Sold For The Greek's Heir
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After all, there truly were shades of grey between the black and white of absolute right and absolute wrong, she ruminated ruefully. Nothing and nobody was perfect. Even at the height of her passionate infatuation with Jax, she had recognised that he was flawed and all too human. He had been moody, controlling, domineering and arrogant and they had fought like cat and dog on a regular basis because, while Lucy might be only five feet tall and undersized, she was no pushover. At heart, she was stubborn and gutsy and quick-tempered. Even if Jax hadn’t let her down so horribly, it would never have worked between them, she reasoned, feeling pleasantly philosophical on that score and firmly stifling the painful little push of heartache that still hollowed out her tummy. So, she’d had her heart broken just as Iola and thousands of other women and men had. It had only made her more resilient and less foolish and naïve, she told herself squarely.
The hotel manager showed her into the lofty-ceilinged back room, which had been comprehensively redecorated only weeks earlier with an opulence that was calculated to appeal to the more discerning customers.
Sometimes when Lucy daydreamed she wondered, if she had come from a more fortunate background, would she have become one of the elegant well-educated young businesswomen she saw round the hotel. Unfortunately she had been handicapped at the outset of life by her birth. Her parents’ marriage had broken down after her mother had had an affair.
‘Annabel always thought some better man was waiting for her round the next corner,’ Kreon had said wryly of Lucy’s mother. ‘I wasn’t rich and I lived by my wits and she had big ideas. We were living in London then where she was struggling to get the finance to set up her nursery business. But my father had returned to Greece after my mother died and he fell ill out here. I had to go to him. When I left London I had no idea Annabel was pregnant and when I contacted her to tell her that I was coming back she told me we were finished because she had met someone else. Now from what you’re telling me, it seems she may have learned that she had this dreadful disease and she didn’t want me around even though she had my child. I can’t understand that, I will never understand that...’
And Lucy couldn’t understand it either because, just listening to Kreon talking, she had recognised that he had loved her mother and had planned to return to London to be with her. But the more Kreon had spoken of her mother’s beauty and her feverish love and need for fresh male attention, the more Lucy had suspected that there definitely had been another man and Annabel had burnt her boats for ever with Kreon shortly before illness had cruelly claimed her future.
Lucy had been two years old when Annabel was hospitalised and her daughter put into care. Her only memory of her mother was of a beautiful redhead lying in bed and shouting at her, so she wasn’t sure that the mother who had surrendered her to the authorities had been that much of a loss in the parent stakes. Kreon had described a flighty, selfish personality, ill-suited to the kind of personal sacrifices a mother was often forced to make. And when, to Lucy’s very great astonishment, Kreon had revealed that Annabel had actually had two other daughters being raised by her own mother somewhere in northern England, Lucy had been silenced by that shattering news.
Apparently she had two half-sisters somewhere, born from her mother’s previous liaisons. Some day Lucy planned to look into that startling discovery but she didn’t even know where you started in such a search because, not only had she no money to pursue enquiries, but also no names even to begin with. Naturally all these years on Kreon didn’t recall such details about Annabel’s background and history. After all, he had never met Annabel’s mother and had been stonewalled by Annabel when he’d asked to do so. All he had remembered was that Annabel never went to visit the two little girls she had left behind her and he had said that even then he had recognised that as a warning sign that Annabel’s attachments were of the shallow sort.
Lucy had counted herself lucky that she was not equally superficial because she adored Bella and would have laid down her life for her child, counting Bella as one of the few good developments in a life that had been far from easy or happy. On the other hand, had she cared less about Jax she would have been less devastated when he disappeared. My goodness, she had fallen apart at the seams and done stupid stuff, she recalled ruefully. She had been thrown off his father’s yacht and warned never to show her face at the marina again while being marched off by security guards. She had been shouted at, called nasty names and utterly humiliated in her fruitless pursuit of Jax. All because she was fundamentally stupid, she conceded with regret.
