Читать книгу The Greek Tycoon's Ultimatum - Люси Монро, Люси Монро, Lucy Monroe - Страница 9

SAVANNAH could hear the happy chatter of her daughters playing in their bedroom as she settled into the creaking desk chair in the small, cluttered study of her home in Atlanta, Georgia.

She stared at the letter from Leiandros Kiriakis, feeling as if it were a black moccasin ready to strike. In it he requested her presence in Greece for a discussion regarding her financial future. Worse, he had demanded Eva and Nyssa’s presence as well.

He would be freezing Savannah’s monthly allowance until such a discussion occurred.

Panic shivered along her consciousness.

After the trial of attending Dion’s funeral a year ago, she had promised herself she would never have to see anyone Kiriakis again. Okay, if not never, then at least for a very long time.

The girls would have to be introduced to their Greek family someday, but not before they were old enough to deal with the emotional upheaval and possible rejection of doing so. In other words, not until they were confident, mature adults.

She wished. She knew that wasn’t realistic. Not after the revelations Dion had made in that final phone call, but she had intended to put the trip off for a while. Like until she had a secure job and her Aunt Beatrice no longer needed her.

Her mouth firming with purpose, she decided Leiandros would have to have his discussion with her over the phone. There was no earthly reason for her to fly all the way to Greece merely to talk about money.

Savannah’s confidence in Leiandros’s reasonability was severely tested ten minutes later when his secretary informed her he would not take Savannah’s call.

“When would you like to fly out, Mrs. Kiriakis?” the efficient voice at the other end of the line enquired.

“I don’t wish to fly out at all,” Savannah replied, her southern drawl more pronounced than usual, the only indicator the conversation was upsetting her. “Please inform your boss that I would prefer to have this conversation by telephone and will await a call at his convenience.”

She rang off, her hands shaking, her body going into fight or flight mode at the very thought of confronting Leiandros Kiriakis again in the flesh.

The phone rang ten minutes later.

Expecting Leiandros’s secretary, Savannah picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“You are due to receive your monthly allowance tomorrow.” Although he had not bothered to identify himself, there was no mistaking the deep, commanding tones of Leiandros’s voice.

It was a voice that haunted her dreams, erotic dreams that woke her in the middle of the night sweating and shaking. She could control her conscious mind, stifling all thoughts of the powerful, arrogant businessman, but her subconscious had a will of its own. And the dreams did nothing but torment her, as she knew without question she would never again experience those feelings outside the subconscious realm.

“Hello, Leiandros.”

He didn’t bother to return the greeting. “I won’t be sanctioning that deposit, or any other until you come to Greece.” No explanation, just an ultimatum.

The exorbitant prices Brenthaven charged for her aunt’s care and the expense of attending university had prevented Savannah from accumulating more than a few weeks of living expenses in her savings. She needed the deposit to make her monthly payment to Brenthaven, not to mention to buy mundane items like food and gas.

“Surely any discussion we need to engage in can be handled via the phone.”

“No.” Again, no explanation. No compromise.

She rubbed her eyes, glad that he could not see the gesture that betrayed both physical weariness and emotional weakness. “Leiandros—”

“Contact my secretary for travel arrangements.”

The phone clicked quietly in her ear and she pulled it away to stare at it. He’d hung up on her. She said a word that should never pass a lady’s lips and slammed the phone back into its cradle. Shocked rigid by her own unaccustomed display of temper, she stood motionless for almost a full minute before spinning on her heel to leave the now stifling study.

She’d reached the door and opened it when the phone rang again. This time it wasn’t Leiandros or his secretary. It was the doctor in charge of Aunt Beatrice.

Savannah’s beloved aunt had had another stroke.

Savannah tucked her daughters into bed, telling them their favorite rendition of the Cinderella tale for their bedtime story before ensconcing herself in the study to make the dreaded call to Leiandros.

She pulled up her household budget spreadsheet on the computer and ran the numbers one more time. Nothing had miraculously changed. She needed the monthly allowance. Even if she could manage to land a full-time job the very next day, starting wages in spite of a degree in business were not going to be enough to cover their household expenses and the increased cost of Aunt Beatrice’s medical care.

