and cream.
As the only son of one of the richest men in the world Jax had more money than he knew what to do with. Everywhere he went in Europe he was photographed and treated like a celebrity. Bands of adoring, manipulative and rapacious women tracked and hunted him much as if he were big game. But in the business field, he reminded himself with determined positivity, he had countless stimulating projects to command his interest and engage his brilliant mind.
One of Jax’s bodyguards brought a phone to him, his expression dour and apologetic. Jax compressed his lips and accepted the predictable call from his father. Heracles ranted and raved in a rage about the risk Jax had taken by going on the race track and driving at breakneck speeds. Jax said nothing because over the past two years he had learned that arguing or trying to soothe only extended such frenzied sermons. Since Argo’s shocking death, Heracles had developed a morbid and excessive fear of Jax participating in any activity that could possibly harm him and if he could have got away with wrapping his only surviving son in cotton wool and packing him away safely in a box he would have done so. While Jax valued his father’s new apparent attachment to him even if he didn’t quite trust it, he loathed the restrictive and interfering trappings of expectation that came with it.
Only for the sake of peace had Jax accepted the five heavily armed bodyguards he didn’t need and who accompanied him everywhere he went. But he remained every bit as stubborn and fiercely independent as he had always been and when he felt the need to relieve stress he still went deep-sea diving, mountain climbing and flying. He still slept with unsuitable women as well...the sort of women even his father couldn’t expect him to marry.
And why not? He loved being single and free as the air because he hated anyone trying to tell him what to do. On the only occasions he had strayed from that practical stance he had ended up in disastrous relationships, so now he didn’t ever do relationships, he only did sex and uncomplicated sex at that. Once he had run off with another man’s fiancée and barely lived to tell the tale, he recalled darkly.
Franca had crept into his bed one night when he was drunk and the deed of betrayal had been done before he’d even recognised who he was doing it with. Franca, of course, had simply used him to escape a life that had no longer suited her but he hadn’t grasped that little fact. He had fallen hook, line and sinker for her ‘damsel in distress’ vibe long before he’d appreciated that he was dealing with a highly manipulative and destructive alcoholic. He had betrayed his friendship with his former business partner, Rio, but in the end he had more than paid his dues sorting Franca out. But had he learned? Had he hell. After Franca had come his second biggest mistake...
Yet another female-shaped mistake. So, he didn’t want a wife and he didn’t want children either and nothing, certainly not any dormant desire to please his long-absent father, was going to change that, he reflected cynically as Kat Valtinos approached him bearing drinks and a winning smile...
* * *
‘I hate you doing work like this,’ Kreon Thiarkis hissed under his breath as his daughter brought him a drink. ‘It’s demeaning—’
‘Hard work is never demeaning, Dad,’ Lucy declared, her dimples flashing as she smiled down soothingly at him. ‘Don’t be a snob. I’m not half as posh as you are and I never will be.’
Kreon bit back tart words of disagreement because he didn’t want to hurt his daughter’s feelings, most particularly because she had only been in his life for the last six months and he was afraid of driving her away by acting like a heavy-handed parent. After all, Lucy had never had a proper parent to look out for her, he acknowledged guiltily. But fiercely independent and proud as she was at twenty-one years old, she had been very much down on her luck when she’d finally approached Kreon, toting his baby granddaughter in her arms, both of them shabbily dressed and half starved. The older man’s heart softened at the thought of little Bella, who was the most adorable toddler and the light of his life and his wife, Iola’s, for he and Iola had met and married too late in life to have a family. He loved having the two of them in his home but he was firmly convinced that his daughter and her child still very much needed a husband to look after them when he himself was no longer around.
And that would have been so easy to achieve if only Lucy weren’t so defensive and insecure, Kreon reflected in frustration, because his daughter was an extraordinarily beautiful girl. In the bar where she worked men stopped in their tracks simply to stare at her. With a mane of strawberry-blonde curls reaching halfway down her back, creamy skin and big blue eyes, she was a classic beauty and dainty as a doll. She made more on tips than any other waitress in the hotel and was, he had been reliably assured by the owner, who was a friend, a terrific asset to business.
Lucy went about her work, ruefully aware that the job she had insisted on taking only annoyed her father. Unfortunately, being a single parent was an expensive challenge even with the wonderful support her father and stepmother had given her in recent months. She was very grateful that she had come to Greece to finally meet her long-lost father for he and his wife had freely given both her and her daughter love, kindness and acceptance. Her father was the son of a Greek who had married an Englishwoman and he had grown up in London. Kreon was a wonderfully supportive parent and grandparent. Without a word of protest or reproach he had taken in Lucy and her child even though she hadn’t warned him about Bella when he’d first invited her out to Greece.
But while Lucy was willing to accept free accommodation as well as her stepmother Iola’s help as a sitter with Bella, she was determined not to become a permanent burden or to take too much advantage of the older couple’s generosity. She was willing to admit that she had desperately needed help when she’d first arrived in Athens but she was trying very hard now to stand on her own two feet. Her earnings might be small but that salary meant she could pay for the necessities like clothing for herself and her child and for the moment that was enough to ease her pride.
As she stepped away from a customer, her boss and the hotel owner, Andreus, signalled to her. ‘We’re hosting an important business meeting here in the rear conference room tomorrow morning at eleven,’ he informed her. ‘I’d like you to serve the drinks and snacks. I only need you for a couple of hours but I’ll pay you for a full shift.’
‘I’ll check with Iola but that should be fine because she doesn’t usually go out in the morning,’ Lucy said, before taking off to serve a customer waving his hand in the air to get her attention.
The customer tried to chat her up and get her phone number but Lucy simply smiled politely and ignored his efforts because she wasn’t even slightly interested in dating, or indeed in anything more physical, being well aware that the very fact she already had a child encouraged most men to assume that she would be a good bet for a casual encounter. She had been there, done that, lost the tee shirt and got a baby for her pains. Unhappily, as a green-as-grass nineteen-year-old virgin she hadn’t grasped that she was involved in a casual fling until it was far too late to protect herself and she had been ditched. In fact, having been treated with such devastating contempt and dismissal by Bella’s father, that final humiliation was still etched into her soul like a burn of shame that refused to heal whenever she thought about it...which was why she didn’t allow herself to think about it or him very often.
In any case, what was the point in agonising over past mistakes and misjudgements, not to mention the most painful and cruel rejections she had suffered? Agonising never did change anything. Lucy had learned that the hard way time and time again when she was a vulnerable child growing up in care, subject to the whims of others and unable to control where she lived or even who she lived with. Now it meant that she found it hard to trust people and if she didn’t have a certain amount of independence and choice she tended to feel horribly trapped and powerless.
But life, she reminded herself with dogged positivity, was getting better because for the first time in years
