Xenakis's Convenient Bride. Dani Collins

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СКАЧАТЬ you deserved to be his heir.

      Sebastien had chided Stavros for not appreciating his family and heritage, since Sebastien hadn’t had those advantages. In his note, he continued:

      I grant you your wish. For the next two weeks Steve Michaels, with all his riches and influence, does not exist. You are Stavros Xenakis and work for Zante Pool Care. Report at 6:00 a.m. tomorrow, three blocks down the road.

      Antonio lasted two weeks without blowing his cover, so I have committed the first third of my five billion to the search-and-rescue foundation. Do the same, Stavros. It could save a life. And use this time to make peace with your past.

      —Sebastien

      Stavros had stayed up later than he should have, some of it jet lag, but mostly conjuring ways to get out of this challenge. Besides, he couldn’t sleep in that hot room, tossing and turning on the hard single bed. Old-fashioned honor had him accepting his lot and falling asleep.

      Then, even earlier than he needed to rise, the sun had struck directly into his eyes. Large trucks with squeaky brakes had pulled in beneath the open window.

      Disgusted, Stavros had eaten a bowl of dry cereal with the canned milk he’d been provided. He’d bought a coffee from a shop as he walked to “work.”

      His boss, Ionnes, had given him a clipboard that held a map, a handful of drawings and a work order. He had dangled a set of keys and pointed at a truck full of supplies and equipment, telling him to be sure to unload it since he wouldn’t have the vehicle tomorrow.

      Stavros might have booked a flight home at that point, but he had left his credit cards in New York, as instructed. He’d been completing Sebastien’s challenges since his first year of university. None had killed him yet.

      Nevertheless, as he’d followed the map, he had recognized the dip and roll of the road through the hills, eighteen years of changes notwithstanding. His heart had grown heavier with each mile, his lungs tighter.

      Perhaps he wasn’t defying his own death with this challenge, but the loss of his father was even more difficult to confront.

      He had sat in the driveway a full five minutes, pushing back dark memories by focusing on the changes in the home they’d occupied until their lives had overturned with the flip of a boat on the sea.

      The villa was well tended, but modest by his current standards. It had been his mother’s dream home when she married. She was a local girl from the fishing village on the bottom of the island. She had insisted her husband use this as his base. It had been a place where he could enjoy downtime. Quality time, with his children. She had called him a workaholic who was losing his roots, spending too much time in America, allowing the expanding interests of the family corporation to dominate his life.

      The villa hadn’t been new. It had needed repairs and his father had enlisted Stavros to set fresh paving stones at the front entrance while his mother and sisters had potted the bougainvillea that now bloomed in masses of pink against the white walls.

      The memories were so sharp and painful as Stavros sat there, he wanted to jam the truck in Reverse and get away from all of it.

      But where would he go? Back to the blaming, shaming glint in his grandfather’s hard stare? Back to the understudy role he hated, but played because his father wasn’t there to be the star?

      Cursing Sebastien afresh, Stavros glanced over his work order. He wasn’t cleaning the pool, but repairing the cracked tiles around it. Déjà vu with paving stones. The mistress of the house would direct him.

      He blew out a disgusted breath. After two decades of bearing up under his grandfather’s dictates, and now facing a demand that he marry, he was at the end of his rope with being told what to do.

      No one answered the doorbell so he let himself in through the gate at the side and went down the stairs into a white-walled courtyard that opened on one side to the view of the sea. His arrival didn’t stir Venus from her slumber.

      Damn, but his tension wanted an outlet. He let his gaze cruise over her stellar figure once more. If she was a wife, she was the trophy kind, but she wasn’t wearing a ring.

      The mistress of the place, his employer had said. He would just bet she was a mistress. How disappointing to have such a beauty reserved by his boss’s client.

      In another life, Stavros wouldn’t have let that stop him from going after her.

      This was another life, he recalled with a kick of his youthful recklessness.

      Crouching, he scooped up a handful of water and flicked it at her.

      * * *

      The spatter of something against Calli’s face startled her awake—in the pool, where she reflexively tried to sit up and immediately unbalanced. She tumbled sideways, sunglasses sliding off her nose, arms outstretched but catching at nothing. She plunged under the cold water into the blur of blue. Oh, that was a shock!

      Ophelia.

      Calli caught her bearings and pumped her arms to burst through the surface, sputtering, “You are so grounded. Go to your room.”

      But that wasn’t Ophelia straightening to such a lofty height at the side of the pool. It was a conquering warrior, tall and forbidding, backlit by the sun so Calli’s eyes watered as she tried to focus on him. His yellow T-shirt and shorts did nothing to detract from his powerful, intimidating form. In fact, his clothes clung like golden armor hammered across the contours of his shoulders and chest, accentuating the tan on his muscular biceps.

      She couldn’t see his eyes, but felt the weight of his gaze. It pushed her back and drew her forward at the same time, making her forget to breathe, making her hot despite being submerged to her shoulders and treading water.

      Heat radiated through her, that dangerous heat that she had learned to ignore out of self-preservation. This time it wouldn’t quash, which caused a knot of foreboding in her belly. He mesmerized her, holding her suspended as though in amber, snared into a moment of sexual fascination that seemed destined to last eternally.

      He folded his arms, imperious, but his voice held a rasp of humor. “Lead the way.”

      To his room, he meant. It wasn’t so much an invitation as an order.

      She had the impression of a dark brow cocked with silent laughter, which made her feel vulnerable. Not threatened, not physically, but imperiled at a deep level, where her ego resided. Where her fractured heart was tucked high on a shelf so no one could knock it to the floor again.

      Her chest prickled with anxiety and she wiped her eyes, trying hard to see him properly, trying to figure out who he was and why he had such an instant, undeniable effect on her. His T-shirt sported the pool man’s logo, but she’d never seen him before.

      “I didn’t hear you come in.”

      “Obviously. Up late?”

      “Yes.” It struck her very belatedly that it couldn’t have been Ophelia to wake her. Calli had fallen asleep in the pool because she’d arrived home in the wee hours after leaving Ophelia at her maternal grandparents’ home in Athens. She had driven half the night, then dozed in the car as she waited for the ferry.

      Takis wasn’t СКАЧАТЬ