Chapter Two
CHAPTER TWO
T HANASIS ENDED THE CALL , rolled his tense neck and slowly filled his lungs with air.
Barely two days ago he’d thought his world on the brink of collapse.
‘You’re an immoral, lying bastard and I’d rather marry a plague-ridden rat than marry you!’ Lucie had screamed before snatching the keys to his Porsche 911 from his hands.
‘I never lied to you,’ he’d retorted furiously. ‘Now give them back.’
She’d delivered a curse of such uncouth viciousness that he’d recoiled. Never in his life had he been on the receiving end of such an insult, not even from Lucie.
If he hadn’t recoiled, none of what followed would have happened. If he’d kept his wits he’d have been able to take his keys from her without any force—Lucie was easily half his size and weight—and she wouldn’t have had time to storm out of his penthouse shouting, ‘The wedding is off and I don’t care what the world thinks. I never want to see you again. I hope you have a horrible life.’
He’d chased after her. Of course he had. Lucie had been like a human grenade whose pin had been released, and there had been no telling how far her explosion would spread. He’d stepped into his foyer as the elevator doors had closed and so had raced down the seven flights of stairs and reached the underground car park to find her reversing out of his space with the clunking of gears and the screeching of wheels, whereupon she’d spun the car towards the exit and put her foot down, flipping him the bird as she’d passed for good measure. He had no doubt that if he’d stood in front of the car in the hope of stopping her, she’d have hit the accelerator even harder.
She couldn’t call the marriage off, he’d tried to assure himself even as he’d made the terse call to Alexis to inform him of what had happened. If the Antoniadises went down then so did the Tsalikis. Everyone would lose.
The decades-long feud between the patriarchs had escalated as they’d aged to the extent that the dirty tricks they’d employed had escalated too, dangerously so, dirty tricks the press had got wind of. What had been an infamous rivalry enjoyed by the public swirled into a maelstrom of relentless negative publicity that had led to investors threatening to pull out of Antoniadis Shipping. Thanasis’s father had voluntarily stepped down his position as Chief Executive, the board of directors voting unanimously for Thanasis to step into his shoes, but this hadn’t been enough to mollify the investors.
At the precise moment Thanasis had been wondering how the hell he was going to stop his company imploding, Alexis Tsaliki, who’d not long forced his own father from the board of Tsaliki Shipping, had called requesting a private meeting. ‘Our fathers’ actions caused all this,’ he’d said. ‘It is for us to end it.’
What had followed had started out like a scene from a gangster film where the new heads of two families fighting over the same territory had faced off.
The deadlock had been broken when Alexis had said, ‘The only way to stem the losses we are both suffering is to show we are serious about ending our fathers’ feud. I propose a marriage.’
‘An intriguing idea but you’re not my type,’ Thanasis had deadpanned, even as he’d immediately seen the sick logic behind the suggestion.
‘A shame. We would make a beautiful couple. But no, I propose a marriage between myself and your sister.’
‘Over my dead body,’ he’d stated flatly. Alexis Tsaliki was poison like all Tsalikis, and an unscrupulous Lothario. Thanasis would sooner live bankrupt in a shed than countenance a marriage with his sister to him.
They’d eyeballed each other for a time that had seemed to suck all the air from the room, until Alexis had given a sharp nod. ‘Then you will have to be the one to make the sacrifice.’
And that was how, eventually, Thanasis had come to be engaged to Lucie Burton, Georgios’s so-called beloved stepdaughter and the so-called beloved daughter of Rebecca Tsaliki.
Rebecca stepped over to him. Voice low, she said, ‘You got my message?’
He nodded curtly.
‘Then you know what to do.’
He didn’t bother hiding his disdain. Now he understood how this wife had succeeded where Georgios’s other wives had failed—her ruthlessness. That this extended to her own daughter sickened him, even if he did despise the daughter as much as the mother.
‘How could you let her believe we’d fallen in love?’ he demanded.
‘I didn’t put the idea in her head, I just ran with it,’ she answered, her own disdain as evident as his. ‘What did you expect me to say? That she was mistaken and you hate each other’s guts?’
‘No, I would have expected you to correct her and tell her our relationship was cordial and businesslike.’
