return to her grim, impoverished life rather than be subject to her father’s machinations in exchange for a life of ease. He felt admiration for her resolve fill him. Yet he knew it was a resolve that would cost her dearly.
He set his drained coffee cup back on the table. ‘Are you really set on going back to London?’ he asked.
She nodded, her mouth set, her expression bleak at the prospect—and who could blame her?
The image of how he’d found her, looking exhausted and worn down, reeking of bleach and worse, that mop and bucket in her rubber-gloved hands, was suddenly and vividly—unacceptably—in his head.
I can’t let her go back to that!
‘No.’
The word fell from his lips, instinctive and automatic. Adamant. A frown flashed across his face. No, she would not go back to that appalling, poverty-stricken life! It was unthinkable—unthinkable for the daughter of one of Greece’s richest men! Surely he could help her get some degree of recompense from her father—find her a lawyer ready to take up her cause? Or a tabloid journalist? Or both?
Her outburst cut across his cogitations.
‘I don’t have a choice!’ she threw back at him, her voice bitter. ‘I refuse to have anything to do with a man who has said such vile, cruel things about my poor mother! Who knew he’d got her pregnant and then deserted her anyway, condemning her to a misery she endured for the rest of her tormented life without lifting a finger to help her—let alone the daughter he knew perfectly well he had! He can rot in hell for that! And for thinking he could buy me with his bloody money and that I’d crawl to him for it so I wouldn’t have to go back to the poverty he deliberately kept me in, hoping it would make me malleable and desperate!’
Xandros could see her face working again, could hear the rage in her voice mounting once more. The fire in her eyes was making them more luminous than ever... Her fury was animating her features...intensifying her beauty...
From somewhere deep in that part of his brain he’d had to silence before, the part that he had refused to pay any attention to, came a thought that was so outrageous he tried to stifle it at birth.
But it would not be stifled. Would not be silenced.
Because there was another way she could avoid being condemned to a life of grinding poverty. His mind raced. A way that would simultaneously do him some good as well. A considerable amount of good.
As his eyes rested on her agitated, stricken face, which for all the emotion working in it was still not diminished in its effect, on the emotion flashing in her eyes, lighting them into a blaze, he heard words rise up in his throat. Insane, surely, as it would be to say them...
And then he said them anyway.
‘What if there was a different alternative?’
His eyes held hers, holding them by the sheer power of the will that was welling up in him from that deep, impossible place in his brain.
She stared. Blankness was in her face.
‘What alternative?’
He held her eyes still—those beautiful, expressive eyes of hers—masking his own expression. But beneath the mask his thoughts were churning wildly. Was he really going to say what he was about to say? Could he mean it?
Then there was no more time for questioning himself, for he could hear himself speak. Saying the words.
‘You marry me after all.’
She was staring at him. The blankness on her face was gone. And her expression now was one of total rejection.
‘Hear me out,’ Xandros urged. He was marshalling his own thoughts, moving them rapidly across his consciousness as they formed. ‘You marry me—just as your father wants,’ he repeated. ‘But—’ and the emphasis was absolute ‘—you do so on your terms—not his.’
Her grey-green eyes were still stony with repudiation so he went on, hearing his own thoughts springing into being.
This will work! And it will work infinitely better than the marriage I was prepared to undertake with Ariadne! Because what made me so reluctant about Ariadne was the prospect of a permanent marriage! Of tying myself to her...having children! Losing my freedom.
But the marriage that was racing through his head now would be quite different! It would be win-win both for him and Stavros’s downtrodden English daughter!
He set it out rapidly and concisely—frankly—in a cool, clear, businesslike manner.
‘We marry—without delay—so your father will finally give the go-ahead I’m seeking and commit to the merger.