Читать книгу The Heiress Bride - Lynne Graham - Страница 7

‘SOONER or later, you will surely choose to marry someone,’ Sander Christoulakis pointed out, his emphasis of that last word reluctant. ‘Why not Ione Gakis?’

Alexio made no response. On one level, he could not believe that this peculiar conversation was actually taking place. Once he would have laughed in his father’s face at the very idea of an arranged marriage. But, for almost two years, Alexio had been living in a hell of grief from which he only escaped when he buried himself in work. In a desperate attempt to obliterate the yawning emptiness inside him, he had flung himself into a series of wild affairs but no miracle recovery had followed. Indeed, if anything, those shallow sexual entanglements had left him with a sour taste in his mouth.

‘It is an honour that Minos Gakis should have approached our family with the offer of his daughter,’ Sander continued with quiet persistence, watching his volatile son with hopeful measuring eyes for his reaction. ‘He has a very high regard for your business acumen and his health has been troubling him. He needs a son-in-law whom he can trust.’

Alexio was grimly amused by that clever speech, which suggested that a marriage arranged between families rather than by the young people concerned was as common an event as it had once been in Greece—for it was anything but. He was also marvelling at how the attention of one of the world’s richest men appeared to have blinded his astute father to less palatable truths. ‘Minos Gakis is an evil bastard and a thug. You know it and I know it.’

‘Nevertheless, his daughter, Ione, is a well brought-up and decent young woman,’ Sander continued with determination, convinced that only such a marriage would have the power to remove his son from the partying, headline-grabbing lifestyle that was currently breaking his adoring mother’s heart. ‘I see no reason why—given time—you shouldn’t find happiness with her.’

No reason? Bitterness hardened Alexio’s lean, powerful face, his brilliant eyes darkening. He could no longer imagine being happy with any woman. But Crystal, the woman he had loved beyond any other, was undeniably gone. But then the issue of his late fiancée was not a subject his father would care to tackle, for the older man was no hypocrite.

Alexio’s conservative Greek parents had hated Crystal and had refused to accept her as a bride for their only son. Her wild-child reputation and chequered past had offended their sensibilities. When he had put an engagement ring on her finger, his father had been outraged and his mother had wept, and for months afterwards Alexio had cut his parents out of his life. Only in the wake of Crystal’s death had the divisions begun to heal and, even then, only because he had initially been in such a haze of despair that he had been incapable of rousing himself to the effort of rejecting his family.

Yet since then every business deal he had touched had turned to solid gold. He was now infinitely richer than his father had ever been for, while Sander had inherited his shipping fortune and merely conserved it, Alexio had gone into venture capital and software development, taking risks that his more cautious father would never have countenanced. It was ironic that only his own massive monetary gains in recent months could have put him in a position where the billionaire tycoon, Minos Gakis, would consider him as a potential son-in-law.

‘I have never even met Gakis’s daughter,’ Alexio said drily.

‘You have,’ Sander contradicted immediately, his brows pleating. ‘According to Minos, you met her when you spent the night on Lexos.’

In his turn, Alexio frowned, but even more darkly. A couple of months back, his yacht had run into difficulty in rough seas off the coast of the island of Lexos and he had radioed for permission to dock there, for Gakis was notorious for the brute henchmen he employed to guard his private island from unwelcome visitors. As it had transpired, Alexio had been made very welcome, indeed lavishly entertained by the reclusive tycoon, but it had been an evening almost surreal in its ghastliness.

Although he was well into his sixties, Minos had had a mini harem of beautiful bimbos staying in his palatial villa and Alexio had been invited to choose one of those women to complete his night’s entertainment. He had been revolted by how very willing the fawning females involved had been to satisfy the older man’s jaded tastes. Even so, Alexio had not made the dangerous mistake of discussing Minos’s proclivities with anyone on his return home. Minos Gakis would make an implacable enemy and only a fool would risk awakening the ruthless older man’s wrath to no good purpose by talking out of turn. And when it came to anything that might threaten his thriving business empire, Alexio Christoulakis was no fool…

Surely one of those bimbos could not have been Ione Gakis? Beneath his father’s bewildered scrutiny, Alexio vented a humourless laugh at that unlikelihood for, though Gakis was far from being a likeable character, he was not unhinged. But, plunder his memory as Alexio did, he could not recall meeting any other woman that night. Apart from the housekeeper who had shown him to his suite while he’d still been seething with thwarted fury over her employer’s offensive amusement at his guest’s refusal to sleep with a whore.

