Page 59 of The Billionaire's Demand

And how little.

She stood, leaning on the balustrade, looking out over the dark sea at the lights from the city playing over its waters, hearing the noise of traffic behind, the buzz of the city. So old a city...stretching way back into classical times...changing hands so often over the course of the centuries. So many lives lived here—and hers was just one more of them.

For a long while she stood, gazing out to sea. Leandros might still be here in the city, in whatever hotel he’d booked into, or he might have taken an evening shuttle to Athens. That was more likely. Flying away, out of her life. This time for ever.

A line from a film came to her. An old Hollywood film, like the one she and Leandros had watched in Paris together...

‘We’ll always have Paris.’

But Paris, for her, was all that she would have...

All she would have of Leandros.

Through the long empty years ahead.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

LEANDROS WAS BUSY. Punishingly busy. He had a lot to get done. He had lawyers on speed dial, estate agents on speed dial, and a firm of specialist financial investigators on speed dial. He needed to get things done—and fast.

Impatience drove him. And urgency.

And a determination that seared through him like rods of steel.

He was moving forward on all fronts and he would get where he wanted to be. Needed to be.

His phone rang and he snatched it up off his desk in the office—once his father’s office, now his. He was now heading the company that had brought him the wealth that his father had been so keen for him to not jeopardise...not to share with a wife whose main interest in his son was his money, his coming inheritance.

‘Any news?’ he demanded of the caller—an estate agent this time.

Two minutes later he replaced the receiver, a look of satisfaction on his face. That box was ticked. Good. Time to move on the next one.

He picked up his phone again, spoke to his PA in the outer office. ‘I need an employment agency,’ he said briskly. Then spelt out his requirements, hung up the phone again.

OK, so what next? Time to chase that damn lawyer again—the one that specialised in family law. He needed answers—reliable ones—and then to set bureaucracy in motion.

So much to do.

He needed to move faster.

I’ve wasted six years—I won’t waste a day longer than I have to.

That was the promise he’d made to himself as he’d watched Eliana walk away from him—for the third and final time.

Psychiko—Paris—and now Thessaloniki.

It wasn’t going to happen again.

He speed-dialled the lawyer, ready to make sure it wouldn’t.

I said I’d fight for her—and that’s what I’m doing. Because now I know that however venal the reason she left me six years ago, this time it could not be more different.

And because of that knowledge searing through him, he would fight for her—and this time he would win.

Because now I know with absolute certainty that my whole life depends on it—my whole future.

And Eliana’s.

The woman he now knew, with that same absolute certainty, he could not live without.

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