CHAPTER ONE
THE PAIN THATshot through Lucie Burton’s eyes when she peered between her lids was so great it momentarily distracted her from the pneumatic drill boring into her head. It also stopped her registering the man sitting beside her, engrossed on his phone. But only initially. One painful blink and he swam to the surface of her vision, the registering of exactly who he was such a shock to her system that she blinked again.
He was still there.
Her heart made the most enormous thump. Thanasis Antoniadis was sitting by her bedside.
Too confused to be frightened, she lifted her head. Well, tried. Another shooting pain stopped her lifting it more than a couple of inches.
Pale green eyes with lashes as dark as the pupils and rings encircling the irises suddenly locked onto hers.
She swallowed, a reflex that had nothing to do with the dryness of her throat. ‘Where am I?’ Whatever bed she was in, it wasn’t her bed, and this was no room she’d been in before.
‘Hospital.’
Her next blink was slightly less painful and she became aware that she had things stuck to her chest and that something had been injected into her hand…a medical drip?
‘You were in a car accident.’
So that was what his voice sounded like. Honeyed coffee. A thought that struck her confused mind as absurd even as her hazy, confused mind wondered why she was fixating on Thanasis’s voice rather than asking what the hell she was doing in hospital with her family’s greatest enemy at her bedside. Or, rather, her stepfamily’s greatest enemy.
Lucie had been only three years old when her mother left her father for the Greek shipping tycoon Georgios Tsaliki, and so her childhood and adolescence had been split between her father and his new family, and her mother, Georgios and his varying offspring. Varying because Lucie’s mother was wife number four. To everyone’s surprise, over two decades later, the marriage was still going strong. Lucie suspected this was because her mother maintained an extremely well-developed blind eye to Georgios’s many infidelities, infidelities she must have factored in when marrying him seeing as she was wife number three’s replacement.
As a result, Lucie had grown up in two wildly differing households. Stability and order had come from her real father. Chaos and fun had come from her stepfather, whose gregarious nature had him on excellent terms with all his ex-wives and the nine children they’d collectively popped out for him. Life for Georgios and his extended family had been one great big holiday, right until the money had run out earlier that year and his eldest son, Alexis, wrested control of the company.
Because the converse to Georgios’s generous heart was also true—when he took against someone, they remained his enemy for life, and Georgios Tsaliki had no greater enemy than rival shipping tycoon Petros Antoniadis, and it was this mutual enmity to blame for the near destruction of both families’ fortunes.
The original cause of the enmity between the two men was something Lucie knew only the bare bones of; a business partnership between two great friends turned sour. If there were more details than that she suspected both men had forgotten them, and now their mutual loathing and feud was simply one of those things, like the fact she barely touched five foot in height and had unmanageable black curls. One of those things like the fact Thanasis Antoniadis smelt as flipping wonderful as he looked.
She’d seen him in the flesh only once before. She’d been eighteen at the time and enjoying her last long Greek summer holiday. Athena, Lucie’s sometime favourite Tsaliki offspring—Athena blew hot and cold—had invited her along to what she’d promised would be the party of the decade. They’d barely stepped into the apartment when Lucie had spotted the best-looking man in the entire world pouring himself a drink at the bar and had actually felt her jaw drop. There had been something familiar about him, which had made her think he must be a famous actor or model or something. Whatever he did for a living, he was the most gorgeous man she’d ever laid eyes on and she’d been unable to tear her gaze away, until Athena had grabbed her hand and in a high-pitched voice whispered, ‘What’shedoing here?’
Lucie had stared at her blankly.
‘Thanasis Antoniadis,’ she’d explained, panicking. ‘If I’d known he was going to be here, I would never have come. Papa willkillme if he hears about this.’
Lucie had looked again at the man causing the usually unflappable Athena to have a semi-meltdown at the exact moment Thanasis had looked across the busy room…and fixed his gaze right onher. The frisson she’d felt snake up her spine was like nothing she’d experienced before, or since for that matter. She might very well still be there gawping at him if Athena hadn’t dragged her away, hissing, ‘Stop looking at him like that! We need to get out of here.’
And that had been that. Less than two minutes under a roof with him.
He’d been familiar because he was the spitting image of his father. Georgios regularly refreshed the photo of Petros Antoniadis he kept on his dartboard.
The man who’d captured her attention so vividly six years ago was now scrutinising her with a strained intensity she felt like a touch to her skin.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.
‘My head hurts and I feel sick,’ she croaked, scrutinising him in turn with an increasing wariness as the drilling in her head settled enough for her brain to start vaguely functioning properly. There was something about the room that made her think she must be in Greece, but that was impossible. She’d gone to sleep in her shared north London flat…hadn’t she?
She couldn’t remember going to bed.
He grimaced. ‘That is to be expected. You took quite the knock.’
‘What happened to me? What’s going on? Why are you here?’
His neck extended, the nostrils of his long, pointed nose flaring. ‘Your mouth sounds dry. Water?’
‘Please. But tell me what’s happened and why you’re here.’
He poured water from a jug into a beaker and placed a straw in it, then stretched an arm to place the straw close to her mouth. ‘You don’t remember?’
