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Like the stock she came from.
Nikos Vassilis swirled the fine vintage wine consideringly in his glass.
‘So, when will my bride arrive, Yiorgos?’ he enquired of his host.
He was dining with his grandfather-in-law-to-be in the vast, over-decorated house on the outskirts of Athens that Yiorgos Coustakis considered suitable to his wealth and position.
‘At the end of the week,’ his host answered tersely.
He didn’t look well, Nikos noted. His colour was high, and there was a pinched look around his mouth.
‘And the wedding?’
His host gave a harsh laugh. ‘So eager? You don’t even know what she looks like!’
Nikos’s mobile mouth curled cynically.
‘Her looks, or lack of them, are not going to be a deal-breaker, Yiorgos,’ he observed sardonically.
Yiorgos gave another laugh. Less harsh this time. Coarser.
‘Bed her in the dark, if you must! I had to do that with her grandmother!’
A sliver of distaste filtered through Nikos. Though no one would dare say it to his face, the world knew that Yiorgos Coustakis had won his richly dowered, well-born wife by dint of getting the poor girl so besotted with him that she’d agreed to meet him in his apartment one afternoon. Yiorgos, as ambitious as he was ruthless, had made sure the information leaked to Marina’s father, who had arrived in time to prevent Yiorgos having to undergo the ordeal of sex with a plain, drab dab of a girl in daylight, but not in time to save her reputation. ‘Who will believe she left my apartment a virgin?’ Yiorgos had challenged her father callously—and won his bride.
Nikos flicked his mind back to the present. Was he insane, going through with this? Marrying a woman he hadn’t set eyes on just because she happened to have a quarter of Yiorgos Coustakis’s DNA? Idly he found himself wondering if the girl felt the same way about marrying a complete stranger. Then he shrugged mentally—in the world of the very rich, dynastic marriages were commonplace. The Coustakis girl would have been reared from birth to know that she was destined to be a pawn in her grandfather’s machinations. She would be pampered and doll-like, her primary skill that of spending money in huge amounts on clothes, jewellery and anything else she took a fancy to.
Well, Nick acknowledged silently, glancing around the opulent dining room, she would certainly have money to spare as his wife! Once he’d taken over Coustakis Industries his income would be ten times what it already was—she could squander it on anything she wanted! Spending money would keep her busy, and keep her happy.
He paused momentarily. With a wife in the background he would obviously have to keep his personal life more low-profile. He would not be one of those husbands, all too familiar in the circles he now moved in, who thought nothing of flaunting their mistresses in front of their families. Nevertheless, he had no intention of altering the very enjoyable private life he indulged himself in, even if he would have to be more discreet about it once he was married.
Oh, he was well aware that as a rich man he could have been as old as Methuselah and as ugly as sin and beautiful women would still have fawned on him. Wealth was the most powerful aphrodisiac to those kind of women. Of course even when he’d been dirt-poor women had always come easily to him—another legacy from his philandering father, no doubt. One of Esme’s many predecessors had said to his face, as she lay exhausted and sated beneath him, that if he ever ran out of money he could make a fortune hiring himself out as a stud. Nikos had laughed, his mouth widening wolfishly, and turned her over…
He shifted in his uncomfortably ornate chair. Thinking about sex was not a good idea right now. His razor-sharp mind might not have objected to kow-towing to Old Man Coustakis’s summons that night, but his body was reminding him that it had been deprived of its customary satiation. Even though he’d put in extra time these last few days at the gym and on the squash courts in the exclusive health club he belonged to, Nikos could feel a familiar tightening that presaged sexual desire.
As soon as he decently could he’d take his leave tonight and phone Xanthe Palloupis. She was an extremely complaisant mistress—always welcoming, always responsive to his physical needs. Even though it had been three months since he’d last visited her—Esme Vandersee had replaced her over two months ago—he knew she would greet him warmly at her discreetly located but very expensive apartment, confident that he would tell her in the morning she could go to her favourite jeweller’s and order something to remember his visit by.
Would he keep her on when he had married this unknown granddaughter of Yiorgos Coustakis? She had other lovers, he knew, and it did not trouble him. Esme, too, right this moment was doubtless consoling her wounded—and highly developed!—ego by letting another of her crowded court do the honours by her. As a top model she always had men slavering after her, but for all that Nikos knew perfectly well that he would only have to snap his fingers and she would come instantly to his heel—and other parts of his anatomy.
