Page 1 of Forbidden Greek Mistress
CHAPTER ONE
Thanasis Zacharias walkedinto his father’s tasteless monstrosity of a villa that took over the entire north side of a relatively obscure island in the Aegean—as his equally tasteless monstrosity of a father had commanded—and saw a ghost.
Had he been anywhere else, he would have rushed to her. He would have crossed the marble floors, heedless and wild with the need to touch her. He would have got his hands upon her, immediately, to feel the warmth of her skin beneath his palms. He would have crushed his mouth to hers—anything to prove that it was truly her.
That she was alive. That this wasn’t yet another one of the dreams that had haunted him relentlessly for five long years. That she was really and trulyhere—
It was theherethat was a problem.
What was his resurrected lost love doinghere?
Thanasis had grown up in this villa. This was the place where he had learned entirely too much about his father’s delight in hurting others, causing pain and sorrow wherever he could, and lifelong commitment to his own selfish ego. It was, at best, a place of smoke and mirrors. Lies upon lies upon lies.
He had learned long ago to keep his reactions to himself, not to mention any inconvenient emotions that might present themselves at the worst possible moment.
The consequences for not doing so had always been dire.
Here, now, there was an impossible ghost standing there beneath the glittering light of the chandeliers in the villa’s great hall, and he did not dare approach her.
Not when he could not be certain how he would act.
Or what he would reveal.
Thanasis forced himself to look away from her, though it caused him actual, physical pain. He had to do it in stages, looking back to make sure he wasn’t seeing things, then going through entire stages of grief again to make himself tear his gaze away once more. He had to be careful. He had to monitor his stampeding heart and the blood surging through him, not to mention the expression he feared was on his face. The face he had only ever showedher—
He looked around, assessing the situation with the cool calculation that had made him such a success in business, despite his father’s appalling antics and reputation for drama.
No one had seen him enter. He had come late, deliberately. It was clear at a glance that he had missed nothing, just the usual chaos of a typical Zacharias family event. He could see three of his five half siblings from his place by the ostentatious marble arches in the entryway, though he had no doubt that the others were somewhere about. They always were. They circled like sharks, because that’s what they were. Forever jockeying for favor and position, when surely they should have known better by now.
Thanasis was the heir to all of this. This excessive bacchanal. This abominable offense against architecture and all the vanity cluttered within it. This enduring mess his father took such delight in making, knowing that one day he would simply leave it behind him, and better yet, in Thanasis’s lap.
Not for Pavlos Zacharias the questionable charms of actual parenting or maintaining healthy relationships with the children he’d fathered indiscriminately, all while remaining married toThanasis’s mother. Not for him some sort of acknowledgment that he had created these lives that now depended so heavily on his own. Then again, he didn’t seem to care overmuch what sort of relationship he had with Thanasis, either, legitimate or not.
Pavlos delighted in torture. Not the rack or the stocks. No thumbscrews or bamboo beneath any fingernails. Those things took effort and Pavlos was too lazy. Why bother making that sort of effort when it was easier by far to simply behave like the depraved monster he was and watch the ripples of that behavior spread out before him?
That was why Thanasis could not trust his eyes. Maybe it wasn’t a ghost, stood here before him in the grand hall. Maybe it was simply a woman wholooked likehis lost, adored Saskia.
Obviously, he told himself sternly, it could not be anything else.
Not here in this funhouse mirror of a place, where nothing was as it seemed, unless, that was, it seemed like hell.
He stayed where he was. He let himself look at her, then forced himself to look away. Again. When that was something he had never been any good at. That had not changed, no matter who this woman really was.
Thanasis could not allow his hunger to show on his face. He could not allow anyone here to see any hint of the things he actually felt inside. He could not allow them to imagine that he had any emotions at all, for that matter. Pavlos’s infamously depraved villa was a festering sore, not any kind of home, and anything found within it was a weapon.
He had learned that when he was still small.
Thanasis smelled what he was certain was a whiff of sulfur, and then there beside him was the half sibling he liked the least—a difficult distinction, but hers all the same. The venal and vain Marissa was a product of Pavlos’s widely publicized affairwith a sharp-edged Parisian model who was as famous for her spitefulness as her cheekbones.
“I thought you no longer adhered to the old man’s commands,” Marissa said in that cut glass voice of hers, sharp and vicious. She did not bother to speak Greek, though they were both in Greece tonight. She preferred her native French and did not care at all if she was understood. The venom came through, loud and clear, no matter what language she used.
Thanasis allowed himself another glance at his beautiful ghost, currently standing across the hall with a wineglass clutched in her fingers, her head tilted slightly to one side, an expression he recognized on her face. A baffled sort of curiosity that, once, had been a precursor to laughter—
But it couldn’t be. It couldn’t.
What he recognized was a memory, nothing more, and this woman before him had nothing to do with it.
Because this woman was not Saskia. Saskia was dead.
