‘Your brother, Argo, wasn’t your brother because he wasn’t your father’s child,’ Kreon delivered very softly. ‘I think Heracles only found that out after your brother died and, believe me, he does not want that humiliating truth spread across the newspapers.’
Jax froze, shock washing over him in an almost physical attack that pulled his every muscle taut to breaking point. In a driven movement he thrust the door shut again and swung violently round.
‘What do you want?’ he demanded of the smaller man, refusing to think of what he had just been told, refusing to join the dots and acknowledge how well that revelation would dovetail with his own quite recent miraculous change of status within the Antonakos family.
‘In return for my continuing silence, I want you to marry Lucy.’
Jax stared back at him in savage disbelief. ‘Marry...her?’
‘She was a teenager when you wrecked her life. You owe her the security of a wedding ring. It doesn’t have to be a life sentence for either of you. But it would give her and Bella the safe harbour and the recognition they need to have a better life—’
‘She wasn’t a teenager!’ Jax raked back at him in furious rebuttal.
‘Lucy was twenty-one last month. We celebrated with dinner at that hotel where she works.’ Kreon shot him a sourly amused appraisal. ‘My wife tells me that teenaged girls do lie about their age occasionally.’
‘Twenty-one,’ Jax repeated thickly, fighting to master the violent anger lashing through him and a powerful urge to strangle Lucy for having dared to lie to him. ‘I would require proof of those allegations about my brother, Argo.’
And from an inside pocket Kreon produced a handwritten letter which he handed to Jax. It had been written and sent to Kreon when his father’s first wife, Sofia, was terminally ill. Unable to face death with such a weight on her conscience, Sofia had admitted the affair that had led to Argo’s conception, although she had not named her lover.
‘Why didn’t you come forward with this at the time of her death?’ Jax demanded harshly a few minutes later. ‘With this letter, you were in possession of facts that were unknown to everyone else involved.’
‘Sofia couldn’t have thought through what she was doing. Your father had just lost his wife and Argo had lost his mother and her letter would have destroyed them both. Back then Heracles had no idea that Argo wasn’t his son. What do you think he would have done?’ Kreon grimaced. ‘He would’ve disinherited the boy and cast him off.’
Jax stared at the wall, knowing that there was a fair chance his father would have reacted like that in the first heat of his fury. Once Sofia had let that genie out of the bottle there would have been no putting it back.
‘I didn’t want that responsibility. I’m not a cruel man. It was a secret that shouldn’t have been told. I never liked your father and he was a lousy absentee husband but, fond as I was of Sofia, once she was gone I preferred to mind my own business...that is, until an Antonakos threatened the security of my own flesh and blood.’
Long after Kreon had gone, Jax studied the copy of the letter the older man had allowed him to keep. He was still shaken even though the woman had died long before he was born. The contents of that letter would distress his father, although, like Kreon, Jax was inclined to believe that somewhere around the time of Argo’s death his father had found out that his eldest son was not actually his son. That would better explain why Heracles had found it possible to move on so fast from that loss and adjust his attitude to Jax almost overnight.
That new knowledge and understanding just about ripped Jax apart, not to mention his view of his family. He had looked up to the big brother he had never really got to know very well and he loved his father. And why did he love Heracles, who had proved to be a useless parent when Jax was young and in need of a father? Ultimately, he had recognised that the older man deeply regretted allowing his dented ego and workaholic ways to triumph over the ties of blood. Heracles was hopeless when it came to expressing emotion though and Jax had realised that he suffered from the same flaw. His father had stumbled on blindly after Mariana’s infidelity had made him a laughing stock in the media, protecting himself as best he could by avoiding his ex-wife...and unhappily that avoidance had included Jax.
Jax hadn’t really thought about how he actually felt about Heracles until that moment, but when he thought of his father being forced to see the tragedy of his first marriage spread across the newspapers he knew he couldn’t allow that to happen. Sofia had died after a long drawn-out fight against breast cancer. Heracles was domineering and manipulative and interfering but he had once adored his first wife and the son he had believed to be his.
Jax’s first act was to summon Zenas and tell his security chief that he wanted an in-depth private investigation carried out on Kreon Thiarkis and his daughter, Lucy. How the hell had something as basic as Lucy’s age been wrong in that file? Her parentage had been incorrectly recorded as well. Lucy did have a Greek father. What else could also be wrong? He needed the background and facts he could rely on. He also needed to check out Kreon’s ties to his father’s first wife, Sofia. And to his father. After all, it was his father who had sent that file to him.
Jax began to mull over the other things he had learned. Lucy was still only twenty-one years old? And had been only nineteen when they had first met? Memories swirled in a colourful haze in Jax’s head and he marvelled that he had not recognised Lucy’s immaturity for what it was. She had been impulsive, outspoken, naïve and unnervingly ignorant about facts he took for granted and a sneaky little unrepentant liar...obviously.
And no way was he prepared to marry her! Kreon could not blackmail him into doing what he had never wanted to do, he assured himself stubbornly. On the other hand, Jax also knew he could not stand back and watch his father endure the scandal that would blow up if Kreon went to the press to sell his story. People would enjoy reading about the skeletons hidden in the Antonakos cupboard and his father would lose his dignity. At the age of seventy, Heracles deserved to keep his dignity, Jax decided heavily. He might have been a lousy husband in Kreon’s eyes but he had surely not deserved the tragic conclusion to his first marriage. Knowing how badly Heracles had reacted to his own mother’s infidelity, Jax could hardly begin to imagine what his father must have felt once he realised that Argo was not his child. Surely Heracles had suffered enough for being a less than stellar husband? How dared Kreon Thiarkis threaten him?
Yet even in the grip of that seething Antonakos rage, Jax could still not stop planning. He knew that it was up to him to control the situation. He reached the stage of listing pros and cons. Were he to marry Lucy, he would get her back into his bed. A sliver of raw anticipation raked through Jax’s tense, angry body and he recognised that that was a fringe benefit that he would very much enjoy. At the same time he would also gain a stronger legal right to his daughter and he would not have to fight to gain access to her.
Nevertheless, Jax hated being told what to do and Kreon Thiarkis had just thrown a double whammy at him that came attached to a very high price tag. Primarily he was in a rage because he knew that Kreon had given him a choice but it was the hateful choice of picking between the lesser of two evils: marriage or his aging father’s public humiliation. He could tell Kreon to do his worst and then stand by and watch his father get hurt. Unfortunately, family loyalty and a very real affection for his inadequate father warred against that option. But the alternative was to surrender his freedom.
No more hot and cold running women, no more sexually self-indulgent variety in the bedroom. But then that wasn’t quite true, Jax allowed with a sudden strong sense of relief. Even Kreon didn’t expect him to stay married to Lucy for ever. Kreon was expecting an eventual divorce, which would still leave Lucy and Bella respectfully acknowledged as members of the Antonakos family and financially secure. Thee mou...he could do marriage on a short-term, strictly temporary basis, particularly with Lucy playing the starring role in his bed every night. Furthermore, Bella would have his name and the safeguard of his presence in her daily life. But just how was he expected to cope with a father-in-law he wanted to strike down and kill in cold blood?
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