He shifted uncomfortably in his seat again. He definitely needed some energetic physical release before his wedding night! The Coustakis girl would be a virgin, of course, and bedding her would be more of a duty, not a pleasure, though he would be as careful with her as was possible. He’d never taken a virgin—he would have to make totally sure he was not sexually frustrated on his wedding night or she’d be the one to suffer from it, however plain she was.
Just how plain was she? Nikos wondered, his mind running on. He had a pretty shrewd idea that from the tinge of open malice in Yiorgos’s expression when he’d made that coarse comment about bedding her in the dark she had no looks at all. The old man probably thought it amusing that a man who was never seen without a beautiful woman hanging on his arm should now be hog-tied to a female whose sole attraction was as the gateway to control and eventual ownership of Coustakis Industries.
Another thought flitted through his mind. Just who exactly was this unknown granddaughter of Yiorgos Coustakis? One of the main attractions of taking over Coustakis Industries was that Yiorgos had no offspring to fight him for control. His only son had been killed in a smash-up years ago. Marina Coustakis had had some kind of seizure, so the gossip went, and had become a permanent invalid—though not managing to die until a few years ago. That meant that Yiorgos had not been free to marry again and beget more heirs. But then, mused Nikos, if the son had indeed been married when he died, and the granddaughter already born, maybe that hadn’t mattered too much to Yiorgos. The son’s widow had presumably married again and was out of the picture, apart from having dutifully reared the Coustakis granddaughter to be a docile, well-behaved, well-bred Greek wife.
Her docility would certainly make things easier for him, Nikos thought. Oh, he wouldn’t flaunt his sex-life in her face, but obviously her mother would have taught her that husbands strayed, that it was in their nature, and that her role was to be a dutiful spouse, immaculate social hostess and attentive mother.
Nikos’s hand stilled a moment as he raised his wine glass to his mouth. Yiorgos was retelling the drama of some coup he’d pulled off years ago, clearly relishing the memory of having beaten off a rival, bankrupting him in the process, and Nikos was only paying attention with a quarter of his mind. Three-quarters of it was considering what it would be like to be a father.
Because that, he knew, was what all this was about. Yiorgos was approaching the end of his life—he wanted to know his DNA would continue. He wanted an heir.
And Nikos? Strange feelings pricked at him. What did he know about fatherhood? His own father didn’t even know he existed—he’d impregnated his mother and sailed with the tide at dawn. He could even be alive somewhere, Nikos knew. It meant nothing to him. His mother had scarcely mentioned him—she’d worked in a bar, when she’d worked at all, and her maternal instincts had not been well developed. Her son’s existence hadn’t been important to her, and when he’d left home as a teenager she’d hardly noticed. As he had slowly, painfully, begun to make money, she’d accepted his hand-outs without question, let alone interest, and hadn’t lived to see him make real money. She’d been knocked down by a taxi twelve years ago, when he was twenty-two. Nikos had given her an expensive funeral.
He lifted the wine glass to his mouth and drank. It was a rare, costly vintage, he knew—learning about wines and all the other fine things of life was information he’d gathered along the way. He relished all fine things, and once he ran Coustakis Industries the finest things in the world would be his for the taking. He would have taken his place not just amongst the wealthy, as he now was, but amongst the super-rich. And if Coustakis wanted him to impregnate his granddaughter and give him a great-grandson—well, he could do that.
Whatever she looked like.
Andrea stood by the front door of the flat, staring at the opened letter. It was not from Coustakis Industries. It was from one of London’s most prestigious department stores, and informed her that enclosed was a gold store card with an immediate credit limit of five thousand pounds. It further stated her that all invoices incurred by her to that limit would be forwarded to the private office of Yiorgos Coustakis for payment. A second opened letter underlaid the one from the store. That one was from Coustakis Industries, and it instructed her to make use of the store card that would be sent under separate cover in order to provide herself with a suitable wardrobe for when she attended Mr Coustakis at the end of the following week. It finished with a reminder to phone the London office to confirm receipt of these instructions.
Andrea’s dark eyes narrowed dangerously. What the hell was the old bastard playing at?
What did he want? What was going on? Her scalp prickled with unease. She didn’t like this—she didn’t like it at all!
Her brain was in turmoil. What would happen if she did what she wanted to do and cut the store card in half and sent it back to her grandfather with orders to stick it where it hurt? Would he get the message? Somehow she didn’t think so.
