Page 100 of Modern Romance September 2025 1-4
Lydia had never understood the war between their families. Okay, she understood the root causes of it—a business partnership between her father and Georgios Tsaliki that had gone wrong—and understood the enmity her father felt towards his old friend and business partner. And she supposed she understood that marital loyalty meant her mother loathed Georgios too, but Lydia had never understood why this loathing extended to every Tsaliki and why it was expected that she despise them too. She’d tried to despise them for her parents’ sake but her heart had never been in it. Maybe if she’d gone to the nightclub with her family’s loathing for Alexis in her heart, she wouldn’t have been so vulnerable to his seductive power…
And she wouldn’t have conceived her child. Her innocent, blameless child, the only innocent in this whole sorry mess, and it was thinking of her innocent child that gave her the resolve needed to climb the wide, winding staircase and cross the mezzanine with her child’s father knowing that she couldn’t back out now just because she melted for him. If protecting her baby meant losing her family to gain a serial seducer as a husband then that was what she would do. What shewasdoing.
The moment he closed the bedroom door she wrenched her hand from his, then found that same hand itching to slap the knowing smile off his face.
Throwing himself onto the sprawling bed piled with pillows, he lay on his back and hooked his arms above his head. It was a pose that brought back memories of his cruel words in the moments before she’d walked out of his bedroom.
‘I hope you’re not expecting me to share that bed with you tonight,’ she said. ‘We’re not married yet.’
‘But, my angel of Hades, we have already sealed the deal on our commitment and, as I told you when we reached our agreement, I will not have the world—and I include my staff in this—believing my wife hates me so much that she won’t share my bed.’
‘It’s bad luck for the bride and groom to sleep together the night before the wedding.’
‘I think you’ll find it’s considered bad luck for the bride and groom to see anything of each other the dayandnight before the wedding,’ he told her cheerfully. ‘So we’ve already broken that taboo.’
‘You’re actively wishing bad luck on us?’
‘My father has been married four times and observed all the rituals in all his weddings, and all four ended in divorce.’
‘His fourth one hasn’t.’
‘Oh, yes. I forgot—sorry, must be wishful thinking on my part.’
Lydia had to bite her cheeks to stop herself sniggering at his droll delivery. Rebecca Tsaliki was the stuff of legends, the ordinary Englishwoman who’d captured the heart—or loins—of the macho billionaire philanderer Georgios Tsaliki and not only managed to get herself installed as wife number four but had him so firmly under her manicured thumb that he didn’t dare replace her with wife number five, having to content himself with numerous affairs that she didn’t bat an eyelash at instead.
Like father like son, and now Lydia was the one with a lifetime of infidelity to look forward to. Somehow she would have to find a way to channel a little of Rebecca Tsaliki’s breezy attitude towards it because she couldn’t change the son any more than Rebecca had been able to change the father.
She didn’t want to change the son, she reminded herself stubbornly. This whole marriage thing was a sham that would be over in all but name as soon as Alexis found himself a new lover because Lydia sure as hell wasn’t going to make any demands on him or demand anything from him, and then they could live in perfect marital harmony far apart from each other.
Sitting himself up, he patted the bed. ‘From tonight, we sleep together, no arguments.’
‘Fine, but no sex until we’re married, and no arguments,’ she shot back.
His eyes gleamed. ‘Wanting to increase the anticipation, are you? I can get on board with that.’
‘No, just delaying the inevitable for as long as I can.’
He swung his legs off the bed, laughing. ‘I’m going to take a shower. Want to join me?’
She answered with a scowl.
‘Sure about that?’ Glimmering eyes locked on hers, he strode like a panther towards her.
Although Lydia’s every instinct was to hide before she found herself within Alexis touching distance, she folded her arms over her breasts and clenched every cell in her body. ‘Very.’
He stopped before her and dipped his mouth to her ear. ‘Just imagine it… I would caress soap over every inch of your delectable body, paying special attention to the parts where you’re most receptive…and I rememberallof them…and then I’d lift you against the wall and take you with the water pouring over us…just like I did last time.’
The only part of him touching her was his breath to her ear but the flame that had taken her was strong enough to induce combustion, and it took everything she had not to falter and to find the strength to drag out, ‘I’d rather die.’
He laughed softly. ‘You forgot to list another reason people lie…’ He lightly covered her breast, feeling its weight and the obvious betraying arousal of her nipple. ‘To hide what they’re really feeling.’ His teeth caught the lobe of her ear and gently pulled before his next murmured words sank straight into her skin. ‘And you forget that I know you intimately. I can read your body, Lydia, and it betrays your words.’ His tongue licked the tender flesh beneath her lobe as he gently squeezed her breast, sending shivers of arousal through her skin and up her spine. ‘Tomorrow you will be mine.Mine…For the rest of your life…’
Alexis stood beneath the steaming water and closed his eyes. By rights, he should be exhausted. The hours spent since his talk with Lydia on the beach had been spent fighting fires and getting everything in place for the fires to continue being fought over the coming days. The carefully crafted, ambiguous statement about Thanasis and Lucie’s wedding being called off had set off the predictable press feeding frenzy. It didn’t help that dozens of the press were already in Greece to cover the wedding.
He wondered if Thanasis now regretted his flat refusal of Alexis’s proposal that, to prove they were serious about ending their fathers’ war, Alexis marry Lydia. ‘Over my dead body,’ he’d said, as if he, Alexis, were Caligula reincarnated.
He’d been tempted to casually hand over the lipstick that had fallen out of Lydia’s bag when their passion had broken free in the back of his car, and say, ‘Can you give this back to your sister for me?’ But that would have been his ego talking. For all that Lydia had punched and bruised his ego in the way she’d left him, she didn’t deserve the fallout she would have had to deal with.
She would be dealing with the fallout she didn’t know he’d protected her from soon enough now. The loathing that had twisted her brother’s face at Alexis’s suggestion of marriage…