‘Let me refresh your memory,’ Sander Christoulakis breathed in some discomfiture, evidently having hoped that his son would recall the young woman without the prompting of the photograph he now set down on the table.

Alexio focused on the photo with incredulity and instant recognition. He muttered a sudden curse and reached for it. Having been taken in profile, it was not a very good shot, but he remembered that submissive bent head, that pale hair pulled back in a severe style and those fragile facial features.

‘I thought she was the housekeeper!’ Alexio confessed with a sound of frank disbelief. ‘She behaved like one, not like the daughter of the house! Gakis snapped his fingers and she appeared and he spoke to her as if she was a servant. That timid little thing was Ione Gakis?’

‘Minos did say that she’s quiet and shy.’

‘Colourless and mousey,’ Alexio countered with ruthless bite, but a faint dark line of colour now scored his sculpted cheekbones and he swung away for, even in the mood he had been in that evening, he had not been impervious to her natural appeal.

He remembered her all too well: the delicacy of her fine features, eyes as green as emeralds and as startling and unexpected in a Greek woman as her fair colouring. A beauty without artifice and the absolute antithesis of the voluptuous and artificial party girls paraded before him by his host. He had never made a pass at a servant in his life but only her silent formality and his own innate sense of fair play had haltered him.

‘I understand that Ione has hardly ever been off that island. Her father believes in keeping his womenfolk at home,’ Sander Christoulakis remarked with the wry fascination of a man who had a wife and two daughters, who thought nothing of flying all over Europe merely to visit friends or shop.

‘At some time in the future, I may well consider a marriage of convenience,’ Alexio conceded, his beautiful mouth hardening on the smouldering reflection that Ione Gakis should have immediately identified herself to him. ‘But I have no interest in marrying Gakis’s oddball daughter. At the very least I would like a wife with some personality.’

‘A little personality can go a long way.’ Unwilling to surrender what he saw as a fantastic opportunity for his son, Sander argued with greater vehemence. ‘And before you criticise Ione Gakis for what she lacks, ask yourself what you have to offer a woman.’

‘In what way?’ Alexio intoned very drily.

‘If you have no heart to give, only a fortune hunter will want to marry you,’ the older man warned in frustration. ‘Your current reputation as a womaniser is sufficient to make most of our friends extremely reluctant to let their daughters come into contact with you.’

‘But then I’m not in the market for born-again virgins or ambitious social climbers. So they’re very wise,’ Alexio drawled with dismissive contempt.

Sander Christoulakis suppressed a heavy sigh. He had done his utmost to persuade his son to consider the benefits of such a business alliance, hoping that the challenge of becoming involved in the vast network of Gakis Holdings would tempt Alexio as nothing else might have done. He had also believed that Alexio might be drawn by the sheer practicality of a marital arrangement that would demand so little from him on a personal basis. Spelling out the very obvious benefits of marrying a young woman who would one day inherit all that her father possessed would not have made the smallest impression.

‘Minos will be insulted by a flat refusal,’ Sander pointed out ruefully. ‘He wants you to meet with him and discuss the proposal. What harm could that do?’

Alexio regarded his parent with the grim dark eyes that his business competitors had learned to respect but, whether he was prepared to show it or not, his interest had already been ignited by his recollection of that night on Lexos. ‘I’ll think it over.’

Fierce strain in her jade-green eyes, Ione checked her reflection with care in the mirror, for so formal a summons from her father was rare and intimidating.

Her pale blonde hair was scraped back from her equally pale face. Her dull dark blue dress barely hinted at the shape of the slim young body beneath and the hemline fell to below her knee. In a crowd nobody would have noticed her and that was exactly how her father believed his daughter ought to look: modest, unobtrusive, sexless. That his ideas were fifty years behind the times and out of place in a wealthy, educated family meant nothing to him for he boasted of his peasant roots and saw no reason why the outside world should intrude on his feudal island kingdom.