Yiorgos Coustakis wanted something from her. He’d never acknowledged her existence before. But he was a rich man—very rich. And rich men had power. And they used it to get their own way.
Her face set. What could Yiorgos Coustakis do to them if he wanted to? Kim had debts—Andrea hated to think of them, let alone the reason for those debts, but they were there, like a millstone round their necks. Both of them, mother and daughter, worked endlessly, repaying them little by little, and given another five years or so they finally would be clear. But that was a long way off.
And Kim’s health was getting worse.
Anguish crushed Andrea’s heart like a vice. Her mother had suffered so much—she’d had such a rotten life. A brief, tiny glimpse of happiness when she was twenty, a few golden weeks in her youth, and then it had been destroyed. Totally destroyed. And she’d spent the next twenty-four years of her life being the most devoted, caring, loving mother than anyone could ask for.
I just wish we could get out, Andrea thought for the millionth time. The high-rise block they lived in was overdue for repairs, though she could understand the council’s reluctance to spend good money on doing up an estate when half its population would simply start to trash it the moment the paint was dry. The flats themselves had a list as long as your arm of repairs needed—the worst was that the damp in the kitchen and bathroom was dire, which did no good at all for Kim’s asthma. The lift was usually broken, and anyway usually served as a late-night public convenience, not to mention a place for scoring drugs.
For a brief, fleeting second Andrea thought of the immense wealth of Yiorgos Coustakis.
Then put it behind her.
She would have nothing to do with such a man. Nothing.
Whatever he planned for her.
CHAPTER TWO
NIKOS pushed the sleeve of his suit jacket back and glanced at the slim gold watch circling his lean wrist. What had Old Man Coustakis called him here for? He’d been cooling his heels on the shaded terrace for over ten minutes—and ten minutes was a long time for a man as busy as Nikos Vassilis. He did not like waiting patiently—he was a man in a hurry. Always had been.
The manservant approached again, from the large double doors leading into the opulent drawing room beyond, and deferentially asked him if he would like another drink. Curtly, Nikos shook his head, and asked—again—when Mr Coustakis would be ready to see him. The manservant replied that he would enquire, and padded off silently.
Irritated, Nikos turned and stared out over the gardens spread below. They were highly ornate, clearly designed to impress, not to provide a pleasant place to stroll around. Nikos had a sudden vision of a small boy trying to play out there and finding nothing but expensive specimen plants, and fussy paths and over-planted borders. His mouth tightened unconsciously. If he were to become a father he would need a decent place to raise his family…
His mind sheered away. The reality of what he was about to do—marry Yiorgos Coustakis’s plain, pampered granddaughter, a female he’d never met—was starting to hit him. Could he really go through with it? Even to get hold of Coustakis Industries?
He shook the doubts from his mind. Of course he would go through with it! Anyway, it wasn’t as if he were signing his life away. Old Man Coustakis would not live for ever. In half a dozen years he would probably be dead, and then Nikos and the unknown granddaughter could come to some sort of civilised divorce, go their separate ways, and that would be that.
And what about your son? What will he think about your ‘civilised divorce’?
He pushed that thought from his mind as well. Who knew? Maybe the granddaughter would turn out to be barren, as well as plain as sin.
A footfall behind him made him turn.
And freeze.
Nikos’s eyes narrowed as he saw the unfamiliar woman step onto the wide sweeping terrace where he stood. The cloud of dark bronze hair rustled on her shoulders, making him take notice of her long, slender neck. Then, as if a brief glance were tribute enough for that particular feature, his eyes clamped back to her face.
Theos, but she was a stunner! Her skin was paler than a Greek’s, but still tanned. She had a short, delicate nose, sculpted cheeks, and a wide, generous mouth. Her eyes were like rich chestnut, the lashes ridiculously long and smoky.
He felt his body kick with pleasure at looking at her. As of their own volition, his eyes wandered downwards again, past that slender neck framed by that glorious hair, down over full, swelling breasts, superbly moulded by the tight-fitting jacket she wore, nipping in to a deliciously spannable waist, and then ripening outwards to softly rounded hips, before descending down long, long legs.
He frowned. She was wearing trousers. The sight offended him. With legs that long she should be wearing a short, tight skirt that hugged those splendid thighs and clung lovingly to the lush, rounded bottom he felt sure a woman like that must have…
Who the hell was she?
His brain interrupted his body’s visceral contemplation of the female’s physical attributes. What was a woman this lush, this drop-dead gorgeous, this damn sexy, doing here in Yiorgos Coustakis’s house?
