The Heiress Bride

‘In what way?’ Alexio intoned very drily.

‘If you have no heart to give, only a fortune hunter will want to marry you,’ the older man warned in frustration. ‘Your current reputation as a womaniser is sufficient to make most of our friends extremely reluctant to let their daughters come into contact with you.’

‘But then I’m not in the market for born-again virgins or ambitious social climbers. So they’re very wise,’ Alexio drawled with dismissive contempt.

Sander Christoulakis suppressed a heavy sigh. He had done his utmost to persuade his son to consider the benefits of such a business alliance, hoping that the challenge of becoming involved in the vast network of Gakis Holdings would tempt Alexio as nothing else might have done. He had also believed that Alexio might be drawn by the sheer practicality of a marital arrangement that would demand so little from him on a personal basis. Spelling out the very obvious benefits of marrying a young woman who would one day inherit all that her father possessed would not have made the smallest impression.

‘Minos will be insulted by a flat refusal,’ Sander pointed out ruefully. ‘He wants you to meet with him and discuss the proposal. What harm could that do?’

Alexio regarded his parent with the grim dark eyes that his business competitors had learned to respect but, whether he was prepared to show it or not, his interest had already been ignited by his recollection of that night on Lexos. ‘I’ll think it over.’

Fierce strain in her jade-green eyes, Ione checked her reflection with care in the mirror, for so formal a summons from her father was rare and intimidating.

Her pale blonde hair was scraped back from her equally pale face. Her dull dark blue dress barely hinted at the shape of the slim young body beneath and the hemline fell to below her knee. In a crowd nobody would have noticed her and that was exactly how her father believed his daughter ought to look: modest, unobtrusive, sexless. That his ideas were fifty years behind the times and out of place in a wealthy, educated family meant nothing to him for he boasted of his peasant roots and saw no reason why the outside world should intrude on his feudal island kingdom.

Indeed, Minos Gakis was a positive god in his own household. A domineering controlling man with an explosive temper that could turn to violence in the space of a moment and, to him, a woman would always be a lesser being and a possession. While she was still a very young child, Ione had learned the correct code of behaviour to observe in her father’s radius and she knew well how to control her tongue and keep her head down in a storm. On more than one occasion, after all, she had seen her late mother being battered by the older man’s fists, and as she’d grown up, no matter how hard Amanda Gakis had tried to protect her daughter from similar treatment, she too had suffered from his brutality.

Her bedroom door opened with jarring abruptness and without the polite warning of a prefatory knock. Flinching, Ione spun round just as her father’s sister, Kalliope, appeared, her thin, sallow face sour.

‘Why are you always looking at yourself in the mirror?’ Kalliope snorted with derision. ‘It’s foolish when you’re so plain. But then, had you been born a Gakis, you would have been a beauty.

Accustomed to the older woman’s gibes, Ione resisted the dangerous temptation to ask what had gone wrong in Kalliope’s own case, for even the kindest person would have been challenged to find attraction in those sharp features. As for that crack about her not having been born into the Gakis family, Ione was too well accustomed to the knowledge that she had been adopted to rise to that bait and give the older woman reason to complain to her brother that her niece had been rude to her.

Kalliope observed her brother’s every household rule with religious fervour and received considerable satisfaction from reporting those unwise enough to transgress those rules. Furthermore, she liked Ione far less than she had liked Ione’s mother, for, while Kalliope had continued to rule the roost over the gentle English bride her brother had taken as a wife, she had found their adopted daughter, Ione, a tougher nut to crack. Ione might not answer back and might show her aunt superficial respect. But ever since the day four years earlier, when Ione had been dragged back kicking and screaming defiance from Athens airport, there had been a silent stoic determination in the younger woman’s clear gaze that made Kalliope feel like an angry, frustrated mosquito trying to sting an indifferent victim.

‘Your father has exciting news for you,’ Kalliope informed her curtly.

As Ione crossed the reception room beyond her bedroom in step with her aunt her pace slowed as apprehension gripped her. ‘I shall look forward to hearing it.’

‘Yet you’ve been such an ungrateful daughter,’ Kalliope told her with harsh disapproval. ‘You don’t deserve what is coming to you!’

What was coming to her? Her aunt’s resentment was unconcealed and Ione’s curiosity flared even higher, but the sick knot of anxiety in her tummy only tightened. She could never be in her father’s presence without feeling fear and he was not a man given to doling out treats. Indeed, Ione had often wondered if her father reaped a mean pleasure from ensuring that she was invariably denied what she most wanted. But then he did not love her, he had never loved her, and, soon after her adoptive mother’s death, he had enjoyed telling her why she had been adopted.

