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But for some reason last night Tamara had decided that, far from being over, their relationship needed rekindling, and on a more serious footing. She’d got horribly drunk and then been horribly sick. Afterwards she’d refused to let go of his arm, clinging on to him as tenaciously as the ivy on Nico’s Georgian mansion, so that in the end it had been easier just to bring her back to his hotel room and let her sleep it off.
Only when he’d told her he was leaving she’d gone nuclear, screaming abuse not just in English but Russian too, and threatening him with all manner of violent and painful acts of retribution.
And when that had failed to change his mind, she’d told him she was going to call her father.
Oleg Ivanov was a Russian oligarch. Immensely wealthy in his own right, he had recently married off one daughter to a tech billionaire and was now actively looking for suitable grooms for her two younger sisters.
Achileas’s spine tensed. And he was going to have to keep on looking. Matrimony was not on his agenda and, given that one in two marriages ended in divorce, he wasn’t exactly sure why it was on anyone else’s.
You could make countless vows in front of an endless stream of witnesses and it wouldn’t change the facts. Fidelity was a social construct, not a biological imperative, and as the unwanted, unacknowledged bastard son of shipping tycoon Andreas Alexios he was living proof of that.
A familiar ache pushed against his ribs. Sometimes it felt like a hollowed-out space inside his chest—an agonisingly silent, still vacuum that nothing could ever quite fill. Other times it throbbed like a bruise. But it was always there, and he’d learned to live with that sense of being incomplete, of being on the outside looking in, surplus to requirements.
Only now he had a chance to change that.
Despite his matrimonial lapse, Andreas was a traditional Greek man. A patriarch from one of Greece’s oldest shipping families. He was also ill and, faced with his own mortality, was looking at his legacy.
A legacy that didn’t include a legitimate male heir with his bloodline.
Which was why he was now ready to welcome his illegitimate son into the Alexios clan.
After thirty-two years, four months and ten days, Andreas had decided he wanted his only son in whatever was left of his life.
The thought rang a single jarring note in his head. As a child he had always known that Richard Kane wasn’t his father, and he had fantasised endlessly about meeting the man who was. Of course, when it had happened, nothing had gone as he’d imagined. It had been like meeting a stranger. A cool-eyed, patrician stranger.
Only now that same stranger was promising him legitimacy and acceptance.
On one condition.
He wanted his only son to settle down and marry. And, although it had been more hinted at than formally discussed, to produce the heirs that would ensure the patrilineal continuation of the house of Alexios.
Achileas felt his breathing stall. If only it was that easy.
He thought back to Tamara’s histrionics.
Maybe it could be. She was wealthy, beautiful, and good in bed. Plus, she wanted things to get more serious. Well, it didn’t get more serious than marriage. If he asked her to be his wife, he knew she would say yes in a heartbeat.
But the truth was he didn’t want to marry Tamara. As for having children... That wasn’t an option. How could a man who had never known his own father possibly know how to be a father himself?
Either way, he was sick and tired of relationships in general, and more specifically relationships with women who thought they could get their own way by yelling and crying and stamping their feet.
His eyes dropped to the woman looking up at him now. Not that this one was yelling or crying.
But apparently Effie Price was expecting him to apologise.
Aware of his bodyguards’ carefully averted gazes, he felt a pulse of anger beat across his skin as he stared down at her.
Just who did she think she was talking to? More importantly, who was she to talk to him in this way?
I mean, look at her, he thought dismissively, his gaze skimming her flat shoes and cheap bag. And as for that dress... It looks like something favoured by early nineteenth-century missionaries.
If she hadn’t walked into him, he would have walked straight past her. His eyes drifted over her small oval face. And yet she seemed familiar for some reason...
The frustration of the last few hours reverberated inside him and he felt something snap. He was tired and hungry and in a hurry. The last thing he needed right now was to be lectured by Little Miss Nobody.
‘That’s not going to happen,’ he said softly.
She blinked owlishly behind the thick lenses of her glasses and there was a moment of silence. Then she lifted her chin, and he felt a sudden, wholly unexpected stirring of lust as his gaze slid down the soft curve of her throat.