After all, it had been crazy of her to believe that she meant anything more to Jax than an easily forgettable sexual fling, and when he was done with a woman, he was definitely done. The crewman on the yacht had called her a cheap whore as he’d bodily manhandled her off the polished deck and forced her down the gangway. She had fallen, been hurt and bruised by that brutality and she had been pregnant at the time. That was one reason she had never told her father the whole truth about Bella’s parentage, preferring him to assume that Bella was the result of some one-night stand with a man in Spain. She knew Kreon would seek revenge and restitution if she ever told him the whole story.
So, in a way, staying silent was protecting her father from doing anything rash, she reasoned uneasily. Kreon was extremely protective. He would hit the roof if he realised that Lucy had been homeless even though Bella’s father was a rich man, who could so easily have helped her and their child. A rich man, who was also Greek. That information wouldn’t help either when Kreon was so immensely proud of his heritage.
But then Lucy had long since decided that rich people were pretty much untouchable, unlike the rest of humanity. The very rich had the power and the money to hold the rest of the world at bay and she saw the evidence of that galling fact every time she saw Jax in the media. Jax surrounded by bodyguards and beautiful women, never alone, never approachable, as protected and distanced from ordinary people as an exhibit in a locked museum case. Jax Antonakos, renowned entrepreneur and billionaire in his own right with a daddy who had billions also.
Her hands trembled as she set out china on the trolley awaiting her. She hated Jax now with the same passion she had once put into loving him. He had strung her along, faked so many things and she could never, ever forgive the fact that he had quite deliberately left her stranded in Spain without a home or a job or any means of support. That she had been pregnant into the bargain was just her bad luck, but then Lucy had little experience of good luck.
A cluster of chattering businessmen entered and she served the coffee, standing back by the wall to dutifully await any further requests. Beyond the ajar door there was a burst of comment and then a sudden hush and the sound of many footsteps crossing the tiled hallway outside. The door whipped back noisily on its hinges and two men strode in, talking into ear pieces while checking the exit doors and all the windows, and that level of security warned Lucy that someone tremendously important was evidently about to arrive. The security men backed against the wall in silence and two more arrived to take up stances on the other side of the room. The almost militaristic security detail seemed so over the top for a small business meeting that Lucy almost laughed out loud.
And then Jax walked in and she stopped breathing and any desire to laugh died in her suddenly constricted lungs...
CHAPTER TWO
THE INSTANT LUCY saw that untidy black hair and the gorgeous green eyes so arrestingly bright against his bronzed skin, she wanted to run and keep on running and only innate discipline kept her where she was while she questioned her reaction. Why should she want to run? What had she done to be ashamed of? She was not a coward, she had never been a coward, she reminded herself doggedly, unnerved by that craven desire to flee. Indeed if anyone should be embarrassed it should be Jax for the cruel way he had treated her.
Couples broke up all the time but the process didn’t have to be downright nasty. She hadn’t been a stalker. There had been no excuse for threats and no need whatsoever to run her out of the neighbourhood.
Recollecting that vicious goodbye, Lucy lifted her chin high. Seated centre stage at the circular table, the cynosure of all attention and conversation, Jax mercifully wasn’t looking round the room enough to notice her. Lucy might have overcome the urge to run but it did annoy her to find herself in a subservient role in Jax’s radius again. In a mad moment she had once fantasised about swanning through some swanky club some day looking like a million dollars and seeing Jax and totally ignoring him to demonstrate her disdain and overall superiority as a decent human being. But now that she was actually on the spot she discovered that she was indefensibly and horribly curious and could only stare at him.
He had kept his black hair short. Once he had worn it long but he had had it cropped not long after she’d first met him, hitting the more conventional note she had suspected his father preferred. In retrospect she found it hard to credit that they had once bonded over their absent fathers. Jax had admitted how recently his father had come back into his life and had shared his grief over the death of the half-brother he had loved, not to mention his mother’s abuse and infidelities. None of those deep conversations had fitted into what she assumed could be described as a typical short-term fling. But then that was Jax, a tough individualist, unpredictable, fiery and mysterious...the archetypal brooding hero beloved of teenaged girls with an overly romantic disposition, she concluded sourly.
