Sold For The Greek's Heir

‘I just want you to know that I hate you and I’ll never forgive you for what you did to me,’ Lucy confided in a belated rush of angry frustration that she could not tell him what she really thought of him any more bluntly than that. In truth she wanted to scream at him, she wanted to throw herself at him and hammer him with angry fists for hurting her.

‘I didn’t do anything to you,’ Jax parried with complete cool.

‘It was vicious...what you did, unnecessary!’ Lucy condemned chokily, bitterness almost overpowering her along with a very human need to hit back. ‘Having me sacked? Leaving me penniless and homeless and forced to go back to the UK when I had nothing there!’

An ebony brow elevated at that improbable accusation of bullying behaviour on his part, Jax swung back to her just as another knock sounded on the door. Whatever else he might be, Jax prided himself on never having treated a woman badly. ‘I don’t have time for this and I shouldn’t make time for it either,’ he acknowledged grimly. ‘You’re a liar and a cheat—’

‘Of course you’re going to say stuff like that, rewrite history, because you’re so up yourself now,’ Lucy shot back at him in disgust as she thought about her innocent, trusting little daughter. ‘But I never lied to you or cheated on you and you never once thought about consequences, did you?’

He wanted her phone number but he wouldn’t ask for it, wouldn’t allow himself to ask for it. He knew what she was. He didn’t want anything to do with her. So, having reached that decision and feeling invigorated by it, he could not explain why he then turned back like a man with a split personality and told her to meet him for a drink the following evening at a little bar he patronised on the marina, a haunt of his for quiet moments, which the paparazzi had yet to discover. Even as he walked back out again, he was questioning the decision and regretting it, lean brown hands clenching into impatient fists. What the hell had he done that for?

But what had she meant by ‘consequences’? And how come she did have a Greek father when according to that file she did not?

He was simply curious, nothing wrong or surprising about that. His libido was not in the driver’s seat, he assured himself with solid conviction. Stray memories had briefly aroused him when he saw her again, nothing more meaningful. All men remembered incredibly good sex. Furthermore, he had a little black book of phonebook proportions to turn to when he felt like sex, hot and cold running women on tap wherever he travelled. That was the world he lived in. There was no way he could ever be tempted to revisit a manipulative little cheat like Lucy Dixon, he reflected with satisfaction.

Naturally, becoming the Antonakos heir had ensured that Jax became significantly more cynical about women. He didn’t listen to sob stories any more, he didn’t let his inherently dangerous streak of chivalry rule him. Indeed the sight of a woman in need of rescue was more like aversion therapy to him now. He knew from experience that that kind of woman was likely to be far more trouble than she was worth.

After all, how many times had he felt he had no choice but to race to his mother’s rescue? When the men she betrayed became violent as her lies were exposed? When she needed another spell in some discreet rehabilitation facility before she could be seen in public again? When he was forced to lie to protect her?

And yet at heart he had always known that his mother was a deeply disturbed and egocentric human being, undeserving of his care and respect. That was why his little sister, Tina, had died, he reminded himself bitterly. Mariana’s self-centred neglect of her younger child had directly led to the incident in which the toddler had drowned. But he had only been fourteen, so what could he possibly have done when so many adults had witnessed the insanity of his mother’s lifestyle and yet failed to act to protect either of her children?

Lucy walked home in a pensive mood. Of course she wouldn’t meet him, she told herself firmly. What would be the point? Bella! Jax was a father whether he liked it or not but she knew he wouldn’t like that news any more than he liked her. And why was her being in Greece such a big deal? What was it to him? It was not as though they were likely to bump into each other again in normal life. Jax lived against a backdrop of massive yachts, private jets and private islands. He didn’t rub shoulders with ordinary working people.

Yet a giant ball of despair was threatening to swallow Lucy up and she didn’t know why. Seeing Jax again, she recognised, had hurt and hurt much more than she had expected. It had brought back memories she didn’t want. She had loved him and had given her trust to a man for the first time ever. His sudden volte-face had almost destroyed her because she had given him so much she had felt bare to the world without him.

And yet he still wasn’t married. She had thought for sure that he would marry the wealthy heiress his father kept pushing in his direction, the very lovely but very bitchy Kat Valtinos. But then Jax was bone-deep stubborn. You could take a horse to water but you couldn’t make it drink and getting Jax to do anything he didn’t want to do was like trying to push a boulder up a steep hill.

Kat Valtinos had organised the party the night Lucy had met Jax on his father’s enormous yacht. Lucy’s memory wafted her back two years into the past. Back then, Jax had been in Spain setting up a new resort on the coast. When the caterers had mucked up with a double booking, Kat had personally trawled through the local bars seeking waitresses for the event.

‘You two will do,’ she had said to Lucy and Tara, looking them up and down as though they were auditioning as strippers. ‘You’re young and pretty and sexy. Just what men like. You put your make-up on with a trowel,’ she had told Tara critically and to Lucy she had said, ‘You need to show more leg and cleavage.’

If the money hadn’t been so good, Lucy wouldn’t have done it but back then she had lived on a budget where no tips meant stale bread and going hungry. Their boss didn’t feed them for free and they had no cooking facilities in their mean little attic room, which had been hot as hell up under the eaves above the restaurant kitchen. Any extra cash was deeply welcome in those days.

The party had been full of blowhard bellicose men talking themselves up in Antonakos’s company and drinking too much. One of them had cornered Lucy when she was sent to a lower deck to restock the bar from the supplies stored there. She had been trying to fight him off when Jax had intervened. Jax, blue-black glossy hair brushing his shoulders, green eyes glittering like shards of glass, who had dragged the guy off her with punishing hands and hit him hard without hesitation.

‘Are you OK?’ the most gorgeous guy she had ever seen had asked, pulling her off the wall she had slumped against, smoothing down the skirt the creep had been trying to wrench up. ‘Diavolos, you’re so tiny. Did he hurt you?’

‘Only a little,’ she had said shakily, trembling like a leaf and in absolutely no doubt that Jax had saved her from a serious assault because, with the noisy party taking place on the deck above, the lower deck had been deserted and nobody would have heard her crying out.

‘Take a moment to recover,’ Jax had urged, guiding her into an opulent saloon to push her down into a seat where her cotton-wool legs had collapsed under her as if he had flipped a switch. ‘What were you doing down here on this deck?’

He had issued instructions on the phone to a crew member to have the bar supplies refreshed. And the whole time she had just been staring at him like a brainless idiot, utterly intimidated by everything about him from the expensive quality of his lightweight grey suit and hand-stitched shoes to the sheer beauty of his perfect features from his edgy cheekbones to his sculpted mouth. It was the eyes that had got to her the most, the tender concern she’d seen there and then the budding all-male appreciation. He had the most stunning eyes and his rare smile had been like the sun coming out on a dark day.

‘Are you OK?’ he repeated.

Well, no, in fact from that moment she had never been OK again. Something she’d needed to survive had lurched into strange territory and softened to let him in, no matter that it had gone against sense and practicality and her life experience. She had truly never been the same since.

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