Her inability to defend herself had infuriated Nikolos. He hated bullies and would have done as much for any helpless creature too stupid to look after itself in a hostile world. But had those trivial displays of good manners, those minor acts of compassion on his part, led to the gruesome offer of Prudence’s hand in marriage? That daunting suspicion made his lean, strong face clench hard. When he walked into a room, she lit up like a Christmas tree. Had Prudence decided to tell her fabulously wealthy grandfather just how much she fancied Nikolos Angelis?
‘Papa…’ Nikolos’s sister Kosma’s distraught voice cut through the simmering silence from the French window that opened out onto the terrace. ‘I know I shouldn’t have been listening and I’ll die if we become poor but you can’t ask Nik to marry Theo Demakis’s granddaughter. She’s a fat cow and plain as a pig!’
‘How dare you hide behind the door and eavesdrop on a private conversation?’ Embarrassment made Symeon Angelis leap up in a wrathful response that his much-indulged daughter had rarely witnessed. ‘Leave us—’
‘But it’s true,’ the pretty teenager wailed, standing her ground and defying his authority. ‘Nikolos would have to put a paper bag over her head to eat at the same table, never mind anything more personal. She’s ugly and he’s so handsome—’
‘Get out,’ Nikolos told his kid sister with ferocious, cutting cool.
The older man watched his daughter retreat tearfully at her big brother’s bidding and released a regretful sigh. ‘Of course, I’ve never seen the girl. If she’s that bad, Kosma would have a point. I couldn’t ask you to marry her.’
Nikolos bit back a sardonic laugh. That this was the only objection his parent could see to such a revoltingly mercenary proposition spoke volumes for his father’s state of mind. Symeon Angelis was fighting despair and ready to clutch at any straw that might drag him back from the abyss of financial ruin. Nikolos asked himself how he could stand back and allow that to happen to his parents and his four siblings.
Yet at twenty-two years old, he felt that his own life had barely begun. He was no innocent though, he conceded grudgingly. Even though he was still at university, he had acquired a reputation as a womaniser. It was true that he pursued pleasure with single-minded zeal. He worked hard and he played hard and he rarely slept alone. He didn’t do long-term and he didn’t do faithful. He had yet to meet a girl who would not accept those conditions. But he still could not begin to contemplate the prospect of becoming a husband or, worse still, a father. Indeed, the very concept of being forced into such a heavy commitment for his family’s benefit filled him with seething anger and bitterness. But he also knew that his grandfather, Orestes, would have laid down his own life to protect his nearest and dearest…
‘You remind me of my late son and his mother.’ Theo Demakis studied his granddaughter with cold derision. ‘You have the same puppy-dog eyes, the same scared smile. You’ve got no backbone and weakness disgusts me.’
‘If I was weak, I would have gone home the day after I arrived.’ Prudence tilted her chin, her soft blue eyes staying steady while beneath her loose cotton shirt she could feel her heart beating so fast with fear that she felt sick.
His unpleasantness continually appalled her. It was three weeks since she had come to stay on the older man’s magnificent estate and every day had been an ordeal. Having flown out to Greece with naïve hopes of getting to know and love the grandfather she had never met, she had instead been forced to accept that he was a cold, malevolent man with not an atom of affection for her and a vicious tongue.
Theo Demakis laughed at her attempt to stand up to him. ‘Do you take me for a fool? Why do you think I invited you to visit me? You’ve taken everything I’ve thrown at you because your mother’s on the booze again and the bailiffs are back at the door!’
Dismay peeling away the composure she was struggling to maintain, Prudence could no longer hold his derisive gaze. As she dropped her head in shame-faced embarrassment, a curtain of chestnut-brown hair fell forward to screen her rounded profile and she looked very much her nineteen years.
‘Am I right?’ the older man sneered.
‘Yes…’ The admission almost choked Prudence, for she would have loved to tell him that he was wrong and that her mother, Trixie, had cleaned up her act and turned her life around. Sadly, that wasn’t possible and her grandfather’s contemptuous satisfaction made the humiliation of her mother’s frailties sting even more. She suspected that he was congratulating himself on his foresight almost two decades earlier when he had told his son to ditch his pregnant girlfriend.
‘What a winner Apollo picked to father my only grandchild with! He had the pick of the world’s heiresses. He could have brought a royal princess home as his bride,’ Theo Demakis growled in disgust. ‘Even then I was rich as Midas and money is the equal of any fancy pedigree. But my son wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, was he? He picked a woman who was a lush, a spendthrift and a whore—’
Her face flaming, Prudence surged upright. ‘I won’t sit here listening to you talking about my mother like that!’
The older man surveyed her with ironic amusement. ‘What choice do you have? You need my money to dig her out of trouble.’
At that blunt declaration, Prudence lost colour. She lowered her head and swallowed hard on her angry pain. Slowly, heavily, she sank back down in her seat again. As she had learned at an early age, penury and dignity rarely went hand in hand. In any case, Theo Demakis was right and the truth was not very pleasant: she did need his money. Her mother was deeply in debt, drinking heavily and currently facing court action over unpaid bills. But Prudence was convinced that if the stress of the older woman’s financial problems was removed, Trixie could be persuaded to enter a clinic and go through rehab again. Painful as it was to accept, Prudence reflected with a sinking sensation in her tummy, Demakis money could well make the difference between her mother living or dying. Years of alcohol abuse had dangerously weakened Trixie’s health.
The older man dealt his silent granddaughter a harsh look of impatience. ‘I brought you to Greece only because I believe you can be of use to me. It’ll be interesting to see if you have the brains to recognise a lucky break when it’s on the table in front of you. ‘
Her brow indented, Prudence was bewildered by that statement.
‘What do you think of Nikolos Angelis?’ Theo asked with the teeth-baring smile that sent a shiver down most people’s backs.
The disconcerting sound of that particular name shattered Prudence’s composure. Blushing like mad in her confusion, she averted her attention from her grandfather without even noticing the chilling curl of his thin mouth. ‘He’s…he’s kind,’ she framed finally, biting back a whole host of other, more enthusiastic words which she felt would have exposed her to the older man’s derision.
How could she possibly speak freely about Nikolos without revealing the depth of her feelings for him? She was in love for the first time in her life but that was her secret and she had no intention of sharing it with anyone. After all, Nikolos had the dark, dangerous beauty of a fallen angel and she was overweight and plain. It was a hopeless passion and she knew it.
‘How do you think Nikolos will handle poverty? At this very moment, the Angelis family are facing financial ruin. They’ll lose their homes, their cars, they’ll have to take the younger children out of their fancy schools and that will just be the beginning of their sufferings. After more than a century of wealth and ease, his parents will find it very difficult to adapt to such heavy losses.’ Theo watched the surprise and immediate concern blossoming in her expressive eyes. ‘But you have it within your power to save them all from that unhappy fate.’
‘How could I help them?’ Prudence exclaimed, shaken by the picture he had drawn.
‘By helping me. If you agree to marry the Angelis boy I’ll rescue his family and also take care of all your mother’s little problems. I will be very generous to all parties concerned and I am not a generous man as a rule.’
Prudence