Buch lesen: «The Santorini Bride»
The Santorini Bride
Anne McAllister
MILLS & BOON
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
COMING NEXT MONTH
CHAPTER ONE
ONE MORE hill.
Looking up the stone steps that twisted up from the dock, Martha could see the house at last. Thank God.
When she’d got off the launch in Santorini she’d thought, “I’m home.” But she’d forgotten the climb and she hadn’t told Ariela, the local lady who took care of the house, that she was coming. So no one knew to meet her.
No matter. She’d been determined to get here on her own, to be here on her own. The climb was just the last part of it. Still, she was exhausted and sweating, and her duffel bag, packed for a move back to New York, not a spur-of-the-moment desperate flight to Greece, felt like lead as she dragged it behind her.
She looked up again. In the shimmering summer heat the walls of the two-story, white-stuccoed building seemed almost like a mirage, a dream. Martha had been running on adrenaline so long that it could well have been a hallucination, if she didn’t know she was down to her last dollar, having spent nearly every cent in her savings account to get her plane ticket from JFK yesterday afternoon.
Was it only yesterday?
It seemed like another lifetime since she had blithely and eagerly bounded up the stairs to her boyfriend, Julian’s, loft apartment in Tribeca, already anticipating his killer grin, his open arms that would grab her and swing her around in joy when she announced she was back for good, that she had finally finished the mural in Charleston that had taken her out of New York for the past month, and that while she was gone she’d made a decision—she was ready at last to share his bed.
She had opened the door, calling his name. Then, hearing the sound of the shower, she had thrown caution to the wind. What better way to prove to him that she was ready for the intimacy he’d demanded—
And so she’d kicked off her sandals, stripped off her shirt and was shimmying out of her skirt as she’d opened the bathroom door.
And discovered Julian wasn’t alone.
Through the steamed glass she could see two bodies beneath the spray—Julian, his blond hair plastered flat, and some curvaceous brunette with an all-over tan. Their bodies bare, their limbs entwined.
Martha had stopped dead, gut-punched, rooted to the spot as she gazed unblinkingly at the sight of her fantasies, her dreams and hopes crashing to bits.
And then the cool blast of air she’d brought in when she’d opened the door caused Julian to look up. He wiped a hand over the glass, clearing it briefly to stare straight at her stunned face.
His mouth opened and an expletive formed on his lips. Martha’s own mouth was as frozen as her feet as she watched the woman rub against him unaware. Julian shut his eyes for a moment, then opened them and met her gaze again. This time there was less shock and more defiance.
And thank God, Martha found that her feet would move.
She spun away, snatching up her shirt to cover her own bareness, her foolish vulnerability. She yanked it on, face burning, heart slamming—but nowhere near as hard as she slammed the door on her way out.
She’d run down the stairs, her duffel bag banging along behind her, desperate to get away into the street where crowds of people passed, unconcerned, unaware of her humiliation, of her world spinning out of control. Nothing had changed for them.
But for Martha the world had just gone upside down.
She had spent the month she was in Charleston thinking about Julian, about their relationship, about whether he was “the one.” She’d taken things slow, unwilling to just jump into bed with him because he was gorgeous and charming and sexy and wanted to go to bed with her.
She’d seen her sister, Cristina, do far too much of that. Martha had always been determined she was going to be “sure” before she ever became intimate with a man.
Fat lot of good it had done her. She’d finally been sure and Julian had found someone else!
She couldn’t stay with him, obviously. In fact she couldn’t even bring herself to stay in New York. It might have ten million people in it, but it wasn’t big enough for both of them. She had to get out.
There were any number of places she could have gone—to her parents’ house on Long Island, to her brother Elias in Brooklyn, to her brother Peter in Hawaii, even to Cristina—though God knew she would never do that. The only person in her family she couldn’t run to was her twin brother, Lukas, because Lukas was always wandering around somewhere—New Zealand this time, she thought, but who knew, really. Everyone else would have taken her in. And Peter and Elias at least wouldn’t even have asked a million nosy questions.
But she couldn’t do it.
She didn’t want to see any of them, didn’t want to witness their sympathy or even their silent commiseration. She just wanted to get away.
