Page 110 of Modern Romance September 2025 1-4
‘Eight, and it took me another twelve years to realise my father is actually a narcissistic arsehole who uses his money as a weapon. He paid my mother and my first two stepmothers off and God knows how many mistresses. I’m one of nine and I’m quite sure there would be more of us if Rebecca hadn’t forced him to have a vasectomy after Loukas was born. He likes to keep everyone close, one big happy family all feeding his ego and living off his largesse, but all it does is create a cycle of dependence and allows him to get away with and justify any kind of behaviour.’
‘So how were you able to see through him if your siblings haven’t?’
‘I’m quite sure all my siblings have seen through him too but they’re happy to be props in Georgios Tsaliki’s tapestry of what a great, generous man he is. I wasn’t.’
‘Butwhy? What made you different?’
‘Partly it’s to do with being the oldest. I’m thirty-seven and can remember a time when it was just my father, my mother, Constantine, Atticus and me. This was before Dad really made a success of the business and traded my mother in and our lives became a circus.’
‘Did you see much of your mother after the divorce?’
‘I saw her all the time. My father’s a generous man and bought her a house close to ours. She would often join us on holidays too. Our relationship’s a good one.’
‘I’m glad.’
‘See?’ he said in a lighter tone. ‘Icansustain a relationship with a woman.’
Lydia cut through the wave of sadness Alexis’s snippet about his early childhood had provoked by forcing a small laugh at a jest that made the sadness heavier. ‘You said you’re different from your siblings in your drive partly because you’re the oldest. Does that mean there was something else at play?’
‘Yes, and that something was your father.’
His words hung between them until he said, ‘Lydia, I grew up believing the Antoniadis name was synonymous with the devil. You were all vultures who’d built your fortune off the back of my father’s work. As my father would tell it, he was the brains in the partnership between himself and your father, and when your father severed it, he took all the best contacts and systems my father had put in place leaving my father to start again from nothing. I still don’t know the truth of this and I doubt I ever will because both men tell a different story, but when I was twenty I passed your father in the street and I was curious, mostly because he didn’t have devil horns in his head.’
‘My father’s a good man,’ she said quietly.
‘He behaved as badly as my father during their war but I believe that fundamentally he’s a better man than him. Seeing him sparked something in me and I started asking about him with contacts, just to get an outside perspective, and all I heard were good things. A good man, a good and fair employer. No scandals, no illegitimate children, no largesse… I’m not saying learning about your father made me want to be like him because I was twenty and his life sounded as exciting as magnolia paint, but it was one of those lightbulb moments—that my father wasn’t the great man I’d always believed, that he was actually selfish and venal and that I was on the path to becoming a carbon copy of him. It just sparked in me a whole new perspective of my father and myself, and it also made me realise I was completely dependent on him and that if I didn’t do something about it, I would be dependent on him for the whole of my life. It lit the fire in me to find my own path and make my own mark on the world.’
Lydia held the hand pressed against her belly, digesting all Alexis had just revealed to her and thinking, too, about how her desire to find her own path outside the family business had extended only as far choosing graphic design over shipping and moving into the cottage at the bottom of the family garden. The Antoniadis Shipping shares assigned to her had been deliberately designed to give her a modest income that would need to be supported by her own endeavours, but, in reality, she’d never reallyhadto work. She’d had the same kind of expensive education as Alexis but she’d done little with it. Everything about her was modest, from her income to her home—which wasn’t even hers—to her car, to the few boyfriends she’d chosen, nothing to set her alight or put a fire in her belly, her existence entirely forgettable.
How had she never seen that before?
No one could ever forget Alexis. He had a fire inhisbelly, an inner spark that shone brightly and drew people to him like moths to bask in the heat of his flame. Lydia had been drawn to that fire from the first lock of their eyes, and now she couldn’t help herself fearing just how badly she would be burned from it.
Not wanting to think about the future she’d chosen to walk into, she said, ‘How did you do it?’
‘My father refused to give me or my siblings shares in the company because he didn’t want to cede any potential control to us, but he paid me a good salary. I started investing it.’ He laughed but there was little humour behind it. ‘One thing I didn’t expect was that he would respect me for it and that in itself spurred me on further. When you get to know my father you’ll learn he has a real magnetism. Basking under his approval makes you feel like the king of the world. He’s a man full of contradictions and my feelings for him are just as contradictory. For all his selfishness and narcissism, he has a generous heart.’
But in that moment she couldn’t have cared less about contradictions or generous hearts. ‘You want me to get to know him?’ she asked in horror.
‘You will get to know all my family,’ he said calmly, as if this were nothing at all.
‘But…they will hate me.’
His voice hardened. ‘Some of them might—Athena is a given, but she hates everyone—but if they want to stay on my good side, they will treat you with courtesy and respect or face the consequences.’
‘I can’t come between you and your family!’
‘Youare my family now, angel. You are my wife and you are carrying my child. That makes you more important to me than anyone.’
The most important person until the novelty wore off, she thought wretchedly but didn’t say.
If there was one trait of his father Alexis had enthusiastically embraced, it was his womanising, and to endure it she was going to have to play the role of Alexis’s stepmother, Rebecca Tsaliki. It wouldn’t happen just yet, not while the chemistry was so strong, but it would happen, and she really must stop thinking about it otherwise the future with Alexis that had been prewritten would start to eat at her before it had even been lived.
‘My family will never accept you or our child and I have nothing to threaten them with to force them,’ she said miserably. ‘In a week’s time I’m going to be lucky if they let me keep the Antoniadis name.’
His hands moved from her stomach and slid up her arms to her shoulders and gently turned her around. Tilting her chin with his fingers, he quietly said, ‘Lydia, I’m not going to pretend I don’t know what’s at stake for you or that things are going to be easy for you, but, whatever happens, you are not alone. Know that. We’re in this together.’ And then, as if to prove his point, his mouth came down on hers and he proved just how together they were.
CHAPTER EIGHT
