get used to it,” Byron replied with a dismissive shrug.
The way he said it had her wondering. “Do you live on the premises?” Her words mingled with the echo of her heels on the marble floor. It had a mournful sound about it.
Byron looked down at her before answering. “Mr. Plageanos likes his people close by.”
Close was not a word she would have associated with the premises. God only knew how many people could actually live within the structure without once bumping into one another. “Doesn’t your wife mind not having a place of her own?”
She thought she heard a slight sound, something akin to a short laugh, escape his lips. “She might. If I still had one.”
Still. Which meant he’d had one once. Kady pressed her lips together. She’d done it again. Even though she tried to curb it, she had a habit of probing; she always had. Her father had told her more than once that it would get her in trouble one day.
“It is good to having a mind that asks question,” he’d said in his heavily accented voice. “Not always so good to having a mouth that is doing the same thing.”
As usual, her father was right. Kady was about to apologize but didn’t get the chance to follow through. They’d reached Milos’s bedroom and Byron was knocking on the ornate door. The next moment, she heard a faint voice telling them to come in.
The room and the bed dwarfed him. Milos was not a little man in any sense of the word, but he appeared so in the custom-made double-king-size bed placed in a room that looked as if it could comfortably hold the population of a small third-world country. A giant hulk of a man she recognized as Milos’s other bodyguard, Ari, was standing quietly off to one side.
“You should have been here sooner,” Milos told her. A giant paw of a hand was dramatically placed over his heart. He tightened his fingers around it. “I didn’t think I could hold on until you came.”
Kady came forward, smiling at him, aware of the game. “And yet, you did.” Her smile deepened as she assessed his color and the way he drew air into his lungs. Both were favorable. “I’m very glad.”
Milos’s eyes shifted to the man behind her. “That makes two of us. Maybe three, eh, Byron?”
“Yes, Milos,” Byron acknowledged.
“All right.” Kady set her medical bag down on the oversize nightstand and opened it. “Tell me what you feel, Mr. Plageanos.”
Milos sighed, sliding slightly against his black satin sheets as he shifted. “Better now that you are here.”
Taking out her stethoscope, Kady looked at him pointedly. “And before I was here?”
Milos spread his hands wide with a little half shrug. “Not so good.”
Men didn’t like to talk about health. Kady knew that like so many people, Milos had harbored the thought, the dream, that he was immortal. That whatever illnesses had been visited upon his forefathers wouldn’t dare touch him. Finding out that he was wrong did not sit well with him.
She looked at the man, not with pity or sympathy, but with understanding. No one liked to think of their own mortality.
“I need more than that, Mr. Plageanos.” Kady paused to look over her shoulder at both Byron and Ari. The latter lumbered to his feet. “I need you two to wait outside while I examine my patient.”
Ari went out. After a moment’s hesitation, Byron turned to do the same. “I’ll be right back,” he told his employer. “I want to talk to the driver about the car. It was making a weird noise when it turned left.”
Milos nodded. “See why I keep him? Details. He is always thinking about details. A good man to have around.” And then he smiled and winked at Byron as he walked past him. “Maybe this time she’ll have her way with me,” he chuckled.
Kady put the stethoscope around her neck. “I came to prevent a heart attack, Mr. Plageanos, not to give you one.” Tickled, Milos began to laugh, so hard he started coughing. She was quick to place her hand on his chest, as if to steady him. “Easy, Mr. Plageanos, easy.”
As the laughter died and the door to the bedroom was eased shut, Kady unbuttoned the top of Milos’s silk pajamas and placed the stethoscope to his chest.
He yelped. “That’s cold!” he cried as he shivered.
She pulled it back immediately. “Sorry.” Kady blew on the silver surface, rubbing it against her palm to warm it up. After a beat she tried again. This time he didn’t jerk back. “Better?”
He nodded, never taking his eyes off her face. “Better.”
She frowned slightly. “Your heart’s still jumping around.” How long had that been going on? she wondered.
The exam was thorough but swift. Milos had even bought his own personal EKG machine so that he didn’t have to go into her office to have his heart monitored. And during the exam, Kady asked a few pertinent questions in between dodging blatant invitations they both knew he would never act on and neither would she. Her questions encompassed his lifestyle, what he’d been eating lately, what he’d been doing. His diet remained relatively unchanged. His activity, however, had heightened.
She listened and watched his face as Milos told her about the other company, Skourous Shipping, the one that was breathing down his neck and had been for quite some time now. Alexander Skourous and his grandson, Nicholas, were trying to steal his customers any way they could, he told her, the veins in his neck thickening as he spoke.
The rivalry between Milos Plageanos and Alexander Skourous, whose families had both originated from the same small fishing village in the south of Greece, had been steadily heating up over the past twenty-five years. In the last five, it had gotten especially ugly. Matters were not helped by the fact that Milos’s second wife had eloped with him a week before she was set to marry Alexander.
“This is not over the woman,” Milos assured her. “For that, Alexander should have sent me a thank-you note because I saved him from a terrible shrew. But he is trying to steal my oldest customer from me. My very first one,” he emphasized. “Theo is gone now, but his grandson…”
He waved his hand, unable to finish his sentence because the words he wanted to use to describe what he thought of his old friend’s grandson weren’t fit for her ears. In some ways, Milos was very much a courtly gentleman and she appreciated it.
Milos sat up, buttoning his pajama top as she put her stethoscope away. “I am a sentimental man—”
“Not to mention a superstitious one,” Kady pointed out, pausing to write something down on her prescription pad.
“Superstition is healthy.” Leaning back against his pillows again, he eyed the pad suspiciously. “It tells us where our place is.”
“I want you to stop thinking about the business so much and start thinking about you.”
“I am the business and the business is me,” he said with finality, then he nodded toward the pad. “What is that you are writing?”
“A prescription.” She tore off