And so she’d come to Santorini.
It wasn’t running away from home.
Her parents had been born here. So had her grandparents. And even though all of her own family—and most of the extended family—were long gone to seek their fortunes in the far corners of the world, they all held Santorini in their hearts. The ancestral house was still here.
In the most fundamental sense of the word, Santorini was home.
Some of her earliest and definitely best memories were of times spent in their house high on a Santorini hillside overlooking the deep Aegean sea. Her parents had moved them from the city to Long Island and back half a dozen times while Martha had been growing up.
No place had ever become the home Santorini was.
She loved it. The minute she’d stepped onto the hot pavement and looked up at the rows of whitewashed houses climbing the hills, she’d known things would get better.
She could breathe here. She could be herself here. She could start again.
She hadn’t been here since she’d come with her parents for a week in January. Then the weather had been almost cool. Now in midsummer it was blazing hot, and Martha was sweating and exhausted as she set her shoulders, then grabbed the handle of her duffel and began to haul it again up the narrow winding street.
The house would be empty. The refrigerator would be shut off and the cupboards bare. She would have to do the shopping and the cooking, but she didn’t care. It would be good to do everything herself. Keeping busy would be a good thing. Immersing herself in the life of the island would distract her and, she hoped, help her get her bearings, look to the future, make new plans.
She certainly had no intention of going on with the old ones—even if Julian had rung her cell phone while she was en route to the airport.
“It’s not as if Andrea means anything to me,” he’d said, sounding wounded, as if Martha was just supposed to accept him making love to another woman.
“Right. No big deal,” she’d said acidly. “I’m sure she’ll be pleased to hear that.”
“Well, what do you expect?” Julian had demanded, trading wholly inappropriate hurt for even less warranted indignation. “You never gave me any, did you?”
It didn’t seem the time to say she had come intending to do just that.
“Smart of me, I’d say,” she bit out.
“You’re a cold fish, Martha. If you’d ever shown a little passion—”
“You want passion? I’ll give you passion!” And Martha had flung the cell phone out the open taxicab window into the road where it had been instantly squashed by an eighteen-wheel semi. She only wished it had been Julian, not the phone, who’d been flattened.
Now she allowed herself a moment’s remembrance of the single satisfying sight she’d had yesterday afternoon. Then she made her way up the last few steps to the gate that led into the walled garden and the last flight up to the house. Sweat was streaming down her back and between her breasts, and her long curly black hair, which she had scraped back into a ponytail the minute she’d got off the plane, was coming loose. Tendrils straggled around her face.
She needed a cold drink, then a cold shower and a nap, in that order. Provided she could stay awake that long.
She opened the gate and let herself in. A trellis overhung with bougainvilleas in bright reds and purples gave her the first shade she’d had since she began the climb. Martha shut the gate, then leaned against the wall and just let the silence and the blessed coolness of the wall and the shade envelope her. For the first time since she’d opened the door to Julian’s bathroom, the desperate urgency to escape faded a bit. She breathed deeper. The stillness seemed to surround her.
Her breathing slowed and steadied. She ran her hand over the rough white stone wall. It felt solid, dependable, strong. And welcoming.
She remembered racing down these same steps as a little girl, running her fingers along the wall, thinking that her father had done that as a boy, and that his father had done the same. She smiled faintly and turned to press her cheek against the cool whitewashed wall, finding comfort in the notion that generations of Antonideses had done that, too.
Others had hurt. Others had survived. She would, too. Settled, comforted, determined, she squared her shoulders, grabbed her duffel and with renewed energy, hauled it up the winding stairs.
Thirty-two steps later she reached the top and fished out her house key. Her father had given each of them a key to the house when they reached the age of twenty-one.
Martha sent a brief silent thank-you to her father now as she turned the key in the lock and pushed open the heavy wooden door. The terrazzo-floored entryway was cool and breezy.
Breezy? Martha frowned, surprised to notice that the front windows were open, the light gauzy curtains rustling in the air. Had someone figured out she was coming?
Had Julian called her parents’ house looking for her? Oh, please no! She pressed a hand to her cheek in dismay.
But then she noticed the pair of sandals—men’s sandals—beside the door. Her heart leapt with joy. “Lukas?”
