PROLOGUE
THE MALE VOICES drifted in from the balcony while Holly hovered, waiting uneasily for the right moment to join the conversation. That was a challenge when she knew she was never particularly welcome in Apollo’s radius.
But there wasn’t much she could do about that when she was married to Vito, Apollo’s best friend. Only recently had she come to appreciate just how close the two men were and how often they talked no matter where they were in the world. Friends from a childhood spent at boarding school, they were as close as brothers and Apollo had distrusted Holly from the outset because she was a poor woman marrying a very rich man. Aware of that fact, she had offered to stay home instead of attending the funeral of Apollo’s father but Vito had been shocked at that suggestion.
So far, their visit to the privately owned island of Nexos and the Metraxis compound had been anything but pleasant. The funeral had been massive. Every one of Apollo’s former stepmothers and their children had attended. Earlier today the reading of the will had taken place and Apollo had stormed out in a passion, having learned that he needed a wife to inherit the vast empire he had been running for several years on his ailing father’s behalf. Vito had shared only that bare detail with his wife, clearly uncomfortable at divulging even that much. But as virtually anybody who knew Apollo also knew of his aversion to matrimony, it was obvious that his father’s last will and testament had put him between a rock and a hard place.
‘So, you pick one of your women and marry her,’ Vito breathed, sounding not at all like the loving husband Holly knew and adored. ‘Dio mio, there’s a long enough list. You marry her, stay married as long as you can bear it, and—’
‘And how am I going to get rid of her again?’ Apollo growled. ‘Women cling to me like superglue. How am I going to trust her to keep her mouth shut? If word escapes that it’s a fake marriage, the stepfamilies will go to court and try and take my inheritance off me. If you tell a woman you don’t want her, she’s insulted and she wants revenge.’
‘That’s why you need to hire a wife as if you’re interviewing one for a job. You need a woman with no personal axe to grind. Considering your popularity with the opposite sex and your bad reputation, finding her could be a challenge.’
Reckoning that it was now or never, Holly stepped out onto the terrace. ‘Hiring a wife sounds like the best idea,’ she opined nervously.
Even sheathed in an elegant dark suit, Apollo Metraxis looked every inch the bad boy he was. With shoulder-length black hair, startling green eyes and an elaborate dragon tattoo peeping out of a white shirt cuff, Apollo was volatile, unconventional and arrogant, the direct opposite of Holly’s conservative husband.
‘I don’t believe you were invited to join this conversation,’ Apollo countered very drily.
‘Three heads are better than two,’ Holly parried, forcing herself down stiffly into a seat.
Apollo elevated a sardonic brow. ‘You think so?’
Holly refused to be excluded. ‘Stop dramatising yourself—’
‘Holly!’ Vito interrupted sharply.
‘Well, Apollo can’t h
elp himself. He’s always doing it,’ Holly argued. ‘Not every woman is going to cling to you like superglue!’
‘Name me one who won’t,’ Apollo invited.
Holly blinked and thought very hard because Apollo was universally acknowledged to be a gorgeous, super-wealthy stud and nine out of ten women followed him round a room with hungry eyes. ‘Well, my friend Pixie for a start,’ she pronounced with satisfaction. ‘She can’t stand you and if she can’t, there’s got to be others.’
A very faint flush accentuated Apollo’s supermodel cheekbones.
‘Pixie wouldn’t quite meet the parameters of what is required,’ Vito interposed hastily, meeting his friend’s appalled gaze in a look of mutual understanding because he had not told his wife the exact terms of the will. Ignorant as Holly was of those terms, she could not know how impossible her suggestion was.
Apollo was outraged by the reference to Holly’s friend, Pixie, who was a hairdresser and poor as a peasant. Apollo already knew everything there was to know about Holly and Pixie because he had had the two women thoroughly investigated as soon as Holly appeared out of nowhere to announce that she had given birth to Vito’s son, Angelo. Apollo had been appalled by Pixie’s grubby criminal background and the debts her unsavoury brother had accrued and which she for some strange reason had chosen to take on as her own. Those debts had resulted in her brother’s punishment beating and her attempt to interfere with that had put Pixie in a wheelchair with two broken legs.