Savannah picked up the phone and dialed Leiandros’s office.

His secretary answered on the first ring. The conversation was short. Savannah agreed to fly out the following week, but she refused to bring her daughters. The secretary hung up after promising to call back within the hour with an itinerary.

Savannah was making herself a cup of hot tea in the kitchen when the phone rang only minutes later.

A sense of impending doom sent goose bumps rushing down her arms and up the backs of her thighs. She just knew the secretary wasn’t calling back with travel plans already.

After taking a steadying breath, she picked up the phone. “Yes, Leiandros?”

If she’d hoped to disconcert him, she was disappointed as there wasn’t even a second’s pause before he started talking.

“Eva and Nyssa must accompany you.”

“No.”

“Why not?” he demanded, his Greek accent pronounced.

Because the thought of taking her daughters back to Greece terrified her. “Eva has almost two weeks left of school.”

“Then come in two weeks.”

“I prefer to come now.” She needed the money now, not in two weeks. “Besides, I see no reason to disrupt the girls’ schedule for what will amount to an exhausting, but short trip.”

“Not even to introduce them to their grandparents?”

Fear put a metallic taste in her mouth. “Their grandparents want nothing to do with them. Helena made that clear when Eva was born.”

She’d taken one look at Savannah’s blue-eyed and blond-haired baby and decreed the child could not possibly be a Kiriakis. Eva’s eyes had darkened to green by the time she was a year old and her baby fine hair had been replaced by a thick mane of mahogany waves by the time she was four.

It was too bad Helena had refused point-blank to even come to see Nyssa. Savannah’s youngest had been born with the black hair and velvet brown eyes of her father.

Unmistakably a Kiriakis.

“People change. Their son is gone. Is it so strange Helena and Sandros should wish to know his off-spring?”

Savannah sucked in much needed oxygen and marshaled her thoughts. “Do they now acknowledge Eva and Nyssa as Dion’s?”

“They will when they meet them.”

No doubt. Both her daughters had enough physical characteristics of the Kiriakis clan that once seen their parentage could not be challenged, but that did not mean she was ready to introduce them to their family in Greece.

“How can you be so sure?” she asked, wondering how he knew of her daughters’ physical resemblance to their relatives.

“I have seen pictures. There can be no question Eva and Nyssa are Kiriakises.” The words sounded like an accusation.

“Dion’s pictures, you mean?”

She’d sent him frequent updates on the girls’ progress along with photos, hoping that one day he would show some inclination to acknowledge them. She’d felt her own lack of family and mourned her inability to know her own father and did not want the same grief visited on her daughters.

“Yes. I supervised the disposal of his effects from his Athens apartment.” Again Leiandros’s voice was laced with censure, as if she should have done the job herself.

After three years of separation and living independent lives on two different continents, she hadn’t even considered such a thing. “I see.”

“Do you?” he asked, his voice silky with unnamed menace and that awful sense of dread washed over her again.

“Have Helena and Sandros expressed a desire to meet them?”

“I have decided the time has come.”

And as the head of the Kiriakis clan, he expected the rest of the family to go along with whatever decision he made.

“No.”

“How can you be so selfish?” Condemnation weighted each word with bruising force.

“Selfish?” she asked, feeling anger roiling in her stomach, making it churn. “You call it selfish for a mother to wish to protect her children from the rejection of people that are supposed to love them, people that should have loved them since birth, but decided for their own obscure reasons not to?”

She knew she wasn’t being entirely fair. For six years, Savannah had believed Dion’s family had hated her because she was not the suitable Greek bride they had chosen for him to wed and therefore rejected her children. His phone call the night before he died effectively obliterated that theory.

Along with other stunning revelations, her dear husband had admitted that he’d been poisoning their minds with his insane jealousy, accusing her of infidelity, from almost the very start of their marriage. Helena and Sandros had what they believed to be legitimate reasons to question the parentage of Savannah’s daughters, but that didn’t make her any more willing to expose Eva and Nyssa to possible rejection and pain.

“Sandros and Helena will accept the girls with open arms.”

“Who do you think you are. God?”