Indeed, Minos Gakis was a positive god in his own household. A domineering controlling man with an explosive temper that could turn to violence in the space of a moment and, to him, a woman would always be a lesser being and a possession. While she was still a very young child, Ione had learned the correct code of behaviour to observe in her father’s radius and she knew well how to control her tongue and keep her head down in a storm. On more than one occasion, after all, she had seen her late mother being battered by the older man’s fists, and as she’d grown up, no matter how hard Amanda Gakis had tried to protect her daughter from similar treatment, she too had suffered from his brutality.

Her bedroom door opened with jarring abruptness and without the polite warning of a prefatory knock. Flinching, Ione spun round just as her father’s sister, Kalliope, appeared, her thin, sallow face sour.

‘Why are you always looking at yourself in the mirror?’ Kalliope snorted with derision. ‘It’s foolish when you’re so plain. But then, had you been born a Gakis, you would have been a beauty.

Accustomed to the older woman’s gibes, Ione resisted the dangerous temptation to ask what had gone wrong in Kalliope’s own case, for even the kindest person would have been challenged to find attraction in those sharp features. As for that crack about her not having been born into the Gakis family, Ione was too well accustomed to the knowledge that she had been adopted to rise to that bait and give the older woman reason to complain to her brother that her niece had been rude to her.

Kalliope observed her brother’s every household rule with religious fervour and received considerable satisfaction from reporting those unwise enough to transgress those rules. Furthermore, she liked Ione far less than she had liked Ione’s mother, for, while Kalliope had continued to rule the roost over the gentle English bride her brother had taken as a wife, she had found their adopted daughter, Ione, a tougher nut to crack. Ione might not answer back and might show her aunt superficial respect. But ever since the day four years earlier, when Ione had been dragged back kicking and screaming defiance from Athens airport, there had been a silent stoic determination in the younger woman’s clear gaze that made Kalliope feel like an angry, frustrated mosquito trying to sting an indifferent victim.

‘Your father has exciting news for you,’ Kalliope informed her curtly.

As Ione crossed the reception room beyond her bedroom in step with her aunt her pace slowed as apprehension gripped her. ‘I shall look forward to hearing it.’

‘Yet you’ve been such an ungrateful daughter,’ Kalliope told her with harsh disapproval. ‘You don’t deserve what is coming to you!’

What was coming to her? Her aunt’s resentment was unconcealed and Ione’s curiosity flared even higher, but the sick knot of anxiety in her tummy only tightened. She could never be in her father’s presence without feeling fear and he was not a man given to doling out treats. Indeed, Ione had often wondered if her father reaped a mean pleasure from ensuring that she was invariably denied what she most wanted. But then he did not love her, he had never loved her, and, soon after her adoptive mother’s death, he had enjoyed telling her why she had been adopted.

Amanda Gakis had given birth to a son, Cosmas, within a year of her marriage but, in the following seven years, she had not managed to conceive again. Desperate for a second son, Minos Gakis had learned that sometimes after a woman had adopted a child her unexplained infertility could subsequently end in her becoming pregnant. In those days, the popular view had been that, having satisfied her longing for a baby, a woman might stop fretting and relax and conception was then more likely to take place. Sadly, however, Ione’s arrival in the family had neglected to deliver the required result for her mother had not become pregnant again. As her father had regarded his adopted daughter as no more than the means to that hopeful end, there had been little chance of her securing much of a hold on his paternal affections in that disappointing aftermath.

Her aunt left Ione standing in the echoing marble hall outside her father’s office suite. Kalliope knew as well as Ione did that she would be kept waiting. Taut with strain, Ione gazed out the window, untouched by the gorgeous view of the bay that the villa overlooked. Golden sunlight and blue skies reflected on the shimmering seas of the Aegean far below. Lexos was a beautiful island and the huge, fabulous house in which she lived possessed every comfort that wealth could buy. Unfortunately, nothing could compensate Ione for the reality that she was as much a prisoner in her father’s home as a criminal in an isolation cell.