Was it any wonder that when her friend had such a bad background he had instinctively distrusted Holly and marvelled at his friend’s eagerness to marry the mother of his child? Indeed Apollo had been waiting on the sidelines ever since for Pixie to try and take advantage of her friendship with Holly by approaching her friend for financial help. To date, however, she had not done so and Apollo had been relieved for he had no desire to interfere again, knowing how much that would be resented. And thanks to his ungenerous attitude at their wedding, Holly already resented Apollo quite enough.
Pixie Robinson, Apollo thought again in wonderment as Vito and Holly retreated indoors to change for dinner. He was unlikely to forget the tiny doll-like blonde in the wheelchair at Vito’s wedding. She had given Apollo nothing but dirty looks throughout the day and had really irritated him. Holly was insane. Of course she was biased, Pixie being her best friend and all that, but even so, could she really imagine Apollo marrying Pixie and them producing an heir together? Apollo almost shuddered before he reminded himself that Holly didn’t know about that most outrageous demand in his father’s will.
He had seriously underestimated the older man, Apollo conceded angrily. Vassilis Metraxis had always had a bee in his bonnet about the continuation of the family name, hence his six marriages and unsuccessful attempts to have another child. At thirty, Apollo was an only child. His father had urged his son to marry many times and Apollo had been blunt and honest about his resolve to remain single and childless. In spite of the depredations of the manipulative, grasping stepmothers and the greedy stepchildren that had come with those marriages, Apollo had always enjoyed a relatively close and loving relationship with his father. For that reason, the terms of Vassilis’s will had come as a very nasty shock.
According to the will, Apollo was to continue running his father’s empire and enjoying his possessions but that state of affairs was guaranteed to continue only for the next five years. Within that period Apollo had to legally marry and produce a child if he wanted to retain his inheritance. If he failed on either count, the Metraxis wealth would be shared out amongst his father’s ex-wives and former stepchildren even though they had all been richly rewarded while his father was still alive.
Apollo could not credit that his father had been so foolish as to try and blackmail his son from beyond the grave. And yet wasn’t it proving most effective? Rigid with tension as he made that sudden leap in understanding, Apollo stood on the terrace looking out to sea and watching the stormy waves batter the cliffs. His grandfather had bought the island of Nexos and built the villa for family use. Every Metraxis since then had been buried in the little graveyard down by the village church, including Apollo’s mother, who had died in childbirth.
The island was Apollo’s home, the only real home he had ever known, and he was disconcerted to realise that he literally could not bear the idea of his home being sold off, which would mean that he could never visit it or his memories again. He was discovering way too late to change anything that he was far more attached to the family name and the family property than he had ever dreamt. He had fought the prospect of marriage, habitually mocking the institution and rubbishing his father’s unsuccessful attempts to recreate a normal family circle. He had sworn that he would never father a child, for as a child Apollo had suffered a great deal and he had genuinely believed that it would be wrong to subject any child to what he had endured. Yet from beyond the grave his father had contrived to call his bluff…
For when it came down to it, Apollo could not contemplate losing the world he took for granted even though he knew that fighting to retain it would be a hellish struggle. A struggle against his own volatile inclinations and his innate love of freedom, a struggle against being forced to live with a woman, forced to have sex with her, forced to have a child he didn’t want.
And how best could he achieve that? Unfortunately, Vito was right: Apollo needed to hire a woman, one who was willing to marry him solely for money. But how could he trust such a woman not to go to the media to spill all or to confide his secrets in the wrong person? He would need a hold on the woman he married, some sort of a hold that meant she needed him as much as he needed her and would have good reason to follow any rules he laid down.
