Page 85 of Love Among the Ruins
“You’re worried he might appear?”
“I’m pissed that he’s talking to Galatis behind my back.”
He got up and started to pace around the room, his hands in his pockets as if he was making a business decision. “I know why he’s doing it, though he denies it. He’s checking up, maybe opening a second channel to Galatis.”
“Wouldn’t that undermine you?”
He stopped and looked at her, his piercing eyes like lasers.Ó Theé mou.Dominic was so handsome. But he was even more so when he was angry. He was intense. Her heart flipped a few times just staring back at him.
“That’s exactly my point. My brother wouldn’t see it as that. He’d see it as him doing the right thing by the company.”
She heard her breath, in and out, short and shallow. That mouth, those lips. It was wrong, so wrong, but she wondered what it might be like to kiss those lips.
“They don’t trust me to do this, and Galatis isn’t making things easy for me, not that he should, but with my family breathing down my neck, Alexander is the last complication I need.”
“How is it that you have a shipping business here at all, with your family being in the US?”
“My father. It’s his doing. It just happened.”
“Happened?”
“In the sixties, my father met a man in a bar in Piraeus—he hadn't gone there to do business, he didn’t even realize it was a worldwide maritime centre—or maybe he did, but he wasn’t there for that reason. He'd just ended up there by mistake, and he met a guy in a bar. They got on instantly, they just clicked, my father said. Before the night was over, they'd decided to go into business together.
My father took a risk. He had money, not as much then but enough to finance this operation, and the man, Simos Pappas, had the know-how, and he was Greek, and he lived there, so it worked just fine. Together they set up this company in Athens. It was the perfect location for keeping an eye on our fleet and subsequent maritime operations. And that's how this transatlantic operation was born. They built the business up slowly over time and it would come to mutually benefit both parties, My father's first fortune came from that.”
“First?”
“We have other businesses, but the shipping part of it, my father just fell into it.”
Was he being deliberately vague? Trying to play down just how wealthy he was? “It was fated, then?”
“What?”
“How they met. It was meant to be, your father ending up there by mistake.”
“Perhaps. But Simos died around fifteen years ago, and that's when The Steele Corporation took over the entire business. It's a good thing we had everything in place, because our core business is tech, real estate and finance.”
It seemed to pain him to disclose this to her. So she dug deeper. “Is that all? Just those three?”
“We're a big company.”
“I expect everything about you to be big, Dominic. What do you call it over there? Supersized.” She stifled the grin.
“We like making money. Nothing wrong with that, but to answer your question, that’s why we have a presence here. My father had considered selling off this company, it doesn't make sense to focus when we're just a minor player in the market.”
“Ouch!”
“What is it? Do you need another painkiller?” His gaze fell to her ankle.
She laughed. “Ouch as in that must hurt, you being a minor player. Not dominating.”
The tiny knot that had formed between his brows slowly vanished. “Shipping is dominated by the Greeks, and now China, Japan and Hong Kong are prominent players, too, not to mention South Korea and Norway. But the business makes money, so ...”
“Of course, why else would you do anything, if it didn't make money?”
“Exactly.”
“Why is Galatis even giving you his time if he has the biggest fleet? Why should he partner with you?”
