was the doctor in charge of Aunt Beatrice.
Savannah’s beloved aunt had had another stroke.
Savannah tucked her daughters into bed, telling them their favorite rendition of the Cinderella tale for their bedtime story before ensconcing herself in the study to make the dreaded call to Leiandros.
She pulled up her household budget spreadsheet on the computer and ran the numbers one more time. Nothing had miraculously changed. She needed the monthly allowance. Even if she could manage to land a full-time job the very next day, starting wages in spite of a degree in business were not going to be enough to cover their household expenses and the increased cost of Aunt Beatrice’s medical care.
Savannah picked up the phone and dialed Leiandros’s office.
His secretary answered on the first ring. The conversation was short. Savannah agreed to fly out the following week, but she refused to bring her daughters. The secretary hung up after promising to call back within the hour with an itinerary.
Savannah was making herself a cup of hot tea in the kitchen when the phone rang only minutes later.
A sense of impending doom sent goose bumps rushing down her arms and up the backs of her thighs. She just knew the secretary wasn’t calling back with travel plans already.
After taking a steadying breath, she picked up the phone. “Yes, Leiandros?”
If she’d hoped to disconcert him, she was disappointed as there wasn’t even a second’s pause before he started talking.
“Eva and Nyssa must accompany you.”
“No.”
“Why not?” he demanded, his Greek accent pronounced.
Because the thought of taking her daughters back to Greece terrified her. “Eva has almost two weeks left of school.”
“Then come in two weeks.”
“I prefer to come now.” She needed the money now, not in two weeks. “Besides, I see no reason to disrupt the girls’ schedule for what will amount to an exhausting, but short trip.”
“Not even to introduce them to their grandparents?”
Fear put a metallic taste in her mouth. “Their grandparents want nothing to do with them. Helena made that clear when Eva was born.”
She’d taken one look at Savannah’s blue-eyed and blond-haired baby and decreed the child could not possibly be a Kiriakis. Eva’s eyes had darkened to green by the time she was a year old and her baby fine hair had been replaced by a thick mane of mahogany waves by the time she was four.
It was too bad Helena had refused point-blank to even come to see Nyssa. Savannah’s youngest had been born with the black hair and velvet brown eyes of her father.
Unmistakably a Kiriakis.
“People change. Their son is gone. Is it so strange Helena and Sandros should wish to know his off-spring?”
Savannah sucked in much needed oxygen and marshaled her thoughts. “Do they now acknowledge Eva and Nyssa as Dion’s?”
“They will when they meet them.”
No doubt. Both her daughters had enough physical characteristics of the Kiriakis clan that once seen their parentage could not be challenged, but that did not mean she was ready to introduce them to their family in Greece.
“How can you be so sure?” she asked, wondering how he knew of her daughters’ physical resemblance to their relatives.
“I have seen pictures. There can be no question Eva and Nyssa are Kiriakises.” The words sounded like an accusation.
“Dion’s pictures, you mean?”
She’d sent him frequent updates on the girls’ progress along with photos, hoping that one day he would show some inclination to acknowledge them. She’d felt her own lack of family and mourned her inability to know her own father and did not want the same grief visited on her daughters.
“Yes. I supervised the disposal of his effects from his Athens apartment.” Again Leiandros’s voice was laced with censure, as if she should have done the job herself.
After three years of separation and living independent lives on two different continents, she hadn’t even considered such a thing. “I see.”
“Do you?” he asked, his voice silky with unnamed menace and that awful sense of dread washed over her again.
“Have Helena and Sandros expressed a desire to meet them?”
“I have decided the time has come.”
And as the head of the Kiriakis clan, he expected the rest of the family to go along with whatever decision he made.
“No.”
“How can you be so selfish?” Condemnation weighted each word with bruising force.
“Selfish?” she asked, feeling anger roiling in her stomach, making it churn. “You call it selfish for a mother to wish to protect her children from the rejection of people that are supposed to love them, people that should have loved them since birth, but decided for their own obscure reasons not to?”
She knew she wasn’t being entirely fair. For six years, Savannah had believed Dion’s family had hated her because she was not the suitable Greek bride they had chosen for him to wed and therefore rejected her children. His phone call the night before he died effectively obliterated that theory.
Along with other stunning revelations, her dear husband had admitted that he’d been poisoning their minds with his insane jealousy, accusing her of infidelity, from almost the very start of their marriage. Helena and Sandros had what they believed to be legitimate reasons to question the parentage of Savannah’s daughters, but that didn’t make her any more willing to expose Eva and Nyssa to possible rejection and pain.
“Sandros and Helena will accept the girls with open arms.”
“Who do you think you are. God?”
Funny, she could actually sense the fury sizzling through the phone lines. He was not used to being questioned. He’d been in charge of the huge Kiriakis financial empire since his father’s unexpected death when Leiandros was twenty. At thirty-two, his arrogance and sense of personal power were as ingrained and natural to him as making his next million.
“Do not be blasphemous. It is unbecoming in a woman.”
She almost laughed out loud at how stilted he sounded, like someone’s maiden aunt giving lessons in etiquette. “I’m not trying to be offensive,” she replied, “I simply want to protect my daughters’ best interests.”
“If you expect those interests to include further financial support from the Kiriakis family, you will bring them to Greece.”
Savannah tried to draw in a breath, but it seemed to get stuck somewhere between her windpipe and her lungs. The edges of her vision turned black and she wondered with a sense of detachment if she
