Page 59 of Reclaimed By His Billion-Dollar Ring

An ache opened inside her, raw and intense. Anguished was tearing at her. To see Nikos here, in the house he grew up in, to remember how he’d been that golden summer of her youth, how totally she’d fallen for him, how ardently she’d given herself to him, wanting nothing more than for that summer to go on and on...never to end.

Never—dear God—to end as it had.

He took my father’s money. Let himself be paid off. Shameful and despicable.

Her eyes were shadowed as she walked towards the table. Nikos had reappeared in her life, out of the blue, and made clear that she had once again aroused in him the same fire of desire that had flared before.

As had he, so fatally, in her, that night at the beach hut.

But I was strong then. At least afterwards—in the morning. Strong enough to leave him.

And to regret, bitterly, her weakness.

But not strong enough to stop herself doing what she should never have allowed herself to do again...

She felt her heart squeeze with pain.

‘Calanthe—’

His voice penetrated the fog of her hopeless thoughts. A wave of that familiar heavy weariness swept over her again. All this traipsing around from island to island. A helicopter, a taxi, a hire car, a ferry... An olive grove, an airport and now his grandmother’s old house.

What was it for?

What purpose could it serve?

He is who he is. Venal and corrupt. There is nothing more. I have to accept it.

But she was here now, and she would see it through.

He was lifting two documents out of the box file. They had a formal, legal look to them, and were both very similar.

She drew closer and he placed one of them in front of her. It was a contract of sale. She glanced at it, frowning, not knowing what she was supposed to be seeing.

‘I mentioned Stavros to you when we were down by the airport. I told you he was shrewd old guy...that few ever got the better of him. This contract shows it.’

He paused, pointing to where the legalese was interrupted by the typed identification of a specific piece of land.

‘This is his olive grove. The one that is now under half of the airport.’ He paused. Pointed at another typed-in line. ‘This is the sum he received for it.’

Calanthe’s eyebrows rose. It was an extremely large sum for just an olive grove. Except, of course, she realised, it was no longer an olive grove but part of a commercial airport.

Nikos was moving the document aside, replacing it with the other one. ‘Take a look at this one,’ he said.

It was identical to the first, except for two things—the identity of the plot of land and the sum paid for it. She frowned. Massively less than the first.

‘The two plots were the same size,’ Nikos was saying.

There was something strange about his voice. She looked at him, still frowning.

He lifted away the top page of each document, revealing the pages behind. Another couple of paragraphs of legalese, and then two sets of signatures. One was common to both—somebody from an outfit called Venture Land. The other was different on each.

One was Stavros’s signature.

The other was Irene’s—Nikos’s grandmother.

‘Look at the dates,’ Nikos was saying now.

She did. His grandmother’s contract was dated three months before Stavros’s.

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