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I tensed, momentarily panicked that she’d learned what I’d hidden from her for the last few weeks. As much as I’d tried to ignore the ever-growing pain in my abdomen, I couldn’t any more. Not only had it become a constant dull ache, it had become a reminder that even health-wise my life wasn’t my own. That I might well be succumbing to the very real ailment that had taken my grandmother—
‘Callie? Are you ready?’
Realising she was talking about the wedding ceremony, I felt the urge to succumb to hysteria pummel me once again. As did the fierce need to be selfish just this once…to simply flee and let the chips fall where they may.
‘Is anyone ever ready to marry a man they’ve never met?’ I asked. ‘Please tell me you’ve found out why he’s demanding I do this?’ I pleaded.
Eyes a shade darker than my own lapis-lazuli-coloured ones turned mournful as she shook her head. ‘No. Your father still refuses to tell me. My guess is that it has something to do with your grandfather and old man Xenakis.’ Before I could ask what she meant, she continued, ‘Anyway, Yiannis will be looking for me, so I need to be quick.’
She reached inside the stylish designer jacket that matched her lavender gown and produced a thick cream envelope, her fingers shaking as she stared at it.
‘What’s that?’ I asked when she made no move to speak.
Within her gaze came a spark of determination I hadn’t seen in years. My heart leapt into my throat as she caught my hand in hers and squeezed it tight.
‘My sweet Callie, I know I’ve brought misery to your life with my actions—’
‘No, Mama, you haven’t. I promise,’ I countered firmly.
She stared at me. ‘I’m not sure whether to be proud or to admonish you for being such a good liar. But I know what I’ve done. My selfishness has locked you in this prison with me when you should be free to pursue what young girls your age ought to be doing.’ Her fingers tightened on mine. ‘I want you to make me a promise,’ she pleaded, her voice husky with unshed tears.
I nodded because…what else could I do? ‘Anything you want, Mama.’
She held out the envelope. ‘Take this. Hide it in the safest place you can.’
I took it, frowning at the old-fashioned cursive lettering spelling out my name. ‘What’s this?’
‘It’s from your grandmother.’
‘Yiayia Helena?’ A tide of sorrow momentarily washed over me, my heart still missing the grandmother I’d lost a year ago.
My mother nodded. ‘She said I’d know when you needed it. And even if I’m wrong…’
She paused, a faraway look in her eyes hinting that she was indulging in all those might-have-beens that sparked my own desperate imagination. When she refocused, her gaze moved dully over my wedding dress.
‘Even if this…alliance turns out to be tolerable, it’ll help to know you were loved by your grandmother. That should you need her she’ll be there for you the way I wasn’t.’
I held on tighter to her hand. ‘I know you love me, Mama.’
She shook her head, tears brimming her eyes. ‘Not the way a mother should love her child, without selfish intentions that end up harming her. I took the wrong turn with you. I left you alone with your father when I should have taken you with me. Maybe if I had—’ She stopped, took a deep breath and dabbed at her tears before braving my worried stare again. ‘All I ask is that you find a way to forgive me one day.’
‘Mama—’ I stopped when she gave a wrenching sob.
Her gaze dropped to the envelope in my hand. ‘Hang on to that, Callie. And don’t hesitate to use it when you need it. Promise me,’ she insisted fervently.’
‘I… I promise.’
She sniffed, nodded, then abruptly turned the wheelchair and manoeuvred herself out of my bedroom.
Before I could process our conversation I was again surrounded by mindless chatter, unable to breathe or think. The only solid thing in my world became the envelope I clutched tightly in my hand. And when I found that within the endless folds of tulle the designer had fashioned a pocket, I nearly cried with relief as I slipped the envelope into it.
Even without knowing its contents, just knowing it came from my grandmother—the woman who’d helped me stand up to my father’s wrath more times than I could count, who’d loved and reassured me on a daily basis during my mother’s year-long absence when I was fifteen years old—kept me from crumbling as my father arrived and with a brisk nod offered his stiff arm, ordered me to straighten my spine…and escorted me to my fate.
The chapel was filled to the brim, according to the excited chatter of the household staff, and as my father led me out to a flower-bedecked horse-drawn carriage I got the first indication of what was to come.
Over the last three weeks I’d watched with a sense of surrealism as construction crews and landscapers descended on our little corner of the world to transform the church and surrounding area from a place of rundown dilapidation into its former whitewashed charming glory.
The usually quiet streets of Nicrete, a sleepy village in the south of the island of Skyros, the place generations of the Petras family had called home, buzzed with fashionably dressed strangers—all guests of Axios Xenakis. With the main means of getting on and off the island being by boat, the harbour had become a place of interest in the last few days.
Every hotel and guest house on the island was booked solid. Expensive speedboats and a handful of super-yachts had appeared on the horizon overnight, and now bobbed in the Aegean beneath resplendent sunshine.
