Greek’s Shotgun Wedding
Autorzy
Lynne Graham
Lektury
15,4K
Rozdziały
11
CHAPTER ONE
‘I THOUGHT YOU were planning to be a no-show,’ Jace’s uncle Evander told his six-foot-four-inch-tall nephew.
Jace strode away from the helicopter with the silver logo flash that announced that the billionaire owner of Diamandis Industries had finally arrived for the funeral proceedings.
Apologising for his late arrival, Jace dealt the older man a regretful smile in which resentment, respect and fondness were all contained. Evander and his British husband, Marcus, had, after all, raised Jace when his own father refused to do so. Of course, both Jace and his uncle had been the outsiders in the Diamandis circle, Evander because he was gay and refused to pretend otherwise and Jace because his father, Argus, had refused to act as a parent and had abandoned his son at the tender age of six.
In actuality, Jace had lost both his parents on the same day. His mother had been an internationally acclaimed and famously glamorous opera singer, who had walked out on Argus for another man that day, leaving her son behind. When she and her lover crashed their car and died a few hours afterwards, Jace’s father had burst into gales of hysterical laughter. And then he had looked only once at the little boy staring at him with his late wife’s bright green eyes and her mop of curls before tucking Jace and his nanny into a limousine to be taken to his parents’ estate, thereby repudiating his firstborn son.
It was a decision that Argus had never revisited over the twenty-two years that had followed...and now he was dead. Jace had indelibly remained a reminder of his father’s lowest moment, a moment when not all the money in the world could compensate a man’s hurt pride or save his shiny public image from malicious gossip about cuckolds. Even though he quickly remarried and had a second son, Argus had continued to reject Jace as his child. At one stage he had also attempted to cut Jace out of the family inheritance and give it instead to Jace’s half-brother, Domenico, only to be prevented by their grandfather’s lawyers.
Jace hadn’t wanted to play the hypocrite and attend his reluctant father’s funeral. Evander, however, had taken a very different stance. Evander had argued vehemently with Jace, pointing out that his nephew might be only twenty-eight years old and single but he was now the de facto head of the Diamandis family, and that it was a matter of good taste and common sense to accept his rightful place. Before Jace could think too much about it, he was engulfed in an embrace by his grandmother, Electra Diamandis. And if she could comfortably attend her son’s funeral when the two of them had lived at daggers drawn, he believed that he had even less to complain about.
Jace was currently the cynosure of all eyes. ‘Why are they all staring at me?’ he murmured as they emerged from the church.
‘You’re worth billions and they don’t know you,’ his uncle reminded him wryly. ‘Bet they are now wincing for all the times they cut you dead.’
‘None of them wanted to know me while I was growing up, apart from you and Marcus,’ Jace agreed grimly. ‘You took in the poisoned chalice and didn’t care about keeping Argus sweet.’
‘All your little nubile cousins have got wedding rings gleaming in their eyes,’ Evander warned him, half under his breath.
Jace laughed with sudden intense amusement. ‘I learned my lesson well with Seraphina.’
An unexpected smile curved his uncle’s mouth. ‘Yes, I did very much enjoy that visit from my brother Adonis when he demanded you marry my niece for stealing her virtue. You see, you can’t go tantalising them all with the headlines you make and not expect to become a target for the gold-diggers in the family.’
‘I’m all grown up now and rather more staid—’
‘Absolute lies,’ Marcus interrupted from his other side. ‘Ain’t nothing staid about your playboy lifestyle.’
‘I’m only going to be young once,’ Jace countered with raw assurance. Yet he remained grateful to the couple who had raised him with love, loyalty and care. A more conventional set of parentals might have given up on him when he went through an extended wild period as a teenager. Marcus and Evander, however, had stuck by him through thick and thin and he would never forget the debt he owed them for the security and stability they had given him.
‘But you’re heading towards thirty and you’ve never had a relationship with a woman,’ Evander quipped. ‘Maybe you need to think about that—’
‘I don’t do relationships.’ Hell, no! Jace thought in horror. He did sex, not relationships. He kept his private life simple and straightforward. Since he had attained adulthood, no dates, no serious discussions with women and no boundaries had ever featured in his world. He did as he liked, when he liked and with whom he liked. And in truth, he honestly believed that he was happier embracing his freedom that way.