The freedom she craved was as much out of her reach as it had ever been. In four endless years she had not been allowed off the island, for her father no longer trusted her. Her attempt to run away had been ill-judged and foolish, a wasted opportunity, she reflected with bitter hindsight, for she had not planned it well enough and had merely forewarned her father of her intentions.

At the time, she had been receiving regular orthodontic treatment in Athens, and it had been relatively easy to slip out of the dental clinic past her unsuspicious bodyguards and dive into a taxi to head to the airport. But she had not had the foresight to check the timetables in advance and had not had the wit to just buy a ticket for the first available seat on any international flight. No, her goal had been London and she had sat around like a fool awaiting that flight only to be cornered and forced from the airport by her bodyguards before the plane had even landed. She shuddered at the recollection of the welcome home she had received from her outraged and incredulous father, who had never dreamt until that day that she might dare to try and escape his bullying tyranny.

After all, her mother never had. But then any spirit Amanda Gakis had ever had had been crushed out of her by her husband’s sneering verbal attacks and even more punishing fists.

‘Where would I go?’ her adoptive mother had once asked Ione with open disbelief when her teenage daughter had suggested that leaving her abusive marriage was the only solution to her unhappiness. ‘How would I live? Wherever I went, your father would find me. He would never let me leave…he loves me too much!’

Love, Ione thought with a pained cynicism far beyond her years. Love had made a victim of the beautiful mother she had adored. Love had been one of Amanda’s favourite excuses for the violence she had accepted as her lot in her life, along with the stress of her husband’s workaholic ways on his temperament and her own inexcusable stupidity. She had blamed herself. Even while she had lain terminally ill, she had blamed herself for lingering long enough to distress and inconvenience her husband and her son.

Eyes stinging as she realised just how much she still missed the woman whose love had cocooned her from the worst of her father’s abuse, Ione stiffened with dread as the older man’s smooth executive assistant emerged with a surprisingly unctuous smile on his face.

‘Miss Gakis…come this way.’

Minos Gakis stood below his own flattering portrait in the lofty-ceilinged room. He was a big thickset man with an imposing presence but he had yet to recover the weight he had shed while he was being treated for cancer. Indeed, although his illness had been a well-kept secret and had been successfully treated, his harsh features looked even more lined and gaunt to her than they had months earlier and his complexion was the colour of putty. For the very first time, it occurred to Ione that his recovery seemed much slower than might have been expected for a man of his former health and vigour.

‘Are you well, Papa?’ she heard herself ask in instinctive dismay, for it had been several weeks since she had seen him as he had been abroad on business.

‘I can see that my caring, compassionate daughter will be sadly missed in this household,’ Minos responded with cutting amusement.

Embarrassed colour washed over Ione’s pallor and only a second later did she begin wondering where she could possibly be going that she might be missed. Hope sprang up in her in so fast and strong a surge that her knees trembled as she stood there. Had he finally forgiven her for trying to run away? Was he now willing to consider allowing her to lead a more normal life?

‘After all these years, you are finally going to be of some use to me,’ the burly older man informed her with satisfaction.

Ione stiffened, recognising the foolish aspect of her wild hopes of being permitted a life of her own. When had her father ever done anything that had pleased her? He had broken down at her mother’s graveside, but her surprise and relief that he had shown that amount of humanity had been ruined by her painful memories of the mental and physical damage he had inflicted on a woman who had never hurt another living soul by word or by deed.

‘I have found you a husband,’ Minos announced and paused for effect.

The shock of that revelation rocked Ione on her feet and, though she struggled not to betray any reaction, a faint gasp was muffled low in her throat. Her heart was racing but her keen mind was racing even faster. A husband? Why on earth would he find her a husband? There had to be a reason. It would have to be of profit to him in some way. She knew better than to utter a single question or exclamation for he would react to either response as if she had been impertinent.

‘Speak when you are spoken to,’ had been a lesson etched into Ione’s soul during childhood. ‘A respectful daughter does not question a parent.’

