The Greek's Penniless Cinderella - Julia James

PROLOGUE

XANDROS LAKARIS TURNED ABRUPTLY, winged brows snapping together over his dark eyes, deepening the lines around his well-shaped mouth.

‘Dammit! Just what do you suggest I do? Storm after her and drag her to the altar?’ he demanded rhetorically.

The man he’d addressed, Stavros Coustakis, sat back in his chair, eyeing his visitor impassively. He had grey-green eyes, unusual for a Greek—but then—unlike Xandros, with his long and illustrious family history—Stavros Coustakis knew little about his antecedents.

‘I’m a nobody,’ he’d readily admitted, with the worldly cynicism Xandros was well used to in this man whose daughter he’d been engaged to marry, ‘but I’ve made myself a very, very rich one.’

Those grey-green eyes hardened now at Xandros’s outburst.

‘No,’ he retorted. ‘It would do you no good. She has defied me and is therefore no longer my daughter.’

Xandros looked at him askance, his frown deepening. He knew Stavros was ruthless—a man few, if any, cared for—yet to hear him disown his daughter so casually was chilling. But he also knew that his own reaction to his former fiancée’s flight was, in fact, predominantly relief.

He had been in no rush to abandon his carefree bachelor lifestyle, indulging in the easy-going short-term affairs which—thanks to his dark good looks, wealth and elevated social position in Athens society—had always come easily to him. Still only in his early thirties, he wanted a few more years of it before he tied himself down in marriage.

It was a preference which he knew warred with the dual responsibility pressing heavily on his shoulders—not only to continue the ancient Lakaris family line, which could trace its heritage back to the imperial nobility of the long-vanished Byzantine empire, but also everything his father had impressed upon him all his life. That old money must continually be replenished with new or risk disappearing completely.

It was that necessity which had dominated Xandros’s childhood. His grandfather had fatally combined lavish spending with rash investments, and the family had come dangerously near the point of complete ruin because of it.

Financial worries had been paramount in his boyhood years, with his father plagued by unpaid creditors and even impending bankruptcy, his mother fearful that their beautiful, gracious family home in the countryside beyond Athens would have to be sold. His father had driven himself relentlessly to restore the Lakaris fortunes and reverse his own father’s unwise profligacy.

He had succeeded more than handsomely, restoring the Lakaris fortunes by the time his son had reached adulthood, but Xandros had grown up indelibly imprinted with the task of continuing his father’s work and ensuring that never again would they want for money—that the family’s wealth would never again be endangered, only enlarged.

An ideal opportunity to do just that—hugely—had presented itself in the prospect of undertaking a highly mutually lucrative merger with the Coustakis empire, its financial lines of business, from venture capital to insurance, that would fit ideally with the Lakaris portfolio.

Xandros’s father, before his untimely death, had been keen to press ahead with it—and not just for financial reasons alone.

Xandros was well aware that his late father had been very keen on pointing out that their ties with Coustakis could, and indeed should, be even closer. And that Stavros’s daughter Ariadne, despite her father’s rough-and-ready self-made origins, would, in all respects, make Xandros a highly suitable wife...

He could see why. Ariadne, though perhaps a little young for him, being only in her early twenties, ticked all the boxes. A striking brunette, intelligent and cultured, she socialised in the same elite circles as he did, and they got on perfectly well together. From his parents’ point of view Ariadne had the added advantage of not only being Stavros Coustakis’s heir, but also the fact that her late mother had come from a very good family and had been best friends with Xandros’s mother.

Moreover, Stavros Coustakis himself had become very keen on making the proposed business deal much more than a corporate merger.

‘I’ve a mind to be father-in-law to a Lakaris and have a Lakaris grandchild,’ he’d informed Xandros bluntly. ‘Being a nobody myself.’

For all his late father’s enthusiasm, and his mother’s urging, it had still not been an easy decision for Xandros to make, but in the end he’d gone for it.

And so, he’d thought, had Ariadne, who was keen to escape her domineering father as much as having any desire to marry. Okay, so neither of them was in love with the other, but they liked each other well enough, and he’d determined to do his best to be a