does have a certain reputation,” Aeolus admitted, the characteristic smile not in evidence now.
“An entirely deserved reputation,” Elias snarled. He stalked around the room. He wanted to punch the walls. Wanted to punch his father. “Damn it to hell! Antonides Marine is not failing!”
“So I hear. Socrates said it was doing very well indeed. He had to give me a pile for it,” Aeolus reflected with considerable satisfaction. “So much that he complained about it. Said he should have bought it five years ago. Said it was too bad he hadn’t known about it then.”
Which had been the whole point. One look at the Antonides Marine’s books eight years ago, and Elias had known their days as a company were numbered unless he could drag them back into the black.
He’d done it. But it had meant long long hours and cost-cutting and streamlining and reorganization and doing all of it without allowing the company to look as if it were in any trouble at all. He’d spent years trying to stay under Socrates Savas’s radar. For all the good it had done him.
“Good thing for us Socrates didn’t notice it then,” Aeolus reflected, as if it had just occurred to him.
“Good thing,” Elias agreed sarcastically, for once taking no pains to spare his father’s feelings.
Aeolus looked momentarily chagrined, but then brightened again and looked at his son approvingly. “You should be proud. You pulled us out of the abyss, Socrates says. Though I don’t know as I’d have called it an abyss,” he reflected.
“I would’ve,” Elias muttered.
Obviously Savas had had his eye on the business for a while whether Elias had known it or not. Circling like a vulture, no doubt. Not that he’d ever given any indication. But he was a past master at spotting prey, waiting for the right moment, then snapping up a floundering company.
For the past year Elias had dared to breathe easier knowing that Antonides Marine wasn’t floundering anymore. And now his father had sold the blackguard forty percent of it anyway?
Damnation!
So what did Savas intend to do with it? The possibilities sent chills down Elias’s spine. He wouldn’t let himself imagine. And he certainly wouldn’t hang around to watch. Knowing he couldn’t bear it gave him the resolve to say words he never ever thought he’d say.
“Fine,” he said, looking his father in the eye. “He can have it. I quit.”
His father gaped at him, his normally rosy countenance going suddenly, starkly white. “Quit? Quit? But…but, Elias…you can’t quit!”
“Of course I can.” Elias had been blessed with his own share of the Antonides arrogance and hauteur, and if Aeolus could sell the business that his son had rescued from the scrap pile without so much as a nod in his direction, then by God, Elias could certainly quit without looking back!
“But…” Aeolus shook his head helplessly, his hands waving in futility. “You can’t.” His words were almost a whisper, his face still ashen. There was a pleading note in his voice.
Elias frowned. He had expected sturm und drang, not a death mask.
“Why can’t I?” he asked with studied politeness, a hint of a not very pleasant smile on his lips.
“Because—” Aeolus’s hands fluttered “—because it’s…it’s written in the contract that you’ll stay on.”
“You can’t sell me with the company, Dad. That’s slavery. There’re laws against it. So, I guess the contract is null and void?” Elias smiled a real smile now. “All’s well that ends well,” he added, managing—barely—to restrain himself from rubbing his hands together.
But Aeolus didn’t look pleased and his color hadn’t returned. His fingers knotted and twisted. His gaze dropped. He didn’t look at his son. He looked at the floor without a word.
“What is it?” Elias said warily in the silence.
Still nothing. Not for a long, long time. Then, at last, his father lifted his head. “We’ll lose the house.”
Elias scowled. “What do you mean, you’ll lose the house? What house? The house on Long Island?”
His father gave an almost imperceptible negative shake of his head.
No? Not the Long Island house?
Then that meant…
“Our house?”
The family home on Santorini? The one his great-grandfather, also called Elias, had built with his bare hands? The one each succeeding generation of Antonides men and women had added to, so that it was home to not only their bodies but their history, their memories, their accomplishments?
Of course, they’d had the house on Long Island for years. They’d had flats in London, in Sydney and in Hong Kong.
But they only had one home.
But his father couldn’t mean that. The house on Santorini had nothing to do with the business! Never had. It belonged to his father now as it had belonged to his father and his father’s father before him. For four generations the house had gone from eldest son to eldest son.
It would be Elias’s someday. And, though he’d saved the company and all its holdings, none of them mattered to him as much as that single house. It held memories of his childhood, of summer days spent working building boats with his grandfather, of the dreams of youth that were pure and untarnished, though life was anything but. The house on Santorini was their strength, their refuge—the physical heart of the Antonides family.
It was the only thing Elias loved.
His fingers curled into fists. It was the only way he could keep from grabbing his father by the front of his emerald-green polo shirt and shaking him. “What have you done to our house?”
“Nothing,” Aeolus said quickly. “Well, nothing if you stay on at Antonides.” He shot Elias a quick, hopeful glance that skittered away at once in the face of his son’s burning black fury. He wrung his hands. “It was just a small bet. A sailboat race. A bet I made with Socrates. Which boat—his or mine—could sail to Montauk and back faster. I’m a better sailor than Socrates Savas!”
Which Elias had no doubt was true. “So what happened?”
“The bet was about the boats,” his father said heavily.
“I know. You raced the boats. So?”
Aeolus shot him an exasperated look. “I’m a better sailor than Socrates Savas. I don’t hold a candle to his son Theo!”
Elias whistled. “Theo Savas is Socrates’s son?”
Even Elias had heard of Theo Savas. Anyone who knew anything about sailing knew Theo Savas. He had sailed for Greece in the Olympics. He had crewed in several America’s Cup races. He had done windsurfing and solo sailing voyages that caught the hearts and minds of armchair adventurers everywhere. He was also lean, muscular and handsome, a playboy without equal and, naturally—according to Elias’s sisters—the