Of course the man I was to marry chose to do things differently.
My carriage was halfway between home and the church when the loud, mechanical whine of powerful rotors churned the air. Children shouted in excitement and raced towards the hilltop as three sleek-looking helicopters flew overhead to settle on the newly manicured lawns of the park usually used as recreational grounds for families. Today the whole park had been cordoned off—evidently to receive these helicopters.
Beneath the veil I allowed myself a distasteful moue. But the barrier wasn’t enough to hide my father’s smug smile as he watched the helicopters. Or his nod of satisfaction as several distinguished-looking men and designer-clad women alighted from the craft.
I averted my face, hoping the ache in my heart and the pain in my belly wouldn’t manifest itself in the hysteria I’d been trying to suppress for what seemed like for ever. But I couldn’t prevent the words from tumbling from my lips.
‘It’s not too late, Papa. Whatever this is… Perhaps if you told me why, we can find a way—’
‘I have already found a way, child.’
‘Don’t call me a child—I’m twenty-four years old!’
That pulse of rebellion, which I’d never quite been able to curb, eagerly fanned by Yiayia when she was alive, slipped its leash. She’d never got on well with my father, and in a way standing up to him now, despite the potential fallout for my mother, felt like honouring her memory.
His eyes narrowed. ‘If you wanted to help then you should’ve taken that business degree at university, instead of the useless arts degree you’re saddled with.’
‘I told you—I’m not interested in a corporate career.’
Nor was I interested in being constantly reminded that I wasn’t the son he’d yearned for. The one he’d hoped would help him save Petras Industries, the family company which now teetered on the brink of bankruptcy.
‘Ne—and just like your mother you let me down. Once again it has fallen to me to find a way. And I have. So now you will smile and do your duty by this family. You will say your vows and marry Xenakis.’
I bit my lip at this reminder of yet another bone of contention between us. I’d fought hard for the right to leave the island to pursue my arts degree, only returning because of my mother. The small art gallery I worked at part-time on Nicrete was a way of keeping my sanity, even as I mourned my wasted degree.
‘After that, what then?’
He shrugged. ‘After that you will belong to him. But remember that regardless of the new name you’re taking on you’re still a Petras. If you do anything to bring the family into disrepute you will bear the consequences.’
My heart lurched, my fists balling in pain and frustration—because I knew exactly what my father meant.
The consequences being my father’s ability to manipulate my mother’s guilt and ensure maximum suffering. His constant threats to toss her out with only the clothes on her back, to abandon her to her fate the way she’d briefly abandoned her family. But while my mother had deserted her child and marriage in the name of a doomed love, my father was operating from a place of pure revenge. To him, his wife had humiliated and betrayed him, and he was determined to repay her by keeping her prisoner. Ensuring that at every waking moment she was reminded of her fall from grace and his power over her.
The reason that I’d been roped in as a means to that end was my love for my mother.
Eight years ago, when he’d returned home with my absentee mother after the doctors in Athens had called and informed him that she’d been in a crash, and that the man she’d run away with was dead, he’d laid out new family rules. My mother would stay married to him. She would become a dutiful wife and mother, doing everything in her power to not bring another speck of disgrace to the family. In return he would ensure her medical needs were met, and that she would be given the finest treatment to adjust to her new wheelchair-bound life.
For my part, I would act the devoted daughter…or my mother would suffer.
The horses whinnying as they came to a stop at the steps leading to the church doors dragged me to the present, pushing my heartache aside and replacing it with apprehension.
The last of the guests were entering while organ music piped portentously in the air. In less than an hour I would be married to a man I’d never exchanged a single word with. A man who had somehow fallen in league with my father for reasons I still didn’t know.
I glanced at my father, desperate to ask why. His stony profile warned me not to push my luck. Like my heartache, I smothered my rebellion.
My father stepped out of the carriage and held out his hand. Mine shook, and again I was glad for the veil’s cover to hide my tear-prickled eyes.
A small part of me was grateful that my father didn’t seem in a hurry to march me down the aisle because he was basking in the limelight that momentarily banished the shadow of scandal and humiliation he’d lived under for the past eight years. For once people weren’t talking about his wife’s infidelity. Or the fact that the woman who’d deserted him had returned in a wheelchair. Or that he’d taken her back just so he could keep her firmly under his thumb in retribution.
Today he was simply the man who’d seemingly bagged one of the most eligible bachelors in the world for his daughter—not the once illustrious but now downtrodden businessman who’d lost the Petras fortune his father had left him.
The doors to the church yawned open, ready to receive their unwilling sacrifice. My footsteps faltered and my father sent me a sharp look. Unable to meet his eyes without setting off the spark of mutiny attempting to rekindle itself inside me, I kept my gaze straight.