That he was startlingly handsome had undoubtedly influenced the fantasies she had woven, she acknowledged, chewing at her lower lip, fingernails biting painfully into her palms. High cheekbones, strong clean jaw line, stunning eyes set beneath well-shaped ebony brows. Of course his mother had been a very famous and stunningly beautiful Spanish movie star and he had inherited her looks. In a big magazine article she had once read about him, which had been accompanied by a close-up photo, the journalist had raved about those dazzling wild green eyes and the spiky length of his sooty lashes.
Bella had his eyes. Lucy swallowed hard, recalling her feelings as her daughter’s blue eyes at birth had slowly transformed to an eerily familiar emerald in her innocent little face. Innocent, something Jax was not and had never been. And reading about his sexual exploits over the past two years had helped Lucy to understand that he had always been a selfish, ruthless womaniser but she had been too trusting and inexperienced to recognise his true nature. Her heart was fluttering a beat so fast behind her breastbone that she wanted to press a hand against it to slow it down.
And then the truth of her response hit her and she was aghast that in spite of everything her body could still react to the presence of his. He glanced up from the file he had been perusing and for a split second, a literal single heartbeat, she clashed in dismay with his fierce gaze. It was like an electric shock pulsing low in her pelvis, tightening bone and sinew, awakening sensations she had almost forgotten and had never felt since. Every pulse she possessed went crazy, her breath catching in her throat, her very skin as achingly sensitive as if he had actually touched her. And then that tiny moment was over and past as Jax blanked her and passed the file back to someone at the table while making some comment about profit margins.
Her Greek vocabulary was slowly growing but in unfamiliar scenarios she still got as lost as any non-Greek-speaking foreigner. And of course Jax was going to blank her, she told herself shakily. Had she really thought he would greet a worker bee as low on the proverbial food chain as a waitress? Her mouth compressed as she wondered anxiously how he would react to the news that he was a father were she to tell him. With furious hostility and denial, she reckoned, her skin turning clammy at the prospect. Jax had once been very upfront about the fact that he didn’t ever want children. Bearing that in mind, Lucy ruminated grimly, he should have been more careful to ensure that he didn’t get her pregnant.
Jax’s lean, chiselled features were rigid. He refused to look back in Lucy’s direction. He didn’t need to. That momentary image was stamped into his brain like a punch. What the hell was she doing in Athens? And her sudden appearance in his presence? Some sort of a set-up? And if so, why? Jax never took anything at face value any more. After all, he had once accepted Lucy for what she appeared to be and learned his very great error.
Bile tinged his mouth as he briefly recalled what he had read in that investigation file on her background: a string of drug offences stretching back years and convictions for soliciting sex. He had felt like a complete idiot. He had rushed off to see her, confront her even though it was late at night and then he had seen who she really was for himself...down an alley with a man enthusiastically giving up what she had made him wait weeks to enjoy.
Disgust and distaste flooded Jax, bringing back even less welcome memories of his mother’s rampant promiscuity and empty promises of fidelity. He had seen her cheating break more than one man who had adored her. His father didn’t know it because he had never dared to ask what his son’s life had been like with his mother but Heracles had not been the only man to be chewed up and spat out in pieces by Mariana, who had wilfully followed every stray sexual impulse. As for Lucy, she was a liar and a cheat and he did not forgive betrayal. The entire episode had been sordid in the extreme. So why was he remembering that she had given him the wildest, hottest sex he had ever had?
A stubborn push of raunchily sexual images infiltrated Jax’s hind brain even while he fought to hold them at bay and kept on talking about the project on the table. Hard as a rock behind his zip, Jax went rigid with angry aggression. How dared Lucy even walk into a room that contained him? He had always told himself that he had not inherited his father’s notorious temper and equally notorious ability to hold a grudge but just then he recognised that he had lied to himself. Had it been possible to bodily throw Lucy out, he would have done so!
