Forgotten Greek Proposal (Greek Rivals #1)

Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE

T HE PAIN THAT shot through Lucie Burton’s eyes when she peered between her lids was so great it momentarily distracted her from the pneumatic drill boring into her head. It also stopped her registering the man sitting beside her, engrossed on his phone. But only initially. One painful blink and he swam to the surface of her vision, the registering of exactly who he was such a shock to her system that she blinked again.

He was still there.

Her heart made the most enormous thump. Thanasis Antoniadis was sitting by her bedside.

Too confused to be frightened, she lifted her head. Well, tried. Another shooting pain stopped her lifting it more than a couple of inches.

Pale green eyes with lashes as dark as the pupils and rings encircling the irises suddenly locked onto hers.

She swallowed, a reflex that had nothing to do with the dryness of her throat. ‘Where am I?’ Whatever bed she was in, it wasn’t her bed, and this was no room she’d been in before.

‘Hospital.’

Her next blink was slightly less painful and she became aware that she had things stuck to her chest and that something had been injected into her hand…a medical drip?

‘You were in a car accident.’

So that was what his voice sounded like. Honeyed coffee. A thought that struck her confused mind as absurd even as her hazy, confused mind wondered why she was fixating on Thanasis’s voice rather than asking what the hell she was doing in hospital with her family’s greatest enemy at her bedside. Or, rather, her stepfamily’s greatest enemy.

Lucie had been only three years old when her mother left her father for the Greek shipping tycoon Georgios Tsaliki, and so her childhood and adolescence had been split between her father and his new family, and her mother, Georgios and his varying offspring. Varying because Lucie’s mother was wife number four. To everyone’s surprise, over two decades later, the marriage was still going strong. Lucie suspected this was because her mother maintained an extremely well-developed blind eye to Georgios’s many infidelities, infidelities she must have factored in when marrying him seeing as she was wife number three’s replacement.

As a result, Lucie had grown up in two wildly differing households. Stability and order had come from her real father. Chaos and fun had come from her stepfather, whose gregarious nature had him on excellent terms with all his ex-wives and the nine children they’d collectively popped out for him. Life for Georgios and his extended family had been one great big holiday, right until the money had run out earlier that year and his eldest son, Alexis, wrested control of the company.

Because the converse to Georgios’s generous heart was also true—when he took against someone, they remained his enemy for life, and Georgios Tsaliki had no greater enemy than rival shipping tycoon Petros Antoniadis, and it was this mutual enmity to blame for the near destruction of both families’ fortunes.

The original cause of the enmity between the two men was something Lucie knew only the bare bones of; a business partnership between two great friends turned sour. If there were more details than that she suspected both men had forgotten them, and now their mutual loathing and feud was simply one of those things, like the fact she barely touched five foot in height and had unmanageable black curls. One of those things like the fact Thanasis Antoniadis smelt as flipping wonderful as he looked.

She’d seen him in the flesh only once before. She’d been eighteen at the time and enjoying her last long Greek summer holiday. Athena, Lucie’s sometime favourite Tsaliki offspring—Athena blew hot and cold—had invited her along to what she’d promised would be the party of the decade. They’d barely stepped into the apartment when Lucie had spotted the best-looking man in the entire world pouring himself a drink at the bar and had actually felt her jaw drop. There had been something familiar about him, which had made her think he must be a famous actor or model or something. Whatever he did for a living, he was the most gorgeous man she’d ever laid eyes on and she’d been unable to tear her gaze away, until Athena had grabbed her hand and in a high-pitched voice whispered, ‘What’s he doing here?’

Lucie had stared at her blankly.

‘Thanasis Antoniadis,’ she’d explained, panicking. ‘If I’d known he was going to be here, I would never have come. Papa will kill me if he hears about this.’

Lucie had looked again at the man causing the usually unflappable Athena to have a semi-meltdown at the exact moment Thanasis had looked across the busy room…and fixed his gaze right on her . The frisson she’d felt snake up her spine was like nothing she’d experienced before, or since for that matter. She might very well still be there gawping at him if Athena hadn’t dragged her away, hissing, ‘Stop looking at him like that! We need to get out of here.’

And that had been that. Less than two minutes under a roof with him.

He’d been familiar because he was the spitting image of his father. Georgios regularly refreshed the photo of Petros Antoniadis he kept on his dartboard.

The man who’d captured her attention so vividly six years ago was now scrutinising her with a strained intensity she felt like a touch to her skin.

‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.

