Forbidden Greek Mistress

Chapter One

Thanasis Zacharias walked into his father’s tasteless monstrosity of a villa that took over the entire north side of a relatively obscure island in the Aegean—as his equally tasteless monstrosity of a father had commanded—and saw a ghost.

Had he been anywhere else, he would have rushed to her.

He would have crossed the marble floors, heedless and wild with the need to touch her.

He would have got his hands upon her, immediately, to feel the warmth of her skin beneath his palms. He would have crushed his mouth to hers—anything to prove that it was truly her.

That she was alive. That this wasn’t yet another one of the dreams that had haunted him relentlessly for five long years. That she was really and truly here—

It was the here that was a problem.

What was his resurrected lost love doing here?

Thanasis had grown up in this villa. This was the place where he had learned entirely too much about his father’s delight in hurting others, causing pain and sorrow wherever he could, and lifelong commitment to his own selfish ego.

It was, at best, a place of smoke and mirrors. Lies upon lies upon lies.

He had learned long ago to keep his reactions to himself, not to mention any inconvenient emotions that might present themselves at the worst possible moment.

The consequences for not doing so had always been dire.

Here, now, there was an impossible ghost standing there beneath the glittering light of the chandeliers in the villa’s great hall, and he did not dare approach her.

Not when he could not be certain how he would act.

Or what he would reveal.

Thanasis forced himself to look away from her, though it caused him actual, physical pain.

He had to do it in stages, looking back to make sure he wasn’t seeing things, then going through entire stages of grief again to make himself tear his gaze away once more.

He had to be careful. He had to monitor his stampeding heart and the blood surging through him, not to mention the expression he feared was on his face. The face he had only ever showed her—

He looked around, assessing the situation with the cool calculation that had made him such a success in business, despite his father’s appalling antics and reputation for drama.

No one had seen him enter. He had come late, deliberately.

It was clear at a glance that he had missed nothing, just the usual chaos of a typical Zacharias family event.

He could see three of his five half siblings from his place by the ostentatious marble arches in the entryway, though he had no doubt that the others were somewhere about.

They always were. They circled like sharks, because that’s what they were.

Forever jockeying for favor and position, when surely they should have known better by now.

Thanasis was the heir to all of this. This excessive bacchanal.

This abominable offense against architecture and all the vanity cluttered within it.

This enduring mess his father took such delight in making, knowing that one day he would simply leave it behind him, and better yet, in Thanasis’s lap.

Not for Pavlos Zacharias the questionable charms of actual parenting or maintaining healthy relationships with the children he’d fathered indiscriminately, all while remaining married to Thanasis’s mother.

Not for him some sort of acknowledgment that he had created these lives that now depended so heavily on his own.

Then again, he didn’t seem to care overmuch what sort of relationship he had with Thanasis, either, legitimate or not.

Pavlos delighted in torture. Not the rack or the stocks.

No thumbscrews or bamboo beneath any fingernails.

Those things took effort and Pavlos was too lazy.

Why bother making that sort of effort when it was easier by far to simply behave like the depraved monster he was and watch the ripples of that behavior spread out before him?

That was why Thanasis could not trust his eyes. Maybe it wasn’t a ghost, stood here before him in the grand hall. Maybe it was simply a woman who looked like his lost, adored Saskia.

Obviously, he told himself sternly, it could not be anything else.

Not here in this funhouse mirror of a place, where nothing was as it seemed, unless, that was, it seemed like hell.

He stayed where he was. He let himself look at her, then forced himself to look away. Again. When that was something he had never been any good at. That had not changed, no matter who this woman really was.

Thanasis could not allow his hunger to show on his face.

He could not allow anyone here to see any hint of the things he actually felt inside.

He could not allow them to imagine that he had any emotions at all, for that matter.

Pavlos’s infamously depraved villa was a festering sore, not any kind of home, and anything found within it was a weapon.

He had learned that when he was still small.