It had to be. Elias never left Brooklyn. “Someone has to work,” he would say dampeningly whenever the word vacation came up. And Peter, as far as Martha knew, had scarcely ever left Hawaii since he’d moved there to go to college. So that left Lukas—her twin.
If she could bear to see anyone right now, it would be Lukas.
He had always been her soul mate. He would understand and sympathize, and spending time with Lukas would keep her from believing that all men were as horrible as Julian Reeves.
“Luke?” Eagerly Martha kicked off her own shoes and started toward the kitchen when she heard the sound of footsteps coming down from the bedrooms upstairs. She turned expectantly.
A lean dark pirate of a man, with tousled jet-black hair and a sharp, narrow nose, was coming down the steps.
He had high, chiseled cheekbones and a hard, jutting chin. He was handsome, she supposed, in a rough-hewn way. If Julian was classically handsome the way a glossy highly polished marble statue was handsome, this man looked like rough-cut granite.
She supposed he must be one of Elias’s friends. He was, from the looks of him, in his thirties, about her oldest brother’s age. Had Elias given him the key and told him to make himself at home? It seemed more like the sort of thing her charming feckless father would have done than hard-nosed, hardworking Elias. She wasn’t sure he had any friends, anyway.
But this man didn’t look like the sort who would have had the patience to deal with her father. Aeolus Antonides loved golf courses and yachts and three-martini lunches—the finer side of civilization, he’d have said.
Civilized wasn’t a word that Martha would have used to describe the man who had stopped at the bottom of the stairs and was staring at her with what could only be described as profound dislike.
Well, she wasn’t exactly enthralled to see him, either.
“Who the hell are you?” he demanded, then startled her further by jerking his head toward the door. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. Just leave.”
Leave? She was supposed to leave?
“Now wait just a minute, buddy,” she said, drawing herself up to her full height and glaring at him. At least he spoke English. In fact he sounded as American as she did. So he must be a friend of Elias’s. And therefore, irritating as he was, she would deal with him. “I’m not the one who’s going anywhere!”
He was the one who was intruding. This was her house, not his. He had no right to stand there, hands on hips, scowling at her as if she were the intruder. And she was damned if she was going to let him keep her from her home and her cool drink and her nap.
“Excuse me.” She started to step around him to go toward the kitchen.
He barred her way. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I want to get a drink,” she said. “I’m perishing. Now move.”
He didn’t.
“Look,” she said. “Who are you? Did Elias give you a key?”
His brows drew down. “Elias? Who’s that?”
So obviously he wasn’t Elias’s friend then. “My brother.”
The man shook his head, causing shaggy black hair to fall across his darkly tanned forehead. “Never heard of him. How’d you get in?” he asked suspiciously.
“How did I get in?” It was Martha’s turn to stare. She nudged the duffel bag with her toe. “With my key. I live here.”
“The hell you do!”
“Well, not always,” Martha admitted. “But I could if I wanted to. My name is Martha Antonides. My family owns this house.”
His expression cleared as if by magic. “Not anymore,” he said cheerfully. “I do.”
“What?” Surely she hadn’t heard him right. Did she have heat stroke? God knew it was hot enough, and she was exhausted enough, and what she’d just heard didn’t make a lick of sense. “What are you talking about? What do you mean, not anymore? Who the hell are you?”
“Theo Savas.”
As if that was supposed to mean something. She just looked at him blankly. “So?”
“So, this is my house now. I own it.”
“No,” Martha said firmly, as confident about that as she was about the world being round. “I’m sorry. You don’t. I don’t know what house you think you own, but it’s not this one. This is our house. It has been for generations.”
“Was,” Theo Savas said easily. “Past tense. As in ‘used to be.’ Sorry,” he added, though he didn’t sound sorry in the least. He sounded as smug and righteous as Julian had when he’d informed her that it was her fault he’d been showering with another woman!
“Prove it,” Martha snapped.
“Whatever you want.” Theo Savas gave a light shrug, then turned and stalked into the room that her father called his office—not that he had ever done a lick of work there. Now she watched as he opened a drawer of her father’s desk and plucked out a piece of paper from a folder.
