With this ring...

After a whirlwind affair, Greek billionaire Jax Antonakos left Lucy Dixon heartbroken and—although he didn’t know it—pregnant! Now Lucy is determined to make a new life with her tiny daughter, yet when Jax sweeps back into her world, she cannot mask her instant response to his seductive charisma!

...I thee buy!

For Jax, a ready-made heir is well worth bidding for—especially when it guarantees making Lucy’s luscious curves his. He’s determined to stake his claim on her body—and their baby—by reminding her of their insatiable chemistry in the wedding bed!

‘Look at me,’ Jax urged, breaking the smouldering silence.

And Lucy looked, even though she knew she shouldn’t, feeling desire clawing at her insides, awakening the yearning buried deep within her body. A ragged breath escaped her…her pulse raced.

‘We’re getting married as soon as it can be arranged,’ Jax decreed.

Her head flew up. ‘You can’t just—’

‘We do it for Bella. Together we make a family,’ Jax intoned.

‘Do you really want to do this?’ Lucy whispered shakily.

‘I want you. I want my daughter. To give her what we both want—to give her what she deserves—we have to get married. We will fight,’ Jax forecast. ‘But we’re good at making up again.’

Lucy flushed and nodded jerkily, and he laughed huskily, for they had always ended up in bed after arguments, taking refuge in the sexual unity that bridged their differences.

‘You say the craziest things,’ Lucy muttered, shaking her head even while locked to the stunning green eyes gleaming below his black lashes.

‘I will say whatever I have to say to get that ring on your finger,’ Jax admitted truthfully. ‘The world’s your oyster tonight, koukla mou.’

Brides for the Taking

With this ring…

At their mother’s deathbed Polly and Ellie Dixon are given a name, a ring and the news of a half-sister they’ve never met!

The search for their heritage leads these three sisters into the paths of three incredible alpha males…and it’s not long before they’re walking down the aisle!

Don’t miss this fabulous trilogy, starting with Polly’s story…

The Desert King’s Blackmailed Bride

February 2017

Continuing with Ellie’s story

The Italian’s One-Night Baby

April 2017

Finishing with Lucy’s story

Sold for the Greek’s Heir

June 2017

Sold for the Greek’s Heir

Lynne Graham

www.millsandboon.co.uk

LYNNE GRAHAM was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen romance reader since her teens. She is very happily married to an understanding husband who has learned to cook since she started to write! Her five children keep her on her toes. She has a very large dog who knocks everything over, a very small terrier who barks a lot, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.

Books by Lynne Graham

Mills & Boon Modern Romance

Bought for the Greek’s Revenge

The Sicilian’s Stolen Son

Leonetti’s Housekeeper Bride

The Secret His Mistress Carried

The Dimitrakos Proposition

Brides for the Taking

The Desert King’s Blackmailed Bride

The Italian’s One-Night Baby

Christmas with a Tycoon

The Italian’s Christmas Child

The Greek’s Christmas Bride

The Notorious Greeks

The Greek Demands His Heir

The Greek Commands His Mistress

Bound by Gold

The Billionaire’s Bridal Bargain

The Sheikh’s Secret Babies

The Legacies of Powerful Men

Ravelli’s Defiant Bride

Christakis’s Rebellious Wife

Zarif’s Convenient Queen

Visit the Author Profile page at

millsandboon.co.uk for more titles.

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For Rachel and Michael, for their unswerving support and their ability to consider my characters as seriously as I do.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Brides for the Taking

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

Extract

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

IN THE PIT, Jax Antonakos climbed out of the low-slung car, adrenalin still pumping fiercely from the excitement of the race. Only a show race for charity, though, he reminded himself wryly, bracing himself as he was engulfed by a large, noisy crowd of people.

He yanked off his helmet, revealing tousled black hair and eyes as strikingly green as emeralds, and the usual collective female gasp of appreciation sounded. While he stripped off his track regalia, photographers flashed cameras, journalists demanded quotes and shot questions at him and beautiful women tried to sidle closer to him, but then all of that was the norm in Jax’s goldfish bowl of a world.

Jax, however, ignored all of them to stride over and congratulate the winner of the race and the reigning world champion.

‘You gave me a good run for a man who hasn’t been behind a wheel in years!’ Dirk conceded cheerfully. ‘Maybe you shouldn’t be pushing numbers behind a desk, maybe you should still be racing.’

‘No, Jax is a business genius,’ a female voice crowed from Jax’s other side, and before he could react the bubbly brunette wrapped her arms round him with enthusiasm. ‘Thank you so much for stepping in last minute to do this when Stefan had to let me down. You know how grateful I am.’

‘Kat,’ Jax acknowledged, frowning as the photographers predictably went for a shot of them as a couple. But he and Kat Valtinos weren’t a couple, no matter how much the media and their families wanted them to be, both of them being conveniently young, single and very rich.

Jax stepped back from Kat with a guarded smile. He liked Kat, he had always liked her but his father was in for a disappointment if he was still hoping for a dynastic marriage that would unite their parents’ massive business empires. Unfortunately the photos would only encourage him in that delusion.