The answer came like a blow to the gut. There was only one reason a woman who looked like this would be swanning around Old Man Coustakis’s private residence, and that was because she was a private guest. Very private.
All of Athens knew that Yiorgos Coustakis liked to keep a stable of women. He was renowned for it, even from long before his wife became an invalid.
And they’d always been young women—even as he’d got older.
Even now, apparently.
Distaste filled Nikos’s mouth. OK, so maybe the old man was still up for it, even at his age, but the idea of the man of seventy-eight keeping a woman who couldn’t be more than twenty-five, if that, as his mistress was repugnant in the extreme.
Andrea blinked, momentarily blinded by the bright light after the dim shade of the interior of the huge house she had been deposited at barely five minutes ago by the lush limo that had met her at the airport.
Then, as her vision cleared, she saw someone was already on the terrace. She took in an impression of height, and darkness. Black hair, a sleek, powerful-looking business suit, an immaculately knotted tie—and a face that made her stop dead.
The skin tone was Mediterranean; there was no doubt about that. But what struck her incongruously was the pair of piercing steel-grey eyes that blazed at her. She felt her stomach lurch, and blinked again. She went on staring, taking in, once she could drag her eyes away from those penetrating grey ones, a strong, straight nose, high cheekbones and a wide, firm mouth.
She shook her head slightly, as if to make sure the man she was staring at was really there.
Suddenly Andrea saw the man’s expression change. Harden with disapproval. And something more than disapproval. Disdain. Something flared inside her—and it was nothing to do with the unmistakable frisson that had sizzled through her like a jolt of electricity in the face of the blatant appraisal this startlingly breath-catching man had just subjected her to. She would have been blind not to have registered the look of outright sexual attraction in the man’s face when he’d first set eyes on her a handful of seconds ago. She was used to that reaction in men. For the most part it was annoying more than anything, and over the years she had learnt to dress down, concealing the ripeness of her figure beneath loose, baggy clothes, confining her glowing hair into a subdued plait, and seldom bothering with make-up. Besides—a familiar shaft of bitterness stabbed at her—she knew all too well that any initial sexual attraction men showed in her would not last—not when they saw the rest of her…
She pulled her mind away, washing out bitterness with an even more familiar upsurge of raw, desperate gratitude—to her mother, to fate, to any providential power, to everyone who had helped her along her faltering way in the long, painful years until she had emerged to take her place as a functioning adult in the world. Considering what the alternatives might have been, she had no cause for bitterness—none at all.
And if she felt bitter about the man who was her father’s father—well, that was not on her own behalf, only her mother’s. For her mother’s sake only she was here, now, standing on this terrace, over a thousand miles from home—being looked at disdainfully by a man she could not drag her eyes from.
It had been a hard decision to make. It had been her friends Tony and Linda who had helped her make it.
‘But why is he doing this?’ she’d asked them, for the dozenth time. ‘He’s up to something and I don’t know what—and that worries me!’
‘Maybe he just wants to get to know you, Andy,’ said Linda peaceably. ‘Maybe he’s old, and ill, and wants to make up for how he treated you.’
‘Oh, so that’s why I’ve been getting letters just about ordering me to go and dance attendance on him! And not a dickey-bird about Mum, either! No, if he’d really wanted to make up he’d have written more politely—and to Mum, not me.’
‘If you want my advice I think you should go out there,’ said Linda’s husband, Tony. ‘Like Linda said, he might be after a reconciliation, but even if he isn’t, suppose he wants to use you for his own nefarious ends in some way? That, you know, puts you in a strong position. Have you thought of that?’
Andrea frowned.
Tony went on. ‘Look, if he does want you for something, then if he doesn’t want you to refuse he’s going to have to do something you want.’
‘Like what?’ Andrea snorted. ‘He doesn’t have a thing I want!’
‘He’s got money, Andy,’ Tony said quietly. ‘Shed-loads of it.’
Andrea’s eyes narrowed to angry slits. ‘He can choke on it for all I care! I don’t want a penny from him!’
‘But what about your mum, Andy?’ said Tony, even more quietly.
Andrea stilled. Tony pressed on, leaning forward. ‘What if he forked out enough for her to clear her debts—and move to Spain?’
Andrea’s breath seemed tight in her chest. As tight as her mother’s breath was, day in, day out. Instantly in her mind she heard her mother’s dry, asthmatic cough, saw her pause by the sink, breathing slowly and painfully, her frail body hunched.
