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After twenty-three years of being useless, after twenty-three years of being an embarrassment, she was aiding her father, significantly aiding him by saving him from bankruptcy and all the ensuing humiliation and shame.
Empowered, Kassiani drew a breath, lifted her chin and took her first step into the four-hundred-year-old Greek Orthodox church. It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the cool, dark interior, and then she spotted the groom before her. It really was a tiny chapel, with just five rows of pews on either side of the narrow aisle.
Damen Michael Alexopoulos stood at the front, just before the altar and priest. Once Kassiani spotted her future husband, she couldn’t look away. Dressed in a severe black suit, he looked even more intimidating than he had yesterday in the villa suite. She didn’t know if it was his height, or the width of his shoulders, but there was a dangerous stillness about him now that made the air catch in her throat.
Was he suspicious?
Had he already figured out she wasn’t the right bride?
Kass was so heavily veiled that she could barely see through the thick white lace, but he was no fool and it wouldn’t take much to assess her size and shape and realize that there was no way she was Elexis, of Instagram fame. Elexis was opposite Kass in every way imaginable. Even wearing treacherously high heels, Kassiani remained short, her plump figure wrapped in the tightest of undergarments, including the old-fashioned corset necessary to make Elexis’s dress fit, and that was after the dress had been altered to include additional panels and a dramatically shortened hem.
“He knows,” she said under her breath.
“He doesn’t,” her father gritted. “And it’s too late for second thoughts. You cannot fail me.”
A lump filled her throat. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t.
She clenched his arm and kept her chin high. The only way through challenging times was to go through them. There would be no retreat. There would be no panicking. She would make this work. She would find a way to please her husband. She would bring the two families together. And it would be her, Petra Kassiani, who did it, not Elexis, and not her playboy brother, Barnabas, who had so little familial love that he hadn’t even bothered to show up for the wedding.
She could do this. She could.
The real question was, would he?
* * *
Damen knew the moment Kristopher Dukas entered the chapel with his daughter that it was the wrong daughter.
He watched them process—portly Kristopher with his heavily veiled daughter teetering in her heels—unable to believe the American’s audacity.
It seemed that once again Kristopher took the easy way out. Instead of retrieving the wayward Elexis, Kristopher had simply swapped daughters, substituting the youngest for the eldest.
Who did that?
What kind of man treated his daughters like cattle?
Damen felt a jolt—shock, disbelief—as Kristopher placed his younger daughter’s hand in his, handing her over at the altar, clearly the sacrificial lamb. Even Damen, who was ruthless in business, knew the difference between dishonesty and betrayal. And this was a betrayal.
It’s not that he needed a beauty queen for a bride, but this younger daughter wasn’t Elexis and he’d chosen Elexis for a reason.
Gleaming, polished, ambitious Elexis Dukas suited him in looks and temperament. She’d hold her own socially, and she’d be an accomplished hostess, things he knew he needed in a wife because he detested social engagements and refused to be part of any dog and pony show. Elexis loved the spotlight. She loved attention. She could easily represent them at important functions and no one would miss him. Why would they, when they had her?
He felt no affection for Elexis, but she was the one he wanted, and he hadn’t proposed to her without knowing exactly what he was getting in a wife—both strengths and weaknesses. Elexis led an enviable lifestyle. She traveled with the jet set. She partied at all the best clubs. She wore the best clothes, sitting in the front rows of the biggest fashion shows. Her life was one photo opportunity after another, but he’d let her carry on as she always had during their engagement, aware that once she became his wife, she’d settle down and become a proper wife.
He needed a proper wife, one who understood her place in his world, and wouldn’t make emotional demands. He didn’t do emotions. And he didn’t tolerate demands.
But now Elexis was gone and there was a very different Dukas at his side and it suddenly crossed Damen’s mind that perhaps this had been Kristopher’s plan from the beginning. Perhaps Elexis had never intended to marry him? Perhaps Kristopher had never planned on giving his beloved Elexis to Damen?
Perhaps Kristopher had always intended on dumping his youngest, the one he casually referred to as the Dukas Ugly Duckling, on him.
He should walk out now.
And just when he was about to drop the Ugly Duckling’s hand, she lifted her face, her dark gaze finding his through her veil, and whispered, “I’m sorry.”
* * *
They signed the registry in the chapel’s antechamber. Damen gritted his teeth, angry beyond measure as it struck him that the worst part of this—no, not the worst but yet another negative among negatives—was that he didn’t even know his new wife’s name. “So who have I married, if not Elexis?” he ground out as the priest handed him a pen.
Her long lace veil had been folded back on the top of her head and she glanced at him but looked away, unable to hold his furious gaze. He felt a tightness in his chest as her ridiculously long black lashes dropped, concealing her eyes.
“Kassiani,” she said huskily.
He felt angrier by the moment. His fingers itched to smash something hard—like the narrow table, or the nearest stone wall. “That wasn’t the name in the ceremony.”
“No, the priest used my legal first name, Petra, but no one calls me Petra. I’m either Kass or Kassiani.”
He ground his teeth together, not just upset with her, but with himself for not having walked out of the service when he could. Why had he let her apology sway him? Why had her whispered words kept him from leaving her there at the altar?
