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Spiros crossed the room and took his brother in a bear-hug.
“It’s my fault,” Dimitri said in tormented tones when Spiros stepped back.
“It is his own fault for not having the surgery when he was told he should.”
“No…I upset him.”
“You two argued? This is nothing new. Again, I say, if he had had the surgery—”
“I told him I would not marry Phoebe,” Dimitri said, interrupting Spiros.
This time Phoebe’s knees wobbled, and she fell back into one of the waiting chairs. Dimitri’s words were so unexpected she desperately sought proof this was not some strange dream. The antiseptic air of the hospital provided it. Dreams didn’t have smells, did they?
Dimitri’s gaze connected with hers for the first time since she had arrived. “I am sorry, Phoebe.”
She nodded, totally clueless about what to say. That it was okay? That she didn’t mind? That she was relieved? She definitely was. But that made her feel guilty. How would her father save Leonides Enterprises now? And her relief was at the cost of Tio Theo’s health.
“What do you mean, you told him you refused to marry Phoebe?” Spiros asked, fury sharply edging every word.
“Some things are more important than promises.” Dimitri looked incredibly tired, but absolutely certain of that statement.
Then the story came out, and Phoebe listened in rapt fascination while Spiros glared like a bad-tempered guardian angel. Dimitri had a mistress, just as she had surmised. What she had not realized—and neither had he, apparently—was that he loved the other woman. Enough to break his vow to his grandfather and marry Xandra if she would have him. It was obvious that Dimitri felt deadly remorse for the way he had treated both Xandra and Phoebe.
Phoebe could not find it in her heart to blame him. She only wished they had talked before. Maybe together they could have come up with a solution.
Now everything was tangled in a Gordian knot she had no idea how to unravel.
Most disturbing, though, was the revelation that the other woman was pregnant and that she had disappeared without a trace. Dimitri had the best detective agencies in the world working on finding the French model, and so far nothing.
“You kept a mistress the entire time the understanding existed between our two families regarding your eventual marriage to Phoebe?” Spiros asked in a chilling voice.
Dimitri stood straighter, putting his shoulders back as if preparing to take whatever came his way. “Yes.”
Spiros’s fist connected with his brother’s jaw in a resounding crack.
Phoebe yelped, and Dimitri crashed backward into the nondescript waiting room wall. He righted himself, but made no move to return his brother’s gesture of anger.
CHAPTER FIVE
SPIROS looked ready to take another swing at him, and that had Phoebe surging to her feet.
She grabbed his arm. “Stop it! That whole understanding was stupid, and apparently only Dimitri and I realized it.”
Spiros glared down at her. “You didn’t take lovers while you waited for my brother.”
“I was not waiting for your brother—and, frankly, if I could have taken a lover and enjoyed it, I would have!”
Spiros looked like she had hit him. “You don’t mean that.”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “And I don’t care, either. Dimitri has a right to happiness, and none of you has the right to try to steal it from him. Not with emotional blackmail or guilt trips.”
She was talking about herself too, but that didn’t matter. Her chance at happiness had been a fleeting thing, and she wasn’t going to spend the rest of her life lamenting her lot. Somehow she would help her father save the company, and one day she would get over Spiros.
But right now someone had to stop the two brothers from becoming enemies. And it looked like that someone was her.
“I am not trying to steal his happiness.”
“Aren’t you? Your brother has fallen in love with a woman who carries his child. She’s disappeared because he let his duty to his family supersede his obligations to her. He’s hurting. She’s no doubt hurting.” Everyone was hurting—was she the only one who saw that? “Dimitri needs your support, not your condemnation, and if you can’t give it, you aren’t the man I know you to be.”
