Page 4 of Forbidden Greek Mistress
Though impatient for what, he could not have said.
He was too aware of the ghost of Saskia, there in the center of this room, as if this entire party was about her. For him, of course, it was.
Thanasis could not manage to think past it. He could not make any sense of it.
He could feel his father looking at him, but he didn’t move toward the old man. He refused to give him the satisfaction.
You must come to the villa, Pavlos had told him, hijacking a business call to make this demand.
I need to do no such thing, and won’t,Thanasis had replied, mildly enough.
It had been years since he’d darkened the marble arches of the villa with his presence. He preferred to avoid it altogether. Refusing to return to the island meant he only had to interact with his father in Athens, where they could keep it in the office and talk some semblance of business, though he kept that to a minimum too.
Handling his father was much easier from afar.
Pavlos stayed in Greece, flitting in and out of the office in Athens as it suited his sense of importance. Thanasis remained in London, where he could run the business with the focused ruthlessness that had made him a billionaire in his own right before the age of thirty.
As the years passed, fewer and far between were these visits home. If he had his way, he would see to it that there was no crossover between Pavlos’s vanity projects and the actual concerns of the shipping business that had been in the family for generations, but that Thanasis had turned into a multinational conglomerate.
You must come,Pavlos had said merrily, sounding wholly undeterred, as ever.I have an announcement to make of supreme importance.
Are you terminally ill?Thanasis had asked dryly.
Pavlos had laughed.You wish, my boy. Soon enough, all this will be your problem to solve. But in the meantime, I require your presence at the villa.
If I refuse this invitation, will you finally cut me out of your will?Thanasis asked.
But the old man only laughed again, and rang off.
If Thanasis had thought that Pavlos really would disinherit him, he might have stayed back in London the way he’d wanted to do. But everything with his father came down to weighing the options. Deciding what was worse at any given time—or what would become worse in the future if ignored—and acting accordingly.
At the end of the day, it cost him relatively little to turn up, appear to dance attendance on the old man’s whims, gather what intelligence he could, and then leave.
Not that there was ever much intelligence on display, of course.
Now, fully in his glory and with all of his children in attendance, Pavlos tapped his glass with one of the signet rings he wore on his thick fingers. He kept going until he claimed the attention of everyone in the room.
It was perhaps more true than Thanasis wanted to admit that his father had excellent taste in women. But what they saw in Pavlos in return was his wealth. His power. His status and fame. A woman who dated Pavlos Zacharias could be certain she would find herself infamous almost at once. Some of his mistresses had parlayed that notoriety into something resembling a career, depending on a person’s definition of that term, but one thing remained certain.
Not a single one of them could possibly have dated the old man for his looks. Not in decades, anyway.
Because Pavlos had once been tall and commanding. Thanasis had seen the pictures. But he was not a handsome man. All of his features were bold and arresting, and he had been calledexcitingandpowerfulin his heyday. Those same bold and arresting features coupled with a lifetime of dissolution and excess, however, meant that these days he resembled nothing so much as a goblin.
Something Thanasis had told him once, though it had done nothing but make the old man howl with laughter.
Jealous, are you?Pavlos had asked when he stopped laughing.A goblin I might be, my boy, and yet still the whole world finds me magnetic beyond reason.
You pronouncedrichincorrectly,Thanasis had replied in his usual dry way, but that had only made his father laugh more.
Someday you will understand that these things are the same,the old man had said.Or you will be poor and forgotten.
Thanasis liked to think that he would be neither, thank you.
Pavlos, ever attuned to the shifting sands of attention and admiration, waited until everyone was staring at him. He smiled broadly. He looked beside him, and took the hand of Saskia’s ghost.
HisSaskia’s ghost, Thanasis thought.
And something inside him…detonated.
