Читать книгу The Marakaios Marriage - Кейт Хьюит - Страница 11

CHAPTER FOUR

ANTONIOS PUT THE suitcases in the villa’s one bedroom, tension knotting between his shoulders. Coming back to Villa Marakaios always gave him a sense of impending responsibility and pressure, the needs and concerns of the family and business descending on him like a shroud the moment he drove through the gates. But it was a shroud he wore willingly and a duty he accepted with pride, no matter what the cost.

He could hear Lindsay moving behind him, walking with the quiet grace and dignity she’d always possessed.

‘Why don’t you rest?’ he said as he turned around. Lindsay stood in the doorway, her pale hair floating around her face in a silvery-golden cloud, her eyes wide and clear, yet also troubled. ‘Everyone is coming for dinner tonight,’ he continued. ‘I need to see to some business. I’ll come back before we have to leave. But I suppose you don’t mind me working all hours now, do you?’

The less they saw each other, the better. Yet he still couldn’t keep a feeling of bitterness or maybe even hurt from needling him when she nodded, and wordlessly he walked past her and out of the villa.

He walked across the property to the offices housed separately from the family’s living quarters, in a rambling whitewashed building overlooking the Marakaios groves that stretched to the horizon, rows upon rows of stately olive trees with their gnarled branches, each neatly pruned and tended, now just coming into flower.

He paused for a moment on the threshold of the building, steeling himself for the demands that would assail him the moment he walked in the door. Ten years after his father had told him of the extent of Marakaios Enterprises’ debt, he’d finally brought the business to an even keel—but it had taken just about everything he had, both emotionally and physically.