and websites the world over, had painted a picture of himself he simply did not recognise. Three of his ex-lovers had sold him out, embellishing and sensationalising what, to him, had been perfectly normal healthy affairs. Half a dozen women he struggled to remember even meeting had sold tales of their nights together. It was complete rubbish.

Strangely enough, the only woman from his past he hadn’t worried about selling her soul for a piece of gold was the woman he’d made the mistake of marrying a decade ago.

All it needed was for one tenacious reporter to go digging through the court records and his marriage would be there for the world to see. It wouldn’t take them long to put two and two together and see that while his jilted Greek fiancée had been falling apart at the seams, he’d been romancing and marrying an American beauty, oblivious to the destruction he’d left behind.

He’d never spoken of his marriage to Elizabeth. Not to anyone. Not his parents. Not his friends.

They’d never lived as man and wife. They’d met, married and gone their separate ways in a mad two-week period on the honeymooner’s paradise of St Francis.

But their separate ways did not include the annulment Elizabeth had sworn—with an uncouth curse thrown at him for good measure—she would obtain.

The last time he’d seen her had been in their hotel villa. She’d had tears streaming down her shell-shocked face.

Did she know their annulment had been denied? Did the billionaire matchmaker know she was the legal wife of a billionaire herself? It beggared belief that she didn’t know, but in all their years apart she’d never reached out to him, not once.

And he’d never reached out to her. He’d pushed her face from his mind almost completely.

He would have to tread carefully.

The report he’d had compiled on her had revealed a different woman from the one he’d known then. She was no longer a carefree nineteen-year-old who lived for nothing more than to feel the wind in her hair and the sun on her face. In the decade since they’d gone their separate ways she’d built a new and successful life for herself.

His phone vibrated, breaking through his thoughts. Hoping it would be his lawyer, who he’d ordered to find out exactly why their annulment had failed, he only just stopped himself pressing the accept button in time. The caller was his father, someone he was not in the mood to speak to.

Xander couldn’t face another argument. The daily calls from Greece were becoming increasingly fractious, from both sides. Late last night, his sister-in-law had been admitted into hospital with alcohol poisoning. Liver failure had been diagnosed. Unless Xander’s brother stopped shovelling drugs into his system, his body would be the next to break down.

All of this would have been difficult enough to cope with without having to deal with the major press intrusion the Celebrity Spy! scandal had unleashed.

Tonight he needed to keep himself together and his head straight. He would return home first thing in the morning but for now he had the annual gala for the Hope Foundation, the main charity he supported, to attend. The press would be out in force. All four of the men in the eye of the scandal would be under the same roof for the first time. They all supported this charity, and evidence was growing that it was now suffering because of its association with them.

Although their businesses lay in different fields, they’d been rivals for years. All four of them were strong, ultra-wealthy men with hard noses for business. There had been nothing friendly about their interactions. Tonight, he suspected they would have to find a way to breach their usual silent antagonism.

All four of them were feeling the pressure. They were in the eye of the storm and the sooner they found their way out of it, the better.

Two weeks later

Elizabeth Young stepped into her West Village apartment with a very real sense of relief. After a week away in Rome, she welcomed the return to the space she called home.

She loved her apartment, set in the heart of New York’s oldest district. While it wasn’t the largest piece of real estate around—she earned excellent money but not that excellent—she had never lived with such contentment anywhere else.

For perhaps the dozenth time since she’d landed at JFK, she checked her cell phone, telling herself it was concern for Piper that had her looking and not the looming possibility of her ex-husband getting in touch.

It was hearing Piper vocalise his name that had her so on edge. The beautiful Australian had been openly prying her with questions. Elizabeth didn’t blame her. In Piper’s shoes she would have been curious too. Three of the men implicated in the Celebrity Spy! scandal had called on her services so it was only natural the fourth would require her assistance too.

Dante did say Xander must call you too.

Were those Piper’s words? They had definitely been something along those lines and had forced Elizabeth to confront what she had spent almost a fortnight in denial about.

Benjamin, Zayn and Dante had all said they’d been recommended to her by Xander. He’d passed her details to them.

She had no idea how her ex-husband knew what she did for a living or how he’d got her details. Leviathan Solutions was run in utter secrecy on a strict word-of-mouth basis.

She assured herself that just because he’d recommended her to the other men it didn’t mean he required her services for himself. His situation was different from the others. Timos SE had been solely owned by the Trakas family for generations.

As a company, it owned countless beauty and clothing lines that were sold around the world. Their customer base couldn’t care less about the scandal. They had no shareholders to pacify or stock markets to tumble from. Xander didn’t need to marry to preserve a family image...

In those first few raw days after he’d dumped her, she’d lived in a cold uncomprehending fog. She would wake hoping it had all been a bad dream and stretch her fingers out, hoping to find him there.

On the fourth day she’d checked her cell phone for the hundredth time, praying for word from him. At that exact same moment her mother had walked into her room. Elizabeth had looked from the cell in her hand to the woman who’d raised her, and the rose-coloured glasses she’d worn all her life had slipped off.

Romance and everlasting love were myths. Her parents were prime examples of this truth and she’d been a naïve idiot to think she would be any different.

From that moment her life changed. Everything.

Over the subsequent years she’d refused to think of the man who’d broken her heart. As far as she’d been concerned, he didn’t exist, which worked for three years until she stumbled on a profile article about the newly appointed head of Timos SE, Xander Trakas. Xander had managed the seemingly impossible and broken into the American market.

Reading it, she’d learned exactly how wealthy he and the Trakas family were, and how powerful; on a par with the Onassis family. It was through this article she’d learned about Ana Soukis. His childhood sweetheart. Xander and Ana had been going to marry but Ana had tragically died in a car accident before they could exchange their vows.

Xander had been twenty when Ana died. The same age he’d been when he’d married her, the lying, cheating dirtbag.

Either he’d married Elizabeth when he was engaged to another woman or he’d married her when he should have been grieving the love of his life.

She’d burnt the article and thanked her lucky stars the lying, cheating scumbag had dumped her before it had been too late to get an annulment. She didn’t think she would have been able to handle a divorce.