‘You need to try it...at least once,’ his uncle said.
Jace gritted his even white teeth. ‘How much longer do I need to stay?’ he breathed, feeling like a teenager again, but he hated it all so much: all the fawning attention from people who had ignored him all his life to meet Argus’s expectations and curry his father’s favour and now? The constant sidewise glances, the supposedly friendly grieving comments. As if he cared an atom for the father he had hardly known, who had hurt him beyond belief as a child when he’d chosen to punish him for his mother’s sins!
‘Speak to your brother before you leave. You don’t need to do drinks and chat with the rest of them. You don’t owe them anything,’ his uncle told him.
‘Why should I speak to Domenico?’ Jace queried in a tone of literal disbelief.
‘He had nothing to do with any of it and you’re the big brother,’ Evander reminded him drily. ‘You’ve never even met him. Five minutes, Jace. He’s the closest relative you have left alive. Make us proud...please—’
Jace breathed in slow and deep, rage hurtling through his big powerful frame at that piece of advice. But then he thought it through for the first time in many years and his temper receded because as always there was a lot of logic in Evander’s words. Their father was dead now. Maybe there was room for him to look again at that particular relationship. It wasn’t his brother’s fault that Jace had been rejected, ignored and threatened with disinheritance. For all he knew, Argus had been a lousy parent to Domenico as well.
And affecting not to hear the remarks or see the languishing glances cast in his direction, Jace went off to meet his half-brother for the first time...
‘What in the world...?’ Gigi marvelled out loud as she stood at her front window and glimpsed the large animal dancing through the traffic with a dangling lead still attached to its collar.
Snowy, the ragged cockatoo in the corner cage in the sitting room, tried to mimic her voice—not very well. Humphrey the tortoise ambled in, munching a lettuce leaf. Hoppy, the terrier dozing on the sofa, didn’t stir as much as a whisker. At the other end of the same seat, however, a big white and orange cat sat up, because Tilly was a knowing cat awake to her mistress’s rising tension.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ Gigi gasped because nobody appeared to be chasing the foolish dog and, on that acknowledgement, she was already racing out of her front door to stage a rescue bid.
Well, you are a veterinary surgeon, she excused herself and, without hesitation, she plunged into the busy street where the animal was capering about, seemingly quite clueless as to the danger it was in from the car wheels, the shouts out of windows for it to move and the squealing horns. Not a street dog, no, someone’s pet and more like a baby than a child with some common sense. Others might have turned their backs on such a view but not Gigi, who valued animals more than people.
Gigi had spent eighteen months living on the Greek island of Rhodes. She worked there at an animal rescue centre but had primarily come to Rhodes in the hope of actually getting to know the Greek half of her family. Basically, it hadn’t worked out like that and her hopes and dreams had slowly withered. That ambition had, seemingly, been naïve. But then Gigi was accustomed to disillusionment when it came to family members. If her own mother hadn’t had any time for her, why had she expected her father and her half-brothers to feel any different? Even so, she had got to know her Greek grandmother, Helene, and although Helene had passed away three months earlier, Gigi had got on well with the older woman and had also learned to speak fluent Greek. Two pluses, she told herself, but more negatives than pluses had featured in her family experiences.
As she filtered through traffic suddenly come to a standstill after two cars collided trying to avoid the dog, she realised that the foolish animal had got its long fragile tail locked between the cars. As a spate of furious Greek male voices broke out over the accident, Gigi pointed out the dog’s predicament but, evidently, nobody cared enough to help her free the dog. She pushed at the cars, trying to move them even an inch to free the animal and then both male drivers started to shout at her about daring to try and intervene on behalf of the dog. Meanwhile the dog started frantically licking her bare legs as if he knew she was striving to save him and a woman got out of one of the stalled vehicles to help her. But Gigi had managed to get that tiny bit of trapped tail released even if, in doing so, she had scraped her knee painfully and hurt her wrist. Thanking the woman for coming to assist her, she smiled even though blood was running down her calf, and hastened back to the house to treat the dog’s injury.
