Page 86 of Modern Romance September 2025 1-4
The bathroom door opened and Alexis was engulfed in a cloud of steam and the unedifying sight of his father dripping wet from the shower he’d been enjoying. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Lucie knows everything. She’s gone. The wedding’s off.’
His father seemed to deflate before his eyes.
‘What do you meanshe’s gone?’ Rebecca demanded in a high voice. ‘How can she begone?’
One of his siblings—and Alexis had many siblings—having heard the commotion, barged into the cabin, quickly followed by another and another and another until it seemed like every Tsaliki in existence was in the cabin shouting over each other, all throwing panicked questions at him.
‘That’s all I know!’ he roared over the noise. ‘Everyone get dressed. We’ll be anchoring soon and you can take the tender over, but I’m taking the jet ski there now so I can find out exactly what’s going on and see if I can find Lucie and talk some sense into her.’
Not giving them the chance to argue, he elbowed his way out of the cabin.
The jet ski was ready for him. Throwing himself on it, he turned the engine on and, not caring that he wore no life jacket, set off at top speed to Sephone.
Lydia saw the figure speeding to the island on the jet ski before anyone else. No trickery caused by distance could discount what the thumping of her heart was telling her, and she gripped her forearms and swallowed back a swell of nausea that was different from the nausea already rolling in her stomach.
‘It will be okay,baba,’ her father said, noticing the change in her demeanour and wrapping a trembling arm around her. Kissing the top of her head, he whispered, ‘I promise, everything will be okay.’
She leaned into him, fighting the threatening tears and fighting the growing urge to open her lungs and vocal cords and just scream; scream until her throat was raw and she had no breath left to give.
‘Thanasis will fix it,’ her father added, as if Lydia’s brother were a god amongst mortals and could bend the world to his whim.
‘How?’ she whispered dully. ‘Lucie will never marry him now. It’s over. Everything’s over.’
She looked at her mother slumped on the fine white sand, the steely smile wiped off her face, her expression that of utter despair. Looked at her brother sitting on the same rock he’d been propped on when he’d explained the situation to them, her mighty big brother who always had the answer to everything sitting there as if all his stuffing had been knocked out of him. And then she glanced again at the figure on the jet ski closing in on the beach.
Another swell of nausea rose from the pit of her stomach followed by a swell of anguished fury and, without thinking of what she was doing, she wrenched herself out of her father’s comforting hold and rounded on her brother.
‘What the hell were you thinking, lying to Lucie like that?’
His dull eyes barely focussed on hers. His confession had left him spent.
Nearly two weeks ago, Lucie had been in a car crash that had seen her hospitalised for days with a major head injury. Thanasis had brought her to his private island to recover. It had made sense. Sephone was a tranquil Greek paradise and their wedding was being held there. Unbeknownst to Lydia, her parents and the rest of the world, Lucie’s accident had been caused after she’d called the wedding off and fled Thanasis’s Athens apartment. Unbeknownst to them all too, Lucie’s head injury had caused an amnesia. She’d forgotten everything about the wedding, including the huge row that had seen her flee from Thanasis. Between them, Thanasis, Lucie’s mother, stepfather and the oldest of her stepbrothers, Alexis, had conspired to make Lucie believe that, far from hating each other, she and Thanasis had fallen in love for real and not just as a game being played out for the sake of their respective family businesses’ survival.
‘Lydia, don’t,’ her mother said tiredly. ‘Your brother is suffering enough.’
Usually her mother’s warning would be enough to make Lydia shut up, but in that moment too many emotions were crowding in her head and chest, and her heart was thrashing too wildly at the jet ski figure closing in on them for her to listen or think clearly.
‘He’ssuffering?’ she screamed. ‘Well, I’m glad! It serves him right! Lucie didnothingto deserve being treated like that.’ Her back to the sea, she threw her hands on her hips to stop them lashing out at her zombified brother. ‘She gave up her home and career to save our business and you didthatto her?’
Because the engagement and planned wedding had never been real. Her father’s uncivil war with his old friend and former business partner turned enemy, Georgios Tsaliki, had escalated to the degree that Georgios had sabotaged the engines of their cargo fleet and Lydia’s father had retaliated by having millions of cockroaches and rats let loose in Georgios’s own fleet. What had been treated in the press as an amusing rivalry between two rival shipping magnates had overnight become a scandal that had ballooned as old dirty tricks between them were either brought to light or rehashed with a brand-new slant. The scandal had led to Antoniadis Shipping’s main investors threatening to pull their money. If acted on, Antoniadis Shipping would go bankrupt.
Tsaliki Shipping hadn’t gone unscathed either. Whilst not fatally wounded like the Antoniadises were close to being, its share prices had plummeted and, with no sign of recovery on the horizon, it was agreed that the only way to manage the situation and prove that the next generation were now in charge and that all the bad blood between the two families was over, was through marriage. Petros Antoniadis’s son Thanasis would marry Georgios Tsaliki’s beloved stepdaughter Lucie.
Except it had been a match made in hell. Thanasis had been determined to hate Lucie and she in turn had grown to despise him.
Poor Lucie had thought Thanasis’s love for her was true and had opened her heart to him.
Lydia didn’t have to stretch her imagination very far to imagine how devastated Lucie must have felt to learn the truth and learn that she’d been so cruelly played and her injury weaponised against her.
‘He did what he had to do to save us all,’ her mother defended.
‘Well, he didn’t save us, did he?’ she cried. ‘My honourable brother who never lies…’ She shook her head in disgust. ‘You men, you’re all the same. You lie and you lie and you lie, and now you have the nerve to sit there looking all injured and sorry for yourself? You caused this, Thanasis.You.If you’d bothered to take me into your confidence instead of listening to that bastard Alexis, I would have told you not to do it. I would have told you to level with her and now look what we’re left with!’
‘I will find her and I will bring her back here. She will listen to me.’
The voice had come from behind her, its impact freezing her on the spot.
