The Latin Lover

EXCITEMENT lacing every movement of her limbs, Phoebe walked into the reception area for her father’s office. It was a new day for the Leonides clan. She could not wait to hear what her father had to say.

His secretary, a severe-looking woman in her fifties, who Phoebe knew from experience had a surprisingly soft heart, looked up. “Good afternoon, Miss Leonides. Your father is in a teleconference, but it should be ending any moment. Would you like to have a seat while you wait?”

“Yes, thank you.” Phoebe sat in a chair facing the window of the Athens high-rise and looked out at the familiar view.

Thrilled that her father had called her into the office to meet with him, she practically vibrated with anticipation. She was the first woman in her family to attend university overseas, and one of the few to attend university at all. Her father had been surprisingly supportive, not only of her request to go to university in America but of her desire to major in Business. She was almost positive he had set up this meeting to offer her a job at Leonides Enterprises. Why else would he request their discussion happen here, at the headquarters of the company?

It was a new era for the women in her family and Phoebe was beyond happy to be a part of it. Now if she could just convince Papa to dissolve the archaic agreement he and Theopolis Petronides had made when Phoebe was barely eighteen, she’d be ecstatic.

There was no way she could marry Dimitri Petronides. She barely knew him, despite how close their families were. It wasn’t like with his younger brother, Spiros. The gap in age between him and Phoebe had never stood in the way of their friendship, but the additional three years between her and Dimitri was an insurmountable distance. At least it felt like it.

Dimitri was a total ice man. There was no way she could wed someone she couldn’t imagine kissing.

She felt nothing for the older Petronides—unlike her feelings for his younger brother. She could not only imagine kissing Spiros, but doing a whole lot more. Of course it wasn’t all imagination, was it?

She was sure Dimitri would be just as happy to dismiss the arrangements made by their elders as she would. After all, it wasn’t he who had come to see Phoebe during the four years she had attended university in the States. Not once.

It had been Spiros.

Her friend and…after the last visit…more. Inner warmth and a series of tingles throug

hout her body suffused her as she remembered that visit. She had learned beyond the shadow of a doubt that the attraction she had felt for him for so long—the attraction she had always believed to be hopeless—was returned.

She had not seen him since her return to Greece, but that was because his honor would not allow him to do so. Not with that ridiculous agreement in place—an agreement she was set on dissolving.

Regardless of how close the two families were, marriage between her and Dimitri was not the way to cement that connection. Frankly, it should never have been considered. A multigenerational friendship was not a compelling enough reason for two people with so little in common to join their lives. That kind of thinking had gone out with the Industrial Revolution, or at least it should have.

She suspected the agreement had less to do with the creation of a family legacy than with two men still grieving the losses of their dearest friends. Her father and Dimitri’s grandfather had been looking for a way to compensate for those losses.

Theopolis Petronides had been best friends with her grandfather. Their sons had continued that tradition. Aristotle Leonides and Timothy Petronides had been as close as any brothers. A generation later, she and Spiros had drawn just as close.

When his parents had died, the story was that Spiros had refused comfort from everybody. However, he would spend hours playing with the year-old baby girl who adored him even more than her own parents.

Phoebe.

He had returned the favor of being the only solace she could accept when her beloved grandfather had died eight years later. By then Spiros had been a young teen, who was much too cool to hang out with a little girl still in pigtails, but that hadn’t stopped him. She thought she’d probably fallen in love with him then. Though at the time everyone had said she had a bad case of hero-worship.

Her feelings for him had grown as she’d got older, and deepened into something much more intimate along with her burgeoning womanhood.

By the time she’d reached eighteen she’d been riding the rollercoaster of unrequited romantic love for more than three years. Spiros had been a good friend to her, but that was all, and watching him with his girlfriends had grown more painful than she could bear. It was a story as old as time, but she’d known that for her there would be no miraculous happy ending.

As far as her childhood hero was concerned, Phoebe might have been his sister. In fact, when she’d asked her father why he and Tio Theo wanted her and Dimitri to wed, rather than her and Spiros, he had said Spiros was too much like her brother. It would almost be incestuous. Her secret fantasies disagreed, but she couldn’t argue the fact that Dimitri was the oldest—and the better prospect because of it.

Her elders’ attitudes, along with the evidence of her own eyes, had made Phoebe realize once and for all that her love for Spiros was hopeless. Spiros was very popular with women—gorgeous, sophisticated, experienced women. Women Phoebe, an often shy, totally innocent teen, had had no hope of competing with.

Phoebe’s agreement to the suggested merging of their two families by an eventual marriage between herself and Dimitri had been an admittedly foolish attempt to do one of two things. Either get over her fixation on Spiros, or catch his attention and make him see that she was indeed a woman. If she was old enough to become promised to his older brother, she was old enough to be of interest to him.

Predictably, neither outcome had come to pass. Though it could not be denied that Spiros did see that she was a woman now, the agreement was in the way, not a catalyst.

The first time he’d come to see her at university she’d been feeling extremely homesick. It must have shown in the e-mails they’d been exchanging, because he’d showed up at her dorm two days after her latest e-mail, devastating smile in place.

He’d taken her to dinner and kept her up late talking. When she’d asked him what he was doing in the country, he’d said he had business interests he was seeing to. He’d made similar excuses to come by and see her at least twice a year. In between times they’d e-mailed one another almost daily, and he had called her at least once a month.

He’d often made the joke that he was looking after Dimitri’s interests—while she had fruitlessly wished the interests were those of Spiros himself.

She’d seen him whenever she was home from university for holidays as well. In fact, she saw him way more than she ever saw Dimitri. The older man couldn’t be bothered to spend time with her. He’d made no effort to get to know her better, and was rarely in Greece when she was. It wasn’t possible that he really wanted to marry her, and she didn’t understand why he had agreed to the future nuptial plans either.

For goodness’ sake, there were even rumors he had a girlfriend in Paris. Everyone thought she was too naive to know about it, but she wasn’t. And the very fact it didn’t bother her was all the indication she needed that she had no feelings for Dimitri in that regard. It about killed her every time she saw a gossip rag story about Spiros and his latest flame, though.