‘My head hurts and I feel sick,’ she croaked, scrutinising him in turn with an increasing wariness as the drilling in her head settled enough for her brain to start vaguely functioning properly. There was something about the room that made her think she must be in Greece, but that was impossible. She’d gone to sleep in her shared north London flat…hadn’t she?

She couldn’t remember going to bed.

He grimaced. ‘That is to be expected. You took quite the knock.’

‘What happened to me? What’s going on? Why are you here?’

His neck extended, the nostrils of his long, pointed nose flaring. ‘Your mouth sounds dry. Water?’

‘Please. But tell me what’s happened and why you’re here.’

He poured water from a jug into a beaker and placed a straw in it, then stretched an arm to place the straw close to her mouth. ‘You don’t remember?’

She inched her face to the straw. Before taking a much-needed drink, she said, ‘I know you’re Thanasis Antoniadis but I don’t know why I’m in hospital, seemingly in Greece, or why you of all people are with me.’

Something flickered in his eyes. ‘Me of all people? And drink slowly or you will make yourself sick. Take sips.’

His heavily accented English was excellent, she thought absently as she savoured the crisp coolness of fresh water in her mouth and hoped it didn’t react to the nausea swirling in her stomach. Lucie’s Greek was fluent but nowhere near as good as Thanasis’s English. ‘Thank you.’

He gave a tight nod of acknowledgement and put the beaker back on the table without his stare leaving her face. ‘Me of all people?’ he repeated.

‘Why would you be here? Where’s my family?’ The more pertinent question, she dimly supposed, was why she wasn’t terrified to have woken with the son of her stepfather’s enemy by her bed; a brooding near-stranger who had to tower over her by well over a foot in height and probably weighed twice as much to boot. All that weight would be muscle, something she knew by the way his light blue shirt stretched across his chest. This man was in prime physical fitness. If he wanted, he could snap her bones with the ease of a cruel child snapping a bug’s wings.

Instead of quailing at the thought, she had an absurd sense of certainty that Thanasis Antoniadis would never lay a hand on her, not in malice nor in anger. Absurd because she didn’t know this man at all, only knew of him, and yet her certainty went hand in hand with the sense coming to life inside her that she did know him, as if they’d met before in a different life or a different world.

That must be some potent cocktail of drugs being pumped through her system, she thought. Her aching brain was being wild .

After a long pause, he said, ‘Your mother is here and has gone to get something to eat, but tell me, why would I not be here?’

‘Because we’re strangers?’ But there was uncertainty, the whisper of a memory floating in her aching head that could have been a dream. A busy restaurant. Alexis, Georgios and her mother.

There was another flickering in his eyes. ‘What is the last thing you remember?’

‘Getting back from work…’ She blinked as the specific memory refused to form. ‘No. Making myself a frittata.’ She’d loaded it with feta—to Lucie’s mind, there was no such thing as too much cheese—but try as she might, she couldn’t conjure the memory of eating it, nor the mound of sweet potato fries she’d made to accompany it.

A sliver of fear snaked into her bloodstream. ‘What date is it?’

The intensity of his stare increased, his full, sensuous lips tightening along with the skin around his fabulously high cheekbones. ‘The twenty-eighth of July.’

She jolted in shock, the fear tightening its grip. How could it be the end of July?

‘What date did you think it was?’

Lucie thought hard, remembered adding a meeting into her work planner. ‘The twentieth of May.’

She blinked again. She hadn’t eaten the frittata because her mother had called. She’d been in London and wanted to take Lucie out to dinner to discuss something…

The busy restaurant floated in her vision again. Her mother. Georgios. Alexis.

‘They want me to marry you,’ she blurted out, the words forming a beat before the memory. She met Thanasis’s stare again. ‘My family want me to marry you to save Tsaliki Shipping.’

His green eyes didn’t blink. ‘What else? What else do you remember?’

She shook her head in fear and frustration. ‘Nothing. There’s nothing else.’

The next pause stretched for an age. When he finally spoke, Thanasis’s voice had lost the taut edge she’d only been barely aware it contained. ‘Lucie, look at your wedding finger.’

Her heart seemed to go into stasis as she unclenched her hand and carefully lifted it, mindful of the medical line running through it. And then every atom in her body contracted with shock to see the sparkling diamond ring on it.

* * *

‘This isn’t possible,’ Lucie whispered.

‘You agreed to marry me,’ he said quietly. ‘Our wedding is in nine days.’

She could only gape at him.

