Anne McAllister - The Antonides Marriage Deal

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RITA ®Award winner ANNE MCALLISTER was born in California. She spent formative summer vacations on the beach near her home, on her grandparents’ small ranch in Colorado and visiting relatives in Montana. Studying the cowboys, the surfers and the beach volleyball players, she spent long hours developing her concept of “the perfect hero.” (Have you noticed a lack of hard-driving type A businessmen among them? Well, she promises to do one soon, just for a change!)

One thing she did do, early on, was develop a weakness for lean, dark-haired, handsome lone-wolf type of guys. When she finally found one, he was in the university library where she was working. She knew a good man when she saw one. They’ve now been sharing “happily ever afters” for over thirty years. They have four grown children, and a steadily increasing number of grandchildren. They also have three dogs, who keep her fit by taking her on long walks every day.

Quite a few years ago they moved to the Midwest, but they spend more and more time in Montana. And as Anne says, she lives there in her head most of the time anyway. She wishes a small town like her very own Elmer, Montana, existed. She’d move there in a minute. But she loves visiting big cities as well, and New York has always been her favorite.

Before she started writing romances, Anne taught Spanish, capped deodorant bottles copyedited textbooks, got a master’s degree in theology and ghostwrote sermons. Strange and varied, perhaps, but all grist for the writer’s mill, she says.

For Aunt Billie

with love forever

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“YOUR father is on line six.”

Elias Antonides stared at the row of red lights blinking on his desk phone and thanked God he’d declined the ten-line option he’d been offered when he’d begun renovating and converting the riverside warehouse into the new Brooklyn-based home of Antonides Marine International nine months ago.

“Right,” he said. “Thanks, Rosie. Put him on hold.”

“He says it’s important,” his assistant informed him.

“If it’s important, he’ll wait,” Elias said, reasonably confident that he wouldn’t do anything of the sort.

Aeolus Antonides had the staying power of a fruit fly. Named for the god of the wind, according to him, and “the god of hot air,” in Elias’s view, Aeolus was as charming and feckless a man as had ever lived. As president of Antonides Marine, he enjoyed three-hour lunches and three olive martinis, playing golf with his cronies and taking them out in his sailboat, but he had no patience for day-to-day routine, for turning red ink into black, for anything that resembled a daily grind. He didn’t want to know that they would benefit from some ready cash or that Elias was contemplating the purchase of a small marine outfitter that would expand their holdings. Business bored him. Talking to his son bored him.

And chances were excellent today that, by the time Elias had dealt with the other five blinking lights, his father would have hung up and gone off to play another round of golf or out for a sail from his Hamptons home.

In fact, Elias was counting on it. He loved his father dearly, but he didn’t need the old man meddling in business matters. Whatever his father wanted, it would invariably complicate his life.

And he had enough complications already today—though it wasn’t much different from any other.

His sister Cristina, on line two, wanted him to help her set up the financing for a bead store.

“A bead store?” Elias thought he’d heard everything. Cristina had variously wanted to raise rabbits, tie-dye T-shirts and go to disk-jockey school. But the beads were new.

“So I can stay in New York,” she explained perfectly reasonably. “Mark’s in New York.”

Mark was her latest boyfriend. Elias didn’t think he’d be her last. Famous for racing speedboats and chasing women, Mark Batakis was as likely to be here today and gone tomorrow as Cristina’s bead-store aspirations.

“No, Cristina,” he said firmly.

“But—”

“No. You come up with a good business plan for something and we’ll talk. Until then, no.” And he hung up before she could reply.

His mother, on line three, was arranging a dinner party on the weekend. “Are you bringing a girlfriend?” she asked hopefully. “Or shall I arrange one.”

Elias gritted his teeth. “I don’t need you arranging dates for me, Mother,” he said evenly, knowing full well as he did so that his words fell on deaf ears.

Helena Antonides’s goal in life was to see him married and providing her with grandchildren. Inasmuch as he’d been married once disastrously and had no intention of ever being married again, Elias could have told her she was doomed to fail. She had other children, let them have the grandchildren she was so desperate for.

Besides, wasn’t it enough that he was providing the financial support for the entire Antonides clan to live in the manner to which three generations of them had become accustomed? Apparently not.

“Well—” she sniffed, annoyed at him as usual “—you don’t seem to be doing a very good job yourself.”

“Thank you for sharing your opinion,” Elias said politely.

He never bluntly told his mother that he was not ever getting married again, because she would have argued with him, and as far as Elias was concerned, the matter wasn’t up for debate. He had been divorced for seven years, had purposely made no effort at all to find anyone to replace the duplicitous, avaricious Millicent, and had no intention of doing so.

Surely after seven years his mother should have noticed that.

“Don’t go all stuffy on me, Elias Antonides. I’ve got your best interests at heart. You should be grateful.”

As that didn’t call for an answer, Elias didn’t supply one. “I have to go, Mom, I have work to do.”

“You always have work to do.”

“Someone has to.”

There was a dead silence on the other end of the line. She couldn’t deny it, but she wouldn’t agree, either. At last Helena said firmly, “Just be here Sunday. I’ll provide the girl.” She was the one who hung up on him.

His sister, Martha, on line four, was brimming with ideas for her painting. Martha always had ideas—and rarely had the means to see them through.

“If you want me to do a good job on those murals,” she told him, “I really should go back to Greece.”

“What for?”

“Inspiration,” she said cheerfully.

“A vacation, you mean.” Elias knew his sister. Martha was a good artist. He wouldn’t have asked her to cover the wall of the foyer of his building, not to mention one in his office and the other in his bedroom if she were a hack. But he didn’t feel like subsidizing her summer holidays, either. “Forget it. I’ll send you some photos. You can work from them.”