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‘Never you mind about me being upset,’ Kreon told her through compressed lips. ‘Be grateful I’m here to support you. Antonakos sending in the lawyers straight off is your first warning of his plans—’
‘What do you mean?’ Iola interjected worriedly.
‘Well, was what happened this morning a nice or considerate thing to do to the mother of your child? Demanding DNA testing? Trying to browbeat Lucy into signing a confidentiality agreement? As a first warning shot, it tells us all we need to know…’
‘Jax is trying to protect himself. I can’t blame him for that,’ Lucy muttered ruefully, troubled by her father’s angry gravity and all too conscious that she was the cause of the lines of stress that had appeared on his weathered face.
‘He can protect himself all he likes but not at your expense or Bella’s,’ Kreon replied.
Lucy was anxious and preoccupied when she went into work that evening and she struggled to remember the drinks orders and deliver them back to the correct tables. Her father’s genuine fear of what Jax might be planning had seriously scared her. Not for the first time she wished she had the ability to get inside Jax’s head.
Earlier that day he had been strangely distant with her but very different in his wholehearted response to Bella. In retrospect it was hard to credit that he had been kissing her, touching her only the night before. Of course, that made sense, she told herself squarely. Everything had changed the minute she’d told Jax about their daughter. She recalled his glacier cool when she had first told him at his house and barely restrained a shiver of apprehension. Her father’s concern had set off all her internal alarms and had left her on the edge of panic and thinking thoughts she had believed she would never think again…
What if she simply upped sticks and vanished? She had done it before and she could do it again. But it would be wrong, her inner voice warned her sternly. It would be wrong not to give Jax the opportunity to form a relationship with his daughter. It would be equally wrong for Lucy to run away from the life her father and stepmother had generously offered her. Running away from her problems would be the childish thing to do and she wasn’t a child any more…
CHAPTER FIVE
‘SO, YOU ARE Lucy’s father,’ Jax commented, lounging back against his office desk with lethal cool, not a shade of what he was thinking revealed by his lean, darkly handsome features. ‘Where were you all the years Lucy was growing up in the care system?’
Kreon straightened his shoulders. ‘That’s my business and Lucy’s. She’s welcome to tell you if she wants. But I’m here now to protect the welfare of my daughter and my granddaughter.’
‘I don’t understand how you plan to do that,’ Jax remarked.
‘Oh, that’s very simple,’ Kreon told him almost cheerfully. ‘I have access to secrets that your father would kill to keep out of the newspapers—’
Taken aback, Jax laughed. ‘My father fears nothing. Is this some sort of clumsy blackmail attempt? I advise you to back off now before I call the police.’
‘That will be your decision but it won’t stop me sharing your family secrets with the press. In fact having me arrested will only add legitimacy to my claims,’ Kreon pointed out calmly. ‘Your father hates me. I will tell you that for free. But why do you think he leaves me alone? He is afraid of what I might know.’
‘You’re talking a lot of nonsense and I don’t intend to listen to it,’ Jax told him, crossing the room to open the door and hasten the older man’s departure.
‘Your brother, Argo, wasn’t your brother because he wasn’t your father’s child,’ Kreon delivered very softly. ‘I think Heracles only found that out after your brother died and, believe me, he does not want that humiliating truth spread across the newspapers.’
Jax froze, shock washing over him in an almost physical attack that pulled his every muscle taut to breaking point. In a driven movement he thrust the door shut again and swung violently round.
‘What do you want?’ he demanded of the smaller man, refusing to think of what he had just been told, refusing to join the dots and acknowledge how well that revelation would dovetail with his own quite recent miraculous change of status within the Antonakos family.
‘In return for my continuing silence, I want you to marry Lucy.’
Jax stared back at him in savage disbelief. ‘Marry…her?’
‘She was a teenager when you wrecked her life. You owe her the security of a wedding ring. It doesn’t have to be a life sentence for either of you. But it would give her and Bella the safe harbour and the recognition they need to have a better life—’
‘She wasn’t a teenager!’ Jax raked back at him in furious rebuttal.
