The Greek's Penniless Cinderella - Julia James Page 0,1
loyal and supportive husband, and eventually a loving father to their children. That would have been enough, wouldn’t it?
Except the text he’d received that afternoon, making him rush hotfoot here to Stavros’s showy mansion in an exclusive suburb of Athens, had disabused him of that assumption.
Xandros—I can’t marry you after all. I’m leaving Athens. I’m sorry—Ariadne.
The words echoed again in his head now—as did the covert tug of relief that had sprung up in him as he’d taken in the implications of her rejection. With Ariadne removing herself from the frame, he was now free to make what he’d preferred all along—a marriage-free merger with Coustakis Corp.
He’d said as much to the man who was not, after all, going to be his father-in-law.
‘Very well,’ he said coolly now, his voice clipped. ‘Then that is that. Ariadne is no longer in the equation. However, as I have argued from the outset, marrying your daughter was never essential to our merger.’
He kept his eyes levelled on Stavros, seated at his heavily gilded desk, aware that he wanted out of this oppressively over-opulent mansion as soon as possible. His own taste was for minimalism, as in his own city apartment, or better still, the simplicity of his whitewashed, blue-shuttered villa on Kallistris.
Kallistris! The very name could lift his spirits! His own private island—his haven—a helicopter flight from Athens. The place he escaped to whenever his work or social life permitted. He had purchased it on attaining his majority, knowing that it would always be a safe haven for him, whatever life threw at him.
He would fly out there this very evening—spend the weekend, get away from all this. Away from a man he didn’t like, whose daughter he hadn’t really wanted to marry and now didn’t have to, because it seemed she hadn’t wanted to marry him either. Stavros Coustakis could forget about his ambitions for a Lakaris son-in-law and grandchild. It wasn’t going to happen.
But first he wanted a definitive answer on the one thing he did want—the merger he sought. His eyes rested on Stavros Coustakis now, as he waited for his reaction. Was it go or no go with the merger? He disliked being played—and with a party like Coustakis it was essential to meet hardball with hardball.
‘You’ll need to give me an agreement in principle,’ he said now, ‘or not.’
He glanced at his watch—a calculated hustle, as he well knew, and Coustakis would know, too, but that was the way the game was played.
‘I’m flying out to Kallistris this evening.’
He wanted to be there in time to watch the sun set into the bay, the moon rise over the headland...
His mind snapped back to where he was now, and his gaze fixed on Stavros. Something was changing in those pouched grey-green eyes—they held a caustic gleam that Xandros suddenly did not like.
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Stavros was saying. His tone was smooth—too smooth. ‘You see...’
There was a definite challenge in his voice now, which Xandros liked even less.
‘Since you are so keen on this merger to take place, I had hoped that you would be flying to London instead.’
He smiled. Not a nice smile at all. And every particle of Xandros’s consciousness went on high alert.
‘In order to collect...’ Stavros Coustakis’s smile deepened, and the smile was indisputably a taunt, just as the now blatant cynical amusement in his eyes was overwhelmingly provocative ‘...my other daughter.’
Xandros froze.
CHAPTER ONE
ROSALIE SIGHED, CROUCHING down beside her bucket of soapy water, a heavy-duty scourer in her rubber-gloved hand, and poured bleach over the disgusting, greasy, trodden-in gunk on the cheap vinyl floor in front of the equally disgusting grease-splattered cooker.
The rest of the kitchen was just as disgusting. Whoever had rented this house had been a pig. The whole place was filthy, from top to bottom, and cleaning it was a pig as well. But it had to be done.
She sighed again. Her rent was due, and she also liked to eat.
She felt a familiar emotion burn in her.
One day I won’t be doing this! One day I won’t be cleaning up other people’s filth and dirt! One day I won’t be living in a total dive and paying a fortune for the privilege! One day I won’t have a wardrobe consisting of clothes from charity shops! One day I won’t be never going out and living on beans on toast...
One day she wouldn’t be poor any more.
It was a poverty she’d grown up with. Her single mother, raising her daughter on