He came back to thrust it into her hands, then stepped back, waiting and watching as she read it. It was an agreement between her father and someone named Socrates Savas.
“My father,” Theo Savas said before she could ask.
Irritated, Martha pressed her lips together and read on. It was the silliest thing she’d ever seen.
“This is about a golf game!” she protested. Something about the winner of the golf game getting to name the president of Antonides Marine International, the company that her great-grandfather had begun, the one her grandfather had developed, the one her father had almost run into the ground, the one that her brother Elias had saved from bankruptcy.
“Keep reading,” Theo Savas advised.
“What’s your father got to do with our company?” she demanded, still reading, the words on the page swirling before her eyes.
“Your father sold him forty percent of it.”
Martha’s head jerked up. She opened her mouth to deny it, to insist that her father would do no such thing!
But the unfortunate truth was, her father might have.
In some horrible misguided effort to help Elias and to prove to his son that he wasn’t a complete disaster as a businessman, Aeolus Antonides might actually have done something as idiotic as that.
Now Martha’s jaw clenched and her fingers tightened on the paper so tightly that they were trembling.
“He lost the golf game,” she said through her teeth. It wasn’t a question. It was right there in black and white.
Theo Savas merely inclined his head. And waited.
Martha, feeling a muscle in her temple tick with tension, turned her attention back to the paper in her hand. The second part of the document was even odder. As if the golf game weren’t enough, this part had to do with a sailboat race—her father’s beloved Argo against Socrates Savas’s Penelope—and stipulated that the winner of said race got possession of the other’s island home.
“I won,” her dark-haired nemesis said unnecessarily.
Martha couldn’t breathe. She stood there, stunned and disbelieving. How could her father have bet their generations-old family home against some weekend cottage on a Maine island?
Furious, she thrust the paper back at the man smiling his smug superior smile at her. “It’s absurd!”
“Pretty much,” the annoying Theo Savas agreed. “But it’s legal. I won the race, therefore I won the house. So I think, Ms. Antonides,” he added pointedly, “that it’s you who needs to leave.”
Martha digested that. Considered it. And reached a conclusion. She hadn’t spent her last dime and traveled halfway around the world to get away from one pompous, idiotic male only to let another one push her around now.
She looked Theo Savas straight in the eye. “No.”
“What do you mean, no?” He sounded as if no one had ever said the word to him in his entire life.
Well, it was time someone did.
Martha shrugged with all the indifference she could muster. “Which letter didn’t you understand? N? O? It’s a big house, Mr. Savas. I won’t bother you. Forget I’m here. I have every intention of forgetting you are!” So saying, she picked up her duffel bag, stepped neatly around him, then headed up the stairs.
“Wait a damn minute!” Footsteps pounded after her. He grabbed at her arm, but Martha twisted out of his grasp and kept right on going.
“You can’t stay here!”
“Of course I can.”
“I don’t want company,” he informed her, dogging her heels.
“Tough.” She reached the room that she had always shared with her sister, Cristina, pushed open the door, then turned to face him defiantly. “What are you going to do? Throw me out?”
The house might not belong to her family anymore, but it was her furniture in the bedroom, her childhood books on the shelves. She lifted her chin and dared him to lay a hand on her.
His fingers ball into fists. A muscle pulsed in his jaw and she could swear she heard his teeth grinding. But he didn’t touch her, just glared.
Martha glared back.
“Look,” he said after a moment, “there are tons of hotel rooms.”
“Can’t afford one.”
“I’ll pay for it.”
“No way. I’m not having everyone on Santorini think I’m your kept woman.”
It was one thing to make up her mind to sleep with Julian. Idiot that she was, she’d believed she loved him. It was something else entirely to let a man pay for her room on the island. That might be fine for those who came on week-long holidays and then went home never to reappear. But she was enough of a local that she would scandalize all the gossipy old women.
“And they wouldn’t think that if you stayed here with me?” He arched a brow.
“Of course not. This is my house—was my house,” she corrected bitterly.
Theo Savas shrugged. “So, fine. Call your father, then. He can pay for a hotel room.”
“No!”
