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‘Do you have any idea how much it would have meant to my mother to be reconciled with him? To be forgiven?’ She stuffed the tissue away and blinked desperately to clear her vision. ‘As if she’d committed some crime.’
‘Your grandfather is a traditionalist,’ Costas said. ‘He believes in the old ways: the absolute authority of the head of the family, the importance of obedient children, the benefits of a marriage approved by both families.’
She looked into his give-nothing-away eyes and his hard face and suspected not much had changed. Costas Palamidis was a man who wore his authority like a badge of identity. Of his blatant masculinity.
‘Is that how you married into the Liakos family?’ she asked, trying to sound offhand. ‘The Palamidis and Liakos clans decided there was benefit in a merger?’
His eyes blazed dark fire and for a moment she felt as if she’d stepped off a cliff without a safety rope. She shivered, for all her bravado, acknowledging an atavistic fear at the idea of rousing this man to angry retaliation.
‘The marriage had the blessing of both families,’ he said eventually, tonelessly. ‘It was not an elopement.’
Which didn’t answer her question. Sophie stared into his face and saw the warning signs of a strong man keeping his temper tightly leashed.
That was answer enough. Just looking at him, she knew Costas Palamidis wouldn’t settle for anything, especially a wife, unless it was exactly what he desired. He’d get what he wanted every time and be damned to the consequences. The idea of him needing help to get a bride was laughable.
Sophie would bet her cousin, Fotini, had been charming, gorgeous and utterly captivated by her bold, devastatingly masculine husband. No doubt she’d been at his beck and call, deferring to him in everything, like a good, traditional Greek wife was apparently supposed to do.
‘Thanks for coming all this way with your news,’ she said at last, ‘but as you can see I …’
What? Don’t care?
No, she couldn’t lie. There was a part of her that felt regret at the old man’s pain. A sneaking sympathy for him, looking death in the face and deciding, far too late, that he had done the wrong thing by his daughter.
The realisation made her feel like a traitor.
‘It’s too late to build bridges,’ she said quickly. ‘I’ve never been part of the Liakos family and there’s no point pretending now that I am.’
She was her own person. Sophie Paterson. Strong, capable, independent. She didn’t need some long-lost family in Greece. Instead she had friends, an address book full of them. And she had a career to start, a life to get on with.
Yet right now she wanted nothing more than to lean against this silent stranger and sob her eyes out till some of the pain went away. To let his obvious strength enfold and support her.
What was happening to her?
This weakness would pass. It must, she decided as she bit down hard on her quivering lower lip.
‘You’ve made your feelings abundantly clear.’ His deep voice scraped across her raw nerves so she shivered. ‘But it’s not that simple to disconnect from your family.’
‘What do you mean?’ She swung round on the seat. For all his calm composure, there was an inner tension about him that screamed its presence. Immediately she shrank back, suddenly aware of how very little she knew about him. Of exactly how much larger and tougher he was.
‘Don’t look like that,’ he growled. ‘I don’t bite.’
She shivered at the immediate, preposterous idea of him bending that proud head towards her and scraping his strong white teeth over the ultra-sensitive skin at the side of her neck.
Where the heck had that come from?
Her breathing notched up its pace and her heart thudded hard against her ribcage. Sophie whipped round away from him, horrified that he might have registered the flash of awareness still rippling through her.
She squeezed her eyes shut. She was off balance. The funeral, the lack of sleep, were taking their to
ll.
‘Sophia—’
‘Sophie,’ she corrected automatically. She’d rejected the original version of her name as soon as she was old enough to realise it belonged to the world of that far-away family who’d treated her mother so appallingly.
‘Sophie.’ He paused and she wondered what was coming next. He sounded as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. ‘I came to find your mother because it seemed she was the only person left who might be able to help.’
‘Why her?’