‘Oh, you’re just gorgeous and a total pet,’ she told the dog cheerfully and he bounced up on his hind legs like an acrobat, a couple of feet taller than she was because now she could see that he was an Irish wolfhound about three feet tall when on four legs. Huge but a fine specimen of an animal, pedigreed and wearing what looked like an expensive collar. She’d bet he was microchipped, which she would check out at the rescue shelter first thing in the morning, so that she could restore him to his probably very grateful owner. But first, he needed his tail treated before the wound turned into something more serious.
‘And you probably won’t like me so much by the time I’m finished,’ she warned him as she fetched her vet bag. ‘Oh, and you’ve scraped your poor leg too. Mo. Is that your name or your owner’s name?’ It was picked out in sparkly stones on the collar. ‘That’s a very girly collar, Mo, for a big boy like you.’
Mo was a pushover of a dog. He lay down for her, seeming to instantly recognise a sympathetic audience. He allowed her to clean his tail and even his leg, which required several stitches. He didn’t even object when she fitted a surgical collar on him to ensure that he left his injuries alone and didn’t lick at them and irritate them more.
‘Oh, I wish you were a street dog I could keep,’ she sighed as she fed and watered him and walked him until he eventually, tiring of his adventures, folded down at her feet and went to sleep like a total babe. ‘What a wonderful temperament you have!’
Some time during the night Mo padded upstairs, and Gigi shifted in the early hours and saw a pair of adoring brown eyes beside her on her bed. ‘Today we find your owner and take you home,’ she told him regretfully.
Not noticeably impressed by that announcement, Mo went back to sleep, taking up more space on the bed than Gigi had for herself. ‘You are a spoilt-rotten dog,’ she told him ruefully.
He stuck to her like glue while she fed and walked him. She was about to head to her car to take him straight to work with her when she recalled that she had left her vet bag in her house. Although it wasn’t her house, she reminded herself darkly, not with the big For Sale sign that had been fixed to it the week before. It was Helene’s house and now her father’s family were understandably keen to sell it, which was why she had decided to return to the UK with her pets as soon as she could make the arrangements. As she strolled back down the street, she noticed a crowd of men standing outside her door and banging the knocker as if someone’s life depended on it.
‘What on earth’s going on?’ she demanded, trudging through the clique of hovering men in dark suits.
‘Mo!’ a male voice cried with enthusiasm.
Mo reacted not at all. He licked Gigi’s thigh ingratiatingly and did not budge an inch.
‘What the hell have you done to him?’ the same voice demanded thunderously. ‘He’s been hurt...injured!’
Gigi stuck her key in the front door and moved inside, Mo accompanying her. ‘When I’ve checked out his microchip you can have him back...but not before. He hasn’t even greeted you, which is weird when you’re claiming to be his owner—’
‘How dare you?’ he demanded even louder.
‘No, how dare you when I rescued this poor dog from traffic and treated him?’ Gigi shot back at him without hesitation. ‘That does not give you the right to come here and shout at me, you ignorant pig!’
To say that Jace was unaccustomed to such cavalier treatment from a woman would not have been an exaggeration. His jaw literally dropped as he gazed down at her, having already noticed that she had not deigned to look at him even once. And there she was, some impossibly tiny woman with a long, messy mop of brownish blonde hair, wearing shorts and a camisole like a...well, not like a streetwalker, he adjusted, for there was nothing come-hitherish about that outfit, nothing decorative or sexy. But she had stunning legs, he had noticed as she’d sauntered down the street with his dog. Mo was the one soft spot in Jace’s hard heart. Hearing that Mo had broken free and run away while Jace was attending the funeral had sent him mad with worry.
‘Treated him? How could you treat him?’ Jace demanded, wishing that she would look up at him and behave more normally.
‘I’m a veterinary surgeon, you dummy, and I’m not handing this beautiful dog back to you until you prove that he belongs to you. If you must, you can come inside and I’ll explain what happened to him, but I should add that I have to be at work soon.’
