Page 3 of Greek's Temporary "I Do"

While the test had eventually come back negative, it was with Incendia that she’d got to see first-hand how much good that charities could do, how integral they were to providing support for people in need. It had inspired her so much that she’d changed her study direction immediately to focus on attaining a business degree at Cambridge, swiftly followed by her master’s in Non-Profit Management.

Her mother thought that she was being foolish, throwing away financial security for misplaced altruism, but Helena had found her passion, and not only that, something she was good at.

Her first job had been with a small charity start-up and she’d relished the opportunity to throw everything she had at it. It paid off and she soon became known for having a head for business, and a fresh, exciting approach to gaining partnerships that were relevant and contemporary to younger generations. Connecting people who were sincere about helping, rather than seeking out borrowed kudos, was what made her unique. Her hard work made her peerless.

And then six months ago it had happened; Incendia had asked if she might be interested in a role as their CEO. It had been the most amazing moment of her life. She had celebrated with Kate and even Leander had made a special trip to London to take her out and treat her to a congratulatory meal that had ended up—as it usually did—with him seeing her safely home in a taxi, before he escorted whatever woman had taken his fancy back to his London apartment.

But within a month following her start at Incendia, the CFO had quit and disappeared with nearly one hundred million pounds in investment funds. Shocked and horrified, she’d gone immediately to both the police and the charity commission. She’d spent days locked in meetings with Incendia’s trustees, where she discovered that the previous CEO had failed to renew the business insurance that would have made this painful rather than disastrous.

Because if there wasn’t a way to cover the shortfall in money, Incendia wouldn’t survive long enough to see what the police could recover. A financial review at the end of the year would declare them bankrupt and all of the people they could help, all of the families Incendia supported, the research into medical conditions that affected millions around the world...would be left with nothing.

Helena couldn’t let that happen. Incendia had been there for her when no one else had been. She’d needed to find a way to fill the hole made by the missing money and there was only one way she could think of.

The shares her father had left her in Liassidis Shipping.

Staring at her reflection in the mirror, she felt that sense of loss keenly. The shares were the last piece of her father that she had left, and she’d never wanted to part with them. She’d hoped to leave them in the business now run almost completely by Leonidas Liassidis, simply content for that to be her connection to the company her father had founded with Giorgos Liassidis. That was all she’d wanted. To know that her father’s legacy lived on. To know that a part of it still belonged to her. But now she would have to let them go. Let him go.

A little piece of Helena’s heart broke under the weight of the sob she kept locked in her chest.

She felt two slender arms come gently around her shoulders and looked to the mirror to meet Kate’s eyes in the reflection.

‘It’s the right thing to do,’ Helena said, unsure who she was trying to convince more, herself or Kate. It was what her father would have done, Helena was sure of it. ‘I can sell the shares as soon as the marriage is registered in the UK and there will be enough there to cover the shortfall in Incendia’s accounts.’

‘Do you think you could buy back the shares, once you have what you need?’ Kate asked gently.

Helena bit her lip and looked down at her feet. ‘No.’ She wouldn’t lie to herself about this. She couldn’t afford to. ‘Only a fool would sell shares in Liassidis Shipping,’ she explained. Only a fool or someone extremely desperate. And she was extremely desperate.

‘Well, then,’ Kate said in her no-nonsense way. ‘We have a plan, we’re going to stick to it and we’re going to get it done!’

Helena smiled at her best friend. ‘I really like that colour on you,’ she said, glad that she had chosen gold for her only bridesmaid; Kate looked absolutely radiant.

Kate smiled, shrugging a delicate shoulder to the mirror and pouted. ‘Merci!’

There was a knock on the door and Helena turned, hoping that it might be her mother, but it was just the officiant letting them know they were ready.

Helena turned back, masking the hurt before Kate could see it. Yes, it was foolish to hope, and she probably should have known better after all these years, but she felt peculiarly alone standing in the small church library that had been given for her to get ready in on her wedding day, without either of her parents there with her.

Pushing that thought aside, she looked at herself in the floor-length mirror.

The deceptively simple wedding dress suited her slim figure. She’d been teased as a teenager for resembling a kitchen towel tube and had never really liked her lack of curves, but the dress by a new Spanish designer—Gabriella Casas—made her look and feel beautiful. A puff of laughter left her lips at the irony. It would be utterly wasted on Leander Liassidis, who had never looked at her as anything other than a little sister.

As Kate told the officiant that they would be right there, Helena touched the silver bracelet her father had given her on her sixteenth birthday. It was the last present he had given her, barely weeks before he’d passed. She was both sad and relieved that he was not here today. Sad because even though this wasn’t ever going to be a real marriage, the small child in her still wanted her father here on her wedding day. But she was also relieved, because he didn’t have to see what she was about to do. Shame stung her skin as she fought an internal battle of wills. She wanted to be a businesswoman that he could have grown to respect, that he could be proud of. And she could still do that. But only if Incendia survived.

‘Are you ready?’ Kate asked from behind her.

Helena nodded.

It was a short walk between the church library and the entrance to the rather grand chamber of the Catholic church in Athens. Helena might have wanted to have a small ceremony with very little grandeur, but Leander had his way in the end.

‘It’s going to be my only wedding—we might as well make it a party!’ he’d exclaimed.

She just hadn’t realised that Leander’s ‘party’ would attract so much attention and so much ‘hoo-ha’, as Kate had said earlier.

If she was honest, she’d been utterly thrown by the press interest in them. Yes, the Hadden name had notoriety in the UK, but in Greece, the Liassidis name was on a whole different level. The press had been stalking them ever since the news became public, each subsequent headline more hysterical than the previous one, the whole of Greece and beyond taken by the friends to lovers fairy tale.

Anyone who was anybody was there, wanting desperately to be seen. In truth, Helena had only cared about a handful of people. Her, Kate, Leander, obviously, and his parents, Giorgos and Cora. She wasn’t naïve enough to think that his twin brother would come. Leander and Leo hadn’t shared a single word in the last five years. Her heart pulsed once. She hadn’t spoken to Leo since the bitter confrontation he’d had with her mother nearly ten years ago, after Gwen had naïvely thought she could continue her father’s work with Liassidis Shipping.

She would be there in the church, with her second husband John, who had reluctantly agreed to interrupt his golfing holiday, and Helena tried to tell herself that it was enough that they had come.

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