jaw and took a deep, calculated breath.
Two years. It was a price he could pay. He’d paid far bigger ones. And this wasn’t just about his life, it was the life of his whole family.
He’d done everything else. How could he not do this?
“All right,” he said at last. “I’ll stay.”
His father beamed, breathed again, pounded him on the back. “I knew you would!”
“But I’m not answering to Socrates Savas. He’s not running things!”
“Of course not!” His father said, relieved beyond belief. “His daughter is!”
The new president of Antonides Marine International hadn’t slept a wink all night.
Tallie had lain awake, grinning ear to ear, her mind whirling with glorious possibilities and the satisfaction of knowing that her father was finally acknowledging she was good at what she did.
She knew it wasn’t easy for him. Socrates Savas was as traditional as a stubborn, opinionated Greek father could be—even though he was two generations removed from the old country.
In her father’s mind, his four sons were the ones who were supposed to follow his footsteps into the family business. His only daughter, Thalia, ought to stay at home, mend clothes and cook meals and eventually marry a nice, hardworking Greek man and have lots of lovely little dark-haired, dark-eyed Greek grandchildren for Socrates to dandle on his knee.
It wasn’t going to happen.
Oh, she would have married. If Lieutenant Brian O’Malley’s plane had not crashed seven years ago, she certainly would have married him. Life would have been a lot different.
But since Brian’s death she’d never met anyone who’d even tempted her. And not for her father’s lack of trying. Sometimes she thought he’d introduced her to every eligible Greek on the East Coast.
“Go pester the boys,” she told him. “Go find them wives.”
But Socrates just muttered and grumbled about his four sons. They were even more of a mystery to him than Tallie was. If she desperately wanted to follow him into business, Theo, George, Demetrios and Yiannis, had absolutely no interest in their father’s footsteps—or his business—at all.
Theo, the eldest, was a world-class open-ocean sailor. Tie him to an office or even stick him in a city and he would die. Socrates wasn’t sympathetic. He considered that his oldest son just “mucked about in boats.”
George was a brilliant physicist. He was unraveling the universe, one strand at a time. Socrates couldn’t believe people actually had theories about strings.
Demetrios was a well-known television actor with an action-adventure series of his own. His face—and a whole lot of his bare, sculpted torso—had recently been on a billboard in Times Square. Socrates had averted his eyes and muttered, “What next?”
But he wouldn’t have believed it if anyone had told him.
Yiannis, the youngest of Tallie’s four older brothers, who was as city-born and -bred as the rest of them, had, five years ago, finished a master’s degree in forestry and was living and working at the top of a Montana mountain!
It was Tallie who had always been determined to follow in her father’s footsteps. She was the one with the head for business. She was the one who had worked in stockrooms and storerooms, in warehouses and shipping offices, doing everything she could to learn how things worked from the ground up.
And she was the one her father had fired more than once when he’d found her working in one of his companies.
“No daughter of mine is going to work here,” he’d blustered and fumed.
So she’d gone to work for someone else.
He hadn’t liked that any better. But Tallie was as stubborn as her old man. She’d gone to university and done a degree in accounting. She’d taken a job in California, crunching numbers for a mom-and-pop tortilla factory. And while she was there, she’d learned everything from how to make tortillas to a thousand ways to cook with them to the cleverest way to market them. Then she’d gone back and got her MBA, working on the side for a Viennese baker who taught her everything he knew. If she were ever going into business for herself, Tallie decided, it would be in baking. She loved making cakes and tortes and pastries. But she preferred that as her relaxation.
Eighteen months ago, MBA in hand, she’d applied for another job with one of her father’s companies—and had been turned down.
So she’d gone to work for Easley Manufacturing, one of his biggest competitors. She’d been doing well there and had recently been promoted. She was on the fast track, the boss had told her. She’d hoped word would get back to Socrates.
Obviously it had.
Two weeks ago he’d rung and invited her to dinner after she got off work.
“Dinner?” she’d echoed. “With whom?”
Had he dredged up another eligible Greek, in other words?
“Just me,” Socrates said, offended. “I’m in the city. Your mother is in Rome with her art group. I’m lonely. I thought I’d call my daughter and invite her to a meal.”
It sounded perfectly innocent, but Tallie had known her father for twenty-nine years. She knew suppressed excitement when she heard it in his voice. She accepted, but not without reservations.
And when she’d met him at Lazlo’s, a Hungarian restaurant on the Upper East Side he’d suggested, she had looked around warily for stray males before she went to sit at the table with him.
But Socrates hadn’t come bearing Greeks for a change. Instead he’d offered her a job.
“A job?” Tallie had done her best to hide her incredulity while she found herself glancing outside to see if the late-May sun was still shining. The words hell froze over were flitting around in her brain. “What sort of job?”
Her father waited until the server had brought their dinners. Then he said in his characteristic blunt fashion. “I’ve just acquired forty percent of Antonides Marine International. They build boats. As major stockholder, I get to name the president.” He paused, smiling. “You.”
“Me?” Tallie’s voice squeaked. She blinked rapidly. Now she was sure that hell had frozen over. Or that she’d lost her mind.
But Socrates picked up his knife and fork and cut into his chicken paprika and said with a shrug, “You’ve always said you wanted to come into the business.”
“Yes, but—”
“So now you’re in.”
Tallie shook her head, mind still whirling. “I meant…I didn’t mean I expected you to buy me a company, Dad!”
“I didn’t buy you a company,” he said, enunciating every word. “I acquired part of a company. And so, I have a say in how it’s run. I want you to run it.”
Tallie