The silence lay like concrete slowly setting her feet into greater rigidity while she waited for him to speak again. A husband, she thought with dazed incredulity. Why had she not foreseen such a possibility? Well, principally she had not anticipated the development because she was painfully aware that her father revelled in keeping his family at his beck and call and wholly dependent on him in every way.

‘If Cosmas had not died,’ the older man stated with harsh exactitude as he referred to her older brother, who had been killed when his private plane had crashed the year before, ‘I would have scorned any thought of making such a marriage for you. But you are all that I have now and some day you will inherit Gakis Holdings.’

If his first announcement had shaken her, that second made her lips part in shock and she whispered, ‘I’m…to be your heir?’

He vented a sardonic laugh. ‘Who else is left? In the eyes of the law, you are my daughter even though you do not possess a single drop of my blood.’

Yet she was proud that she was not a Gakis, relieved that she need never fear the taint of his genes, and she stood there lost in her own increasingly frantic thoughts. She did not want to inherit Gakis Holdings. His huge international business empire was the monster that had created his unfettered power. Enormous wealth had made him untouchable. Without hesitation, he destroyed those who antagonised him and his sphere of influence stretched terrifyingly far and wide. Time and time again the greed of others had protected him for he bribed those who might have exposed his corrupt business methods…or even what went on in his own home.

Perspiration beaded her short upper lip as she registered the peculiar direction of her thoughts at that particular moment. Her father had just told her that he had found her a husband. Why wasn’t she thinking about the shattering statement? As the silence buzzed around her she felt faint and sick and the sound of her own heartbeat seemed to be thundering in her own ears.

Suddenly she understood why she could not dwell on the news that she was to be married off like some medieval bride without any right to have a say in her own future. What was the point of agonising over what she could not prevent? For if she defied him, he would hurt her and harm what mattered most to her. He was remorseless and the process of intimidation would begin the instant she voiced a word of objection. He had turned her into a coward, a lousy, grovelling thing without the guts to take on a fight she knew she could not win.

‘I’m impressed,’ Minos Gakis informed her with a quietness of tone that sent a cold shiver down her rigid spine. ‘You know your place in life now. That’s good, for I won’t take any nonsense over this matter. As your father, I know what is best for you.’

‘Yes, Papa,’ she muttered sickly.

‘Don’t you even want to know who your husband will be?’ he mocked, revelling in her submission to his dictates.

‘If you want to tell me,’ she intoned half under her breath.

‘Alexio Christoulakis.’

Her knees almost gave beneath her in shock. She glanced up and encountered her father’s cold look of amusement. ‘Alexio…Christoulakis?’

Slowly, painfully slowly, her triangular face drenched with colour for she recalled the night she had met Alexio Christoulakis with too great a clarity for comfort. Her long, naturally dark lashes dropped again to conceal her transfixed gaze. Alexio Christoulakis…the numero uno womaniser, who seemed addicted to making headlines in both the business section and the society pages. The guy who didn’t like to sleep on satin sheets and who had insisted she changed them even though it had been the early hours of the morning. The guy whose bride-to-be had drowned in a drunken moonlit swim. The guy who had treated her like a maid and barely registered that she was human. The guy who was so achingly beautiful to look at she had stared and stared in spite of herself every chance she had got…

‘I’m not surprised that you can hardly credit your good fortune,’ Minos Gakis murmured unpleasantly. ‘But I’m sure I don’t need to add that you need not look for fidelity from him. This is a business arrangement. He will take the place that your brother once occupied and as your husband he will become part of this family.’

With his every successive word the blood in her veins chilled more. He was spelling out the brutal facts. She would only be the means by which Alexio Christoulakis could be put in a position of trust as a son-in-law.

‘He’s brilliant, single-minded, strong. It took a lot to persuade him to agree to this alliance. But I need him. When he arrives tomorrow, you will do whatever it takes to keep him content. Is that understood?’ her father pressed coldly.

Pinning bloodless lips together, she nodded jerkily. ‘Yes, Papa.’

‘Even when you become his wife, your first loyalty will remain with me. You will not tell him that you are adopted. The Christoulakis family take great pride in their family tree. You will not embarrass or offend them with the news that you were born illegitimate or reveal that you have a twin sister, who is nothing more than a common prostitute. Nor will you again seek contact with her. Is that also understood?’