‘If you’d kept it cordial and businesslike we wouldn’t be standing here.’
That this observation was on the money only added to the burning angst pumping through him.
‘You need to be nice to her for a week,’ Rebecca said in the same acidic tone he’d heard her daughter use more times than were countable. ‘That’s it. Be nice, and get her to the damned church to make her vows. After that, you can do whatever you want with her.’
They both knew Lucie would never sell them out to the press. Even when she’d furiously screeched away in his Porsche, Thanasis had been certain her intense aversion to being public property would stop her taking that nuclear step. Whether she took that step or not though was irrelevant—her failure to marry him would set off a nuclear detonation of its own.
‘I will go along with this pathetic charade until the wedding because you leave me no other choice, but you’d better pray her memories don’t come back before it.’
‘We should all pray for that.’
He shook his head in disbelief. ‘When she learns the truth… She will hate you for facilitating the lies. You know that, yes? You could lose your daughter for this.’
Rebecca was unmoved. ‘If that’s the price I have to pay then I can live with that. All that matters is that the wedding goes ahead. Anything that comes after can and will be managed. We’ll pay her off if necessary—she pretended not to care but I know she was jealous of Georgios’s brood having their own trust funds. Cold hard cash always makes injured feelings sting a little less.’
Sickened to his core, Thanasis turned without another word and strode with heavy footsteps back to Lucie’s room.
Before entering, he took a moment to compose himself.
The path had been set and he had to follow it. The alternative would be devastation for everyone and everything.
Their engagement had stemmed much of the press negativity and calmed the investors, but there had been predicted cynicism too. If the wedding failed to go ahead the media would go into a frenzy, the becalmed investors likely pull their investments.
In only three weeks, Antoniadis Shipping would take delivery of fifty new container ships to add to their fleet at a cost of close to six billion euros. Two thirds of this still needed to be paid. If the investors pulled out, Thanasis would have to conjure four billion euros. Antoniadis Shipping was worth tens of billions but that money wasn’t sitting in a bank account. It would take months to liquidate enough assets to cover it.
All these things had been going through his head as he’d tried to work out how the hell he was going to steer his company away from the impending disaster when he’d received the call that Lucie had been in an accident.
Thanasis’s luck had turned one-eighty, but this luck was on a knife-edge. Lucie’s amnesia was a blessing but he couldn’t predict how long it would last, and now he was being forced into a risky game that upped the stakes considerably.
It was time to up the game to match the stakes and step into the shoes of the man Lucie thought him to be. If her memories returned before the wedding she’d run from his life all over again, and this time she really would destroy everything.
* * *
By the time night fell on Lucie’s third day in hospital—technically her fifth but she didn’t count the first two as she’d been sedated—she was seriously contemplating asking the medical team to sedate her mother. If she’d known it would take a traumatic head injury to make her do some actual mothering, she’d never have got behind a wheel because her mother’s definition of actual mothering was doing Lucie’s poorly head in. It was the non-stop chatter about the wedding, the constant emphasis about how wonderful it was all going to be, what a beautiful couple Lucie and Thanasis made and what a happy marriage they were going to have, how wonderful it was that the feud between the two families had come to an end because of it, plus the constant need to fill Lucie in on all the details about the wedding itself, the world-famous singers who’d be performing for them, the guest list, the catering, yada-yada-yada. All this while constantly watching Lucie with an anxious scrutiny she’d not shown a shred of when Lucie had caught the flu over the Christmas holidays a decade ago. The only Tsaliki to brave a visit had been Athena, who quite rightly assumed no germ would dare latch itself into her system. When Lucie had finally recovered from it, she’d been surprised to find her mother hadn’t marked her bedroom door with a big red X.
All her mum’s chattering meant she’d found herself grateful for all the sleep her body currently demanded. Lots and lots of sleep. So much sleep that she could feel herself coming out of the fog, becoming more lucid and less dreamlike. She didn’t feel sick any more either, which was a blessing because Lucie hated feeling sick; hated feeling too ill to eat. Give her a headache over sickness any day of the week. And now she had neither, although she was certain her headache would be back with a vengeance at the rate her mother was talking. If she didn’t know better, she’d assume her mother was deliberately distracting her from having to think.
