The Greek Tycoon's Ultimatum
Auteur
Lucy Monroe
Lezers
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Hoofdstukken
13
CHAPTER ONE
“THE coldhearted bitch.”
Flinching as the words flew venomously from her sister-in-law’s lips, Savannah Marie Kiriakis forced her gaze to remain fixed on the emerald-green grass in front of her.
The traditional Greek Orthodox graveside service was over and everyone had paid their final respects, everyone but her. Poised on the edge of the grave, a single white rose in her hand, she tried coming to terms with this—the final end to her marriage.
Relief warred with guilt inside her, forcing out the pain of Iona’s verbal attack.
Relief that her own torment was over. No one would ever again threaten to take her children. And guilt that this should be her reaction to the death of another human being, particularly Dion—a man she had married in good faith and youthful stupidity six years ago.
“What right has she to be here?” Iona continued when her first insult was not only ignored by Savannah, but also by the other mourners.
Dion’s younger sister had a flair for the dramatic.
Unbidden, Savannah’s gaze sought the reaction of Leiandros Kiriakis to his cousin’s outburst. His dark eyes were not set on Iona, but focused on Savannah with a look of such contempt if she’d been a weaker person, she would have been tempted to jump into the grave with her dead husband.
She could not turn away, though her heart and emotions were screaming inside for her to do just that. Leiandros’s contempt might be justified, but it hurt in a way that Dion’s frequent infidelities and bouts of violent temper had not.
The smell of fresh earth mixed with the floral offerings covering the now closed casket assailed her nostrils and she managed to shift her gaze to her husband’s grave.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered soundlessly before dropping the rose she carried onto the casket and stepping back.
“A touching gesture, if an empty one.” More words meant to wound, but these delivered directly to her with the sharp precision of a stiletto aimed at her heart.
It took every bit of Savannah’s inner fortitude to turn and face Leiandros after the way he had looked at her a moment ago. “Is it an empty gesture for a wife to say her final goodbye?” she asked as she lifted her head to make eye contact.
And wished she hadn’t. Eyes so dark, they were almost black, blazed with a scorn she knew she had earned, but nevertheless grieved. Of all the Kiriakis clan, this man was the only one with legitimate reason to despise her. Because he had firsthand knowledge of the fact she had not loved Dion, not passionately and with her whole heart as a man like her husband had needed to be loved.
“Yes empty. You said goodbye to Dion three years ago.”
She shook her head in instinctive denial. Leiandros was mistaken. She would never have risked saying goodbye to Dion before fleeing Greece with her two small daughters in tow. Her only hope of escape had been to board the international flight for America before Dion realized she was gone.
By the time he had tracked her down, she had filed for a legal separation, thus preventing him from spiriting their children from the country. She had also filed a restraining order, citing her healing bruises and cracked ribs as evidence that she was not safe in Dion’s company.
The Kiriakis clan knew nothing of this. Even Leiandros, head of the Kiriakis Empire and thus the family, was ignorant of the reasons for the final break in Dion and Savannah’s marriage.
Leiandros’s sculpted face hardened. “That’s right. You never did say a final goodbye. You wouldn’t give Dion his freedom and you wouldn’t live with him. You were the kind of wife nightmares are made of.”
Each word pierced her heart and her sense of self as a woman, but she refused to bow in shame under the weight of his ugly judgments. “I would have given Dion a divorce at any time over the last three years.” He had been the one to threaten to take their daughters if she made good on her intention to file for permanent dissolution of their marriage.
Leiandros’s face tightened with derision and she felt the familiar pain his scorn caused. His opinion of her had been cast in stone the night they met.
She’d been nervous attending a party given by a man she didn’t know, a man Dion had raved about and stressed she had to impress in order to be accepted into the Kiriakis family. If that pressure had not been enough to make her tremble with anxiety, the fact that Dion had abandoned her in a crowd of strangers speaking a language she did not understand was.
Attempting to be unobtrusive, she hovered near a wall by the door to the terrace, away from the other guests.
“Kalispera. Pos se lene? Me lene Leiandros,” A deep, male voice speaking in Greek penetrated her isolation.
She looked up to see the most devastatingly attractive man she’d ever encountered. His lazy smile all but stole her breath right out of her chest. She stared at him, mesmerized by a rush of inexplicable feelings toward him, unhindered by societal conventions or even unfamiliarity.
Feeling horribly guilty for such a reaction to a man who was not her husband, she blushed and dropped her gaze. Using the only Greek phrase she knew, she told him she could not understand his language. “Then katalaveno.”
He placed a finger under her chin and forced her head up so she had no choice but to look in his eyes. His smile had turned vaguely predatory. “Dance with me,” he said in perfect English.
She was shaking her head, trying to force her frozen vocal chords to utter the word no even as he put a possessive arm around her waist and pulled her out onto the terrace. He then drew her into his arms, his hold anything but conventional. She struggled while their bodies swayed to the seductive chords of the Greek music.
He pressed her closer. “Relax. I’m not going to eat you.”
“But I shouldn’t be dancing with you,” she told him.
His hold grew even more possessive. “Why? Are you here with a boyfriend?”
“No, but—”
Demanding lips drowned her explanation that she was with her husband, not a boyfriend. Her struggles to get free increased, but the heat of his body and the feel of his hands caressing her back and her nape were already seducing her good intentions.
And to her everlasting shame she felt her body melt in helpless response. The kiss drew emotions from her Dion had never tapped into. She wanted it to go on forever, but even under the influence of a wholly alien passion, she knew she had to break away from the seduction of his lips.
