The Heiress Bride. Lynne Graham

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СКАЧАТЬ had been revolted by how very willing the fawning females involved had been to satisfy the older man’s jaded tastes. Even so, Alexio had not made the dangerous mistake of discussing Minos’s proclivities with anyone on his return home. Minos Gakis would make an implacable enemy and only a fool would risk awakening the ruthless older man’s wrath to no good purpose by talking out of turn. And when it came to anything that might threaten his thriving business empire, Alexio Christoulakis was no fool…

      Surely one of those bimbos could not have been Ione Gakis? Beneath his father’s bewildered scrutiny, Alexio vented a humourless laugh at that unlikelihood for, though Gakis was far from being a likeable character, he was not unhinged. But, plunder his memory as Alexio did, he could not recall meeting any other woman that night. Apart from the housekeeper who had shown him to his suite while he’d still been seething with thwarted fury over her employer’s offensive amusement at his guest’s refusal to sleep with a whore.

      ‘Let me refresh your memory,’ Sander Christoulakis breathed in some discomfiture, evidently having hoped that his son would recall the young woman without the prompting of the photograph he now set down on the table.

      Alexio focused on the photo with incredulity and instant recognition. He muttered a sudden curse and reached for it. Having been taken in profile, it was not a very good shot, but he remembered that submissive bent head, that pale hair pulled back in a severe style and those fragile facial features.

      ‘I thought she was the housekeeper!’ Alexio confessed with a sound of frank disbelief. ‘She behaved like one, not like the daughter of the house! Gakis snapped his fingers and she appeared and he spoke to her as if she was a servant. That timid little thing was Ione Gakis?’

      ‘Minos did say that she’s quiet and shy.’

      ‘Colourless and mousey,’ Alexio countered with ruthless bite, but a faint dark line of colour now scored his sculpted cheekbones and he swung away for, even in the mood he had been in that evening, he had not been impervious to her natural appeal.

      He remembered her all too well: the delicacy of her fine features, eyes as green as emeralds and as startling and unexpected in a Greek woman as her fair colouring. A beauty without artifice and the absolute antithesis of the voluptuous and artificial party girls paraded before him by his host. He had never made a pass at a servant in his life but only her silent formality and his own innate sense of fair play had haltered him.

      ‘I understand that Ione has hardly ever been off that island. Her father believes in keeping his womenfolk at home,’ Sander Christoulakis remarked with the wry fascination of a man who had a wife and two daughters, who thought nothing of flying all over Europe merely to visit friends or shop.

      ‘At some time in the future, I may well consider a marriage of convenience,’ Alexio conceded, his beautiful mouth hardening on the smouldering reflection that Ione Gakis should have immediately identified herself to him. ‘But I have no interest in marrying Gakis’s oddball daughter. At the very least I would like a wife with some personality.’

      ‘A little personality can go a long way.’ Unwilling to surrender what he saw as a fantastic opportunity for his son, Sander argued with greater vehemence. ‘And before you criticise Ione Gakis for what she lacks, ask yourself what you have to offer a woman.’

      ‘In what way?’ Alexio intoned very drily.

      ‘If you have no heart to give, only a fortune hunter will want to marry you,’ the older man warned in frustration. ‘Your current reputation as a womaniser is sufficient to make most of our friends extremely reluctant to let their daughters come into contact with you.’

      ‘But then I’m not in the market for born-again virgins or ambitious social climbers. So they’re very wise,’ Alexio drawled with dismissive contempt.

      Sander Christoulakis suppressed a heavy sigh. He had done his utmost to persuade his son to consider the benefits of such a business alliance, hoping that the challenge of becoming involved in the vast network of Gakis Holdings would tempt Alexio as nothing else might have done. He had also believed that Alexio might be drawn by the sheer practicality of a marital arrangement that would demand so little from him on a personal basis. Spelling out the very obvious benefits of marrying a young woman who would one day inherit all that her father possessed would not have made the smallest impression.

      ‘Minos will be insulted by a flat refusal,’ Sander pointed out ruefully. ‘He wants you to meet with him and discuss the proposal. What harm could that do?’

      Alexio regarded his parent with the grim dark eyes that his business competitors had learned to respect but, whether he was prepared to show it or not, his interest had already been ignited by his recollection of that night on Lexos. ‘I’ll think it over.’

      Fierce strain in her jade-green eyes, Ione checked her reflection with care in the mirror, for so formal a summons from her father was rare and intimidating.

      Her pale blonde hair was scraped back from her equally pale face. Her dull dark blue dress barely hinted at the shape of the slim young body beneath and the hemline fell to below her knee. In a crowd nobody would have noticed her and that was exactly how her father believed his daughter ought to look: modest, unobtrusive, sexless. That his ideas were fifty years behind the times and out of place in a wealthy, educated family meant nothing to him for he boasted of his peasant roots and saw no reason why the outside world should intrude on his feudal island kingdom.

      Indeed, Minos Gakis was a positive god in his own household. A domineering controlling man with an explosive temper that could turn to violence in the space of a moment and, to him, a woman would always be a lesser being and a possession. While she was still a very young child, Ione had learned the correct code of behaviour to observe in her father’s radius and she knew well how to control her tongue and keep her head down in a storm. On more than one occasion, after all, she had seen her late mother being battered by the older man’s fists, and as she’d grown up, no matter how hard Amanda Gakis had tried to protect her daughter from similar treatment, she too had suffered from his brutality.

      Her bedroom door opened with jarring abruptness and without the polite warning of a prefatory knock. Flinching, Ione spun round just as her father’s sister, Kalliope, appeared, her thin, sallow face sour.

      ‘Why are you always looking at yourself in the mirror?’ Kalliope snorted with derision. ‘It’s foolish when you’re so plain. But then, had you been born a Gakis, you would have been a beauty.

      Accustomed to the older woman’s gibes, Ione resisted the dangerous temptation to ask what had gone wrong in Kalliope’s own case, for even the kindest person would have been challenged to find attraction in those sharp features. As for that crack about her not having been born into the Gakis family, Ione was too well accustomed to the knowledge that she had been adopted to rise to that bait and give the older woman reason to complain to her brother that her niece had been rude to her.

      Kalliope observed her brother’s every household rule with religious fervour and received considerable satisfaction from reporting those unwise enough to transgress those rules. Furthermore, she liked Ione far less than she had liked Ione’s mother, for, while Kalliope had continued to rule the roost over the gentle English bride her brother had taken as a wife, she had found their adopted daughter, Ione, a tougher nut to crack. Ione might not answer back and might show her aunt superficial respect. But ever since the day four years earlier, when Ione had been dragged back kicking and screaming defiance from Athens airport, there had been a silent stoic determination in the younger woman’s clear gaze that made Kalliope feel like an angry, frustrated mosquito trying to sting an indifferent victim.

      ‘Your СКАЧАТЬ