For all that her mother was doing her head in, in one respect she was grateful for this late onset maternal blossoming—her mother’s constant presence meant she’d only spent snatches of time alone with Thanasis.
Like her mother, he was a constant presence at Lucie’s bedside. Unlike her mother, he rarely spoke, which in fairness was because her mum never stopped talking long enough for him to get a word in edgeways.
He rarely spoke but every time Lucie glanced at him she found his green gaze on her. Every time, a frisson would snake up her spine.
With no memories to fall back on it was impossible to know if she really had fallen in love with this man but her reactions were telling her she’d felt something for him. And, as incredible as it was to believe, something in the way he looked at her told her he’d felt something for her too, and she didn’t know if it was relief or anxiety she felt when her mother finally announced she was going home to get some sleep. The other times her mother had left her alone with Thanasis, Lucie had been deep in sleep herself.
‘I’ll be back in the morning in time for the results of your scan, darling,’ she said as she placed a kiss to Lucie’s forehead. ‘Let’s hope they give you the all-clear to be discharged.’
Lucie smiled wanly. ‘Fingers crossed.’
She watched her mother swish to the door, certain she wasn’t imagining the significant look she threw at Thanasis before she disappeared through it. Lucie would have wondered what the look was about if she hadn’t been so immediately aware that she was alone with the stranger she was shortly to marry.
A stranger she instinctively knew without her mother having to keep banging on about it that she shared something with, a short but significant history her brain refused to reveal.
It took an immense amount of courage to turn her face to him.
Their eyes locked.
‘Is it just me or have you suddenly gone deaf too?’ she asked, going into her default mode of cracking a joke to cover an awkward silence even though it wasn’t awkward she was predominantly feeling but, inexplicably, shy. Lucie couldn’t remember ever feeling shy, not once in her whole life.
Lines appeared around his eyes as his perfect teeth flashed before his expression softened and he hunched forward to gently cover her hand. ‘How are you really feeling, matia mou ?’
‘Better. Much less fuzzy.’ Although the sensation of Thanasis’s hand on hers made her glad the medical team had detached the sticky things on her chest that measured her heart rate, or the whole hospital staff would be kicking the door down to see what had caused the massive spike in it.
He was just so dreamily handsome, with his dark brown hair and thick stubble, and the deep olive hue of his skin and those mesmerising eyes and full lips. As hard as she looked, she couldn’t find a single flaw, not unless you counted the lines that formed around his eyes when he gave one of his rare smiles, which she didn’t because they gave perfection an extra dimension.
‘That is good to hear.’ Broad shoulders lifting, he rubbed his thumb over her palm sending sensation dancing through her skin. ‘Do you feel well enough in yourself to go home if the scans show it’s safe?’
She nodded, then hesitated before asking, ‘Where is home for me now?’
‘With me.’ He bowed his head and gently brushed his lips to her fingers.
Warm breath danced fleetingly over her skin. The beats of her heart spiked again.
So it was true. They had fallen for each other, and as this thought swirled, she thought of the Montagues and Capulets…and then remembered how that particular story ended and quickly strove for a different comparison.
‘Do we live in Athens?’ she asked when no other comparison came to her.
‘We have been, but when you are discharged I would like to take you to Sephone.’ At her uncomprehending look, he smiled. It was like being doused in a ray of sunlight. ‘Sephone is my island.’
‘You have your own island? Seriously?’
‘When we are married it will be our island. It is a secluded paradise. You will love it there, I promise.’
‘You’ve not taken me before?’
‘There hasn’t been the time, but as you need peace to recover and we are due to marry there, it is the perfect setting for you to recuperate before our big day…that is if you still want to marry me?’ He posed the question casually but there was a shadowy flickering in his eyes that made her pulses thump.
He was frightened her amnesia would make her change her mind, she realised.
‘I know your mother has done her best to impress on you how far advanced our wedding preparations are, but I will understand if you want to postpone it and give your memories the chance to come back,’ he said quietly, her hand now swallowed whole inside both of his. ‘If you’d rather call the whole thing off…obviously it would make things difficult from a business perspective but that is the least of my concerns. You and your health are my primary concerns, so if you want to postpone or cancel altogether, do not be afraid to say. I only want what is best for you.’
A dizzying rush of blood filled Lucie’s head.
