Page 2 of Forbidden Greek Mistress
It had taken him every moment of the past five years to be able to accept that simple statement of fact.
He couldn’t allow himself to linger, not even with a gaze from across a great hall. Not with this ghoul at his elbow, more than prepared to leap on him like a carrion crow.
Hoping he would give her the opportunity, more like.
“I accepted my father’s invitation, if that is what you mean,” he replied. With a certain cool neutrality that he had perfected over the years, because it drove every member of his family into paroxysms of temper and rage.
Marissa sneered. “I keep waiting for him to announce that he’s changed his will. Perhaps then you wouldn’t be quite so high and mighty, eh?”
Normally, Thanasis played this game when he was here. If he had allowed himself to be enticed or ordered back to the villa, there was no point attempting to avoid the unpleasantnessas he otherwise preferred to do from afar. He allowed these conversations. He leaned into them. And he was not averse to crossing a sword or two when he encountered his father’s by-blows.
But everything was different tonight.
Becauseshewas here, whoever she was.
And until he knew who sheactuallywas—or, more importantly, who shewasn’t—he found he had no stomach at all for the games he usually lowered himself to play in this place.
“I cannot understand how you have reached your thirties without understanding that he will never do anything of the kind,” he told his venomous half sister, impatiently. “I do not want to be his heir, and therefore, he will make certain that I am. You, by contrast, have debased yourself for the whole of your life in the hopes that he will give it all to you instead, and so he never will. It is really that simple, Marissa, and I have no idea why you cannot grasp it.”
She bared her teeth at him and he broke away, too aware that he could not afford to let her or anyone else here goad him into revealing things he shouldn’t.
Not that he had. Not yet. But he didn’t like that it feltprecarious.
He had always hated his father. This was a natural consequence of watching how the old man treated Thanasis’s stoic, heartbroken, stubborn-to-her-own-detriment mother. When she’d died, when Thanasis was in his twenties, he hadn’t known whether to cheer her escape or mourn her passing. And the vile old man had bloomed in the face of his son and heir’s disgust, entertaining himself by dragging Thanasis into the family business no matter how he’d tried to break away.
Those dreams had crumbled after university, when Thanasis had finally understood that no matter what he did or where he went, his name went with him and the specter of his father hungover him like the sword of Damocles. He had been forced to surrender to the inevitable, and so he had—but he had done it on his own terms.
It had taken him years to demonstrate that there were two Zacharias shipping concerns under the same corporate name. One catered entirely to his father’s whims, grudges, reversals, and lies. The other was Thanasis’s domain.
Pavlos made headlines. Thanasis made deals. And one day, he would wash his hands entirely of the problems his father made for him.
He dreamed of that day all the time.
The only other thing he ever dreamed about appeared to be standing here, in this very same room, with music wrapping itself around her and light finding her as she breathed, but he told himself—again—that this was impossible. This womanresembledhis Saskia, that was all. He needed to stop imagining it could be otherwise.
He had spent years trying to imagine her back to life.
If it was possible, he would have done it already.
The usual twisted, vacuous socialites flooded about as he moved along the outskirts of the crowd, knowing better than to get in his way. The paparazzi, forever being fed stories by his bitter half siblings, called Thanasis the boardroom bully. Or the real Zacharias monster. They took great pleasure in shredding him apart in their pages.
But if the goal was to isolate or shame him, it didn’t work, because he was entirely too competent at his job.
All his half siblings’ efforts had brought him was entirely too much female attention, little as he wanted it. The idea of a demanding man with too much money on his hands was apparently catnip to some. Yet though they flocked to him, they rarely stayed near him. He cut through small talk like a blade. He was too intense, too certain, too opposed to the usual nonsense.
And most importantly, he had yet to get over Saskia.
In this world where everything was brightly colored, airy, and insubstantial until it drew blood, Thanasis—according to his father—dressed like an undertaker. Always all in black, he carved his way through parties like a hearse.
These frilly, frivolous people fluttered around him like he was the king of the underworld himself.
Sometimes he even enjoyed it, but not tonight.
Thanasis didn’t trust himself to drink, not when what he really wanted was to take a whole bottle of whatever was on offer and toss it back. Not when he generally allowed these people to think he was drearily sober, because it made them hate him more.
And certainly not when he couldn’t be certain how he would react if alcohol hit all the yearning and need and cruel hope inside him.
He skirted the edges of the vapid crush, listening to them bray and shriek, and got a different vantage point of this woman before him who could not possibly exist.
