Chapter One
CHAPTER ONE
‘T ELL ME AGAIN that I’m doing the right thing.’
‘You are doing what you need to do.’
‘Am I?’
‘Helena, if you want me to talk you out of this, I can... I don’t care about the guests, the church, the press interest all of this hoo-ha has gained, or the damn money.’
‘Hoo-ha?’
‘Yes, Helena. Your wedding is a load of hoo-ha,’ Kate said with such seriousness, Helena didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Groaning, she turned away from her reflection in the mirror. ‘You’re right. It is a load of hoo-ha. Just think what would happen if they all knew the truth,’ Helena said as her heart lurched guiltily.
That this marriage was a farce, a sham, utterly fake. But it was also the only way to fix the terrible situation she was in—the only way to save her charity, Incendia.
‘If only they hadn’t been whipped into a frenzy by Leander the Lothario ,’ Kate joked.
Helena smiled at Kate’s teasing. Leander Liassidis might have been the eternal playboy cruising through life like he didn’t have a care in the world, but for Helena, when she needed it, he’d been her rock and her saviour. She loved Leander like a brother and the only thing that ever caused her any worry was the hope that one day he might find someone that he could love sincerely. Which was perhaps a tad ironic, considering that in less than twenty minutes Helena would be walking down the aisle to stand beside him in front of one hundred and fifty guests, where a priest would declare them husband and wife.
‘If only my inheritance didn’t have the most ridiculous strings attached to it,’ Helena wished out loud.
‘What on earth was your father thinking?’ Kate demanded. ‘As if access to your inheritance should ever have depended on a man.’
Helena’s heart turned as it always did when she thought about her father. He had passed away just after her sixteenth birthday and not a single day had gone by that she hadn’t thought of him, hadn’t missed him.
‘To be fair, if I could have waited just two years until I was twenty-eight, none of this would have even been necessary,’ Helena countered.
‘Of course. Also, perfectly reasonable,’ Kate said sarcastically. ‘A woman matures only when she marries a man or when she’s nearly thirty!’ she cried.
Helena couldn’t help but smile. Their unwavering defence of each other was what made them strong, their bond closer than family because it had been chosen. And Helena would choose Kate every single day.
‘I’m sure my mother would have helped me fight it, if there had been time,’ she insisted, missing the sceptical look that passed across Kate’s features. ‘But challenging a will in the courts would take too long and draw too much attention. The financial review of Incendia is due in December. The police have advised that they won’t have caught Gregory by then, and even if they do, they won’t be able to return the money he stole until after a full investigation and a lengthy court case,’ Helena said, shaking her head.
Helena had never believed that she’d one day get to work at the charity that had been a lifesaver to her when she’d needed it. After the loss of her father, her abrupt return to boarding school had been hard. Her fear of falling asleep and never waking up—just like her father had done one awful June night—was at risk of becoming full blown and permanent insomnia. So her tutor had recommended Incendia to her. There she’d received grief counselling and support while she underwent the genetic testing to see if she had inherited Brugada syndrome, the disease that had killed her father.
While the test had eventually come back negative, it was with Incendia that she’d got to see first-hand how much good that charities could do, how integral they were to providing support for people in need. It had inspired her so much that she’d changed her study direction immediately to focus on attaining a business degree at Cambridge, swiftly followed by her master’s in Non-Profit Management.
Her mother thought that she was being foolish, throwing away financial security for misplaced altruism, but Helena had found her passion, and not only that, something she was good at.
Her first job had been with a small charity start-up and she’d relished the opportunity to throw everything she had at it. It paid off and she soon became known for having a head for business, and a fresh, exciting approach to gaining partnerships that were relevant and contemporary to younger generations. Connecting people who were sincere about helping, rather than seeking out borrowed kudos, was what made her unique. Her hard work made her peerless.
And then six months ago it had happened; Incendia had asked if she might be interested in a role as their CEO. It had been the most amazing moment of her life. She had celebrated with Kate and even Leander had made a special trip to London to take her out and treat her to a congratulatory meal that had ended up—as it usually did—with him seeing her safely home in a taxi, before he escorted whatever woman had taken his fancy back to his London apartment.
But within a month following her start at Incendia, the CFO had quit and disappeared with nearly one hundred million pounds in investment funds. Shocked and horrified, she’d gone immediately to both the police and the charity commission. She’d spent days locked in meetings with Incendia’s trustees, where she discovered that the previous CEO had failed to renew the business insurance that would have made this painful rather than disastrous.
Because if there wasn’t a way to cover the shortfall in money, Incendia wouldn’t survive long enough to see what the police could recover. A financial review at the end of the year would declare them bankrupt and all of the people they could help, all of the families Incendia supported, the research into medical conditions that affected millions around the world...would be left with nothing.