I needed to do this for my mother.
I spotted her in the front row, her head held high despite her fate, and it lent me the strength to put one foot in front of the other. The slight weight of my grandmother’s envelope in my pocket helped me ignore the rabid curiosity and speculative whispers of three hundred strangers.
Unfortunately there was only one place left to look. At the towering figure of the man waiting in perfect stillness facing the altar.
He didn’t twitch nor fidget. Didn’t display any outward signs of being a nervous groom.
His broad back and wide shoulders seemed to go on for ever, and his proud head and unyielding stance announced his power and authority. He didn’t speak to the equally tall, commanding figure next to him, as most grooms did with their best man. In fact both men stood as if to military attention, their stance unwavering.
My gaze flicked away from Axios Xenakis, my breath stalling in my throat the closer I approached. Even without seeing his face I sensed a formidable aura—one that forced me again to wonder why he was doing this. What did he have to gain with this alliance?
He could have any woman he wanted. So why me?
And why had several butterflies suddenly taken flight within my belly?
Wild instinct urged me to fan my rebellion to life. Fight or flight. Pick one and deal with the consequences later.
But even as the thoughts formed they were discarded.
I had no choice. None whatsoever.
But maybe this man I was marrying would be a little more malleable than my father. Maybe—
He turned. And the feeble little hope died a horrible death.
Eyes the colour of polished gunmetal bored into me as if they were with fierce, merciless hooks. They probed beneath the veil with such force that for a moment I imagined I was naked—that he could see my every weakness and flaw, see to the heart of my deepest desire for freedom.
His lips were pressed into a formidable line, his whole demeanour austere. Axios Xenakis could have been in a boardroom, preparing to strike a deal to make himself another billion euros, not poised before an altar, about to commit himself to a wife he’d never met.
I catalogued his breathtaking features. Wondered if that rugged boxer’s jaw ever relaxed—whether the cut-glass sharpness of his cheekbones ever softened in a smile. Did he maintain constant control of those sleek eyebrows so they were permanently brooding? Did his nose ever wrinkle in laughter?
Why was I interested?
I was nothing but part of a transaction to him—one he didn’t seem entirely thrilled about, judging by his icy regard. So it didn’t matter that the olive vibrancy of his skin drew from me more than a fleeting look, or that he was without a doubt the most strikingly handsome man I’d ever seen.
He was a world removed from the boys I’d sneakily dated at university, before my father had found out and ruthlessly thwarted my chances with them before anything resembling a relationship could form.
Axios Xenakis belonged in a stratosphere of his own. One I was apprehensive about inhabiting.
My footsteps stalled and I heard my father’s sharp intake of breath. It was swiftly followed by the tight grip of his hand in warning.
Don’t disgrace the family.
Defiance sparked again.
But then I saw my mother’s head turn. The ubiquitous misery filmed her eyes, but alongside it was a look so fierce it might have been a reflection from my grandmother’s eyes.
It was a look that infused me with courage.
It’s up to you, it said. Do this…or don’t.
My heart thundered. The need to turn around and simply walk away was a wild cyclone churning through me.
At the altar, Axios’s eyes never shifted from me, his stance unchanging in the face of my clear reluctance. It was as if he knew what I’d decide and was simply waiting me out.
And, since I was playing in a game whose rules no one had bothered to apprise me of, there was only one move I could make.
I would play this round, then fight my corner later.
With that firm promise echoing inside me, I stepped up to the altar.
I saw a fleeting disappointment in his eyes before he masked his features. He was disappointed? Did that mean he didn’t want this?
Wild hope flared within me even as bewilderment mounted. If he didn’t want this then there might be room to negotiate. Room to get what I wanted out of this.
Realising I was staring, and that my father had been dispatched and I was now the sole focus of Axios Xenakis’ eyes, I hurriedly averted my gaze. But not before acknowledging that up close he was even more electrifying. Perhaps it was the severity of his grey suit. Or the fact that the hand he held out to me screamed a silent command.
The last strains of the hymn trailed away, leaving behind a charged silence. With each second it weighed heavier, pressing down on me.
His hand extended another inch, and heavy expectation thickened the air.
With a deep breath, inevitably I slipped my hand into his—and joined the stranger who was to be my husband.
Almost immediately he released me. But the sensation of his touch lingered, and a sizzling chain reaction I was unprepared for travelled up my arm, flaring wide.
It was enough momentarily to drown out the intonation of the priest’s voice as he began the ceremony.
I rallied long enough to murmur the words I’d reluctantly memorised and, when the time came, to pick up the larger of the two platinum wedding bands.
With fingers that still trembled I faced Axios. The impact of his eyes, his towering frame, the much too handsome face momentarily erased the words from my brain.
In silence he held out his left hand, his laser eyes boring into me as he simply…waited.