A faint shudder rippled through Ione’s slight frame until she pulled herself taut again. Bitter revulsion and anger currented through her but it was backed by despair. She saw how her future was being mapped out: a future that would be as confined and empty as the present. He expected her to marry a stranger and spy on him for his benefit. He was demanding that she go on living a lie for he did not want it to be known that macho Minos Gakis had adopted his daughter, rather than sired her himself. And to drive the knife in harder, he abused the twin she had never met, scorning her sister for her lifestyle. Hatred made her very lungs burn and she turned her head away.

‘Answer me, Ione,’ he growled.

‘Yes, Papa. I understand,’ she said with all the expression of a robot.

The instant the interview was at an end, she headed straight for the gymnasium. There she changed into an exercise outfit and embarked on a rigorous training session to empty her taut, shivering body of stress. She overdid it and exhausted herself, finally slumping down on a mat, damp and shaking, to stare at the floor. And it was only then, at the last expected moment, that she finally grasped why she should be greeting the announcement of her approaching nuptials with joy and relief…

The minute that she left the island with her bridegroom would simply be the countdown to her eventual escape from the whole darned lot of them! Ione flung back her pale blonde head and her laughter suddenly echoed across the big empty gym. Alexio Christoulakis would be her passport to freedom, not her future keeper, not yet another lord and master in her life.

Having had experience of one bullying, aggressive male, she had no intention of accepting a second. But it was essential that Alexio marry her just to get her off Lexos. Not even her father was likely to suspect that she might choose to walk out on her bridegroom after her wedding. Especially not when it came to a male as eligible and good-looking as Alexio Christoulakis, who was rumoured to be the top pin-up in girls’ schools across the globe.

Ione began to smile, soft mouth curving as she flung herself back on the padded mat and started to plan. When she reached England she would find her sister, Misty, for although it had been more than four years since that letter had arrived from her twin she still remembered every line of the address on it. Fossetts, her sibling’s foster home had been called, and surely from that point it would be a simple matter to trace Misty even if she no longer lived there. Yet her own sister knew nothing about her, not even her present name, Ione acknowledged ruefully. At birth Ione had been given the name Shannon, but Amanda Gakis had chosen a new name for her adopted daughter. However, when she did finally get to meet her long-lost twin she really would have to work out some very tactful, very, very kind way of persuading her elder sister that she did not need to be the victim of rich, using, abusing men.

As the helicopter came in to land over Lexos, Alexio was thinking about the disconcerting meeting he had had with Minos Gakis forty-eight hours earlier and the commitment he had made in agreeing to marry Ione.

After having advanced an extremely advantageous business partnership that had taken Alexio by surprise, Gakis had laid all his cards on the table. In telling Alexio the truth about his health, the older man had to a very great extent put himself in Alexio’s power, for the news that the billionaire tycoon might only have a few months left to live would send shock waves crashing through the business world and cause a steep fall in the value of the shares in Gakis Holdings, making it vulnerable to a takeover bid.

The Gakis empire ran only with Minos Gakis at the helm. His senior executives had been picked not for their ability to think on their feet but for the efficiency in following orders without question. Minos did indeed need a second-in-command, a son-in-law bound by family ties to hold the fort while he went into hospital for further treatment. For if he did not emerge again, what would happen to a daughter raised like a convent novice on an island and without the smallest grasp of what the real world was like? A young woman who would inherit billions and become the target of every smooth-talking greedy fortune hunter across the globe?

But without a doubt, Gakis was sick in more than body, a father jealous of his precious little girl’s affections, for why else should he have raised his daughter in such unnatural isolation? Almost twenty-three and never had a boyfriend? Was Minos Gakis crazy? Didn’t he realise that his daughter would fall madly in love with the first man who gave her some attention?

That’s likely to be you, Alexio’s intelligence told him and, even though women who clung and looked at him with adoration turned him off big time, the shadow of a faint smile touched the corners of his strong mouth. Ione would be his wife, after all, and she had not looked like the demanding type. Different horses for different courses, he reflected with cool confidence. If she loved him their marriage of convenience might well run a great more smoothly. But what kind of a woman allowed herself to be bartered off like a commodity?