One of the bodyguards nudged Lucy’s elbow and she glanced up, dragged from her own bemused thoughts with a vengeance. The older man indicated the coffee on the trolley and angled his head in his employer’s direction, clearly urging her to get on with her job.
Reddening all the way up to her hairline, Lucy unfroze in an effort to behave normally. Even so she had to fight a huge inner battle to force her legs over to the trolley and pour Jax a coffee when all she really wanted to do was empty the entire contents of the pot over his hateful, arrogant head. Without him looking once at her or indeed acknowledging her in any way, she settled the coffee at his elbow with a hand that trembled slightly. Next she laid out the snacks and topped up the cups, signalling the bar waiter at the door when one of the men requested a shot of ouzo to wash down his coffee.
From below screening lashes and the almost infinitesimal movements of his proud dark head, Jax tracked Lucy’s every move like a predator planning an attack. A blinding flash of memory assailed him: skin as translucent as fine porcelain in the dawn light, his fingers knotted into tumbling golden ringlets spread across a pillow, glorious bright blue eyes holding his, a tiny slender body with surprisingly sexy little curves reaching up to his. A little curvier than she used to be, he estimated abstractedly, remembering for a few seconds and then suddenly emerging again from that uncharacteristic reverie to answer a question, angrier and hotter than he had been in years.
The louse could at least have thanked her for the coffee, Lucy reflected with growing annoyance. Even a nod would have been acceptable but then Jax had always been a law unto himself, ferociously uncompromising and challenging, driven to succeed, survive and flourish as if it was in his genes. And perhaps it was. Only in a fantasy could there ever have been a scenario in which she believed that Jax Antonakos would settle down with a humble waitress... Bitterness gripped her and resentment shot through her like a sheet of lightning flashing off all her exposed nerve endings with painful effect.
Who the hell did Jax Antonakos think he was to treat her with such derisive dismissal?
Jax summoned Zenas, his head security guard, with an almost imperceptible flicker of his gaze and passed him a note. Zenas stood back to read it and confusion gripped his features for an instant before discipline kicked in and he left the room to do his employer’s bidding. Lucy paid little heed to the byplay and only tensed when her own boss appeared in the doorway and silently summoned her out into the hallway.
A frown line bisected the older man’s brow as he studied her. ‘Mr Antonakos wants to speak to you in private when he’s finished. I’m not sure how your father would feel about that request—’
Comprehension gripped Lucy fast. Andreus had no idea that she already knew Jax. He simply thought that Jax was trying to get off with her.
‘Please don’t mention this to Dad,’ she muttered unevenly, for that was not a connection she wanted made. Once a link of any kind was established, secrets could spill out.
Andreus cast open the door of a smaller room across the corridor. ‘Wait in there...but only if you want to,’ he added with deliberate meaning. ‘This is nothing to do with your employment here or with me. I have only passed on his request because I am very reluctant to offend so powerful a man.’
Lucy turned a slow, painful red, rage mushrooming inside her again as she imagined what her employer must be thinking. Jax wouldn’t care about appearances. Jax had never had to care about appearances. For an instant she almost walked away from the opportunity to tell Jax what she thought of him. But she was too nervous, too aware of what had happened the last time her very existence nearby had become objectionable to Jax Antonakos. He had paid her then boss in Spain to sack her and she had lost her job and the accommodation that went with it. That was the kind of power the super wealthy had. Her boss in those days had been outrageously frank with her, admitting that he couldn’t afford to keep her on when so much money to do otherwise was on offer and that he had had a poor summer season.
She paced the floor in the small room that was normally used as an office by the hotel housekeeper, thinking herself lucky that Jax hadn’t had a room in the hotel and called her there, which would have looked even worse. Why on earth after ignoring her would he have demanded a meeting? From his point of view that made no sense, she reasoned with a frown. After all, he had ditched her two years earlier without an explanation or even a text. He hadn’t turned up for their last date, hadn’t phoned, hadn’t done anything and when she had tried to contact him he had blocked her calls. Either he had simply tired of her or she had done or said something that had offended.