He really did have feelings for her. Feelings enough to take the pressure of the wedding off her shoulders and give her brain the chance to heal even though the consequences for his business would likely be disastrous.
Close to being overwhelmed with the emotions being evoked by this man who was a stranger and yet with whom… Her heart skipped as her thoughts jumped.
If she already lived with this man then she was already sharing his bed…
Heat to power a small house suffused her from the inside out.
She’d shared a bed with Thanasis. Made love to him.
Concern creased his forehead. ‘You are flush, matia mou . Are you in pain?’
But that only deepened the heat scorching her, and she gave a quick, frantic shake of her head. No way was she going to confess what was going on in her head, not to a stranger, especially not a male one. The embarrassment would kill her. Whatever intimacies they’d shared, she had no memories of them.
‘You are sure?’ he pressed.
She drew in a long breath as she practically pinned her thoughts into submission so she could think and speak coherently. ‘Thanasis, I have no recollection of anything about our engagement or wedding plans but I know in my heart that I did promise to marry you. I’ve never broken a promise before and I’m not going to start now.’
The corners of his mouth twitched. ‘I would understand if you wanted time to start over. You must feel at a great disadvantage.’
‘It’s frustrating more than anything,’ she confessed. ‘It must be frustrating for you too. You and I have a history together but my stupid brain is taking us back to step one in the getting-to-know-you stakes.’
He turned her hand and pressed his mouth to her palm. ‘I would rather be on the first step with you than no step.’
The whole of her body sighed, and as his face inched closer to hers and the connection of the lock of their eyes deepened, anticipation pulsed into life and she held her breath…
He gently released her hand and gave a rueful twist of his lips. ‘It is getting late,’ he said, inching his chair back. ‘I will leave you to sleep.’
If there was one thing Thanasis had learned in the two months he’d spent getting to know Lucie Burton, it was that she was incapable of hiding her emotions, and he felt a flare of satisfaction mingled with guilt to see disappointment flash over her face.
‘I will be back before you wake, but I haven’t been home in five days.’ He shook off the guilt. If Lucie had taken one damn minute to hear him out, none of this would have happened, but the pin on the grenade of her temper had spent weeks a hair trigger away from being pulled out. If it hadn’t been Athena it would have been something or someone else. Lucie’s mother had forced him into playing the role of loving fiancé but Lucie’s actions had caused the necessity for it. ‘You need to sleep and I need to make arrangements to get you safely to Sephone and ensure all your medical needs can be taken care of.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with my body, only my head.’
There was everything wrong with her body, and it took every ounce of self-control not to let his attentive fiancé mask drop and his revulsion show.
The revulsion was entirely for himself.
Thanasis had prepared himself to loathe Lucie. He could forgive Georgios’s blood children for loving their father and being loyal to him but Lucie chose to love him. She’d voluntarily chosen to sacrifice her life in England to save his fortune. She’d freely given her love and loyalty to a monster, which to Thanasis’s mind meant she condoned the monster and so made her equally despicable.
His first meeting with her had been after the terms of the marriage had been negotiated and agreed between himself and Alexis. A marriage in name only, one that would last a few years before they quietly went their separate ways. Their fathers had been given no choice but to fall in line with their plan. With everything agreed, the only thing left to do…apart from arrange the wedding…was for Thanasis to meet his ‘bride’.
The meet had taken place in the neutral territory of an exclusive hotel’s bar. Alexis had made the call and minutes later a tiny waif with a mop of long black curls had appeared. Just one look had been enough for Thanasis’s heart to explode.
Dear God in heaven, it was her .
His mind had flown back six years to Leander’s party and the waif dressed all in black and with black hair piled on top of her head like a curly pineapple. A tiny, tiny creature with the most strikingly beautiful face he’d ever set eyes on.
It had been the only time in his life he’d experienced that ‘eyes meeting across the room moment’. Before he’d had the chance to cross the floor to her and introduce himself, her friend, a blur to his eyes like every other face in the apartment had been in that moment, had dragged her away, not just from the room they’d entered but from the apartment itself. She’d vanished.
He’d asked Leander about her but Leander hadn’t known who he was talking about. Neither had anyone else.
