Page 61 of Reclaimed By His Billion-Dollar Ring

Her voice seemed to come from a very long way away.

Nikos smiled. ‘Got it in one,’ he said.

CHAPTER TWELVE

SO HE HAD told her. Told her just why, eight years ago, when Georgios Petranakos had sent his fixers in to put it to him that he might like to consider the offer they were willing to make him, he had not sent them packing.

Now, eight years later, he pushed aside the box file, looked up at Calanthe. ‘You’d better sit down,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you passing out on me, and you’ve gone white as a sheet.’

He watched her numbly collapse down on one of his grandmother’s dining chairs. She put her hands on the table, holding them tightly together, so the knuckles showed as white as her face.

‘You were just evening the score,’ she said, and he could see what each word was costing her.

‘Yes,’ said. ‘I was just evening the score. Your father’s fixers weren’t happy—they wanted me to accept the sum they’d offered me. But I held out. It was peanuts for your father—I knew that and they knew that—but they were careful with his money all the same. For me, the sum I got out of them was simply...justice.’

He sat back, ran a hand through his hair. Tiredness filled him, and a sense not of vindication but simply of resignation.

‘Does it make any difference to you?’ he asked.

His voice was tired. He was tired of all this. Tired because he suspected none of it was of any use. Not even what he now asked her.

‘Does it make any difference to you, Calanthe, if I say the rest of it? That your father’s fixers needn’t have bothered to offer me anything at all.’ His eyes rested on her. ‘Because they could have achieved their ends without costing your father a cent.’

He frowned, fingering the edge of the box file, looking down at the surface of the table where he had eaten all his meals as a child, so familiar that if he listened hard enough he could almost hear his grandmother moving around in the kitchen, putting pots and pans away, not letting him help, telling him he must get on with his homework instead.

‘Studying is important, Nikki—with education, the world is yours!’

He had believed her—and it was true. The world was his. He had achieved so much—for himself, certainly, and even something for the world as well. Safer housing and offices and factories for those threatened by earthquakes.

His eyes lifted to the woman sitting opposite him. So beautiful, even with her face so pale, her eyes so stricken. She had caught his eye from the very first, but she had not liked his attention...had resisted him at first.

But he’d won her round. Won her, full stop. Made her his. And to him she’d entrusted her virginity—a gift he’d cherished. Honoured.

What did I feel for her then, all those years ago?

Even now he was not sure.

But of one thing he was sure, and he would tell her so.

He drew a breath, spoke again. ‘Your father didn’t need to pay me off.’ He met her eyes. ‘You see, the moment I realised who you were I knew I had to end it.’

He saw her eyes widen. Saw her not understanding.

He took another breath. ‘Calanthe, there’s a name for poor men who make up to the daughters of rich men. It’s not a name I ever wanted. And had your father been any rich man other than the man he was his fixers would have got short shrift from me! But all the same I’d have done what they wanted. Finished with you and left you. But instead...’ his eyes would not let hers drop ‘...because of who he was, and because of what he’d done to my grandmother, I took his money—everything that I held out for. And then I left you. Left you to go back to my grandmother. To give her the cheque they’d given me, made out to her, not me.’

His voice changed, tightened. There was bitterness in it now.

‘So your father has never known that I am the man he paid off all those years ago. My grandmother took the cheque because I told her that I’d confronted the head honcho of the company that had bought her olive grove and demanded from them its true value—and got it.’

She spoke finally, her voice low and stricken. ‘I’ve always thought my father an honourable man who made his money fairly—’ She broke off.

‘Maybe he did—mostly,’ Nikos said. ‘For all I know, in this particular instance, his Venture Land front man simply tried it on and got away with it. Maybe that email I showed you with your father’s name on it was never read by him. Maybe it was just filed by his PA along with hundreds of others. My grandmother’s olive grove was small fry...even the airport was small fry—just one of scores of other land deals your father has struck in his time through the people he employs and the subsidiaries he’s set up.’

She looked at him, anguish in her eyes. ‘Or maybe you might just be...be trying to make it easier for me.’

‘Maybe I am,’ he said, his voice weary. ‘But does it? If it counts at all, the reason I told your father’s men that you must never know was that I didn’t want you hurt. But your father...’ He sighed. ‘Your father thought it best you were hurt. To protect you from the man he thought I was.’

And am I that man, after all?

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