‘In nine days our two families will come together to celebrate the marital union of an Antoniadis and a Tsaliki, and the war that has caused so much destruction to both our families and businesses will be officially over.’

All she could think to say to this was, ‘But Athena’s a Tsaliki, not me. I’m a Burton.’

‘To the world at large, Georgios considers you his own. You’re a Tsaliki daughter and sister in all but blood and name.’

Wasn’t that along the lines of what Alexis had said during the meal when he’d thrown the bombshell that, to save Tsaliki Shipping, the family needed her to marry Thanasis? She had only had vague snippets of memory of that evening and everything that followed was a complete blank, but she remembered enough to feel what she’d felt then—a bloom in her heart to be considered a real Tsaliki.

A tight-knit group despite being born from varying wives, the Tsaliki siblings had always welcomed Lucie into the gang during the long school holidays she’d spent with them, and always made sure to include her in everything, but she’d always had the underlying sense they never truly saw her as one of them, a feeling that extended to her half-brother Loukas, the only child her mother had borne Georgios. She’d always had the same underlying sense at her father’s home too, a cuckoo in the nest who never fitted in, especially once her half-sisters were born.

Of all Lucie’s half-siblings and stepsiblings, the only one she’d felt a real sense of kinship with had been Athena, Georgios’s only daughter and the Tsaliki closest to Lucie in age, and even that sense of kinship had been dependent on Athena’s varying moods. If Athena was to swish into the hospital room now, she would come armed either with flowers and chocolate or with a syringe to needle at Lucie with. She often reminded Lucie of a cat imperviously swiping its claws at some unfortunate rodent for no other reason than that it was bored.

Smothering a yawn, Lucie gazed again into Thanasis’s eyes, wishing she could find in them the answers for everything her injured brain was refusing to reveal. She had to fight her closing throat to say, ‘Are you telling the truth? Did I really agree to marry you?’

He didn’t blink. ‘I do not lie.’

‘As any good liar would say,’ she pointed out. Thanasis was an Antoniadis, and, if Georgios was to be believed, all Antoniadises were born with forked tongues.

There was the slightest loosening of his full lips but before he could respond, the door opened and a nurse entered the room. When she saw Lucie’s eyes were open, she shot an accusatory glare at Thanasis, which she then quickly tried to cover by making effusive noises about Lucie being awake.

While the nurse checked the machine the things stuck to Lucie’s chest were attached to, Thanasis got smoothly to his feet, his phone gripped in his large hand. ‘I will let your mother know you’re awake.’

Utterly dazed, not entirely convinced she wasn’t dreaming, Lucie watched the man who’d once haunted her dreams leave the room.

* * *

‘She’s awake,’ Thanasis said curtly.

The reply was reverential. ‘Thank God for that.’

‘She remembers nothing.’

A silence that went on too long and then a slow, ‘Nothing?’

‘Her memories of the last two months appear to have been wiped out.’

More silence. ‘Have you filled her in?’

‘She knows only that she agreed to the marriage.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘Nothing else,’ he confirmed.

Another long, long silence. ‘Then let us hope her memories stay wiped until after the wedding.’

Lucie’s mother ended the call.

* * *

‘He must be very much in love with you,’ the nurse confided as she shone a torchlight into Lucie’s eyes. ‘It is the first time he has voluntarily left your side.’

Of all the revelations that had been thrown at her in the short time she’d been awake, that one came as the biggest shock.

Thanasis Antoniadis was in love with her?

‘Do you think?’ she asked doubtfully. Nothing in his body language had made that kind of impression on her, although, with the fuzziness of her mind and the gaping void in it, she couldn’t really be sure about anything. If anything, she’d had a vague impression of being scrutinised with a watchful wariness, as if she were some kind of unpredictable wild animal with Thanasis tasked as her handler.

The nurse turned the medical torch off and slipped it into her top pocket. ‘You have been here two days.’

This was certainly the day for shocks and revelations.

‘Seriously?’ That long?

‘We had to keep you sedated.’ A misty look came in the nurse’s eyes. ‘He has kept watch over you.’

Wow. He’d been sitting in that hard armchair the whole time?

And then Lucie remembered Thanasis had told her she’d been in a car accident. Funny how she’d been too engrossed in listening to his voice to bother listening to his words. And then she’d been too engrossed in discovering she was supposed to be marrying him to worry about the fact she was lying in a hospital bed feeling as sick as a parrot and with a seeming head injury.

‘Am I very badly hurt?’