Helena couldn’t let that happen. Incendia had been there for her when no one else had been. She’d needed to find a way to fill the hole made by the missing money and there was only one way she could think of.
The shares her father had left her in Liassidis Shipping.
Staring at her reflection in the mirror, she felt that sense of loss keenly. The shares were the last piece of her father that she had left, and she’d never wanted to part with them. She’d hoped to leave them in the business now run almost completely by Leonidas Liassidis, simply content for that to be her connection to the company her father had founded with Giorgos Liassidis. That was all she’d wanted. To know that her father’s legacy lived on. To know that a part of it still belonged to her. But now she would have to let them go. Let him go.
A little piece of Helena’s heart broke under the weight of the sob she kept locked in her chest.
She felt two slender arms come gently around her shoulders and looked to the mirror to meet Kate’s eyes in the reflection.
‘It’s the right thing to do,’ Helena said, unsure who she was trying to convince more, herself or Kate. It was what her father would have done, Helena was sure of it. ‘I can sell the shares as soon as the marriage is registered in the UK and there will be enough there to cover the shortfall in Incendia’s accounts.’
‘Do you think you could buy back the shares, once you have what you need?’ Kate asked gently.
Helena bit her lip and looked down at her feet. ‘No.’ She wouldn’t lie to herself about this. She couldn’t afford to. ‘Only a fool would sell shares in Liassidis Shipping,’ she explained. Only a fool or someone extremely desperate. And she was extremely desperate.
‘Well, then,’ Kate said in her no-nonsense way. ‘We have a plan, we’re going to stick to it and we’re going to get it done!’
Helena smiled at her best friend. ‘I really like that colour on you,’ she said, glad that she had chosen gold for her only bridesmaid; Kate looked absolutely radiant.
Kate smiled, shrugging a delicate shoulder to the mirror and pouted. ‘Merci!’
There was a knock on the door and Helena turned, hoping that it might be her mother, but it was just the officiant letting them know they were ready.
Helena turned back, masking the hurt before Kate could see it. Yes, it was foolish to hope, and she probably should have known better after all these years, but she felt peculiarly alone standing in the small church library that had been given for her to get ready in on her wedding day, without either of her parents there with her.
Pushing that thought aside, she looked at herself in the floor-length mirror.
The deceptively simple wedding dress suited her slim figure. She’d been teased as a teenager for resembling a kitchen towel tube and had never really liked her lack of curves, but the dress by a new Spanish designer—Gabriella Casas—made her look and feel beautiful. A puff of laughter left her lips at the irony. It would be utterly wasted on Leander Liassidis, who had never looked at her as anything other than a little sister.
As Kate told the officiant that they would be right there, Helena touched the silver bracelet her father had given her on her sixteenth birthday. It was the last present he had given her, barely weeks before he’d passed. She was both sad and relieved that he was not here today. Sad because even though this wasn’t ever going to be a real marriage, the small child in her still wanted her father here on her wedding day. But she was also relieved, because he didn’t have to see what she was about to do. Shame stung her skin as she fought an internal battle of wills. She wanted to be a businesswoman that he could have grown to respect, that he could be proud of. And she could still do that. But only if Incendia survived.
‘Are you ready?’ Kate asked from behind her.
Helena nodded.
It was a short walk between the church library and the entrance to the rather grand chamber of the Catholic church in Athens. Helena might have wanted to have a small ceremony with very little grandeur, but Leander had his way in the end.
‘It’s going to be my only wedding—we might as well make it a party!’ he’d exclaimed.
She just hadn’t realised that Leander’s ‘party’ would attract so much attention and so much ‘hoo-ha’, as Kate had said earlier.
If she was honest, she’d been utterly thrown by the press interest in them. Yes, the Hadden name had notoriety in the UK, but in Greece, the Liassidis name was on a whole different level. The press had been stalking them ever since the news became public, each subsequent headline more hysterical than the previous one, the whole of Greece and beyond taken by the friends to lovers fairy tale.
Anyone who was anybody was there, wanting desperately to be seen. In truth, Helena had only cared about a handful of people. Her, Kate, Leander, obviously, and his parents, Giorgos and Cora. She wasn’t na?ve enough to think that his twin brother would come. Leander and Leo hadn’t shared a single word in the last five years. Her heart pulsed once. She hadn’t spoken to Leo since the bitter confrontation he’d had with her mother nearly ten years ago, after Gwen had na?vely thought she could continue her father’s work with Liassidis Shipping.
She would be there in the church, with her second husband John, who had reluctantly agreed to interrupt his golfing holiday, and Helena tried to tell herself that it was enough that they had come.
She and Kate paused outside the large doors that would open to the nave of the church, listening for a moment to the gentle hum of conversation and the soft sounds of string music. Helena wasn’t religious, but she couldn’t help but wonder if it was sacrilegious to marry in this way, in this place, for reasons that had nothing to do with love.