None of the family knew where she was—and Martha was determined to keep it that way. The last thing she wanted was to announce her humiliation to her parents and siblings.
“Suit yourself. But you’d better come up with an idea, sweetheart, because I don’t want you here.”
“But—”
“No.” He was adamant. “I’ve had it. No women. I’m sick to death of them.”
Martha blinked. “So you…prefer men?” Pity, actually, because from a “populating the earth” perspective, Theo Savas had gorgeous genes, definitely worth passing on.
“I do not prefer men!” Theo snapped, then scowled furiously and raked a hand through his hair. “I’m just sick to death of being badgered, of women turning up at all hours.”
Martha gave him another once-over and lied with dripping scorn, “Well, you’re not that gorgeous.”
He grimaced. “Never said I was. It was that damn magazine—all that drivel about ‘world’s sexiest this and world’s sexiest that!’”
Martha laughed in disbelief. “Oh? And you’re what? World’s sexiest pirate? Curmudgeon?” That she could believe.
“Sailor,” he muttered, making her brows arch in surprise. He shrugged irritably. “It’s crap. All of it. But tell that to all those stupid females who read it and think they’re the woman of your dreams!”
Martha grinned at his hunted look.
“So I damned sure don’t want some silly gooey-eyed teenager hanging around,” he said, effectively wiping the grin off her face.
“Gooey-eyed teenager?” Martha was outraged. “I’m twenty-four!”
“Wow.” Theo was clearly underwhelmed. “Like I said, a baby.”
Martha bristled, sick and tired of being dismissed as young. Everyone in her family, except Lukas, was always telling her she was too young, that she needed someone to look out for her.
“Trust me, Methuselah, I wouldn’t look at you if you were the last man on earth. Make that the second last,” she muttered grimly under her breath.
Theo obviously heard her. His brow lifted. His mouth quirked. “Ah, like that is it?”
Martha scowled. “Like what?”
“You’re running away from a man.”
“I am not running away from anyone!” she retorted hotly. “I just…needed a break. A vacation. I finished a job and I wanted a little R&R.” It was the truth, just not all of it. “Look,” she said wearily, “as much as I would love to stand here and chat with you, I’m really bushed. I don’t sleep well on planes and I’ve been up for over thirty-six hours. I need some sleep.”
And without waiting for his approval—in fact, half expecting him to grab her by the arm and haul her downstairs—Martha turned her back on him and headed for her bed, falling into its welcome softness and breathing deeply in relief.
Behind her there was silence.
And more silence.
And then finally Theo said, “Okay. You can sleep it off. Take a nap. I’m going out for a sail. But I’ll be back tonight, kiddo,” he warned. “And when I get here, you’d better be gone.”
Theo muttered as he left the house. He muttered all the way down the hill and in the dinghy as he rowed out to his sailboat. He’d just begun to breathe easier in the last few days, relieved that no one on Santorini seemed to know about that damned article. Women still flirted with him, which was fine. But these at least hadn’t been peering in his windows and rubbing up against him in bars.
He’d started to think he’d get his life back.
And now this!
He was overreacting, of course, and he knew it. But it had been a shock to hear the door open and discover his fortress had been breached.
“Damn woman,” Theo muttered irritably now as he hoisted the mainsail, then cast off the mooring line.
Damned attractive woman with her wind-blown tangle of hair and her flushed face and her wide brown eyes. His hormones had registered that, even as his brain had resisted.
He wasn’t interested, and she wasn’t his type! Martha Antonides was too young. Too prickly. Too opinionated. Too wholesome. Too…irritating.
He liked women—a lot—but he preferred to be the hunter, not the hunted. Since that article had been published he’d begun to feel like a deer on the first day of hunting season. The hordes of women who had dogged his steps for the past six months were not to be believed. He certainly wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t experienced it firsthand!
He’d been confident the initial frenzy would wear off—a nine-day wonder, he’d assured himself. But he hadn’t counted on low hard news, and wire services hungry for something to spice up their pages.
Especially when a couple of former girlfriends had decided it was in their best interests to gain publicity by kissing and telling.
Of course it would blow over eventually. Who, after all, was really interested in his marriageability—besides his mother? Someone else he’d been avoiding.
