No rats,” Aeolus said quickly. “Just a figure of speech.”
“Well, forget it.”
“No. You work too hard, Elias. I know I haven’t done my part. It’s just…it’s not in me. I—” Aeolus looked bleak.
“I know that, Dad.” Elias gave his father a sincere, sympathetic smile. “I understand.” Which was the truth. “Don’t worry about it. It’s not a problem.”
Not now at least. Eight years ago it had cost him his marriage.
No, that wasn’t fair. His father’s lack of business acumen had been only one factor in the breakup with Millicent. It had begun when he’d toyed with quitting business school to start his own boat-building company, to do what his grandfather had done. Millicent had been appalled. She’d been passionate about him finishing school and stepping in at Antonides. But that was when she’d thought it was worth something. When she found out its books were redder than a sunset, she’d been appalled, and livid when Elias had insisted on staying and trying to salvage the firm.
No, his father’s business incompetence had only highlighted the problems between himself and Millicent. The truth was that he should have realized what Millicent’s priorities were and never married her in the first place. It was a case of extraordinary bad judgement and one Elias was not going to repeat.
“But I do worry,” his father went on. “We both do, your mother and I. You work so hard. Too hard.”
Elias had never spoken of the reasons for the divorce, but his parents weren’t fools. They knew Elias had worked almost 24/7 to salvage the business from the state it had slid to due to his father’s not-so-benign neglect. They knew that the financial reality of Antonides Marine did not meet the expectations of their son’s social-ladder climbing wife. They knew she had vanished not long after Elias dropped out of business school to work in the family firm. And within weeks of the divorce being final, Millicent had married the heir to a Napa Valley winery.
Of course no one mentioned any of this. For years no one had spoken her name, least of all Elias.
But shortly after Millicent’s marriage, the fretting began—and so had the parade of eligible women, as if getting Elias a new wife would make things better, make his father feel less guilty.
As far as Elias was concerned, his father had no need to feel guilty. Aeolus was who he was. Millicent was who she was. And Elias was who he was—a man who didn’t want a wife.
Or a business partner.
“No, Dad,” he said firmly now.
Aeolus shrugged. “Sorry. Too late. It’s done. I sold forty percent of Antonides Marine.”
Elias felt as if he’d been punched. “Sold it? You can’t do that!”
Aeolus’s whole demeanor changed in an instant. He was no longer the amiable, charming father Elias knew and loved. Drawing himself up sharply with almost military rigidity, he looked down his not inconsiderable nose at his furious son.
“Of course I can sell it,” Aeolus said stiffly, his tone infused with generations of Greek arrogance that even his customary amiable temperament couldn’t erase. “I own it.”
“Yes, I know that. But—” But it was true. Aeolus did own Antonides Marine. Or fifty percent of it anyway. Elias owned ten percent. Forty percent was in trust for his four siblings. It was a family company. Always had been. No one whose name was not Antonides had ever owned any of it.
Elias stared at his father, feeling poleaxed. Gutted. Betrayed. He swallowed. “Sold it?” he echoed hollowly. Which meant what? That his work of the past eight years was, like his marriage, gone in the stroke of a pen?
“Not all of it,” Aeolus assured him. “Just enough to give you a little capital. You said you needed money. All last Sunday at your mother’s dinner party you were on the phone talking to someone about raising capital to buy some outfitter.”
“And I was doing it.” Elias ground out.
“Well, now I’ve done it instead.” His father rubbed his hands together briskly. “So you don’t have to work so hard. You have breathing room.”
“Breathing room?” Elias would have laughed if he hadn’t already been gasping. His knees felt weak. He wanted to sit down. He wanted to put his head between his knees and take deep desperate breaths. But instead he stood rigid, his fingers balled into fists, and stared at his father in impotent fury, none of which he allowed to show on his face.
“You didn’t need to sell,” he said at last in measured tones that he congratulated himself did not betray the rage he felt. “It would have been all right.”
“Oh, yes? Then why did we move here?” Aeolus wrinkled his nose as he looked around the newly renovated offices in the riverside warehouse Elias had bought and which until today his father had never seen.
“To get back to our roots,” Elias said through his teeth. There was no reason at all to pay midtown Manhattan prices when his business could be better conducted from Brooklyn. “This is where Papu had his first offices.” His grandfather had never wanted to be far from water.
Aeolus didn’t seem convinced. “Well, it’s obvious that things aren’t what they used to be,” he said with a look around. “I wanted to help.”
Help? Dear God! Elias took a wild, shuddering breath, raked a hand through his hair. With help like this he might as well throw in the towel.
Of course, he wouldn’t.
Antonides Marine was his life. Since he’d shelved his dream of building his own boats, since Millicent had walked out, it was the only thing he’d focused on. She would have said, of course, that it was the only thing he’d focused on before she’d left him. But that wasn’t true. And he’d done it in the first place for her, to try to give her the life she’d wanted. How was he to know she’d just been looking for an excuse to walk out?
Now it was all he had. All he lived for. He was determined to restore it to the glory his great-grandfather and his grandfather had achieved. And he was almost there.
But it hadn’t been an easy road so far, and he shouldn’t expect it would start now. Deliberately he straightened his tie and pasted a smile on his face and told himself it would be all right.
This was just one more bump in the road. There had been plenty of bumps—and potholes—and potential disasters in the road since he’d taken over running Antonides Marine.
With luck he could even work out a deal to buy the shares Aeolus had sold away. Yes. That was a good idea. Then there would be no more opportunity for his father to do something foolish behind his back.
Elias flexed his shoulders, worked to ease the tension in them, took another, calmer breath and then turned to his father, prepared to make the best of it.
“Sold it to whom?” he asked politely.
“Socrates Savas.”
“The hell you say!”
So much for calm. So much for polite. So much for making the best of it!
“Socrates