‘We could run, you know. I’ve got the car keys,’ Kate whispered as if sensing her hesitation.
Helena laughed and turned to see Kate’s reassuring smile, the easy confidence she had radiating over Helena like a balm.
‘No. I’m good. But thanks though,’ Helena said.
‘Loves ya,’ Kate said, causing Helena to grin at the favourite phrase passed back and forth between them.
‘Loves ya,’ Helena replied. ‘Now, let’s do this.’
The wedding march started up and unseen hands opened the doors from the inside. Kate began her procession down the aisle and Helena’s heart started to pound. Even though it was silly, it wasn’t ever going to be a real marriage, nerves dotted her skin with pinpricks. Helena locked her gaze firmly on the bouquet in her hand, which was why she didn’t see the way that Kate stiffened and almost missed a step.
Helena didn’t, in fact, see much until she was nearly halfway up the aisle because it was only when Kate stepped to the side, glancing in panic between her and the man at the top of the aisle, that Helena realised that something was wrong.
Something was terribly, horribly wrong.
Because standing at the top of the aisle, the six-foot-four-inch dark-haired, bronzed Adonis wasn’t the man who had promised that he’d do everything in his power to help her. No.
Standing at the top of the aisle was the last man she’d ever expected to see.
Leonidas Liassidis.
Leo stared at the closed doors of the church, silently cursing his arrogant, reckless brother to hell and back, utterly uncaring that he did so in a church.
He was furious. How dared Leander do something like this?
If Leo hadn’t picked up the message his brother had left him little less than three hours ago, he wouldn’t have even been here. As it was, he’d barely made it on time.
Leo cursed silently again.
He hadn’t spoken to Leander in five years and this was the first thing his brother had asked of him?
‘Be me.’
There had been more on the message, but now as he stood at the top of a church aisle in front of one hundred and fifty guests, it was all Leo heard.
‘Be me, be me, be me.’
They hadn’t pulled this stunt since they were boys. Back when he’d still considered Leander his brother, before his lies had betrayed the future that Leo had thought he would have with Leander by his side. The future Leo had wanted.
Time hadn’t dulled the memory of the day they had turned eighteen, when their father had offered them a choice: inherit Liassidis Shipping, beginning a three-year handover period from him to them, or take a sizeable fortune and strike out on their own.
They’d spent years of their teenage lives talking about what they would do with Liassidis Shipping. Years, planning how to make it the industry number one, how they would rule together, side by side, sharing all decisions and doing it all together.
And right up until that moment, Leo would have sworn he knew his brother better than he knew himself. But when their father made the offer that had been made to him by his father, Leo had looked at Leander and seen a stranger staring back at him.
Even the thought of it rippled tension across the muscles of his back. Betrayal, fury, a potent phosphoric taste in his mouth. Leo clenched his teeth together, painfully aware that he was the sole focus of the entire congregation at that moment in time. And in that congregation were his parents, staring at him, looking horrified.
Because although he and Leander were truly identical—to the point where the number of people that could tell them apart could be counted on one hand—his parents had recognised him the moment he had entered the church.
But he had been ushered immediately up to the top of the aisle before he could tell them what was going on. And even if he had been able to speak to them, what would he have said? Would he have repeated what his brother had said when he’d left his message?
That Leander had ‘needed time’?
Time for what, the maláka had not even bothered to explain.
Leander had insisted that he would be back by the end of the honeymoon, but Leo didn’t believe him for one second.
Helena needs this. Really needs it. So please. I’ll ask...beg. But please, don’t leave her alone on the wedding day.
Leo clenched his teeth again, a thin lightning strike of tension spreading up his neck and jaw. Of all the women in the world, his brother had chosen to marry Helena Hadden? Leo would have been happy to have lived the rest of his life never seeing or hearing of a Hadden woman ever again.
There had been a time when things had been different. When he’d enjoyed Helena’s company, when he had almost thought them friends. But that was before Helena had taken Leander’s side following his betrayal, and things had only become worse three years later, after what her mother, Gwen, had done to Liassidis Shipping following the death of her husband.
Whether it had been grief or sheer stupidity, Gwen’s actions had nearly destroyed Liassidis Shipping for ever by engaging the competitor of an existing client at a knockdown price. It had taken everything, everything , Leo had had in him, to pull it back from the brink of ignominy.
Christós , what was he even doing here?
He looked back at the church doors. No matter how much he resented the Haddens, and hated his brother, he couldn’t have left Helena alone to face down a near obscene number of wedding guests, let alone the press corps camped outside. No, only his selfish, uncaring brother would do such a thing. And he—Leo assured himself with an almost violent intensity—was nothing like his brother.
