‘The point is saving our respective businesses and fortunes.’
‘If that’s the case, if the hatchet isn’t actually buried, what’s to stop your father or Georgios picking it up and burying it into each other’s backs again once the businesses are saved?’ Saying this, Lucie knew not even a written guarantee would stop Georgios from going after his nemesis again if the mood struck him.
How the big-hearted man with an even bigger smile could be so vengeful was beyond her understanding, and that there were two elderly Greek men out there who’d been unable to take a hard look at themselves in the mirror and say a firmnowhen the ‘pranks’ they’d played on each other had turned so dangerous just blew her mind.
‘They know what’s at stake if they do,’ he assured her.
‘But there has to be more than that to stop them starting it all up again. Sure, with you and Alexis now in charge there’s not going to be the blatant sabotage of each other’s fleets—and I know I’ve probably said it before, but I was horrified when I learned Georgios was behind the fuel replacement in your ocean liners that destroyed all those engines. I love him dearly but that was a terrible thing to do—but what’s to stop them making it even more personal if they hate each other so much?’
And how would that affectthem? she suddenly thought with what could only be described as panic. Would things escalate to the extent she would be forced to choose between her new family and her stepfamily?
She might never have felt like a true Tsaliki but they’d all been good to her. Georgios had doted on her as if she were one of his own. The boys, all older except her half-brother, Loukas, had teased and looked out for her in the same way they’d teased and looked out for Athena. As for Athena, with her being only two years older than Lucie and the only girl in a household of boys, it was natural that they should have gravitated together. Sure, Athena could be a Grade A bitch and there were times Lucie would prefer to bury herself alive than be in her company, but when she was on form she was brilliant. When you knew and loved someone as much as Lucie knew and loved Athena, you forgave the less palatable sides of their nature.
How was she supposed to choose between all that and her new family who didn’t even like her? They hated her!
‘My father has given me his word, and Alexis has given his word to keep Georgios in line,’ Thanasis told her steadily.
She pulled a sceptical face and tried her hardest to swallow back the growing angst.
He folded his arms across the gloriously broad chest she ached to bury her face in, and rested his back against a marble pillar. ‘Trust me,matia mou. They both know how close they have come to losing everything. The hatchet might not be buried but, I promise you, the war is over.’
Loving and hating his endearment—loving how tender it sounded on his tongue but hating that it was the closest thing to affection he would currently allow between them—she expelled the last of her sudden panic with a sigh. ‘I’m sorry. I forgot for a minute that you and Alexis put all the hard work in and dotted all the I’s and crossed all the T’s months ago. There would have been no point in you and I agreeing to marry in the first place if we didn’t have those assurances from them.’
‘Akrivos,’he said. Exactly.
But now the mentions of her stepbrother had stirred something else in her brain. ‘Were Alexis and Athena really the only members of my family you had contact with before my accident?’
‘In a face-to-face capacity, yes. Why do you ask?’
‘I don’t know.’ And she didn’t, not really, more that her brain was trying to take hold of something in her memory bank, the whisper of a recent conversation…with her mother? It had to be. Who else had she spoken to that she cared for since being hospitalised other than Thanasis and her mother? She had no phone so hadn’t been able to make any calls since arriving on Sephone, and it occurred to her that she’d not given a single thought since her arrival of Thanasis’s offer to have a replacement phone flown over for her.
To her surprise, she found she didn’t want a replacement. Not yet. There was something quite freeing about being uncontactable here on this island paradise, and besides, everyone she loved and cared for would be part of the five hundred strong party that would be descending on Sephone in a few days’ time for the wedding.
For the first time since their kiss, Thanasis’s stare captured hers with the intensity of old. ‘Do you have a memory coming back?’
Returning to the whispers in her memory bank, Lucie shook her head in frustration. ‘I don’t think so. Whatever I’m searching for is recent but I think the drugs I was fed in hospital have blurred things for me.’ She shook her head again and tried to be philosophical about it. She had two months of her life missing and was fixating on one little nebulous thing? Sometimes she really needed to give her head a good wobble. ‘Oh, well, what’s another lost memory between friends…? Does that sound like a helicopter to you?’
She was quite sure she could hear a rotor.
Thanasis, his watchful eyes still on her, craned his ear and nodded. ‘That must be your wedding dress.’
‘Clever dress to fly a helicopter,’ she deadpanned, and was rewarded with a loosening of his features and that glorious spark that always zinged between them whenever he hopped onto her wavelength.
Wryly, he said, ‘For the amount it’s costing, I’m hoping it can cook steak too.’
Almost giddy to have shaken off the disquiet that had sneaked up on her out of nowhere, she had to practically glue her feet to the intricately patterned cool flooring to stop herself from reaching for him. ‘I guess that means it’ll soon be dress-fitting time… What kind of dress is it?’ Funny, she hadn’t thought to ask that before.
‘A wedding dress.’
‘Very helpful. I meant whatkindof wedding dress.’
‘I do not have the faintest idea.’ Pointedly, he added, ‘I would assume it’s white but if your wardrobe is anything to go by, it might very well be black.’
She curtsied in her short, black, strapless playsuit and flat black sandals.
He laughed loudly, the deep sound bouncing off the chapel’s walls, a glorious sound that didn’t just soak into her ears but soaked into her skin and veins, feeding the longing for him it felt like she’d been carrying for ever, and meeting his eyes, the lines around them creased with his amusement, she could do nothing to stop the sigh of her longing from seeping out…
His eyes flickered at the sound and in an instant the laughter died. The lines uncreased and the light on his face dimmed.