When he’d returned to New York long enough to win the sailboat race for his father, Theo had deliberately avoided going out to the family home on Long Island.
He loved his mother, but he didn’t need her input into the mess that was his life. She was always ready to meddle.
“Offer suggestions,” she called it.
In this case he knew exactly what suggestion she’d offer. “Get married, Theo. End of problem.”
But it wouldn’t end the problem, Theo knew. He’d been married once—not that his mother knew it. And it hadn’t ended his problems at all. It had simply created more.
Now, older and wiser, Theo knew that marriage wasn’t his style. Relationships weren’t his metier. He was perfectly happy playing the field—as long as the field wasn’t overcrowded and the women understood the rules.
He was glad he’d made sure Little Miss Jet Lag understood she wasn’t moving in. She might not have known about the article, she might not have come because of it, but he didn’t want her there getting ideas!
He was sorry she’d come all this way for nothing. But there were lots of guest houses on Santorini. So what if the ones available at the last minute weren’t likely to be at quite the level of homey comfort she was used to. Too damn bad. If she didn’t like it, she could go back to wherever she’d come from.
It was her problem, not his.
The ferry from Crete was just coming into the harbor. Tourists hung over the railings and waved and shouted. Plenty of them were gorgeous, eager women. And not one of them, God willing, knew he was here.
Breathing a sigh of relief, Theo cranked in the jib and smiled as the boat heeled away from the wind and picked up speed.
Turning his back on the ferry, he headed out of the harbor and put everything else out of his mind.
It was dusk when he got back. The tavernas were all lit up and music throbbed from half a dozen small nightclubs and cafés. The quay was crowded with holidaymakers, laughing and jostling and some even dancing. Two or three even wanted to dance with him.
Theo smiled and shook his head. Equanimity restored, he could look at them dispassionately now. Sometime in the near future he might even take some lovely lady up on it.
But chatting up some woman seemed more effort than it was worth tonight. He was tired and so he kept going, climbing the steps that led up the hillside, looking forward to a cold beer and a shower and a soft bed.
He climbed the winding stairs to the front door—and stopped dead at the sight of Martha in the window, crossing from the living room toward the kitchen.
Equanimity evaporating, Theo thundered up the last dozen steps, pushed open the front door and headed straight for the kitchen after her.
“Listen, I thought I told you—”
“Theo!” A sultry Scandinavian-accented voice came after him from the living room.
Theo jerked around. A tall slender blonde woman—every man’s dream, he’d thought when he’d first met her—opened her arms wide as she glided toward him.
“Agnetta?” It wasn’t really a question. And Agnetta was no longer a dream—she was a nightmare. If there was any woman he wanted to see in his living room less than he’d wanted to see Martha Antonides, it was Agnetta Carlsson.
But before she could reply, another younger woman appeared as well. “Theo!” She ran across the room to throw her arms around him.
Theo caught her before she could smother him with kisses and stared down at her, horrified. Whoever she was, she looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t put a name to her. In fact, he didn’t have to.
“Remember me? Cassandra,” she told him cheerfully. “You know, Cassie! Cassie Thelonikis. Your mother’s goddaughter!”
Ye gods. Deliberately Theo held her at arm’s length, recognizing her now, and not at all happy with the recognition.
“Your mother sent us over,” Cassie said happily, confirming his worst fear. “Isn’t that cool?”
Cool was not the word Theo would have used to describe it. “Sent you here? Why?” He knew he sounded harsh. He couldn’t help it.
But Cassie was immune. “She says you need some distraction. And protection,” she added. “She says you’re too focused on sailing and since you’re the world’s sexiest sailor you have too many women bothering you.”
Which gave his mother full marks for perception. But why the hell had she thought sending more women would improve matters?
And Agnetta Carlsson of all people! Theo grimaced inwardly. She didn’t even know Agnetta! Did she?
Cassandra, who obviously could read minds, explained. “I’ve been modeling this past year, and I worked with Agnetta lots this spring. They seem to think it’s cool, her being so fair and me so dark.” She shrugged. “We got to be friends. And when I had lunch with your mother last week in the city, Agnetta came along. She wanted to meet your mom because you two were friends.”