The nurse gently squeezed her hand. ‘There are concerns but all your vital signs are looking good. I have paged the doctor—it is for her to explain what has happened to you.’

‘My head?’ she guessed, a guess greatly aided by Thanasis’s earlier observation that her head hurting was to be expected . And also aided by her memories being wiped. She wondered if it accounted for the dreamlike state she was in or if that was the result of whatever drugs were being fed into her.

But maybe this wasn’t just a dreamlike state but an actual dream, she wondered again, and as she thought this, Thanasis came back into the room, all tall, dark and brooding, accompanied by a woman whose demeanour immediately identified her as a doctor, and Lucie’s mother.

One whiff of her mother’s overpowering perfume was all the proof Lucie needed to know that this was no dream.

* * *

Lucie had to wait until Thanasis left the room to make some business calls before she could speak to her mother privately. She was exhausted, her stomach still unsettled, and all she really wanted to do was sleep, but this was too important to wait.

‘Is it true?’ she asked. ‘Did I really agree to marry him?’

Her mother’s perfectly painted lips smiled. ‘Yes, my darling, you did, and I cannot begin to tell you how proud and grateful we all are for the sacrifices you’re making for us.’

But Lucie’s head was too fuzzy to think about sacrifices, even when her mother airily mentioned Lucie resigning her job so she could move to Greece. The few short hours she’d been awake had been like waking in some kind of twilight zone where up was down and left was right. She had a diamond ring on her finger given to her by a man who when she’d last fallen asleep had been her stepfamily’s enemy. And, she supposed, by extension, her enemy.

‘Mum…how do Thanasis and I get on? The nurse seems to think…’ But it was too incomprehensible to vocalise.

‘Seems to think what?’ her mother prompted.

She had to drop her voice to a whisper to actually say it. ‘She thinks he’s in love with me.’

The black eyes Lucie had inherited flickered. There was a long hesitation before her mother said, ‘It has been obvious to us all that strong emotions have developed between you.’

‘So he does love me?’

A shorter hesitation. ‘I am certain of it.’

‘And am I in love with him?’

This time there was no hesitation at all. ‘Yes, my darling, I do believe you are.’

* * *

Thanasis strode to the end of the corridor by the fire exit, checked no one was within earshot, and made the call.

Alexis answered on the second ring. ‘Is it true?’

‘Yes. She has amnesia.’

‘How long until her memories come back?’

‘Unknown. Could be days. Could be months. They might never come back.’

‘Who knows what happened between the two of you?’

‘You, your father and Lucie’s mother.’

‘Not your parents?’

‘Obviously they know about the accident but not what went on before. Have you told anyone else?’

‘No.’

Thanasis thought hard and quickly. If it was only the four of them who knew the full truth, they could keep it contained. ‘What about Athena?’

‘She knows nothing.’

‘Keep it that way. And keep her away from the hospital. She’s a loose cannon.’

He heard Alexis suck in a breath at the slight to his only sister, but Thanasis didn’t care. Of all the Tsalikis, Athena had proven herself to have the most poisonous sting. ‘The press have been tipped off about the accident,’ he said. ‘The hospital’s security team have moved them off the grounds but they are waiting to ambush her as soon as she’s discharged.’

It went without saying that Lucie abhorred the press, and it was a mark of her affection and loyalty to the monster that was Georgios Tsaliki that she’d willingly put herself in the media’s spotlight to save his fortune.

‘When will that be?’ Alexis asked.

‘A couple of days at least. When she’s released, I will take her to my island—no one can reach her there. In the meantime, I propose we put out a short statement confirming the accident and confirm that she is recovering well and that the wedding is going ahead as planned.’

‘Is it?’

Thanasis closed his eyes, recalling the message Lucie’s mother had sent him only a few minutes earlier.

She believes you were in love. Unless you want her to run again, play along with it until the wedding.

‘If her memories stay lost and your sister keeps her mouth shut then yes, I am certain Lucie will honour the agreement.’

‘Good.’

A figure stepped into the corridor. Rebecca Tsaliki. Lucie’s mother.

Thanasis met her stare and felt a wave of loathing towards the Englishwoman. Bad enough that he and Alexis were planning to use Lucie’s amnesia to their advantage, but this was her mother conspiring against her.

‘I need to go,’ he said curtly into the phone.

‘Keep me updated.’

‘Likewise.’

‘And, Thanasis?’

‘Yes?’

‘I suggest you play things differently with her this time. For all our sakes.’