Page 87 of Modern Romance September 2025 1-4
He’d reached them.
Like synchronised meerkats, her mother, brother and father all looked over her shoulder.
Lydia wasn’t sure if time really did stand still or if the roar of blood in her head made it seem that way, but in the time it took her to turn to face him, no one spoke.
She looked at the man she’d last seen in the flesh naked, and came within a breath of vomiting on the spot. Summoning every ounce of her strength, she raised herself as tall as she could draw her short, curvy figure and crossed her arms. Then and only then did she meet the stare that had once melted her bones, and transferred all her anguish and loathing to him. ‘You will leave her alone.’
The blue-grey eyes held hers for the beat of a moment before snapping away from her. ‘Where is she?’
‘Gone,’ Thanasis replied in the same dull tone.
‘Where? How did she find out? Did her memories come back?’
‘I told her.’
‘You…’ The full, sensuous lips that had kissed Lydia senseless opened and closed as Alexis Tsaliki’s handsome face contorted in disbelief. ‘You told her? What the…?’
‘She needed to know.’
‘No, she needed to damn well marry you! Have you lost your mind?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where is she?’
No one answered. Lucie thought of the supply boat heading towards Kos and the figure she’d seen slip below deck and said, ‘Wherever she’s gone, it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t want to marry Thanasis and that’s the end of it.’
He didn’t even look at her. ‘Do you see all those yachts entering your waters, Thanasis? They are your guests. Your wedding guests. The press are on their way here too. If we don’t get her back right now it will be too late.’
‘It’s already too late,’ Lydia spat. ‘Lucie doesn’t want to marry him and I don’t blame her.’
It was as if her voice didn’t exist to his ears. His attention still on Thanasis, he said, ‘I can think of a few places she would go. I’ll get people on it. If you can—’
‘No.’ Thanasis’s inertia lifted off him like a blanket as he rose to his feet. ‘No. No search parties. We leave her alone. That’s all she wants.’
‘What’s the matter with you? Who cares what she—?’
A roar cut Alexis’s words off and then a split-second later he was on his back. Another split-second later and Thanasis was on top of him, his fist raised to land another punch, but this time Alexis was prepared and before Lydia could even blink, he’d flipped Thanasis onto his back, his own fist raised.
It was the scream that stopped Alexis from slamming his fist into Thanasis’s face as the bastard deserved.
Breathing heavily, he pulled himself off him, wiped the blood seeping out of his lip with his thumb, and dusted himself down as he cast a disdainful eye over all the Antoniadises…except one. The one whose scream had stopped him giving as good as he’d been given.
‘You’re all finished. You understand that, yes? Everything you have…’ He snapped his fingers together. ‘In weeks it will all be gone. The losses my family have suffered will take time for me to recoup but Iwillrecoup them, whereas you will have nothing to build back from because it will all be dust, and you will only have yourselves to blame.’
‘And you,’ said the voice he most hated, the voice whose scream had stopped him in his tracks. ‘We will have you to blame too, and every member of your family that chose to lie and deceive a woman when she was at her most vulnerable. I don’t know how you sleep at night.’
He tuned out the inflection of tone that suggested the speaker was talking about more than his stepsister. ‘My conscience is clear,’ he said tightly.
‘That’s because you don’t actually have a conscience… Oh, look, here comes your family. How delightful. Is that really all the Tsaliki spawn squeezed on that tender? You should tell them to be careful—all those egos in one boat could make it capsize.’
Alexis took a long breath through his nose before fixing Lydia with a swift warning stare. ‘Unless you want to lose any hope of salvaging something from this mess, I suggest you watch what you say about my family.’
She laughed. ‘Or what? You’ll bankrupt us? Those wheels will be turning as soon as the news breaks. We’re finished, remember?’
‘Damage limitation might buy you some time…’ There was a tap on his shoulder. He turned to find Elektra Antoniadis’s lined face gazing up at him.
He could almost feel sorry for the Antoniadis matriarch. Possibly he would have done if she hadn’t been looking at him with such loathing.
