huh?”
Selene, Aristedes’s wife and Kassandra’s best friend, had told her the broad lines about Kassandra before introducing them to each other, confident they’d work spectacularly well together. Which they did. But they’d only started being more than business associates in the past two months, gradually becoming close personal friends. Which Cali welcomed very much. She did need a woman to talk to, one of her own age, temperament and interests, and Kassandra fulfilled all those criteria. Although Selene certainly fit the bill, too, ever since Cali had given birth to Leo, being around family, which Selene was now, had become too...uncomfortable.
So Kassandra had been heaven-sent. And though they’d been delving deeper in private waters every time they met, it was the first time they’d swerved into the familial zone.
Glad to steer the conversation away from herself, she grinned at her new confidante. “Selene only told me the basics, said she’d leave it up to you to supply the hilarious details.”
Kassandra slid lower on the couch, her incredible hair fanning out against the cushions in a glossy sun-streaked mass, her Mediterranean-green eyes twinkling in amusement. “Yeah, I flaunted their strict values, their conservative expectations and traditional hopes for me. I wasted one huge opportunity after another of acquiring a socially enviable, deep-pocketed ‘sponsor’ to procreate with, to provide them with more perfect, preferably male progenies to shove onto the path of greatness, following my brothers’ and cousins’ shiningly ruthless example, and to perpetuate the romantic, if misleading, stereotype of those almighty Greek tycoons.”
Cali chuckled, Kassandra’s dry wit tickling her almost atrophied sense of humor. “They must have had collective strokes when you left home at eighteen and worked your way through college in minimum-wage jobs and then added mortification to worry by becoming a model.”
Kassandra grinned. “They do attribute their blood-pressure and sugar-level abnormalities to my scandalous behavior. You’d think they would have settled down now that I’ve hit thirty and left my lingerie-modeling days behind to become a struggling designer.”
Kassandra was joking here since at thirty she was far more beautiful than she’d been at twenty. She’d just become so famous she preferred to model only for causes now. And she was well on her way to becoming just as famous as a designer. Cali felt privileged to be a major part of establishing her as a household name through an innovative series of online ad campaigns.
Kassandra’s generous lips twisted. “But no. They’re still recycling the same nightmares about the dangers I must be facing, fending off the perverts and predators they imagine populate my chosen profession. And they’re lamenting my single status louder by the day, and getting more frantic as they count down my fast-fading attractions and fertility. Thirty to Greeks seems to be the equivalent of fifty in other cultures.”
Cali snorted. “Next time they wail, point them my way. They’d thank you instead for not detonating their social standing completely by bearing an out-of-wedlock child.”
A wicked gleam deepened the emerald of Kassandra’s eyes. “Maybe I should. It doesn’t seem I’ll ever find a man who’ll mess with my mind enough that I’d actually be willing to put up with the calamity of the marriage institution either for real, or for the cause of perpetuating the Stavros species. Not to mention that your and Selene’s phenomenal tykes are making my biological clock clang.”
Cali’s heart twitched. Whenever Kassandra lumped her with Selene, it brought their clashing realities into painful focus. Selene, having two babies with the love of her life. And her, having Leo...alone.
“Being a single parent isn’t something to be considered lightly,” she murmured.
Contrition filled Kassandra’s eyes. “Which you are in the best position to know. I remember how Selene struggled before Aristedes came back. As successful as she is, being a single mother was such a big burden to bear alone. Before her experience, I had this conviction that fathers were peripheral at best in the first few years of a child’s life. But then I saw the night-and-day difference Aristedes made in Selene and Alex’s lives....” She huffed a laugh. “Though he’s no example. We all know there’s only one of him on planet earth.”
Just as Cali had thought there was only one of Maksim. If not because of any human traits...
But Aristedes had once appeared to be just as inhuman. In his case, appearances had been the opposite of reality.
Cali sighed again. “You don’t know how flabbergasted I still am sometimes to see how amazing Aristedes is as a husband and father. We used to believe he was the phenomenally successful version of our heartless, loser father.”
It had been one specific night in particular that she’d become convinced of that. The night Leonidas—their brother—had died.
As she and her sisters had clung together, reeling from the horrific loss, Aristedes had swooped in and taken complete charge of the situation. All business, he’d dealt with the police and the burial and arranged the wake, but had offered them no solace, hadn’t stayed an hour after the funeral.
That had still been far better than Andreas, who hadn’t returned at all, or even acknowledged Leonidas’s death then or since. But it had convinced her that Aristedes, too, had no emotions...just like their father.
She’d since realized that he was the opposite of their father, felt too much, but had been so unversed in demonstrating his emotions, he’d expressed them instead in the support he’d lavished on her and all his siblings since they’d been born. But after Selene had claimed him, as he said, something fundamental had changed in him. He was still ruthless in business, but on a personal level, he’d opened up with his family and friends. And when it came to Selene and their kids, he was a huge rattle toy.
“So your father was that bad, huh?” Kassandra asked.
Cali took a sip of tea, loath to discuss her father. She’d always been glib about him. But it was suddenly hitting her how close to her own situation it all was.
She exhaled her rising unease. “His total lack of morals and concern for anything beyond his own petty interests were legend. He got my mother pregnant with Aristedes when she was only seventeen. He was four years older, a charmer who never held down a job and who only married her because his father threatened to cut him off financially if he didn’t. He used her and the kids he kept impregnating her with to squeeze his father for bigger allowances, which he spent on himself. After his father died, he took his inheritance and left.”
Cali paused for a moment to regulate her agitated breathing before resuming. “He came back when he’d squandered it, knowing full well that Mother would feed him and take care of him with what little money she earned or got from those who remained of her own family, those who’d stopped helping out when they realized their hard-earned money was going to that user. He drifted in and out of her and my siblings’ lives, each time coming back to add another child to his brood and another burden on my mother’s shoulders before disappearing again. He always came back swearing his love, of course, offering sob stories about how hard life was on him.”
Chagrin filled Kassandra’s eyes more with every word. “And your mother just took him back?”
Cali nodded, more uncomfortable by the second at the associations this conversation was raising.
“Aristedes said she didn’t know it was possible for her not to. He understood it all, having been forced to mature very early, but could do nothing about it except help his mother. He was only seven when