The ‘commodity’ in question was engaged in equally careful thought at that moment. Ione was working out how she could best put Alexio at ease and lull him into a false sense of security. After all, she did not want him succumbing to an attack of cold feet and spoiling her plans, and she had not forgotten her father’s admission that it had taken a great deal to persuade Alexio into marrying her. She would have liked to show him that she could be a lot more presentable in appearance than her current circumstances allowed. Unfortunately that option was barred for her father might well lose his temper if she appeared wearing the cosmetics and the more flattering outfits that she sometimes put on to cheer herself up in the privacy of her bedroom.

Unfortunately, the only thought in Alexio Christoulakis’s head when he first looked at her would be…sex. Her nose wrinkled. He would wonder what she would be like in bed; he wouldn’t be able to help himself. He was Greek, he was very oversexed. And he had made an outsize fool of himself two years ago over a greedy little tart of a show-off with nothing else going for her but her ability to show her boobs and bare bottom off in public on a monotonously regular basis. Face it, she would be dealing with a very basic, testosterone-driven male, who left his supposedly brilliant brain outside the bedroom door. And here she was looking as plain and sexless as it was possible to look and he might well take fright. So she had to draw him in…somehow, ensure he got the impression that, no matter how devoid of instant appeal she might seem, the wedding night at least was likely to be a wow.

Of course, she didn’t plan on sticking around for the wedding night, but he could have no suspicion of that reality. But then, he deserved all that he had coming to him, didn’t he? What kind of a man agreed to marry a woman as part of a cold-blooded, callous business deal? A sexist, domineering, ruthless, power-hungry, insensitive pig!

As Alexio Christoulakis emerged from the helicopter he was gilded by bright sunlight. The selfish, spoilt pig who had demanded that she change his wretched bed sheets at two o’clock in the morning, Ione reminded herself as she stood like a small, rigid statue by her burly father’s side.

But she had chosen to forget the sheer raw impact of Alexio in the flesh and the closer he got, the less she breathed and her chest tightened, for he was so incredibly good-looking. The golden light shimmered over the luxuriant blue-black hair cropped to his arrogant head, accentuated his superb bone structure, the stunning dark, deepset eyes, the bold brows, aggressive jawline and wide, charismatic mouth. His pearl-grey business suit was cut to fit wide shoulders, lean hips and long, powerful thighs that required no helpful enhancement from his tailor. He strolled towards them not one whit put out by a reception committee and a situation that would have filled ninety-nine out of a hundred men with a sizeable degree of discomfiture.

Her own heart was hammering with nervous tension and, had she not been holding herself taut with the self-discipline of years of training, she would have trembled. His vibrant self-assurance infuriated her, but on another level she could only be impressed by that show of strength, that cool, contained tough front. One wrong move, one word out of place and her father would ruin him. Didn’t he realise that he was walking into the lion’s den? Didn’t he appreciate that if he married into the Gakis family he would be selling his soul to the devil?

‘Ione…’ Alexio looked down into eyes the same shade as precious jade, the most unreadable female eyes he had ever met, utterly empty of any impression, and the smooth and polished greeting ready on his tongue somehow died there. She had the pale, still face of a madonna, possessed of pure, perfect symmetry and…untouchable. At a distance she had looked like a doll, now she bore a very close resemblance to an ice statue: frigid from head to toe. The wedding night promised to be a real challenge.

‘Alexio…’ Ione squeezed out his name in acknowledgement, straining with all her might to get enough oxygen back to manage that feat.

Alexio watched the flow of warm pink colour burnish her cheeks, the uncertain flutter of her silky brown lashes and the brief relaxation of her taut lipline into soft, sexy fullness as she spoke. As he noted the tiny pulse beating out her tension below her delicate collar-bone, he recognised that she was neither indifferent nor cold, but raw with nerves and struggling to hide the fact. A primal sense of satisfaction lancing through him, his slow, dangerous smile curved his handsome mouth…