The Sarantos Secret Baby

One

The devil had come to her father’s funeral.

Though Selene Louvardis had always heard it would be bad-mouthing the devil to call Aristedes Sarantos that.

Aristedes Sarantos. The destitute nobody who’d risen from the quays of Crete to rocket to household-name status in the shipping industry and beyond. A name that everyone whispered in awe, a presence everyone heeded. A power everyone feared.

Everyone but her father.

For over a decade, since she’d been seventeen, not a week had passed without her hearing about yet another clash in her father’s ongoing war with the then twenty-seven-year-old man. The man her father had once said should have been his biggest ally, but who’d become his bitterest enemy.

Now the war was over. Her father was dead. Long live the king. If her brothers didn’t put their own differences aside, Aristedes Sarantos would soon assimilate the empire that her father had built and they’d expanded before each had tried to pull it in a different direction. If her brothers couldn’t work together, Aristedes would rule supreme.

She’d been shocked to see him at the funeral. They’d arrived to find him there. He’d stood in the distance, dominating the windy New York September day as if he existed outside time and awareness, his black coat flapping around his juggernaut’s body like a giant raven—or a trapped, tormented soul. She hadn’t thought it strange when someone had speculated that he’d come to claim her father’s.

She’d thought he’d leave after the burial. But he’d followed the mourners’ procession to her family mansion. For the past minutes, he’d surveyed the scene from the threshold, assessing the situation like a general taking stock of a battlefield, a magician setting his stage by casting a thrall on the crowd.

The moment she thought he’d turn around and leave, Sarantos moved forward.

She held her breath as his advance cut a swath through the crowd. On a physical level, apart from her brothers, who stood his equal, everyone he passed by dwindled into insignificance. On other levels, he was unrivaled.

Her brothers wore their distinction like second skins, and she had heard from the endless women who ricocheted in their orbits how sinfully irresistible they were. To her own senses, they had none of Sarantos’s gravity well of influence, of ruthless charisma, of unrepentant danger.

She felt it now like an encroaching wave of darkness, seductive and overpowering and inescapable.

Only her brothers stood their ground at his approach, glaring at him with a decade’s worth of pent-up enmity. She feared the youngest of her three older brothers, Damon, would intercept him, kick him out. Or worse. His expression showed him struggling with the impulse before paying Sarantos what his older brothers had decided his presence here deserved. Pointed disregard.

Suddenly she felt fed up with them all.

No matter what they thought or felt, out of respect for their father, they should have done what he would have. Hektor Louvardis wouldn’t have treated anyone who’d come to his turf—including Sarantos, his worst enemy—with such sullen passive aggression.

Just as she decided to tell her oldest brother, Nikolas, to act his part as the new patriarch of the Louvardis family and shake the man’s hand and accept his condolences graciously, her lungs emptied.

Said man was zeroing in on her.

She froze as his steel-and-silver gaze slammed into hers across the bustling space, holding her prisoner.

Her next scheduled breath wouldn’t come. Her mind stuttered to a standstill as the power and purpose of his strides eliminated the gap between them, before it kicked off again in a jumble. She was dimly aware that everyone was openly hanging on his every move like she was, bursting with curiosity and anticipation.

Then he stopped before her and brought the whole world to a halt with him. Made it cease to exist. Made her feel tiny, fragile, when she was anything but.

She stood five-foot-eleven in her two-inch heels, but he still dwarfed her. She’d never realized he was this imposing, this…incredible. And he wasn’t even handsome. No, calling him handsome would almost be an insult. He was…one of a kind. Unadulterated power and raw maleness in human form. And she already knew that the unique package housed as formidable a brain, intensifying his appeal. But again, appeal was a lame word when describing his impact. Aristedes Sarantos didn’t just appeal to her. He incited a jarring, helpless, unstoppable response.

She winced inwardly. What a time to revisit the feverish crush she’d had on him since the first time she’d seen him. She’d soon known it was futile, not just because he was her family’s enemy, but because he took zero interest in others. She still hadn’t been able to stop herself from taking every opportunity to feed her fascination by sneaking as many up-close glimpses of him as possible.

But she’d never been this close. Had never had him looking down at her with such focus. She could now see that his eyes were the crystalline manifestation of molten steel, bottomless vortices of—

She gave herself a mental slap.

Stop fluttering over his imperfect perfections like a schoolgirl who’s bumped into her rock idol. Say something.

She cleared her throat. “Mr. Sarantos.” She extended her hand. “Thank you for coming.”

He didn’t answer, didn’t take her hand. Just stared down at her until she realized it was as if he didn’t really see her. She pulled back her suspended hand to her side, her eyes lowering, escaping the embarrassment and the crowd’s scrutiny.

“I’m sorry he’s gone.”

His voice, so low, so dark and fathomless, boomed along her nerves and inside her rib cage like a bone-shaking bass line. But it was his words, their import, that made her gaze flicker up to the unwavering opacity of his own. Not I’m sorry for your loss, the mantra everyone had droned to her for the past hours. He wasn’t here to offer her, or any of her family, condolences, real or perfunctory.

Aristedes Sarantos was here for himself. He was sorry her father was gone. And she suddenly realized why.

“You’ll miss fighting with him, won’t you?”

His eyes bored into hers, yet still made her feel as if he was looking through her into his own realizations. “He made my life…interesting. I’ll miss that.”

Again, he was focused on what her father’s death meant to him. His candidness, his unwillingness to bend to the laws of decorum, to dress his meaning in social acceptability and political correctness, took her breath away. And freed her to admit her own selfishness.