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‘Particularly as he idolised his first wife and despised my mother…and me…for my mother’s infidelity. When he found out that he hadn’t fathered Argo he immediately suspected your father because of the close friendship Kreon had had with Sofia.’
Lucy winced. ‘I honestly don’t think it was that sort of friendship.’
‘It wasn’t. Kreon saw Sofia as a little sister. His mother, your grandmother on Kreon’s side, was Sofia’s nanny and as children Kreon and Sofia spent a lot of time together,’ Jax told her. ‘Unfortunately having married Sofia my father distrusted their friendship and became jealous.’
‘In other words, your father is an old dinosaur who can’t credit that a man and a woman can have a platonic friendship,’ Lucy commented, still watching Heracles as he lifted Bella onto his knee with careful hands.
‘I wouldn’t appreciate my wife being that friendly with another man either,’ Jax admitted.
‘Sadly I don’t currently have any close male friends to torment you with.’ Lucy sighed with unhidden regret on that score.
‘You’re a little witch,’ Jax growled, running his forefinger along the lush line of her full lower lip. ‘Why does that make me want to kiss you again?’
‘You love a challenge?’ Lucy whispered unevenly, meeting those stunning green eyes in a head-on clash and feeling more than a little dizzy with excitement, her lips parting.
‘But I don’t enjoy an audience,’ Jax countered, running a finger back and forth across the delicate bones of her wrist below the level of the table.
Lucy was breathing in rapid shallow little gusts, insanely conscious of her body responding to him on every level. She could feel her breasts full and constricted within the bodice of her dress, her distended nipples pushing hard against the scratchy lace of her bra and then there was the tight locked-down tension and heat between her thighs, not to mention the dulled little throb there that made her ache and stiffen her posture.
‘It’s showtime—but not for what we want,’ Jax murmured drily as Iola took a seat beside him and Heracles settled down beside Lucy with Bella still on his knee.
‘She’s very cute,’ Heracles said of her daughter. ‘She knows what she wants.’
‘Mum… Mum,’ Bella framed, lurching straight off Jax’s father into her mother’s arms and flopping down sleepily.
‘She needs a nap,’ Lucy sighed.
‘Where’s the nanny I hired for the day?’ Jax asked.
The older woman was already approaching Lucy, ready to take the tired toddler off her hands, but Lucy stood up. ‘I’ll come upstairs with you and get her settled.’
‘Your bride doesn’t take hints, does she?’ Heracles remarked with some amusement to his son. ‘You’ll have your hands full with the two of them.’
Jax, who very much wanted to follow his bride upstairs and have her settle him down, grimaced. ‘I know it.’
‘Well, you can’t make worse choices than I did. I won’t say anything more,’ his father declared piously. ‘With my track record, I can’t afford to preach, can I?’
‘No, you can’t.’
‘Three marriages ending in one death and two divorces and your mother was almost as bad. We didn’t set you much of an example, did we?’ Heracles sighed heavily. ‘By the way, I’ve set up the island for your honeymoon—’
Thoroughly taken aback, Jax frowned. ‘But you live on Tifnos,’ Jax objected, because he had been planning to take Lucy cruising round the Mediterranean on the yacht.
‘Tifnos is yours now that you’re a father. It was built to be a family home and I’m tired of living there alone in that great barn of a house. I’v
e signed it over to you and I’m in the process of buying an estate outside Athens,’ the older man told him in a tone of finality. ‘It’s time for me to step back and make room for the next generation.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
LUCY CAME OUT of the room where she had left the nanny watching over Bella and smiled at the sight of Kreon waiting for her. ‘Dad? What are you doing up here?’ she asked with a grin. ‘Are you trying to escape all the polite chit-chat? Or have you heard a rumour that the food’s going to be bad?’
Kreon shifted uneasily on his feet, his face grave and troubled. ‘I have done something wrong and it concerns you.’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Lucy laughed as he urged her into an alcove with seats.
‘Talking to Heracles made me see stuff…differently.’ Her father selected his words with an air of discomfiture as he sat down. ‘It made me appreciate that we’ve all had our tragedies and our triumphs but it’s how we deal with them that makes us who we are. I’d like to be proud of who I am but right now I’m not.’
Lucy narrowed her eyes in confusion. ‘You don’t sound like yourself.’
‘Jax’s father neglected Jax because he despised Jax’s mother, whom he divorced. He knows he can never make it up to Jax and he has to live with it every day, knowing that all those years he left his boy to deal alone with a very difficult woman,’ Kreon told her.
‘But you and I have a different history,’ Lucy reasoned, tucking that fresh information about Jax into her memory to take out and ponder at a more suitable time. ‘You didn’t even know that my mother was pregnant when you left London and she didn’t tell you later when she could have done—’
‘That’s not what I’m talking about,’ Kreon told her heavily. ‘For many years I hated Heracles Antonakos because he put me down over my friendship with his wife. I’m ashamed to admit that I took my resentment out on his son.’
Lucy’s smooth brow had furrowed. ‘In what way?’
