Playing by the Greek's Rules (Puffin Island 0.50)

He was about to make another attempt to change the topic when his father reached out and took Lily’s hand.

‘One day you will have a family of your own. A big family.’

Nik ground his teeth. ‘I don’t think Lily wants to talk about that right now.’

‘I don’t mind.’ Lily sent him a quick smile and then turned back to his father. ‘I hope so. I think family makes you feel anchored and I’ve never had that.’

‘Anchors keep a boat secured in one place,’ Nik said softly, ‘which can be limiting.’

Her gaze met his and he knew she was deciding if his observation was random or a warning.

He wasn’t sure himself. All he knew was that he didn’t want her thinking this was anything other then temporary. He could see she’d had a tough life. He didn’t want to be the one to shatter that optimism and remove the smile from her face.

His father gave a disapproving frown. ‘Ignore him. When it comes to relationships my son behaves like a child in a sweetshop. He gorges his appetites without learning the benefits of selectivity. He enjoys success in everything he touches except, sadly, his private life.’

‘I’m very selective.’ Nik reached for his wine. ‘And given that my private life is exactly the way I want it to be, I consider it an unqualified success.’

He banked down the frustration, wondering how his father, thrice divorced, could consider himself an example to follow.

His father looked at him steadily. ‘All the money in the world will not bring a man the same feeling of contentment as a wife and children, don’t you agree, Lily?’

‘As someone with massive college loans, I wouldn’t dismiss the importance of money,’ Lily said honestly, ‘but I agree that family is the most important thing.’

Feeling as if he’d woken up on the set of a Hollywood rom-com in which he’d been cast in the role of ‘bad guy’, Nik refrained from asking his father which of his wives had ever given him anything other than stomach ulcers and astronomical bills. Surely even he couldn’t reframe his romantic past as anything other than a disaster.

‘One day you will have a family, Lily.’ Kostas Zervakis surveyed her with misty eyes and Nik observed this emotional interchange with something between disbelief and despair.

His father had known Lily for less than five minutes and already he was ready to leave her everything in his will. It was no wonder he’d made himself a target for every woman with a sob story.

Callie had spotted that vulnerability and dug her claws deep. No doubt Diandra was working on the same soft spot.

A dark, deeply buried memory stirred in the depths of his brain. His father, sitting alone in the bedroom among the wreckage of his wife’s hasty packing, the image of wretched despair as she drove away without looking back.

Never, before or since, had Nik felt as powerless as he had that day. Even though he’d been a young child, he’d known he was witnessing pain beyond words.

The second time it had happened, he’d been a teenager and he remembered wondering why his father would have risked putting himself through such emotional agony a second time.

And then there had been Callie...

He’d known from the first moment that the relationship was doomed and had blamed himself later for not trying to save his father from that particular mistake.

And now here he was again, trapped in the unenviable position of having to make a choice between watching his father walk into another relationship disaster, or potentially damaging their relationship by trying to intervene.

Lily was right that his father was a grown man, able to make his own decisions. So why did he still have this urge to push his father out of the path of the oncoming train?

Emotions boiling inside him, he glanced across the table to his future stepmother, wondering if it was a coincidence that she’d picked the chair as far from his as possible.

She was either shy or she was harbouring a guilty conscience.

He’d promised he wouldn’t interfere, but he was fast rethinking that decision.

He sat in silence, observing rather than participating, while staff discreetly served food and topped up glasses.

His father engaged Lily in conversation, encouraging her to talk about her life and her love of archaeology and Greece.

Forced to sit through a detailed chronology of Lily’s life history, Nik learned that she’d had three boyfriends, worked numerous low-paid jobs to pay for college tuition, was allergic to cats, suffered from severe eczema as a child and had never lived in the same place for more than twelve months.

The more he discovered about her life, the more he realised how hard it had been. She’d made a joke about Cinderella, but Lily made Cinderella look like a slacker.