‘I thought he’d been kidnapped. There’s a tracker on his collar—’
‘He should be microchipped,’ Gigi told him reprovingly as she stepped through her front door. ‘That would be safer. I mean, what happens if the collar falls off or is removed? You couldn’t find him then. Anyway, why would you stick a tracker on a dog, for goodness’ sake?’
Jace breathed in deep and slow, as if he was bracing himself. What a weird woman—what a thoroughly weird woman! And then she finally paid him the compliment of looking up at him and he saw her for the first time...and she was gorgeous in that strangely natural way only a very few women could match. No make-up, nothing enhanced. Just pale porcelain skin, huge cornflower-blue eyes and a mouth, a sultry pink full mouth that could only exist for sin.
‘Well. Come in if you’re coming,’ she told him impatiently. ‘And I’m sorry but your friends will have to stay outside because it is a very small house and one stranger at a time is quite enough for me at this time of day.’
Dark colour edged Jace’s cheekbones. A woman had never addressed him in that no-nonsense tone in his life. It felt exceedingly...wrong, he decided, wondering why she was reacting that way to him. Of course he had been rude, he reminded himself, attacking rather than pausing to first discover what had happened to his pet.
‘Sit down,’ Gigi urged. ‘I’d offer you a coffee but I haven’t got the time to entertain you right now—’
‘Of course not,’ Jace conceded, reeling back from her apparent indifference to him.
‘Well, sit!’ she shot at him. ‘I can’t abide someone so tall standing over me all the time and talking down to me like I’m a child!’
Gigi sat down on the sofa. Mo climbed up beside her and, beneath his owner’s incredulous gaze, reclined across the entire top of her like the little lap dog he so obviously wasn’t and could never be, not when he was the size of a pit pony.
‘You’re unusually small,’ Jace pointed out almost apologetically.
‘So?’ Gigi replied shortly.
Gigi surveyed the big powerful male with the bad temper and no manners. He looked rich, sophisticated, everything she was not. He was also as impossibly handsome as a movie star. He didn’t look quite real to her, seated as he was in Helene’s former armchair in the very ordinary little sitting room.
Gigi told him in a few words about how she had seen Mo from her front window and how he had caused an accident and got his tail and his leg hurt. She explained her treatment much as if he were a potential adopter of an animal at the rescue shelter.
‘Are you satisfied he wasn’t being kidnapped now?’ she enquired very drily.
‘I apologise for that. I was upset, worried about him,’ he stressed.
‘Yes, you do leap to conclusions fast,’ she conceded with a slight wrinkling of her delicious little nose. ‘Perhaps I was a little hard on you. I’m not comfortable with volatile people.’
‘What’s your name?’ Jace asked, relaxing a little from the sheer tension gripping him, a tension he couldn’t even begin to understand beyond a barely acknowledged desire for her to like him.
‘Gigi Campbell...and yours?’
Jace did not think he had had to introduce himself to a woman in living memory. It was unexpectedly refreshing. ‘Jace Diamandis. You speak excellent Greek but going by your accent, you’re not Greek—’
‘No, I’m British...try and get your dog to come to you,’ she urged, keen to get rid of him and get to work. ‘I gather he’s not microchipped? You should get that taken care of asap.’
‘Tell me where you work and I’ll take care of it,’ Jace suggested in English.
‘Yes, that would do,’ Gigi conceded with innate practicality. ‘Don’t you realise that it’s against the law not to have your dog microchipped? I work at a rescue shelter.’
Taken aback by that reproving response and casting a weathered eye at his dog, who had gone to sleep on his saviour’s lap, Jace said, ‘Let me take you to dinner this evening to thank you for rescuing him for me.’
‘No need to put yourself to that trouble,’ Gigi assured him cheerfully. ‘I rescue animals all the time. It’s my vocation.’
‘I find that interesting. Taking you out for a meal would be a pleasure,’ Jace asserted, wondering when she would crack and behave normally.
‘Go on,’ was all Gigi said in response. ‘Try and get your dog to come to you...’
