She looked at him questioningly.
‘My family goes back a long way,’ he supplied. ‘Back to the Byzantine Empire itself—the empire that succeeded the Roman Empire at the start of the Dark Ages for Western Europe. Here in the east the light of civilisation continued to burn, and the Byzantine capital, Constantinople—modern-day Istanbul—was one of the greatest cities on earth!’
She frowned, and he realised he needed to explain something more to her.
‘It’s because my family can trace its roots so far back,’ he said, choosing his words carefully, ‘that your father—who, by his own admission, is a completely self-made man—is so keen on marrying his family into it.’
He saw Rosalie’s expression change.
‘He threw it at me,’ she said. ‘The fact that I would be marrying “a lordly Lakaris.”’
Xandros’s mouth twisted. ‘Was that before or after he threatened to throw you out, still as penniless as he’d deliberately kept you all your life, if you didn’t do what he wanted?’
He shook his head, dismissing his own question. If Stavros’s daughter married him it would not be at her father’s bidding—let alone because of his financial blackmail.
‘But we don’t need to consider your father at all,’ he said with a dismissive shrug. ‘After the despicable way he’s treated you he deserves no consideration! What we do is our business—not his.’
He saw Rosalie’s expression flicker momentarily, and then a questioning look in her eye.
‘Are you really “lordly”?’ she asked.
Did her question indicate reservations? Xandros shook his head again. ‘Not for centuries!’ he said lightly. ‘The Byzantine Empire ceased to exist over five hundred years ago!’
She frowned again. ‘I thought there was a king of Greece at some time. Isn’t there a royal family somewhere?’
‘In exile,’ Xandros explained. ‘But it was never actually Greek. The family is an offshoot of the Danish royal family, installed when Greece got its freedom from the Ottomans in the nineteenth century. There are links to the last of the Byzantine imperial dynasties, but very distant. Not involving my family at all.’
It seemed irrelevant to add that during the era of the Greek monarchy his forebears had been courtiers—those times were long gone now. His thoughts darkened. Besides, it had been during the final post-war phase of the monarchy that his grandfather, with close personal links to the royals, had lived so extravagantly and recklessly, creating a financial precipice that had nearly bankrupted the family.
As his grandson, he was still intent on ensuring such danger would never again threaten the Lakaris fortunes. And it was that intention that was the driver for this Coustakis merger that his father had recommended as the best way forward. The lucrative merger to which the exquisitely beautiful woman opposite him was now key.
It will work—the plan that I have come up with! It will placate Stavros, convince him to agree to the merger. It won’t tie me permanently in marriage, and yet it will give me all the time I want with this most desirable of women...
Now all he had to do was convince her to accept him and claim her for his own...
CHAPTER SEVEN
ROSALIE STIRRED, STRETCHING her limbs in the wide bed, waking slowly. She had slept so much better than on that night of nerve-racked tossing and turning she had spent in that over-gilded bed in her father’s over-gilded mansion. Then, her dreams had been fitful, filled with seesawing hopes and apprehension. But last night they had been very different.
They had been filled not with anxious imaginings of her forthcoming encounter with her long-lost father, which bitter reality had sent crashing and burning into oblivion, but with memories of the afternoon she had spent with Alexandros Lakaris.
And their evening together.
And his kiss on greeting her...
She felt a melting within her as memory replayed that moment—how his mouth had dipped to hers, brushing with exquisite lightness the tender swell of her lips.
So brief...so magical...
And so entirely unexpected.
Because nothing in his behaviour towards her till that moment had given her cause to think that he was thinking of her in those terms.
Oh, she’d seen the stunned expression on his face when she’d sailed out of that hotel restaurant in London, glitzed to the hilt after her shopping spree. And it had been gratifying not to be Little Miss Invisible to him any more, after his obvious disdain for the way she’d looked when he’d found her.
But after complimenting her on her improved appearance—it would have been difficult for him to have ignored the difference all those beauty treatments and a designer outfit had made to her!—he’d reverted to his earlier attitude: impersonal to the point of indifferent. And he’d clearly been glad to be shot of her when he’d dropped her off at her father’s house and driven off immediately.
But she’d been wrong about him. Quite wrong.
More memory pushed into her head. How she’d sobbed all over him in her rage and misery when he’d found her fleeing her father’s house the next day...how comforting he’d been. How kind and sympathetic. She heard his words again, as he explained to her just why he’d brought her to Athens, how shocked he’d been to find her living the way she’d had to in London.
‘How could I leave you there like that?’ he’d said.
She felt her throat tighten.
I thought him brusque and uncaring—but he isn’t! He isn’t at all.
There was a warmth in him she had never suspected. Just as she had never expected that kiss last evening.
Memory came full circle and it played again in her head, tantalising and beguiling...
But had it meant anything?
It was just a kiss in public. He probably kisses every woman he dines with. Especially a woman he wants to persuade to marry him.
And there it was—centre-stage in her head—the one thing she had to think about. Marrying Alexandros Lakaris for six months to their mutual financial benefit.
Emotions, thoughts, churned inside her. Could she really do it? Do what Xandros was urging her to do?
She lay there, staring up at the ceiling, thinking through the implications. For six months she would be Alexandros Lakaris’s wife—dressed up to the nines, enjoying the kind of luxury she had never dreamt would come her way in all her life! She would be living here in Greece, exploring the heritage she had never known.
Suddenly there was a bleakness in her eyes. She would not have a chance to get to know that heritage if she went back to her poverty-stricken life in London. How long would it take her to earn enough money to come back to Athens? Even when she eventually got a half-decent job once she had some qualifications?