Page 26 of Forgotten Greek Proposal
Alexis laughed.
‘One million is aninsult.’
‘It will be two million if you match it, more than she would earn in her lifetime.’
‘Irrelevant,’ he snarled. ‘Your family might think her expendable but I will not see her paid off so cheaply when, without her, we would all have lost everything by now. Twenty each or I tell her the truth this minute and leave all our fates to the gods.’
He heard a sharp suck of air.
Good. Let Alexis think he meant it. He deserved it for his contempt and the cruelty of what all the Tsalikis were doing to her.
This wasn’t a game. This was Lucie’s life.
Bad enough that he was playing his part in it, but this was her mother and the people she regarded as family conspiring against her without any care for what the truth would do to her.
Thanasis had no control over what the truth would do but he could play his part in making it more palatable for her to live with.
After a long silence, Alexis finally said, ‘Okay. Twenty each. But you are playing a dangerous game, my friend.’
‘No, I am trying to save you from losing a sister.’ Hadn’t he warned Rebecca that she stood to lose Lucie? Clearly she’d not taken his warning on board or shared it with the rest of her family.
‘She is not my sister.’
An image flashed in Thanasis’s mind. Lucie’s face in that early moment in her hospital bed when he’d told her the world at large considered her a Tsaliki daughter and sister in all but blood and name. The amazement and delight in her expression.
Alexis might not regard Lucie as his sister but she thought of him as her brother.
Responding with a voice cold enough to freeze the Aegean, Thanasis said, ‘And you are not my friend. Goodbye.’
He disconnected the call then had to breathe all the way into his twisted guts to stop himself hurling his phone over the balustrade.
Thiswas why he’d fought tooth and nail to keep Lucie at a strict arm’s length.
One kiss. One goddam kiss. It had softened him up and humanised her in the way he’d always known he must never allow, not with someone he despised with such strong passion because how could he keep his future marriage pure living with such heady, twisted temptation?
He pulled more ragged air into his lungs.
He didn’t know when his feelings for Lucie had first shifted but he was starting to understand that she’d never deserved his loathing any more than she deserved Alexis’s contempt.
Shifted feelings and increasing guilt or not, there was too much at stake to confess the truth before the wedding, too many lives and livelihoods at stake to walk away.
He might have thought this whole charade wrong from the start, but he’d gone along with it and would continue playing along because there was still no better option. He needed Lucie to marry him. They all needed her to marry him. Even Lucie did, and he must never let the chemistry between them win before the truth could be told.
He sensed movement behind him and turned to find her crossing the narrow bridge.
Blood filled his head, all his senses whirring back to life as she neared him. The taste of her in his mouth strengthened like a taunt.
She stopped before him like a proud goddess with her chin lifted and a hint of defiance ringing in the all-seeing eyes. ‘What you just said before your phone call, about all my feelings for you being false…’
The blood in his head began to pound.
He held his breath.
‘I don’t believe they are,’ she finished. And then she smiled her Aphrodite smile. ‘But I get why it bothers you that they are and why you need me to be certain—’
‘There can be no certainty until your memories come back,’ he interrupted roughly. ‘I could tell you anything and you have no way of knowing if it is the truth or not.’
Her Aphrodite smile didn’t diminish an iota. ‘You can tell me anything and I have no way of verifying it.’