‘Lucy was twenty-one last month. We celebrated with dinner at that hotel where she works.’ Kreon shot him a sourly amused appraisal. ‘My wife tells me that teenaged girls do lie about their age occasionally.’
‘Twenty-one,’ Jax repeated thickly, fighting to master the violent anger lashing through him and a powerful urge to strangle Lucy for having dared to lie to him. ‘I would require proof of those allegations about my brother, Argo.’
And from an inside pocket Kreon produced a handwritten letter which he handed to Jax. It had been written and sent to Kreon when his father’s first wife, Sofia, was terminally ill. Unable to face death with such a weight on her conscience, Sofia had admitted the affair that had led to Argo’s conception, although she had not named her lover.
‘Why didn’t you come forward with this at the time of her death?’ Jax demanded harshly a few minutes later. ‘With this letter, you were in possession of facts that were unknown to everyone else involved.’
‘Sofia couldn’t have thought through what she was doing. Your father had just lost his wife and Argo had lost his mother and her letter would have destroyed them both. Back then Heracles had no idea that Argo wasn’t his son. What do you think he would have done?’ Kreon grimaced. ‘He would’ve disinherited the boy and cast him off.’
Jax stared at the wall, knowing that there was a fair chance his father would have reacted like that in the first heat of his fury. Once Sofia had let that genie out of the bottle there would have been no putting it back.
‘I didn’t want that responsibility. I’m not a cruel man. It was a secret that shouldn’t have been told. I never liked your father and he was a lousy absentee husband but, fond as I was of Sofia, once she was gone I preferred to mind my own business…that is, until an Antonakos threatened the security of my own flesh and blood.’
Long after Kreon had gone, Jax studied the copy of the letter the older man had allowed him to keep. He was still shaken even though the woman had died long before he was born. The contents of that letter would distress his father, although, like Kreon, Jax was inclined to believe that somewhere around the time of Argo’s death his father had found out that his eldest son was not actually his son. That would better explain why Heracles had found it possible to move on so fast from that loss and adjust his attitude to Jax almost overnight.
That new knowledge and understanding just about ripped Jax apart, not to mention his view of his family. He had looked up to the big brother he had never really got to know very well and he loved his father. And why did he love Heracles, who had proved to be a useless parent when Jax was young and in need of a father? Ultimately, he had recognised that the older man deeply regretted allowing his dented ego and workaholic ways to triumph over the ties of blood. Heracles was hopeless when it came to expressing emotion though and Jax had realised that he suffered from the same flaw. His father had stumbled on blindly after Mariana’s infidelity had made him a laughing stock in the media, protecting himself as best he could by avoiding his ex-wife…and unhappily that avoidance had included Jax.
Jax hadn’t really thought about how he actually felt about Heracles until that moment, but when he thought of his father being forced to see the tragedy of his first marriage spread across the newspapers he knew he couldn’t allow that to happen. Sofia ha
d died after a long drawn-out fight against breast cancer. Heracles was domineering and manipulative and interfering but he had once adored his first wife and the son he had believed to be his.
Jax’s first act was to summon Zenas and tell his security chief that he wanted an in-depth private investigation carried out on Kreon Thiarkis and his daughter, Lucy. How the hell had something as basic as Lucy’s age been wrong in that file? Her parentage had been incorrectly recorded as well. Lucy did have a Greek father. What else could also be wrong? He needed the background and facts he could rely on. He also needed to check out Kreon’s ties to his father’s first wife, Sofia. And to his father. After all, it was his father who had sent that file to him.
Jax began to mull over the other things he had learned. Lucy was still only twenty-one years old? And had been only nineteen when they had first met? Memories swirled in a colourful haze in Jax’s head and he marvelled that he had not recognised Lucy’s immaturity for what it was. She had been impulsive, outspoken, naïve and unnervingly ignorant about facts he took for granted and a sneaky little unrepentant liar…obviously.