Funny, she could actually sense the fury sizzling through the phone lines. He was not used to being questioned. He’d been in charge of the huge Kiriakis financial empire since his father’s unexpected death when Leiandros was twenty. At thirty-two, his arrogance and sense of personal power were as ingrained and natural to him as making his next million.

“Do not be blasphemous. It is unbecoming in a woman.”

She almost laughed out loud at how stilted he sounded, like someone’s maiden aunt giving lessons in etiquette. “I’m not trying to be offensive,” she replied, “I simply want to protect my daughters’ best interests.”

“If you expect those interests to include further financial support from the Kiriakis family, you will bring them to Greece.”

Savannah tried to draw in a breath, but it seemed to get stuck somewhere between her windpipe and her lungs. The edges of her vision turned black and she wondered with a sense of detachment if she were going to faint. Leiandros didn’t know it, but he was forcing her to choose between the elderly aunt who had raised her and the safety of her daughters’ emotions along with her own sanity.

It was her second worse nightmare. The first had already happened. She’d married Dion Kiriakis.

“Savannah!”

Someone was shouting in her ear. Her hand instinctively tightened on the phone and the room came slowly back into focus.

“Leiandros?” Was that thready voice hers?

How pathetic she must sound to the self-assured man on the other end of the line, but then she doubted anyone had ever forced him to do anything he did not want to.

“Are you all right?”

“No,” she admitted. The last of her emotional reserves seemed to have dissipated with his overt threat.

“Savannah, I’m not going to let anyone hurt Eva and Nyssa.” His voice reverberated against her ear with conviction and assurance.

But would he let them hurt her? “How can you prevent it?”

“You will have to trust me.”

“I don’t trust people named Kiriakis.” Her words came in the flat monotone she couldn’t seem to shake.

“You don’t have a choice.”

Leiandros hung up the phone, satisfied.

The opening gambit had gone to him. It would only be a matter of time before he captured her.

Savannah and her daughters would be flying to Greece the day after Eva’s school let out for the summer. Savannah had agreed only after extracting a promise from him not to instigate any meeting between Eva, Nyssa and their grandparents before she had an opportunity to speak to Helena and Sandros.

How could she now show such concern for her daughters’ emotional well-being when her lies about their parentage had denied them the love of their family since birth?

No doubt, her arguments were an attempt at manipulation. Perhaps she intended to try to use the girls as bargaining chips for a larger allowance. While her current stipend was substantial, it would hardly support the designer clad, jet setting lifestyle she had experienced while living with Dion.

He put through a call to his secretary. “Arrange for my jet to land in Atlanta to transport Savannah Kiriakis and her children to Athens two weeks from today.”

He cut the connection after giving his secretary other necessary details.

Savannah had balked at flying on his jet, but after he told her the plane had a bedroom the girls could use to sleep in comfort, she had agreed. If she’d remained insistent he would have given in to her. The first step in his plan was the most important: getting Savannah and the girls to Greece.

Savannah had to be on the chessboard in order to engage her in the game.

He would not allow an ocean and two continents to prevent him from exacting full payment from her for all that she had cost his family, all that she had cost him.

Savannah had committed the gravest of all sins against his family, that of withholding her children, using lies and manipulation to cheat Dion out of his fatherhood and Helena and Sandros out of their rightful role as doting grandparents.

That would end in two weeks time.

When he had first met Savannah, he had been drawn to her apparent innocence, to the impression of untouched sensuality she had exuded. So drawn he had kissed her without knowing her name or anything else about her.

She had struggled at first, but within seconds had gone up in flames. Her response had been more exciting than any other sexual experience he’d ever had. Then, she’d yanked herself from his arms and told him she was married. His first, primitive instinct had been to tell her she had married the wrong man. And then her husband had arrived. His cousin.

Leiandros’s body still remembered the feel of hers. His mouth still hungered for her taste. His sex still ached for the release denied him that night. No matter how he tried to forget the forbidden desire for his cousin’s wife, she was always there, in his dreams, in his mind.

Even knowing she was a scheming, heartless witch, he wanted her. Now, he would have her. She would replace what he had lost and in the process, he would sate his body’s urge to possess her.