Adam still looked doubtful. “Are you sure I have to meet your father? I wouldn’t want to be the cause of a heart attack. Maybe we should call the whole thing off.”
Maybe, she debated for a brief moment, she should reconsider and let him off the hook. Only there was that green card she yearned for and the chance to be beyond her father’s controlling reach.
“As far as I’m concerned, we made an agreement,” Melina said firmly. “We have too much at stake to back out now.”
“We have?” Adam’s complexion paled.
Melina gathered her purse and prepared to go back to work. “Yes, we have. You said you needed a wife. I want a green card. I said I’ll marry you, and I will.”
“But your father!”
“Don’t worry about my father,” she said with a frown, “I’m sure I’ll be able to think of something to make it right with him.”
Her father was as healthy as only a man who regularly used virgin olive oil on his food to stay healthy could be. She’d grown up watching her father enjoy his weekly Sunday morning “medicinal” breakfast of cucumbers, nuts mixed with yogurt, doused with a liberal portion of Greece’s famous virgin olive oil. A man who could survive that kind of regime was surely healthy enough to survive meeting Adam.
Melina rose and waved goodbye to Eleni and Arianna. If she wanted things to look real, she had to wait for Adam to leave with her. “If you want to make things look real, maybe you ought to walk me back to my desk.”
Adam heard the plea in Melina’s voice as he rose from the table. Damn! The woman had taken him seriously when he’d only been kidding. He had a sinking feeling this was his last chance to climb out of the hole he’d dug for himself. But how?
The light in Melina’s eyes deterred him from telling her so in public. Especially since Melina was a woman who was frank in her hopes and dreams and who trusted him.
The idea of meeting her father, a traditional Greek man, left a hollow, sinking feeling in his chest. He had to make one last attempt to get her to back out of their agreement.
“Maybe we should elope,” he said suddenly. “Tomorrow is Friday. We can get married Saturday night, elope and go on a three-day honeymoon. By the time you tell your father we’re married, it’ll be too late for him to hassle you.”
No sooner had Adam suggested the elopement than he wanted to bite his tongue. Until now he’d prided himself on being honest and pragmatic and definitely a man in control of his life. He was thirty-four, and a successful businessman. And smart enough, he told himself as he glanced down at his “intended,” to handle a marriage of convenience, if it came to that, without any complications.
What was there about this beautiful, young Greek woman that had caused him to lose his usual self-discipline and to test his sanity? he mused as he followed her into the elevator.
Her smile? The charming way she looked at him under dark eyelashes? The gentle sway of her hips?
What was there in her walk that frankly interested him, when he had no right to be interested?
Her quaint Greek persona? He’d always had an interest in everything Greek, he mused as he tried to reason with himself, or he wouldn’t be in the business of importing commodities from Greece.
But a wife he couldn’t touch and who looked like Melina? The more he gazed at her, the more he had to smother a desire to take her in his arms and to kiss her senseless.
“Elope? Greek women do not elope!” Melina said, startled at Adam’s proposal. She’d been searching for a way to take her mother’s advice about compromise, considering Adam’s need for a quick marriage. But an elopement?
“Why not? You wanted to get married a moment ago?”
“A marriage, yes. An elopement, no,” she agreed, reluctant to let go of the idea of a traditional Greek wedding. Not in church, perhaps, but a wedding with Greek food and hauntingly lovely Greek music. “We have to consider tradition,” she sighed, debating the trade-off between settling for a quick wedding ceremony for the chance to realize her dreams. Evidently now was the time to make that compromise. “Okay, I’ll agree to the quick wedding, but first, I have to take you home to meet my parents. Would tonight be convenient for you?”
Adam smothered a sigh and reluctantly agreed. There was no use insisting they elope to get Melina to back out of their agreement. She wasn’t buying.
On the other hand, what if her father changed Melina’s mind for her? What had seemed like a good idea to get her to call off the marriage proposal suddenly turned into an odd sense of loss. To his surprise, he was actually looking forward to having this fascinating woman in his life. One way or another. Even if it meant going by her rules.
“PAPA, MAMMA,” Melina said later that night at the door to her family home. “I would like you to meet Adam Blake. Adam is the man I told you about over the telephone. Adam is the man I plan to marry.”
Mikis Kostos eyed him in a way that made Adam uneasy. The uncompromising message in the man’s eyes was clear: no man is going to date, let alone marry, my daughter without my approval. From the frown on the man’s face, it was also clear to Adam that the chances of his gaining this man’s acceptance were slim to none.
“I’m pleased to meet you, sir,” Adam said. He didn’t go so far as to try to extend his hand, not when Kostos’s fists were clenched at his side.
Melina’s mother edged closer to her husband. “Mikis?”
It was only after the quiet prompting by Melina’s mother that her father held open the door. “Come in, come in,” he said. “We don’t need to have neighbors watching me be embarrassed by my own daughter.”
Adam glanced around at the neighboring houses before he followed Melina into the house. If anyone was watching what was going on on the Kostos’s porch, they were either hiding behind bushes or the man was paranoid.
Maybe this visit hadn’t been a good idea, after all.
Inside the house, there wasn’t a single flat surface not covered with lace doilies and knickknacks of all sizes and shapes. The lamps were topped by upholstered shades with dangling beaded trim. Religious pictures hung on the walls. To Adam, it looked as if time had stood still here while the rest of the world had moved on. No wonder Melina wanted a taste of the twenty-first century before she settled down.
“So, young man, you wish to marry my daughter?”
Adam was taken aback at the speed with which Mikis Kostos cut to the chase. Prompted by Melina’s elbow in his ribs, he nodded. “Yes, sir. I do.”
“Are you Greek?”
“No, I’m afraid I’m not. I’m an American.”
“Your father perhaps is Greek?”
“No, sir. Dad’s family came to the United States from England before he was born.”
“Your mother is Greek?”
Adam felt as if the walls were beginning to close in on him. It sounded as if Melina’s father was about to insist she marry a Greek man loud and long enough for Melina to change her mind about marrying him. “No sir, my mother’s family is Irish. In fact, my parents have recently retired to Ireland.”
Kostos frowned and looked as if he couldn’t find a redeeming branch on Adam’s family tree. In the man’s mind, Adam was clearly a mongrel. “So tell me, why do you want to marry my Greek daughter?”
Adam glanced at Melina. Now that he’d seen her father, he sympathized with her need for independence. For her sake, he had to find his way through this minefield of a marriage charade without getting married and without hurting Melina.
Melina