For months he’d been unable to drive or walk a street in Athens without casting an eye for a diminutive waif with black curly hair, but he’d never seen her again. In time, he’d convinced himself that he’d imagined her.
But she’d been real.
She’d strolled—although bounced would be a more accurate description—into the hotel bar wearing a loose-fitting, sleeveless black dress patterned with blood-red roses that fell to her knees. On her feet had been a pair of calf-length clumpy black boots. Her hair had been worn loose, cascades of curls springing in all directions. She’d looked like a cross between a modern-day Bride of Frankenstein and an ethereally beautiful elf. Except elves were supposed to have big, pointy ears and he’d been unable to see anything of her ears through the mass of curls.
Lucie, a beam on her face and expectation shining in eyes as black as her hair, had stepped to Thanasis with arms outstretched as if expecting an embrace.
Up close, her beauty had shone as much as the shine in her black eyes, and there had been a beat when he’d been powerless to do anything but soak in the oversized eyes and pretty little nose and full heart-shaped lips, all set on a flawless golden heart-shaped canvas.
His heart thumping hard enough to rattle his ribs, he’d pointedly held his hand out.
It was her hesitation before slipping her tiny hand into his that had confirmed in his mind that she too remembered that brief moment of connection from six years earlier, but it was the jolt of electricity that had powered through him at the connection of their skin that had made his jaw clench.
‘Nice boots,’ he’d said acidly, pulling his hand from her clasp.
The shine in her eyes had dimmed into confusion before her little heart-shaped chin had defiantly lifted. ‘It’s lovely to meet you too.’
If not hugely aware that time had been ticking to save his company, Thanasis would have called a halt to the agreement there and then.
He’d been fully prepared to marry someone he despised, prepared to spend a few years swallowing his loathing for the good of everything that mattered in his world: his mother, who’d always shaken her head at her husband’s rivalry with Georgios Tsaliki, his father, who for all his faults had been a loving father and husband, his sister, who’d become increasingly gaunt and withdrawn since the extent of the rivalry between Antoniadis and Tsaliki had been made public, and the thousands and thousands of people Antoniadis Shipping employed.
What he’d not been prepared for was attraction. Not to someone who’d spent her life in the Tsaliki nest and who considered Georgios Tsaliki a father figure.
Attraction was the last thing he’d expected or wanted, and that he should feel it so powerfully for the captivatingly beautiful Lucie Burton had been additional nails in the coffin of his loathing for her.
By the time she’d screeched away in his Porsche, she’d hated him as much as he hated her, and now he had to remind himself of the expectant shine in her eyes when she’d bounced into that hotel bar all those long weeks ago. There had been hope in that shine too, a hope he’d scotched with his first words to her.
Lucie’s amnesia had granted him a reset, a means to play things differently, and he had no intention of screwing it up again.
Speaking steadily, he captured a curl in a manner that could only be interpreted as affectionate. ‘Every part of you is too precious for me to risk your health.’
She gave a sigh as soft as the curl in his fingers. ‘I’ll do everything I can to get the memories back.’
Exactly what he didn’t want to hear.
‘Just concentrate on healing, matia mou , and let the memories take care of themselves.’ And then, because he knew he must, he bowed his head, held his breath, and pressed a kiss so chaste to Lucie’s mouth he barely felt the pressure of it.
It wasn’t chaste enough to stop his heart pumping harder and faster, and it took even more control not to recoil into retreat.
With unhurried movements, he got to his feet, but his escape was thwarted when she caught his hand.
Black eyes gazing up at him with a solemnity he’d never seen in them before, she quietly said, ‘I was raised to despise your family. It was instilled in all of us that the Antoniadises were spawns of the devil. The loyalty and affection I feel towards Georgios means I would have agreed to marry you even if I had believed the indoctrination. I would have married the devil himself if it had meant saving Tsaliki Shipping. But I never did believe it, not really, and now you’ve proved I was right not to.’ There was an almost imperceptible catch in her husky voice. ‘Thank you for being here for me.’
Thanasis’s throat had closed so tightly it was an effort to speak. ‘Parakalo,’ he whispered hoarsely.
He left the room with his lips still abuzz from the barely-there pressure of Lucie’s mouth, and with the skin of his hand burning as if her touch had marked it.