Thanasis smelled what he was certain was a whiff of sulfur, and then there beside him was the half sibling he liked the least—a difficult distinction, but hers all the same.

The venal and vain Marissa was a product of Pavlos’s widely publicized affair with a sharp-edged Parisian model who was as famous for her spitefulness as her cheekbones.

“I thought you no longer adhered to the old man’s commands,” Marissa said in that cut glass voice of hers, sharp and vicious.

She did not bother to speak Greek, though they were both in Greece tonight.

She preferred her native French and did not care at all if she was understood.

The venom came through, loud and clear, no matter what language she used.

Thanasis allowed himself another glance at his beautiful ghost, currently standing across the hall with a wineglass clutched in her fingers, her head tilted slightly to one side, an expression he recognized on her face. A baffled sort of curiosity that, once, had been a precursor to laughter—

But it couldn’t be. It couldn’t.

What he recognized was a memory, nothing more, and this woman before him had nothing to do with it.

Because this woman was not Saskia. Saskia was dead.

It had taken him every moment of the past five years to be able to accept that simple statement of fact.

He couldn’t allow himself to linger, not even with a gaze from across a great hall. Not with this ghoul at his elbow, more than prepared to leap on him like a carrion crow.

Hoping he would give her the opportunity, more like.

“I accepted my father’s invitation, if that is what you mean,” he replied. With a certain cool neutrality that he had perfected over the years, because it drove every member of his family into paroxysms of temper and rage.

Marissa sneered. “I keep waiting for him to announce that he’s changed his will. Perhaps then you wouldn’t be quite so high and mighty, eh?”

Normally, Thanasis played this game when he was here.

If he had allowed himself to be enticed or ordered back to the villa, there was no point attempting to avoid the unpleasantness as he otherwise preferred to do from afar.

He allowed these conversations. He leaned into them.

And he was not averse to crossing a sword or two when he encountered his father’s by-blows.

But everything was different tonight.

Because she was here, whoever she was.

And until he knew who she actually was—or, more importantly, who she wasn’t —he found he had no stomach at all for the games he usually lowered himself to play in this place.

“I cannot understand how you have reached your thirties without understanding that he will never do anything of the kind,” he told his venomous half sister, impatiently.

“I do not want to be his heir, and therefore, he will make certain that I am. You, by contrast, have debased yourself for the whole of your life in the hopes that he will give it all to you instead, and so he never will. It is really that simple, Marissa, and I have no idea why you cannot grasp it.”

She bared her teeth at him and he broke away, too aware that he could not afford to let her or anyone else here goad him into revealing things he shouldn’t.

Not that he had. Not yet. But he didn’t like that it felt precarious.

He had always hated his father. This was a natural consequence of watching how the old man treated Thanasis’s stoic, heartbroken, stubborn-to-her-own-detriment mother.

When she’d died, when Thanasis was in his twenties, he hadn’t known whether to cheer her escape or mourn her passing.

And the vile old man had bloomed in the face of his son and heir’s disgust, entertaining himself by dragging Thanasis into the family business no matter how he’d tried to break away.

Those dreams had crumbled after university, when Thanasis had finally understood that no matter what he did or where he went, his name went with him and the specter of his father hung over him like the sword of Damocles.

He had been forced to surrender to the inevitable, and so he had—but he had done it on his own terms.

It had taken him years to demonstrate that there were two Zacharias shipping concerns under the same corporate name. One catered entirely to his father’s whims, grudges, reversals, and lies. The other was Thanasis’s domain.

Pavlos made headlines. Thanasis made deals. And one day, he would wash his hands entirely of the problems his father made for him.

He dreamed of that day all the time.

The only other thing he ever dreamed about appeared to be standing here, in this very same room, with music wrapping itself around her and light finding her as she breathed, but he told himself—again—that this was impossible.

This woman resembled his Saskia, that was all.

He needed to stop imagining it could be otherwise.

He had spent years trying to imagine her back to life.

If it was possible, he would have done it already.