‘Mo!’ Jace grated.
Mo opened one eye, squinted at him and very carefully closed it again, playing dead.
‘I think he’s decided that he likes you better. He’s not usually stubborn or disobedient,’ Jace commented with a rare feeling of embarrassment, because he had owned the dog for two years and he was being royally ignored. ‘I left him behind to attend a funeral yesterday and possibly he’s sulking.’
‘You’ll have to carry him out then, because I have to get to work,’ Gigi reminded him gently.
Jace sprang upright, opened her front door and two of the men left outside came in and carried a supine Mo out.
‘Couldn’t you have carried him yourself?’ Gigi remarked in astonishment.
Faint colour flared along Jace’s high cheekbones. She was the least tactful woman he had ever met, so why did he want her? And he did, he knew he did from the instant he had matched those legs to that beautiful heart-shaped face. Yet she wasn’t even his type. He went for tall leggy blondes, not tiny, not impertinent, not anything other than conservative females. And this was a woman with a tortoise under her sofa, a bedraggled bird in a cage and a dog with one eye and three legs. Only the cat looked halfway normal in the assembly of animals. In fact, he didn’t know what he was doing and it freaked him out more than a little. It was as if his brain went walkabout in front of her and he couldn’t concentrate.
He would buy her flowers or something, forget about her because she didn’t seem attracted to him in any way and that shocked him. In fact, it was the biggest shock Jace had withstood from a woman in many years.
There had been his best friend’s wife, who had made a pass at him, all the employees over the years who had come on to him, every female student he had ever met. Jace had learned at a very early age that he was irresistible to her sex. He didn’t kid himself that it was purely his looks and charm; he wasn’t that innocent. No, it was literally the wealth and the lifestyle that made him so apparently irresistible to women.
‘Thank you for looking after Mo,’ he declared quietly. ‘I truly appreciate your kindness.’
‘Not a problem,’ Gigi assured him, escorting him to the front door with enthusiasm.
‘And if you should change your mind about dinner, here’s my card.’ Jace extended a business card to her. ‘Maybe you have a boyfriend—’
Gigi raised both brows. ‘Are you kidding? Men are more trouble than they’re worth. I found that out years ago—’
‘A girlfriend?’ Jace persisted without even understanding why he was doing it, but he needed to know in that moment.
‘Good heavens, no, I’m not gay, maybe just not that interested in...er...dating or whatever,’ she completed in an oddly embarrassed rush of self-defence.
Jace nodded and he didn’t get it, he still didn’t get it. He wanted to change her mind, but he didn’t know enough about her or what was happening inside his own head to understand why she was virtually indifferent to him or why he didn’t wish to accept that fact. He went back into the street and she slammed the door behind him as if he had been an unwelcome intrusion.
‘A strange woman,’ his chief of security commented.
‘You have no idea,’ Jace responded as a limo complete with a still snoozing Mo drew up at the pavement.
So strange that he couldn’t take his eyes off her! All curves in a very small package, eyes as blue as the Greek sky, hair as streaky as toffee in a pan that he recalled from his childhood and the most flawless face and complexion. Shaking his black curly head at such peculiar thoughts, Jace got into the limo.
‘You’re a traitor, a turncoat,’ he told his dog without hesitation. ‘I’ve loved you for two years and you wouldn’t give me as much as a tail wag when I came to fetch you home!’
Gigi went into work with relief.
‘Thought you were planning to sleep in today,’ Ioanna, the shelter nurse, quipped without much surprise at Gigi’s appearance. ‘You’re a workaholic...admit it!’
‘I couldn’t sleep late today. I had a dog I found last night and he needed walking—’
‘Gigi...you could go to a blasted pop concert and come home with a dog!’ the older woman teased. ‘But it’s no life for someone your age.’
‘I’m quite happy with my life as it is,’ Gigi lied.
But she wasn’t going to reference her experience of men to anyone she worked with. Even on Rhodes within her own family, she had learned how unreliable men were these days. She had three half-brothers who were man whores with tourists and one whose marriage had broken up because he had cheated on his wife. And what about her father, who had insisted he was legally separated from his wife at the time that Gigi was conceived? Gigi wasn’t convinced of that legal-separation claim after meeting her father’s wife, Katerina, who had treated her very much as though she were some designing young female trying to muscle in on her family.