And no way was he prepared to marry her! Kreon could not blackmail him into doing what he had never wanted to do, he assured himself stubbornly. On the other hand, Jax also knew he could not stand back and watch his father endure the scandal that would blow up if Kreon went to the press to sell his story. People would enjoy reading about the skeletons hidden in the Antonakos cupboard and his father would lose his dignity. At the age of seventy, Heracles deserved to keep his dignity, Jax decided heavily. He might have been a lousy husband in Kreon’s eyes but he had surely not deserved the tragic conclusion to his first marriage. Knowing how badly Heracles had reacted to his own mother’s infidelity, Jax could hardly begin to imagine what his father must have felt once he realised that Argo was not his child. Surely Heracles had suffered enough for being a less than stellar husband? How dared Kreon Thiarkis threaten him?
Yet even in the grip of that seething Antonakos rage, Jax could still not stop planning. He knew that it was up to him to control the situation. He reached the stage of listing pros and cons. Were he to marry Lucy, he would get her back into his bed. A sliver of raw anticipation raked through Jax’s tense, angry body and he recognised that that was a fringe benefit that he would very much enjoy. At the same time he would also gain a stronger legal right to his daughter and he would not have to fight to gain access to her.
Nevertheless, Jax hated being told what to do and Kreon Thiarkis had just thrown a double whammy at him that came attached to a very high price tag. Primarily he was in a rage because he knew that Kreon had given him a choice but it was the hateful choice of picking between the lesser of two evils: marriage or his aging father’s public humiliation. He could tell Kreon to do his worst and then stand by and watch his father get hurt. Unfortunately, family loyalty and a very real affection for his inadequate father warred against that option. But the alternative was to surrender his freedom.
No more hot and cold running women, no more sexually self-indulgent variety in the bedroom. But then that wasn’t quite true, Jax allowed with a sudden strong sense of relief. Even Kreon didn’t expect him to stay married to Lucy for ever. Kreon was expecting an eventual divorce, which would still leave Lucy and Bella respectfully acknowledged as members of the Antonakos family and financially secure. Thee mou…he could do marriage on a short-term, strictly temporary basis, particularly with Lucy playing the starring role in his bed every night. Furthermore, Bella would have his name and the safeguard of his presence in her daily life. But just how was he expected to cope with a fatherin-law he wanted to strike down and kill in cold blood?
As an Antonakos, Jax had little experience of being threatened. He was too rich, too powerful to cross and his father had long enjoyed the same protection. But Kreon was in legal possession of very private and personal information that went right to the heart of Jax’s family, the kind of secret nobody wanted exposed and picked over in public. Even worse, one revelation would almost inevitably lead to others. What might be dug up about his own mother? Jax shuddered at the prospect of Mariana’s drug-addicted frailties and Tina’s death being dragged out into the punishing light of day. At that point it struck him that a wedding ring was a worthwhile sacrifice if it bought peace and left the family’s dirty laundry untouched.
*
Lucy studied the text from Jax with wide incredulous eyes. He had asked her when she finished work.
I’ll pick you up when you finish and we’ll talk.
Jax? Talk? Jax had been known to leave the room or remember a pressing engagement when any form of serious discussion was threatened. Jax didn’t believe in talking about stuff. He thought in private and then he acted to fix a problem. He didn’t share the reasoning that led to the decision. He believed that talking only heightened the wrong emotions, encouraged divisive stances and made issues seem worse than they were. When she had once tried to talk to him about where their affair was heading he had become angry and he had walked away. Naturally he had, she conceded, because he had known their affair was going nowhere.
But obviously he had to talk to her about Bella, she reasoned ruefully. Even he couldn’t make unilateral decisions about the daughter they now had to share. He would want to make arrangements to see Bella again, he would want to ask questions about what the little girl liked and didn’t like. That he was prepared to talk was a healthy sign, Lucy told herself heavily, striving to muster some enthusiasm about the idea of sharing her daughter with her father.