The sound of the doors opening screeched against the floor, causing him to wince momentarily at the shocking intrusive sound. And then, just for a second, he saw her centred in the doorframe, smiling at her bridesmaid, her face filled with hope and excitement, and it cut through the red haze of his anger.
That wasn’t Helena Hadden, his body roared.
The effect she had on him was instantaneous, his stomach tensing against a punch to the gut, as heat worked its way around his system. The woman standing in the ivory sheath was statuesque tall, beyond beautiful, and barely reminiscent of the gangly girl he’d last seen ten years before. The sheer marked difference between what he saw and what he’d been expecting destroyed any instinctive barrier against seeing the intense feminine beauty of the woman standing at the opposite end of the aisle and he was frankly relieved when the bridesmaid came to take her place in front of the bride.
Get yourself together. Right now.
Reminding himself who she was, what her mother had done—what his brother had got him into—tuned his feelings back to where they should be. Right around the time that the bridesmaid stepped aside and Helena caught sight of him.
He was staring at her so intently he saw the exact moment she realised it was him standing at the top of the aisle, not his brother. Shock and horror morphed quickly into anger, the fire in Helena’s startling blue eyes burning him as badly as that first impression of her had.
And yet he could do nothing—say nothing—until she reached his side. And even then? They were facing the entire congregation and because someone —probably his egotistical brother—had the genius idea to have the priest stand with the congregation rather than with them, as tradition would dictate, they were in full view of absolutely everyone.
Helena needs this. Really needs it.
Leo bit back a scornful laugh. One look at the sheer panic in her eyes was enough to tell him what he needed to know.
This was no love marriage. Not that he’d have believed it even if they’d tried to deceive him. There had been absolutely no trace of such feeling between her and Leander in all the years that the Haddens had spent with his family. So Leo could be forgiven for thinking that it was a joke when the wedding invitation had first arrived. He’d left the thick embossed cream paper on the corner of his desk, almost needing to see it again and again just to believe it.
That was until the press and the gossip magazines had started to whisper rumours that ‘Leander the Lothario’ was finally settling down.
What had started as a few pieces in lifestyle magazines had taken Greece by storm. The Liassidis family name combined with, Leo would grudgingly admit, Leander’s own achievements were lauded throughout the country. It should have come as little surprise that this mockery of a love story would have captured the nation’s attention.
But Leo had seen members of the international press right by the steps of the church. Was that why his brother had decided to cut and run? Or was there another reason? Did it even matter, Leo asked himself, as his brother had once again proved that only his own needs and desires mattered, uncaring of who he hurt in the process?
He turned his attention back to Helena, who was mere steps away, and she was still glaring at him with a fury that promised nothing less than hellfire.
Finally, she stepped up beside him, her eyes locked onto his face as if he were the one who had put them in this situation, rather than his brother. As if he didn’t have better things to do with his time than to play groom in whatever scheme Helena and his brother had cooked up.
She pasted a smile over exquisite features and hissed out from between her teeth, ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Your beloved fiancé has done a runner,’ he returned with an equally false smile and gritted teeth, aware that the gaze of every person in the room was on them. If he hadn’t been the employer of nearly twenty thousand staff around the globe, he might have found the experience a bit intimidating.
He looked back at Helena to see that the blood had drained from her creamy complexion.
Malákas.
This time, he wasn’t sure whether he was cursing his brother or himself.
‘He said he’ll return before the end of the honeymoon,’ his hitherto unknown conscience prompted him to add.
In her wide eyes he could see her thoughts churning like a sea swell in the Aegean, but they were just as unfathomable to him.
‘Smile,’ he warned as he registered a ripple of unease pass across the guests in the church.
She flashed another glare at him that didn’t need translating. It was the eye-squint equivalent of Don’t tell me to smile, damn you. But she did exactly as he’d said. She turned to face not only the priest but also the guests, the delicate rosebud of her lips widening. And Leo could have sworn he heard a collective sigh pass across them as if she’d bestowed them with a gift.
The priest welcomed the guests in English and began the wedding service, but he could have sworn that he felt Helena’s panic tugging at his senses, inflaming his own frustration that his brother had involved him in such a scheme.
And as the choir began the first of what he hoped was only a few carefully selected hymns, Leo only had one thing on his mind—getting out of this ridiculous situation as quickly as possible—which was why he went through the process of saying what was needed to be said, when it needed to be said.
Honeymoon be damned, the moment this ceremony was over he was done. Out. Back to his apartment in Athens, back to Liassidis Shipping, where several important meetings and events would consume his thoughts. Not the quagmire of chaos that surrounded both Helena and Leander.
The priest gestured for them to enter the vestry, where they would sign the marriage document, and if anyone thought it odd that Leander Liassidis had grasped the hand of his soon-to-be wife and rushed her away from the view of the congregation it was only put down to just how passionately he loved the beautiful Helena Hadden.