Although he would never consider her as a possibility, he needed a woman like Pixie Robinson. In her case he could have bought up her brother’s debt and used it to put pressure on her, thereby ensuring that it was in her best interests to keep her mouth shut and give him exactly what he needed to retain his family empire. How was he supposed to find another woman in that kind of situation?
Of course, had he trusted women generally, he might have been less cautious. But Apollo, his cynical distrust honed over no fewer than six stepmothers and countless lovers, had never trusted a woman in his life. In fact trust was a real issue for him.
His first stepmother had sent him off to boarding school at the age of four. His second stepmother had beaten him bloody. His third had seduced him. His fourth stepmother had had his beloved dog put down. His fifth stepmother had tried to foist another man’s child on his father.
Add in the innumerable women whom Apollo had bedded over the years. Beautiful, sexually adventurous women and gold-diggers, who had endeavoured to enrich themselves as much as possible during their brief affairs with him. He had never known any other kind of woman, couldn’t quite believe that any other type existed. Holly was different though, he acknowledged grudgingly. He could see that she adored Vito and their child. So, there was another category out there: women who loved. Not that he would be looking for one of those. Love would trap him, inhibit him and suffocate him with the dos and don’ts he despised. He suppressed a shudder. Life was too short to make such a mistake.
But in the short term he still needed a wife. A wife he could control was the only sort of wife he would be able to tolerate. He thought about Pixie again. Pixie and her weak, feckless brother’s financial problems. She had to be pretty stupid, he reflected helplessly, to mess up her life by taking on her sibling’s problems. Why would you do that? Never having had a brother or a sister, Apollo was mystified by the concept of such thankless sacrifice. But just how far would Pixie Robinson go to save her brother’s skin?
It amused Apollo to know so much more than Holly did about her best friend’s problems. It amused him even more that Holly had cheerfully assured him that Pixie couldn’t stand him. Holly had to be blind. Obviously Holly hadn’t noticed that, in spite of the dirty looks, Pixie had covertly watch
ed Apollo’s every move at her friend’s wedding.
The beginnings of a smile softened the hard line of Apollo’s wide sensual mouth. Maybe he should take a closer look at the miniature blonde and work out whether or not she could be of use to him…what did he have to lose?
CHAPTER ONE
‘MORNING, HECTOR,’ PIXIE mumbled as she woke up with a tousled bundle of terrier plastered to her ribs.
Smothering a yawn, she steeled herself to get up and out. She got out of bed to head to the bathroom she shared with the other tenants on the same floor before returning washed and dressed to snap a leash on Hector’s faded red collar and take her pet out for his morning walk.
Hector trotted along the road, little round eyes reflecting anxiety. He flinched when he noticed another dog across the street. Hector was scared of just about everything life threw at him. People, other animals, traffic and loud noises all made the whites of his eyes gleam with an edge of panic. Calm and untroubled the rest of the time, he was very quiet and had never been known to bark.
‘Probably learned not to as a puppy,’ the vet next door to the hair salon had opined when Pixie had asked. ‘He’s scared of attracting attention to himself in any way. Abuse does that to an animal. But in spite of his injuries he’s young and healthy and should have a long life ahead of him.’
Pixie still marvelled at the fact that regardless of her own problems she had chosen to adopt Hector. But then, Pixie had triumphed over adversity many times in life and so had the little terrier. Hector had repaid her generosity a thousand times over. He comforted her and warmed her heart with his shy little ways and eccentricities. He had filled some of the giant hole that had opened up in Pixie’s world when Holly and Angelo had moved to Italy.
She had lost her best friend to marriage and motherhood but their friendship had been more damaged by the secrets Pixie had been forced to keep. There was no way she could tell Holly about her brother Patrick’s gambling debts without Holly offering to settle those debts for them. Holly was very generous but Patrick was not Holly or Vito’s responsibility, he was Pixie’s and had been since the day of their mother’s death.