Before she even went into work, her own father had lectured her, urging her not to do to Bella what had been done to her. She had grown up without a father because her mother had selfishly chosen not to tell Kreon he had a daughter. Now, quite unnecessarily, Kreon was advising Lucy to take a long-term view and keep her anger and resentment out of the situation.
‘I know it’s a big ask,’ Kreon had conceded, ‘but you have to deal with what’s happening now and handle it sensibly. Try to concentrate on what’s best for Bella.’
Her father’s outlook had surprised Lucy because he seemed to have come to terms with what she had told him about Jax very quickly and had now taken a more detached view of events. Unfortunately everything still felt painfully personal to Lucy. Jax had rejected her but he had not rejected their daughter. She knew she shouldn’t be thinking that way but she couldn’t help it because she was only human.
A car picked her up from the hotel. It wasn’t a limo and Jax wasn’t in it but she recognised Jax’s security guards. She climbed in, smoothed down her denim skirt and worried at her lower lip with the edge of her teeth. She was wondering what Jax wanted while telling herself to keep her temper and her daughter’s emotional and physical well-being at the forefront of her mind regardless of what he might say.
Jax had plans as well. He would not confront Lucy about anything until they were safely married. Hopefully by then he would also know how accurate that file he had actually was. But he was also well aware of how deceptive Lucy could be, he reminded himself grimly, thinking of the familiar flash of that red dress below the street lights as she’d walked down that alleyway to have sex with another man. Lucy wasn’t the faithful type. Two of his father’s three wives had betrayed him with other men and Jax’s own mother had never been faithful to anyone. Surrounded from childhood by broken, dishonest relationships, Jax had always tried to avoid emotional involvement and commitment. But when his daughter came into the equation he discovered that he badly wanted to give Bella the storybook family he had never had. Something better, something happier, something lasting…
Lucy walked dry-mouthed and nervous into the house with the confusing mirrored hall. The elegant drawing room looked more welcoming than it had on her last visit with only a couple of lamps lit to leave the rest of the very large room shrouded in shadow. When Jax stepped out of the shadows, she flinched and stilled on the threshold.
‘I ordered supper for you.’ Jax indicated the
table spread with a selection of snacks.
Jax wore jeans and an open-necked shirt. He shouldn’t have taken her breath away in such ordinary garments but he did. The jeans clung to his narrow hips and outlined his long, powerful thighs. The pale shirt accentuated his bronzed skin tone and the blue black of his hair. She sucked in a breath in the tense silence and clashed with shimmering green eyes fringed by black and her heart hammered out a drumbeat inside her.
‘Supper,’ she repeated, that being the last thing she had expected from him, but she stepped fully into the room to head for the table, grateful to have something other than Jax to focus on.
‘Help yourself,’ he advised.
Settling down on a sofa, Lucy needed no further encouragement because she was always hungry after work and she was involuntarily impressed that he had remembered that little fact. She filled a plate and poured a cup of tea. ‘This is what I call civilised,’ she admitted with a wry smile.
‘I thought it would be,’ Jax said. ‘Were you working in that outfit?’
Lucy smoothed a self-conscious hand over her comfy skirt with which she had teamed a black tee shirt. ‘Yes…’
Jax gritted his teeth. A tripwire stood in front of him but he neatly avoided it by refusing to give way to his inner caveman. The short skirt showed off her surprisingly long and very shapely legs and the tee shirt shaped her pert breasts to perfection. Once upon a time he had objected to her wearing the sort of clothing that revealed her body and that had set off heated arguments. Now he was respecting boundaries to preserve the peace. He sank down onto the sofa opposite her while mentally trying to come up with garments that would still be fashionable but which would miraculously shield that glorious body from the visual attention of other men. And he finally registered that there were no such garments on the market. Lucy had always outshone her clothing. From her bright tumbling hair to her luminous skin and radiant blue eyes, Lucy glowed with sheer energy, attracting attention even in a crowded room.