It hurt to look back and recall how many weeks she had tormented herself by pathetically wondering what she had done to annoy Jax. But nothing could have justified his subsequent behaviour in having her sacked and forced to leave the area like some vagrant whose very presence was offensive. That more than anything was what she could not forgive.
‘You literally have three minutes or you’ll miss your flight,’ Zenas warned Jax outside the door.
Jax strode into the room, absently wondering if there was actual truth in the idea that human beings needed closure following certain experiences because he could not imagine any other reason why he should still feel driven to confront Lucy. Two years ago, he had never wanted to see or speak to her again. But possibly curiosity provided more motivation than he was willing to admit, he reasoned impatiently, angry tension tightening his lean, darkly handsome features.
‘What the hell are you doing in Athens?’ Jax demanded.
Lucy spun round from the window to face him, inwardly reeling from the shock of Jax in the flesh standing close enough to touch. He was so tall and he radiated restive energy and dominant vibes in waves. Tensing, she lifted her head up but she still had to tip it back to actually see any part of him above chest level. Not for the first time her diminutive height struck her as an embarrassing flaw. Being almost child-sized often meant that people didn’t take her seriously or treat her like an adult. ‘What’s that got to do with you?’ she slung back sharply, her tone similar to his own.
Jax drew himself up to his full six-foot-three-inch height and glowered down at her, green eyes luminescent with rage because it had been two years since anyone but his father had challenged him. ‘Answer me,’ he ground out impatiently.
‘I don’t owe you any answers... I don’t owe you the time of day,’ Lucy traded with the kind of provocation that struck a deep and unwelcome note of familiarity with Jax.
‘You will answer me,’ Jax raked back at her in a raw undertone, watching as she angled her head back and struck an attitude, hand on hip. Strawberry golden curls slid round her shoulders, her hair falling round her heart-shaped face, accentuating the defiant blue of her eyes and the lush fullness of her rosy lips.
And that fast, that urgently, Jax wanted to throw her down on the desk and control her the only way he had ever really controlled her, with the seething passion that was the mainstay of his character. For the briefest of moments he allowed himself to imagine the hot, wet tightness of her and the pulse at his groin reacted with unbridled enthusiasm. He reminded himself that it had been a toxic relationship and that she had played him like a con artist with her stories, her fake innocence and her lies. A dizzy surge of rage ignited inside him like a threatening fireball.
‘If you don’t answer me you will live to regret it,’ Jax threatened in a wrathful undertone, every drop of his merciless Antonakos blood burning through him and hungry for a fight.
An angry spurt of fear made Lucy’s stomach turn over sickly. He was too influential to challenge as even her boss had reminded her. She knew Jax could cause trouble for her, maybe even for her father as well if she wasn’t careful. She might hate Jax but it would be insane to risk such penalties. ‘What am I doing in Athens?’ she repeated flatly. ‘I finally looked up my birth father and he lives here—’
‘But that was all lies,’ Jax breathed in momentary bewilderment. ‘You don’t have a Greek father.’
Her smooth brow furrowed with genuine confusion. ‘Lies? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I believe my birth certificate is as accurate as anyone else’s. At the moment I’m living with my father and his wife.’
‘That’s not possible,’ Jax told her, stiffening as a light knock on the door warned him that their time was up if he planned to make it to the airport. His long, lean frame swivelled as he half turned towards the door to leave, common sense and practicality powering him.
‘I just want you to know that I hate you and I’ll never forgive you for what you did to me,’ Lucy confided in a belated rush of angry frustration that she could not tell him what she really thought of him any more bluntly than that. In truth she wanted to scream at him, she wanted to throw herself at him and hammer him with angry fists for hurting her.
‘I didn’t do anything to you,’ Jax parried with complete cool.
‘It was vicious...what you did, unnecessary!’ Lucy condemned chokily, bitterness almost overpowering her along with a very human need to hit back. ‘Having me sacked? Leaving me penniless and homeless and forced to go back to the UK when I had nothing there!’