“Of course I can sell it,” Aeolus said stiffly, his tone infused with generations of Greek arrogance that even his customary amiable temperament couldn’t erase. “I own it.”
“Yes, I know that. But—” But it was true. Aeolus did own Antonides Marine. Or fifty percent of it anyway. Elias owned ten percent. Forty percent was in trust for his four siblings. It was a family company. Always had been. No one whose name was not Antonides had ever owned any of it.
Elias stared at his father, feeling poleaxed. Gutted. Betrayed. He swallowed. “Sold it?” he echoed hollowly. Which meant what? That his work of the past eight years was, like his marriage, gone in the stroke of a pen?
“Not all of it,” Aeolus assured him. “Just enough to give you a little capital. You said you needed money. All last Sunday at your mother’s dinner party you were on the phone talking to someone about raising capital to buy some outfitter.”
“And I was doing it.” Elias ground out.
“Well, now I’ve done it instead.” His father rubbed his hands together briskly. “So you don’t have to work so hard. You have breathing room.”
“Breathing room?” Elias would have laughed if he hadn’t already been gasping. His knees felt weak. He wanted to sit down. He wanted to put his head between his knees and take deep desperate breaths. But instead he stood rigid, his fingers balled into fists, and stared at his father in impotent fury, none of which he allowed to show on his face.
“You didn’t need to sell,” he said at last in measured tones that he congratulated himself did not betray the rage he felt. “It would have been all right.”
“Oh, yes? Then why did we move here?” Aeolus wrinkled his nose as he looked around the newly renovated offices in the riverside warehouse Elias had bought and which until today his father had never seen.
“To get back to our roots,” Elias said through his teeth. There was no reason at all to pay midtown Manhattan prices when his business could be better conducted from Brooklyn. “This is where Papu had his first offices.” His grandfather had never wanted to be far from water.
Aeolus didn’t seem convinced. “Well, it’s obvious that things aren’t what they used to be,” he said with a look around. “I wanted to help.”
Help? Dear God! Elias took a wild, shuddering breath, raked a hand through his hair. With help like this he might as well throw in the towel.
Of course, he wouldn’t.
Antonides Marine was his life. Since he’d shelved his dream of building his own boats, since Millicent had walked out, it was the only thing he’d focused on. She would have said, of course, that it was the only thing he’d focused on before she’d left him. But that wasn’t true. And he’d done it in the first place for her, to try to give her the life she’d wanted. How was he to know she’d just been looking for an excuse to walk out?
Now it was all he had. All he lived for. He was determined to restore it to the glory his great-grandfather and his grandfather had achieved. And he was almost there.
But it hadn’t been an easy road so far, and he shouldn’t expect it would start now. Deliberately he straightened his tie and pasted a smile on his face and told himself it would be all right.
This was just one more bump in the road. There had been plenty of bumps—and potholes—and potential disasters in the road since he’d taken over running Antonides Marine.
With luck he could even work out a deal to buy the shares Aeolus had sold away. Yes. That was a good idea. Then there would be no more opportunity for his father to do something foolish behind his back.
Elias flexed his shoulders, worked to ease the tension in them, took another, calmer breath and then turned to his father, prepared to make the best of it.
“Sold it to whom?” he asked politely.
“Socrates Savas.”
“The hell you say!”
So much for calm. So much for polite. So much for making the best of it!
“Socrates Savas is a pirate. A scavenger! He buys up failing companies, guts them, then sells off what’s left for scrap!” Elias was yelling. He knew he was yelling. He couldn’t help it.
“He does have a certain reputation,” Aeolus admitted, the characteristic smile not in evidence now.
“An entirely deserved reputation,” Elias snarled. He stalked around the room. He wanted to punch the walls. Wanted to punch his father. “Damn it to hell! Antonides Marine is not failing!”
“So I hear. Socrates said it was doing very well indeed. He had to give me a pile for it,” Aeolus reflected with considerable satisfaction. “So much that he complained about it. Said he should have bought it five years ago. Said it was too bad he hadn’t known about it then.”
Which had been the whole point. One look at the Antonides Marine’s books eight years ago, and Elias had known their days as a company were numbered unless he could drag them back into the black.
He’d done it. But it had meant long long hours and cost-cutting and streamlining and reorganization and doing all of it without allowing the company to look as if it were in any trouble at all. He’d spent years trying to stay under Socrates Savas’s radar. For all the good it had done him.
“Good thing for us Socrates didn’t notice it then,” Aeolus reflected, as if it had just occurred to him.
“Good thing,” Elias agreed sarcastically, for once taking no pains to spare his father’s feelings.
Aeolus looked momentarily chagrined, but then brightened again and looked at his son approvingly. “You should be proud. You pulled us out of the abyss, Socrates says. Though I don’t know as I’d have called it an abyss,” he reflected.
“I would’ve,” Elias muttered.
Obviously Savas had had his eye on the business for a while whether Elias had known it or not. Circling like a vulture, no doubt. Not that he’d ever given any indication. But he was a past master at spotting prey, waiting for the right moment, then snapping up a floundering company.
For the past year Elias had dared to breathe easier knowing that Antonides Marine wasn’t floundering anymore. And now his father had sold the blackguard forty percent of it anyway?
Damnation!
So what did Savas intend to do with it? The possibilities sent chills down Elias’s spine. He wouldn’t let himself imagine. And he certainly wouldn’t hang around to watch. Knowing he couldn’t bear it gave him the resolve to say words he never ever thought he’d say.
“Fine,” he said, looking his father in the eye. “He can have it. I quit.”
His father gaped at him, his normally rosy countenance going suddenly, starkly white. “Quit? Quit? But…but, Elias…you can’t quit!”
“Of course I can.” Elias had been blessed with his own share of the Antonides arrogance and hauteur, and if Aeolus could sell the business that his son had rescued from the scrap pile without so much as a nod in his direction, then by God, Elias could certainly quit without looking back!
“But…” Aeolus shook his head helplessly, his hands waving in futility. “You can’t.” His words were almost a whisper, his face still ashen. There was a pleading note in his voice.
Elias frowned. He had expected sturm und drang, not a death mask.
“Why can’t I?” he asked with studied politeness, a hint of a not very pleasant smile on his lips.
“Because—” Aeolus’s hands fluttered “—because it’s…it’s written in the contract