‘I can’t,’ she answered faintly. ‘I can’t take that man’s money!’
‘Think it through,’ urged Tony. ‘You wouldn’t be taking his money for yourself, but for your mum. He owes her—you’ve always said that and it’s true! She’s raised you single-handed with nothing from him except insults and abuse! He lives in the lap of luxury, worth hundreds of millions, and his granddaughter lives in a council flat. Do it for her, Andy.’
And that, in the end, had been the decider. Though every fibre of her being wanted never, ever to have anything to do with the man who had treated her mother so callously, the moment Tony had said ‘Spain’ a vista had opened up in Andrea’s mind so wonderful she knew she could not refuse. If she could just get her grandfather to buy her mother a small apartment somewhere it was warm and dry all year round…
It was for that very reason that Andrea was now standing on the terrace of her grandfather’s palatial property in Athens.
She would get her mother the dues owed her.
She gave a smile as she looked again at the impressive man who stood before her. A small, tight, defiant—dismissive—smile. So, he knew who she was, did he, Mr Mega-Cool? He looked so sleek, screaming ‘money’ in his superbly tailored suit, with his immaculately cut dark hair, the gleam of gold at his wrist as he paused in the action of checking his watch—oh, he must be one of her grandfather’s entourage. No doubt. One of his business associates, partners—whatever rich men called each other in their gilded world where the price of electricity was an irrelevance and there was never green mould on the bathroom walls…
So much, she thought with self-mocking acknowledgement, for the shopping spree she’d been on with Linda and Tony in that ultra-posh London department store, courtesy of its gold store card! She’d thought the outrageously priced trouser suit she’d bought, shouting its designer label, would do the trick—fool anyone who saw her that the last thing she could possibly be was a common-as-muck London girl off a housing estate! And Linda had even done her hair and make-up that morning, before she’d set out for the airport, making her look svelte and expensive to go with the fantastic new outfit she’d travelled in. Obviously she need not have bothered!
The man looking at her so disdainfully out of those cold steel-grey eyes knew perfectly well what she was—who she was. Yiorgos Coustakis’s cheap-and-nasty bastard granddaughter!
Her chin went up. Well, what did she care? She had her own opinions of Yiorgos Coustakis—and they were not generous. So if this man standing here on her grandfather’s mile-long terrace, looking down his strong, straight nose at her, his mouth tight with disdain, thought she wasn’t fit for a palatial place like this, what was it to her? Zilch. Just as Yiorgos Coustakis was nothing to her—nothing except the price of some small, modest reparation to the woman he had treated like dirt…
Her eyes hardened. Nikos saw their expression change, saw the derisive smile, the insolent tilt of the woman’s chin. Clearly the female was shameless about her trade! The distaste he felt about Old Man Coustakis keeping a mistress at his age filtered into distaste for the woman herself. It checked the stirring of his own body, busy responding the way nature liked it to do when in the presence of a sexually alluring female.
So when the woman strolled towards him, the smile on her face unable to compensate for the hardness in her eyes, he responded in kind.
Andrea saw the withdrawal in his eyes, and suddenly, like a cloud passing in front of the sun, she felt a chill emanate from him. Suddenly he wasn’t just a breath-catchingly, heart-stoppingly handsome man, looking a million dollars, tall and lean—he was an icily formidable, hard-eyed, patrician-born captain of industry who looked on the rest of humanity as his inferior minions…
Well, tough! She tilted her head, almost coquettishly, letting her glorious hair riot over her shoulders. An intense desire to annoy him came over her.
‘Hi,’ she breathed huskily. ‘We haven’t met, have we? I’d remember, I know!’ She let a gleam of appreciation enter her glowing eyes. That would annoy him even more; she instinctively knew.
She held her hand out. It was looking beautiful—Linda had given her a manicure the night before, smoothing the work-roughened skin and putting on nail extensions and a rich nail-varnish whose colour matched her hair.
Nikos ignored the hand. A revulsion against touching flesh that had caressed, for money, a rich old man, filled him. It didn’t matter that half his body was registering renewed arousal at the sound of that breathy voice, the heady fragrance of her body as she approached him. He subdued it ruthlessly.
Besides, it had just registered with him that the woman was English. That would account for the auburn colouring. Presumably, he found himself thinking, for a woman of her profession hair that colour would command a premium in lands where dark hair was the norm.