Amanda Gakis had given birth to a son, Cosmas, within a year of her marriage but, in the following seven years, she had not managed to conceive again. Desperate for a second son, Minos Gakis had learned that sometimes after a woman had adopted a child her unexplained infertility could subsequently end in her becoming pregnant. In those days, the popular view had been that, having satisfied her longing for a baby, a woman might stop fretting and relax and conception was then more likely to take place. Sadly, however, Ione’s arrival in the family had neglected to deliver the required result for her mother had not become pregnant again. As her father had regarded his adopted daughter as no more than the means to that hopeful end, there had been little chance of her securing much of a hold on his paternal affections in that disappointing aftermath.

Her aunt left Ione standing in the echoing marble hall outside her father’s office suite. Kalliope knew as well as Ione did that she would be kept waiting. Taut with strain, Ione gazed out the window, untouched by the gorgeous view of the bay that the villa overlooked. Golden sunlight and blue skies reflected on the shimmering seas of the Aegean far below. Lexos was a beautiful island and the huge, fabulous house in which she lived possessed every comfort that wealth could buy. Unfortunately, nothing could compensate Ione for the reality that she was as much a prisoner in her father’s home as a criminal in an isolation cell.

The freedom she craved was as much out of her reach as it had ever been. In four endless years she had not been allowed off the island, for her father no longer trusted her. Her attempt to run away had been ill-judged and foolish, a wasted opportunity, she reflected with bitter hindsight, for she had not planned it well enough and had merely forewarned her father of her intentions.

At the time, she had been receiving regular orthodontic treatment in Athens, and it had been relatively easy to slip out of the dental clinic past her unsuspicious bodyguards and dive into a taxi to head to the airport. But she had not had the foresight to check the timetables in advance and had not had the wit to just buy a ticket for the first available seat on any international flight. No, her goal had been London and she had sat around like a fool awaiting that flight only to be cornered and forced from the airport by her bodyguards before the plane had even landed. She shuddered at the recollection of the welcome home she had received from her outraged and incredulous father, who had never dreamt until that day that she might dare to try and escape his bullying tyranny.

After all, her mother never had. But then any spirit Amanda Gakis had ever had had been crushed out of her by her husband’s sneering verbal attacks and even more punishing fists.

‘Where would I go?’ her adoptive mother had once asked Ione with open disbelief when her teenage daughter had suggested that leaving her abusive marriage was the only solution to her unhappiness. ‘How would I live? Wherever I went, your father would find me. He would never let me leave…he loves me too much!’

Love, Ione thought with a pained cynicism far beyond her years. Love had made a victim of the beautiful mother she had adored. Love had been one of Amanda’s favourite excuses for the violence she had accepted as her lot in her life, along with the stress of her husband’s workaholic ways on his temperament and her own inexcusable stupidity. She had blamed herself. Even while she had lain terminally ill, she had blamed herself for lingering long enough to distress and inconvenience her husband and her son.

Eyes stinging as she realised just how much she still missed the woman whose love had cocooned her from the worst of her father’s abuse, Ione stiffened with dread as the older man’s smooth executive assistant emerged with a surprisingly unctuous smile on his face.

‘Miss Gakis…come this way.’

Minos Gakis stood below his own flattering portrait in the lofty-ceilinged room. He was a big thickset man with an imposing presence but he had yet to recover the weight he had shed while he was being treated for cancer. Indeed, although his illness had been a well-kept secret and had been successfully treated, his harsh features looked even more lined and gaunt to her than they had months earlier and his complexion was the colour of putty. For the very first time, it occurred to Ione that his recovery seemed much slower than might have been expected for a man of his former health and vigour.

‘Are you well, Papa?’ she heard herself ask in instinctive dismay, for it had been several weeks since she had seen him as he had been abroad on business.

‘I can see that my caring, compassionate daughter will be sadly missed in this household,’ Minos responded with cutting amusement.

Embarrassed colour washed over Ione’s pallor and only a second later did she begin wondering where she could possibly be going that she might be missed. Hope sprang up in her in so fast and strong a surge that her knees trembled as she stood there. Had he finally forgiven her for trying to run away? Was he now willing to consider allowing her to lead a more normal life?

‘After all these years, you are finally going to be of some use to me,’ the burly older man informed her with satisfaction.