Her mother had been a committed career woman, a high-earning nuclear physicist, who had travelled a lot, often working abroad on government projects. She had placed Gigi in boarding school at an early age to remain free of the domestic burden of raising a child. She had informed Gigi’s father, Achilleus Georgiou, that she had had a child after their fling in Athens while she was in Greece at a conference. But Gigi’s father had never bothered to come and visit Gigi or write to her or even contribute to her care.
Achilleus owned three thriving businesses in the Old Town and he had four sons, all of whom worked for him. Had Gigi paused to consider such hard, revealing facts she would not have been foolish enough to come to Greece in search of a family after her mother’s sudden death. Unfortunately, she had decided to seek out her roots in the hope of making a connection, but it hadn’t happened. She had simply met up with a bunch of uninterested people who had their own lives and didn’t need her in those lives.
‘So, tell me about the dog,’ Ioanna encouraged.
And Gigi did, from start to finish when Mo had been carried out like a parcel and she had been invited yet again to dinner.
‘So, why didn’t you say yes? Was he ugly? Too old?’
‘No...er...no, he was extremely good-looking, probably only a few years older than me, and he even gave me a business card.’ Gigi giggled in recollection of that unexpected moment of formality and dug it out of the back pocket of her shorts with a flourish.
Ioanna snatched at the card and her eyes widened and her mouth fell open. ‘Jace Diamandis...oh, my word, I don’t believe this!’ she gasped. ‘Only one of the richest men in the world! And certainly the richest in Greece!’
Gigi pursed her full pink lips. ‘He did look kind of fancy—’
‘Fancy? Haven’t you noticed that giant matt-black yacht anchored out in the bay?’ Ioanna practically shrieked in excitement. ‘It belongs to him and the funeral he mentioned was his father’s. He was buried yesterday.’
Gigi winced at that announcement, feeling that she had signally failed to excuse Jace’s loss of temper when it seemed he would naturally have been grieving. Poor guy, she thought helplessly, sympathetic for the first time towards her unwelcome visitor.
‘And the worst thing of all is that you are not even impressed!’ the nurse commented.
‘Well, why would I be?’ Gigi asked with a frown. ‘What’s his money got to do with me?’
‘He asked you out and you said no! I can’t believe that you said no to Jace Diamandis!’
‘Well, he did seem a bit surprised that I was turning him down,’ Gigi conceded reluctantly. ‘But I got the impression that he was totally full of himself and that’s a major turn-off for me. I wouldn’t have had anything in common with him, so it would have been a waste of time meeting him again—’
‘But you should have gone just for the thrill!’ Ioanna carolled.
‘I’m quite...shy with men. It wouldn’t have worked and if he’s that rich, it would have been just a plain peculiar experience. Look, who’s first on today’s surgical rota?’ Gigi enquired, keen to get off the topic of Jace Diamandis and his filthy lucre and the unknown thrills he might be expected to offer.
On his legendary superyacht, Sea King, Jace was giving way to his curiosity and requesting an in-depth investigation into Gigi Campbell, who for some eccentric reason he couldn’t get out of his head. He sent flowers too that evening when he assumed she would be at home.
Receiving a giant basket of glorious wildflowers absolutely bemused Gigi, who had never thought of herself as a flowery woman. She sat staring at them for almost an hour, and at the card, wondering what insanity had possessed Mo’s owner. He was trying to say thank you, she supposed, failing to appreciate that she would have performed the same rescue bid on any animal running loose in busy traffic.
She wondered how Mo was getting on. She missed the dog. She had really, really liked Mo. Somehow, he had made her feel less lonely. She wondered if he performed the same service for Jace, but doubted that someone as handsome, powerful and wealthy could possibly feel in need of that kind of support.
On his yacht, Jace studied his disaffected dog, whimpering mournfully by the door as if he had been stolen against his will from Gigi, and he sighed heavily...