The hand on her back moved to her front and cupped her breast as if he had every right to do so. The fact that he was touching her so intimately was not nearly so appalling as her body’s reaction to it. Her breasts seemed to swell within the confines of her lacy bra while their tips grew hard and aching. She’d never felt this way with Dion.
The thought was enough to send her tearing from Leiandros, her sense of honor in tatters while her body actually vibrated with the need to be back in his arms. “I’m married,” she gasped.
His eyes flared with the light of battle and she stood paralyzed for a solid minute, their gazes locked, their breathing erratic.
“Leiandros. I see you’ve met my wife.”
And Leiandros, whose body was turned away from Dion so her husband could not see his expression had glared at her with a hate filled condemnation that had not diminished in six years.
“Do not fool yourself into believing that since my cousin is not here to defend himself, your behavior can be dismissed with lies.”
Leiandros’s voice brought her back to the present, to a woman no longer capable of any kind of response to a man. For a moment she grieved the memory of those awesome feelings she had not experienced since and knew she would never experience again. Dion had seen to that.
Leiandros’s six-foot-four-inch frame towered over her own five feet, eight inches, making her feel small and vulnerable to his masculinity and the anger exuding off of him. She took an involuntary step backward and finding refuge in silence, she merely inclined her head before turning in order to leave.
“Do not walk away from me, Savannah. You won’t find me as easy to manage as my cousin.”
The implied threat in his tone halted her, but she did not turn around. “I do not need to manage you, Leiandros Kiriakis. After today, all necessity for communication between myself and your family will be at an end.” Her voice came out in an unfamiliar husky drawl when she had meant to sound firm.
“In that, you are mistaken, Savannah.” His ominous tone sent shivers skating along her nerve endings.
She whirled to face him, taking in the stunning lines of his masculine features, the way the sun glinted off his jet-black hair and the aura of power surrounding him even as she tried to read the expression in his enigmatic gaze.
“What do you mean?” Had Dion betrayed her in the end?
Leiandros’s sensual lips thinned. “That is something we will have to discuss at a later date. My wife’s graveside service begins in a few minutes. Be content with the knowledge that as sole trustee for your daughters’ inheritance, you and I must of necessity talk occasionally.”
Pain assailed her—a sympathetic pain for the grief this strong and arrogant man must be feeling at the death of his wife in the same car accident as his cousin.
“I’m sorry. I won’t keep you.”
His eyes narrowed. “Aren’t you coming?”
“I have no place there.”
“Iona thought you had no place here, yet you came.”
Because of the phone call. She never would have come if Dion had not made that call the night before his accident.
“Regardless of what the Kiriakis clan would like to be true, I married Dion. I owed my presence here to his memory.” Both the memory of the Dion who had courted her and the man who had called that one last time.
“Then do you not owe me your attendance at Petra’s service as a member of my family?”
“Why in the world would you want me there?” she asked, unable to hide her complete bewilderment.
“You claim your place in my family. It is time you paid the dues accompanied by that status.”
Humorless laughter fought to break free of the constriction in her throat. Paid her dues? Hadn’t she done that for six long years? Hadn’t she paid dearly for the privilege of wearing the Kiriakis name?
* * *
Leiandros watched emotions chase across Savannah’s usually expressionless face. She hadn’t been that way the first time they met. Then, she had seemed achingly vulnerable and sweet. So sweet she allowed another man to kiss her, to touch her while married to his cousin, he reminded himself.
Although she avoided eye contact with him on the few occasions they met after that, she’d still had an appealing vibrancy and beauty which made him understand why Dion stayed with her even after she had shown herself unworthy of her husband’s respect and love. At least for the first year, but the one time Leiandros had seen her the second year she lived in Athens, she had changed beyond recognition.
Her green eyes had dulled to the point of lifelessness. Had guilt over her lovers done that? Her demeanor had completely lacked emotion—except when she looked at her daughter. Then a love Leiandros had envied—and hated himself for doing so—had suffused her face and brought life back to her green eyes. No wonder Dion ran wild with his friends. His wife had reserved all her emotion for the daughter she bore as the result of a liaison with one of her lovers.
Leiandros had chided Dion for showing so little interest in fatherhood after Eva’s birth. Dion had cried when he told Leiandros that his wife had claimed the baby was not his. If Leiandros had ever doubted Savannah’s culpability in their shared kiss the night they met, he doubted no longer.
Remembering that encounter, his body tensed with anger. “Perhaps you are right. You have no place at my wife’s funeral. One display of false grief within our family is enough.”
Her eyes widened with what he could have sworn was fear before she took yet another step away from him. “I’m sorry Petra died, Leiandros.”
The apparent sincerity in her soft voice almost touched him, but he refused to be taken in by her act a second time. She was no more the vulnerable innocent than he was a gullible fool. “I think you will be, Savannah.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, her voice quavering in a way that annoyed him while she brushed a lock of wheat-colored hair away from her face.
What did she think he was going to do? Hit her? The thought was so ridiculous, he dismissed it out of hand. She had reason to be concerned, if not afraid. He did have plans for her, but they had to wait. “Never mind. I have to go.”
She nodded. “Goodbye, Leiandros.”
He inclined his head, refusing to utter a farewell he did not mean. After he expressed his respect for Petra with a year of mourning, Savannah would be seeing him again.
Then she would be made to pay for all that she had cost his family…all she had cost him.
