LYNNE GRAHAM: The Heiress Bride

‘Colourless and mousey,’ Alexio countered with ruthless bite, but a faint dark line of colour now scored his sculpted cheekbones and he swung away for, even in the mood he had been in that evening, he had not been impervious to her natural appeal.

He remembered her all too well: the delicacy of her fine features, eyes as green as emeralds and as startling and unexpected in a Greek woman as her fair colouring. A beauty without artifice and the absolute antithesis of the voluptuous and artificial party girls paraded before him by his host. He had never made a pass at a servant in his life but only her silent formality and his own innate sense of fair play had haltered him.

‘I understand that Ione has hardly ever been off that island. Her father believes in keeping his womenfolk at home,’ Sander Christoulakis remarked with the wry fascination of a man who had a wife and two daughters, who thought nothing of flying all over Europe merely to visit friends or shop.

‘At some time in the future, I may well consider a marriage of convenience,’ Alexio conceded, his beautiful mouth hardening on the smouldering reflection that Ione Gakis should have immediately identified herself to him. ‘But I have no interest in marrying Gakis’s oddball daughter. At the very least I would like a wife with some personality.’

‘A little personality can go a long way.’ Unwilling to surrender what he saw as a fantastic opportunity for his son, Sander argued with greater vehemence. ‘And before you criticise Ione Gakis for what she lacks, ask yourself what you have to offer a woman.’

‘In what way?’ Alexio intoned very drily.

‘If you have no heart to give, only a fortune hunter will want to marry you,’ the older man warned in frustration. ‘Your current reputation as a womaniser is sufficient to make most of our friends extremely reluctant to let their daughters come into contact with you.’

‘But then I’m not in the market for born-again virgins or ambitious social climbers. So they’re very wise,’ Alexio drawled with dismissive contempt.

Sander Christoulakis suppressed a heavy sigh. He had done his utmost to persuade his son to consider the benefits of such a business alliance, hoping that the challenge of becoming involved in the vast network of Gakis Holdings would tempt Alexio as nothing else might have done. He had also believed that Alexio might be drawn by the sheer practicality of a marital arrangement that would demand so little from him on a personal basis. Spelling out the very obvious benefits of marrying a young woman who would one day inherit all that her father possessed would not have made the smallest impression.

‘Minos will be insulted by a flat refusal,’ Sander pointed out ruefully. ‘He wants you to meet with him and discuss the proposal. What harm could that do?’

Alexio regarded his parent with the grim dark eyes that his business competitors had learned to respect but, whether he was prepared to show it or not, his interest had already been ignited by his recollection of that night on Lexos. ‘I’ll think it over.’

Fierce strain in her jade-green eyes, Ione checked her reflection with care in the mirror, for so formal a summons from her father was rare and intimidating.

Her pale blonde hair was scraped back from her equally pale face. Her dull dark blue dress barely hinted at the shape of the slim young body beneath and the hemline fell to below her knee. In a crowd nobody would have noticed her and that was exactly how her father believed his daughter ought to look: modest, unobtrusive, sexless. That his ideas were fifty years behind the times and out of place in a wealthy, educated family meant nothing to him for he boasted of his peasant roots and saw no reason why the outside world should intrude on his feudal island kingdom.

Indeed, Minos Gakis was a positive god in his own household. A domineering controlling man with an explosive temper that could turn to violence in the space of a moment and, to him, a woman would always be a lesser being and a possession. While she was still a very young child, Ione had learned the correct code of behaviour to observe in her father’s radius and she knew well how to control her tongue and keep her head down in a storm. On more than one occasion, after all, she had seen her late mother being battered by the older man’s fists, and as she’d grown up, no matter how hard Amanda Gakis had tried to protect her daughter from similar treatment, she too had suffered from his brutality.

Her bedroom door opened with jarring abruptness and without the polite warning of a prefatory knock. Flinching, Ione spun round just as her father’s sister, Kalliope, appeared, her thin, sallow face sour.

‘Why are you always looking at yourself in the mirror?’ Kalliope snorted with derision. ‘It’s foolish when you’re so plain. But then, had you been born a Gakis, you would have been a beauty.

Accustomed to the older woman’s gibes, Ione resisted the dangerous temptation to ask what had gone wrong in Kalliope’s own case, for even the kindest person would have been challenged to find attraction in those sharp features. As for that crack about her not having been born into the Gakis family, Ione was too well accustomed to the knowledge that she had been adopted to rise to that bait and give the older woman reason to complain to her brother that her niece had been rude to her.

Kalliope observed her brother’s every household rule with religious fervour and received considerable satisfaction from reporting those unwise enough to transgress those rules. Furthermore, she liked Ione far less than she had liked Ione’s mother, for, while Kalliope had continued to rule the roost over the gentle English bride her brother had taken as a wife, she had found their adopted daughter, Ione, a tougher nut to crack. Ione might not answer back and might show her aunt superficial respect. But ever since the day four years earlier, when Ione had been dragged back kicking and screaming defiance from Athens airport, there had been a silent stoic determination in the younger woman’s clear gaze that made Kalliope feel like an angry, frustrated mosquito trying to sting an indifferent victim.

‘Your father has exciting news for you,’ Kalliope informed her curtly.

As Ione crossed the reception room beyond her bedroom in step with her aunt her pace slowed as apprehension gripped her. ‘I shall look forward to hearing it.’

‘Yet you’ve been such an ungrateful daughter,’ Kalliope told her with harsh disapproval. ‘You don’t deserve what is coming to you!’

What was coming to her? Her aunt’s resentment was unconcealed and Ione’s curiosity flared even higher, but the sick knot of anxiety in her tummy only tightened. She could never be in her father’s presence without feeling fear and he was not a man given to doling out treats. Indeed, Ione had often wondered if her father reaped a mean pleasure from ensuring that she was invariably denied what she most wanted. But then he did not love her, he had never loved her, and, soon after her adoptive mother’s death, he had enjoyed telling her why she had been adopted.

Amanda Gakis had given birth to a son, Cosmas, within a year of her marriage but, in the following seven years, she had not managed to conceive again. Desperate for a second son, Minos Gakis had learned that sometimes after a woman had adopted a child her unexplained infertility could subsequently end in her becoming pregnant. In those days, the popular view had been that, having satisfied her longing for a baby, a woman might stop fretting and relax and conception was then more likely to take place. Sadly, however, Ione’s arrival in the family had neglected to deliver the required result for her mother had not become pregnant again. As her father had regarded his adopted daughter as no more than the means to that hopeful end, there had been little chance of her securing much of a hold on his paternal affections in that disappointing aftermath.