Ione stiffened, recognising the foolish aspect of her wild hopes of being permitted a life of her own. When had her father ever done anything that had pleased her? He had broken down at her mother’s graveside, but her surprise and relief that he had shown that amount of humanity had been ruined by her painful memories of the mental and physical damage he had inflicted on a woman who had never hurt another living soul by word or by deed.

‘I have found you a husband,’ Minos announced and paused for effect.

The shock of that revelation rocked Ione on her feet and, though she struggled not to betray any reaction, a faint gasp was muffled low in her throat. Her heart was racing but her keen mind was racing even faster. A husband? Why on earth would he find her a husband? There had to be a reason. It would have to be of profit to him in some way. She knew better than to utter a single question or exclamation for he would react to either response as if she had been impertinent.

‘Speak when you are spoken to,’ had been a lesson etched into Ione’s soul during childhood. ‘A respectful daughter does not question a parent.’

The silence lay like concrete slowly setting her feet into greater rigidity while she waited for him to speak again. A husband, she thought with dazed incredulity. Why had she not foreseen such a possibility? Well, principally she had not anticipated the development because she was painfully aware that her father revelled in keeping his family at his beck and call and wholly dependent on him in every way.

‘If Cosmas had not died,’ the older man stated with harsh exactitude as he referred to her older brother, who had been killed when his private plane had crashed the year before, ‘I would have scorned any thought of making such a marriage for you. But you are all that I have now and some day you will inherit Gakis Holdings.’

If his first announcement had shaken her, that second made her lips part in shock and she whispered, ‘I’m…to be your heir?’

He vented a sardonic laugh. ‘Who else is left? In the eyes of the law, you are my daughter even though you do not possess a single drop of my blood.’

Yet she was proud that she was not a Gakis, relieved that she need never fear the taint of his genes, and she stood there lost in her own increasingly frantic thoughts. She did not want to inherit Gakis Holdings. His huge international business empire was the monster that had created his unfettered power. Enormous wealth had made him untouchable. Without hesitation, he destroyed those who antagonised him and his sphere of influence stretched terrifyingly far and wide. Time and time again the greed of others had protected him for he bribed those who might have exposed his corrupt business methods…or even what went on in his own home.

Perspiration beaded her short upper lip as she registered the peculiar direction of her thoughts at that particular moment. Her father had just told her that he had found her a husband. Why wasn’t she thinking about the shattering statement? As the silence buzzed around her she felt faint and sick and the sound of her own heartbeat seemed to be thundering in her own ears.

Suddenly she understood why she could not dwell on the news that she was to be married off like some medieval bride without any right to have a say in her own future. What was the point of agonising over what she could not prevent? For if she defied him, he would hurt her and harm what mattered most to her. He was remorseless and the process of intimidation would begin the instant she voiced a word of objection. He had turned her into a coward, a lousy, grovelling thing without the guts to take on a fight she knew she could not win.

‘I’m impressed,’ Minos Gakis informed her with a quietness of tone that sent a cold shiver down her rigid spine. ‘You know your place in life now. That’s good, for I won’t take any nonsense over this matter. As your father, I know what is best for you.’

‘Yes, Papa,’ she muttered sickly.

‘Don’t you even want to know who your husband will be?’ he mocked, revelling in her submission to his dictates.

‘If you want to tell me,’ she intoned half under her breath.

‘Alexio Christoulakis.’

Her knees almost gave beneath her in shock. She glanced up and encountered her father’s cold look of amusement. ‘Alexio…Christoulakis?’

Slowly, painfully slowly, her triangular face drenched with colour for she recalled the night she had met Alexio Christoulakis with too great a clarity for comfort. Her long, naturally dark lashes dropped again to conceal her transfixed gaze. Alexio Christoulakis…the numero uno womaniser, who seemed addicted to making headlines in both the business section and the society pages. The guy who didn’t like to sleep on satin sheets and who had insisted she changed them even though it had been the early hours of the morning. The guy whose bride-to-be had drowned in a drunken moonlit swim. The guy who had treated her like a maid and barely registered that she was human. The guy who was so achingly beautiful to look at she had stared and stared in spite of herself every chance she had got…

‘I’m not surprised that you can hardly credit your good fortune,’ Minos Gakis murmured unpleasantly. ‘But I’m sure I don’t need to add that you need not look for fidelity from him. This is a business arrangement. He will take the place that your brother once occupied and as your husband he will become part of this family.’