Stam dealt him a crushing appraisal in retribution for his disrespect. ‘A married man taking one of his domestic staff to bed? I understand you perfectly. You picked her because she was poor and powerless and unlikely to be indiscreet for fear of dismissal. You made her your mistress and shifted her down to your country house for sleazy weekends. Be assured that I know exactly what kind of a man you are! A cheating, manipulative bastard!’
Eros flung back his handsome head, black curls tumbling back from his brilliant green eyes. ‘And yet you want me to marry Winnie?’
‘I want my great-grandson legitimised,’ Stam ground out with finality. ‘You get your precious island back. I don’t expect you to live with Winnie or stay with her. In fact, I don’t want you to because she could do a hell of a lot better than you as a husband and that little boy will have me as a male role model! He doesn’t need you!’
Vexed way beyond the limit of expressing his explosive emotions, Eros swung on his heel and walked out, his wide shoulders and long back rigid while he mentally rained down the hellfire of revenge on Winnie and her offensive grandfather. How dared they?
How dared they?
Talk and behave as though he were powerless? Dismiss his rights as a father as though they did not exist? Suggest he could have no value as a parent? That, indeed, he would be a negative influence on his own child? They would pay for those slurs, one way or another they would both pay, Eros swore with inner vehemence.
Even worse, the implication that he was the sort of man who preyed on his domestic staff like some shady creep! Winnie had never been his mistress. Eros had never had one and certainly not during his marriage to Tasha. He had been celibate for years and then Winnie had appeared and somehow... His teeth gritted as he thrust the memory away, along with all his other memories of Winnie Mardas. The affair had been a mistake, a very human mistake but still a mistake. He knew that very well. Temptation had led to an error and then ultimately to freedom, he reminded himself, shelving that train of thought for something much more important.
He had a child... He had a son, whose name he didn’t even know! Engaged in frantic mathematical calculations, Eros worked out that his little boy had to be under two years of age, a mere toddler. A faint shard of relief touched him. That wasn’t too late for a child to meet his father for the first time. How much worse would it have been if he had never found out or if the child had been much older and embittered by his father’s long absence from his life?
Yeah, it could have been worse, he jeered at himself for such ruminations. But not much worse... Stam Fotakis threatening him, trying to stampede him into marriage when he had only just escaped an imprudent marriage, his first child estranged from him, the mother of his child equally estranged and her subsequent behaviour were inexcusable. Seriously, how could the situation have been worse?
And the whole chaotic fiasco stemmed from one mistake. Eros’s own mistake, he acknowledged grudgingly. He had naively agreed to marry a young woman he didn’t love and didn’t desire to soothe a dying man’s fears about his daughter’s future. But it had never been a real marriage. He had never shared a bed with Tasha, had never even shared a home with her. Throughout their marriage they had lived entirely separate lives. He had accepted all the restrictions of marriage without receiving any of the benefits. And then Winnie had come into his life and logic, honour and restraint had gone out of the window simultaneously.
* * *
Stam Fotakis surveyed his empty office with bemused eyes. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t sure how a business meeting had gone. It had been business, purely business, he told himself soothingly. But Nevrakis had gone up like a firework display, far more volatile in nature than Stam’s careful research had led him to expect. He had never seen a man in such a rage, particularly not one renowned for being cooler than ice. Suppose he let that rage out in little Winnie’s direction?
A new fear assailed Stam as he grabbed the phone to speak to his granddaughters’ bodyguards, the security detail the girls didn’t even know they had watching their every move in London. Possibly, security would have to be a little more visible in the near future, Stam reasoned worriedly. Nevrakis had left his office in violent haste...
* * *
‘So,’ Vivi summed up, copper hair as sleek as a swathe of silk framing her vivid face as she looked across the kitchen table at her sisters. ‘Our grandfather is as crazy as a loon. Where does that leave us?’
‘What we do is our choice.’ Winnie threw back her head so that her mass of brunette hair tumbled down her back, enabling her to gather it up and expertly twist it into a ponytail, ready for work. ‘Nobody can force us to do anything.’
‘Agreed, but Grandad is our only option for the money we need,’ Zoe piped up with innate practicality. ‘Nobody else is willing to give us money to save John and Liz’s home. We tried to get a loan and we failed.’
That unwelcome reminder fell like a brick into the tense silence.
Winnie tugged her little boy up onto her lap because he was drooping tiredly by her side. Teddy closed his eyes and relaxed, his little face drowsy below his crown of black curls. Talk was cheap and easy, but reality had just spoken in Zoe’s quiet little voice, Winnie reflected ruefully. In truth, none of the three sisters had an actual choice. In the kindest way possible for a very rich tyrant, Stam Fotakis had spelt out the truth that his assistance would be given and gladly, but that financial help would come at a price they might not be prepared to pay.
And why did they need that financial help?
Their foster parents, John and Liz Brooke, whose care had transformed the sisters’ lives and reunited them as a family group, were in deep financial trouble. When Winnie had learned that John and Liz were within days of having their ramshackle farmhouse repossessed and losing the foster children currently in their care, she had disregarded her long-dead father’s warning and had approached her wealthy grandfather with a begging letter.
Stam Fotakis had cut off their late father, Cy, without a penny when he was barely more than a teenager. Cy had demonstrated his disdain for the family name by legally changing it to his grandmother’s maiden name of Mardas, which, of course, had meant that their grandfather had had no way of tracing either his son or the family he had eventually had.
At twenty-six, Winnie was old enough to remember their parents, who had died in a car crash when she was eight, but Vivi had only the barest recollection of them, and Zoe, a mere toddler at the time, had none at all.
But all three young women were very much aware that the Brooke family had saved them when they’d needed saving, giving them the care and support they had long lacked to rise above the tragic loss of their mum and dad and the disturbing consequences that had followed because they had all had bad experiences in state care. Winnie, extracted from a physically abusive foster home, had arrived with them first, and John and Liz’s caring enquiries and persistence had eventually led to the sisters being reunited within their home.
From that point on all their lives had improved beyond all recognition and gradually a happy, secure normality had enveloped the traumatised siblings. You couldn’t put a price on what John and Liz had done for them, Winnie conceded ruefully, because you couldn’t put a price on love. Without adopting them, John and Liz had become the girls’ forever family, treating them like daughters and encouraging and supporting them every step of the way into adulthood.
‘That’s true.’ Vivi spoke up again with a grimace at the reminder that they had failed to get a loan. ‘And we can only get that money if we agree to marry men hand-picked by our crazy grandad. Obviously getting his granddaughters married off to suitable men is hugely important to him.’
‘He did say they didn’t have to be real marriages...in-name-only stuff is rather different,’ Winnie muttered the reminder ruefully, because in truth she didn’t want to get married either, even if it did only mean a piece of lega
l paper and a ring on her finger.
When she had first contacted her grandfather, she had had to provide documents to prove her identity but, barely a week later, she and her sisters and her little boy had been flown out on a private jet to Greece for several days. They had been stunned by their grandfather’s wealth and his very big and opulent home and had been well on the road to liking him until he had mentioned his terms for giving them the money to save the roof over John’s and Liz’s heads.