Clare Connelly - Bride Behind The Billion-Dollar Veil

Title Page Bride Behind the Billion-Dollar Veil Clare Connelly www.millsandboon.co.uk

Copyright ISBN: 978-1-474-08842-8 BRIDE BEHIND THE BILLION-DOLLAR VEIL © 2019 Clare Connelly Published in Great Britain 2019 by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental. By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher. ® and ™ are trademarks owned and used by the trademark owner and/or its licensee. Trademarks marked with ® are registered with the United Kingdom Patent Office and/or the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market and in other countries. www.millsandboon.co.uk Version: 2020-03-02

Note to Readers

Dedication For Penny Jordan, whose beautiful, sensual, romantic Mills & Boon novels have given me hours and hours of romance-reading pleasure, not to mention a certainty that dreams really can come true.

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Extract

About the Publisher

Twelve years ago

‘LISTEN TO ME.’

Thanos looked up at his brother, barely able to see him through the fog of rage and disbelief that shrouded his every thought and feeling.

‘We will get it back.’

Thanos gripped the pen in his hand, returning his attention to the imperious black line at the bottom of the contract. A contract for the sale of Petó, the company their grandfather, Nicholas Stathakis, had built from the ground up. The company Thanos had learned to operate at his grandfather’s knee. The company that meant everything to him.

‘No.’ He dropped the pen to the boardroom table, extending to his full six and a half feet, striding across the room with a ramrod-straight back.

He knew his half-brother was watching him, and he knew Leonidas was feeling the same sense of outrage and disbelief. Only Leonidas was somehow better at processing this. He was calm, outwardly, even as their world crumbled around them, whereas Thanos wanted to torch the building on his way out.

He braced his palms on the floor-to-ceiling glass, looking out on downtown Athens. All of this they had once commanded.

All of this, their father had destroyed.

‘We will get it back, Thanos,’ Leo repeated, with urgency. ‘But we must sell it for now.’

Nausea split Thanos’s side. Sell it? Sell the jewel in their grandfather’s business empire? Because their father had tied the company to the mafia?

Thanos ground his teeth together, locking his jaw intently. He wanted to say there was another way. He wanted to fix this. To make it better. And suddenly he was eight years old again, watching his mother walk away. He was eight years old and knowing himself to be the instrument of a family’s breakdown. He was eight years old and everything in this world was his fault. But this was so much worse.

Nicholas had trusted Thanos with Petó, and he’d been careless. He’d trusted Dion Stathakis—their father—when he should have seen what was happening right beneath his nose.

What could he do now?

‘I cannot bear to think of someone else running his business.’ Thanos’s voice cracked with the strength of his emotions.

‘Do you think I can?’ Leonidas growled, and Thanos turned to face his brother then, their eyes meeting with complete understanding. This situation was wrong. Wrong in every way.

Leonidas softened his expression a little. ‘But this is the best possibility we could have hoped for. Kosta Carinedes wants Petó. His plan to fold it into his own logistics empire are sound, so too the rebranding he envisages. Petó will live on, Thanos, and it will continue to prosper.’

Thanos’s stomach clenched. ‘But not by our hands.’

‘No.’ Leonidas’s eyes glittered in acknowledgement of that.

‘I will not live in a world where this company is not mine, Leonidas. One day, one way or another, Petó will be ours again.’

Leonidas nodded slowly but Thanos wasn’t satisfied. ‘Swear it to me, Leo. Swear to me now that we will right this wrong—and all our father’s wrongs—even if it takes us the rest of our lives.’

Leonidas expelled a soft, low breath. ‘I swear it. But you must sign the contract now.’

Thanos nodded, knowing his brother to be correct. Still, he glared at the paper as though it were a writhing tangle of snakes at his feet. He lifted the pen with difficulty and hovered it over the page, his perennial tan paled to straw in that moment.

He scrawled his name on the page and silently swore to himself, once more, that this wasn’t the end.

This wasn’t over—not by a long shot. Petó was a part of his blood and his DNA, and it always would be.

ALICE TOOK A full ten seconds to remember who she was and what she was doing. For a moment, the appearance of one man had managed to skittle everything from her mind: her job, her responsibilities; the mountain of medical bills she had in her handbag waiting for her to wade through at lunch time; the credit card that was almost maxed, and the fact this temp position would be finishing in two weeks, meaning she’d yet again need to find a job; her mother’s worsening condition and Alice’s inability to find a proper long-term solution for her care. Every second of every day those considerations pursued her, but for a moment, with the sound of the elevator doors opening to the top floor of the glass and steel monolith that was Stathakis Towers, she found the chatter of her mind was silenced and all she could do was stare.

Her almond-shaped brown eyes tracked his progress across the office, her pulse hammering her body from the inside out, the closer he came to her desk.

Thanos Stathakis was here. In his office. In Manhattan.

Despite the fact she’d temped for the man for five months, she hadn’t once laid eyes on him, outside the endless stream of photos that littered the Internet. Photos of him invariably in a state of undress, relaxed, surrounded by a bevy of supermodels and actresses, partying, drinking, living the kind of life Alice could barely imagine.