‘Let’s get you a drink,’ Kat urged, closing a possessive arm round his spine. ‘I really appreciate you flying out here and doing this for me today at such short notice—’

‘It was for a good cause,’ Jax pointed out. ‘And you’re a friend—’

‘A friend who could be so much more,’ Kat whispered with laden intent in his ear.

‘I enjoyed the race,’ Jax admitted, choosing to be tactful and sidestep her leading comment. After all, there was no kind way of telling her why she was wasting her time chasing him and, with his reputation for womanising, it would be sheer hypocrisy for him to do so. Even now he retained fond memories of Kat’s raunchy wildness when they were teenagers and he had been on the outskirts of the same social set but he still wasn’t willing to marry a woman who had slept with every one of his friends. If that was a double standard, so be it, he acknowledged grimly.

In any case, he didn’t want a wife, any kind of wife. Nor was he prepared to deliver the grandchildren his father, Heracles Antonakos, was so eager to have. Parenting was a minefield: Jax knew that better than anyone because he had stumbled through his own very unhappy childhood, filled as it had been with constant change and even more constant emotional drama.

His parents had gone through a bitter divorce when he was only a toddler and for the following twenty-five years his father had pretty much ignored his younger son’s existence. Heracles’s elder son, Argo, had been born from his first marriage. Widowed, Heracles had plunged into his second marriage far too quickly and he had never forgiven his second wife, Jax’s mother, for her subsequent infidelity. Jax had paid the price for his mother’s extra-marital affair in more ways than one. He had had no safe harbour from which to escape the fallout of his mother’s broken relationships, nor any paternal support. He had struggled alone through Mariana’s divorces, suicide attempts and regular stays in rehabilitation facilities.

And one of his earliest memories was of hiding in terror in a cupboard from one of his mother’s druggie meltdowns. He must have been about three years old, he mused, old enough and wise enough to know that he would be kicked and punched if she found him before the rage wore off. His mother, a gorgeous, much-adored film star on the public stage and a drug-addled monster behind closed doors. That was the woman whose tender mercies his father had left him to rely on as a defenceless child.

And then, when he was twenty-six years old, everything had suddenly and quite miraculously changed. His half-brother, Argo, had died in a bungled mugging in a city street and without the smallest warning Heracles Antonakos had moved on surprisingly fast from his grief and had begun to take a passionate interest in the younger son he had snubbed for years. Of course, Jax’s mother had been gone by then, Jax reminded himself ruefully, but he still could not adequately explain or understand the very abruptness of his father’s change in attitude. Even so, the paternal recognition and support he had craved from his earliest years had unexpectedly and finally become his. Naturally he still wondered if his father’s change of heart would last and life being what it was, of course, he had discovered a whole new set of challenges because life as the Antonakos heir was not all peaches 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 she was daring to start putting down roots. She was happier than she had been in years and hoping to come up with a plan to improve her career prospects for Bella’s sake. Very probably she would accept her father’s offer to pay for some sort of job training or further education that would enable her to move out of low-paid employment. Perhaps it was finally time to start making some long-term decisions and think like a responsible adult, she told herself firmly.

‘You’re worth so much more than this kind of grunt work...’ Bella’s father had told Lucy two years earlier in Spain.

Well, look just how badly daring to have dreams and believe in them had turned out for her then, Lucy reflected, rigid with regret and pain as she stood at the bar to collect an order. Her friend at the time, another waitress called Tara, had been far more realistic about that relationship.

‘He’ll sleep with you and dump you and move on the minute he gets bored,’ Tara had forecast, although the words she had used had been much earthier. ‘Guys like that don’t stick with girls like us. We’re only good enough to party with for a few nights.’

Perspiration broke on Lucy’s short upper lip and she wanted to punch herself hard for letting herself drift even momentarily down that bad memory lane, because hindsight only made her more ashamed of how stupid and naïve she had been. It was not as if she hadn’t known what men were like, not as if she had grown up in some little princess castle, always protected and loved. She should have known better and she had yet to forgive herself for her rashness.

But at the end of her shift, when she got home to her father’s very comfortable small town house and crept into the bedroom she shared with her daughter, she realised that nothing was quite that cut and dried. Bella slept nestled in her cot, curly black hair dark against the bedding, her olive skin flushed by sleep, long lashes screening her bright green eyes. Bella was gorgeous, like a little angel, Lucy thought with her eyes stinging and, although she could be sorry for everything else, she could not find it in her heart to regret Bella’s existence in any way.

‘Come with us to this dinner on Saturday night,’ Iola urged over breakfast the next morning. She was a curvy brunette in her late forties with smiling dark eyes. ‘It would please your father so much.’

Lucy went pink as she washed her daughter’s face clean of breakfast debris. She knew that her dining out with them would please Kreon, but she also knew it would entail fending off the advances of at least two handpicked young men because her father’s current main aim in life seemed to centre on finding her an eligible boyfriend. In that line Kreon was old-fashioned because he refused to credit that Lucy choosing to remain a single parent could be a viable plan for the future.

‘Mum... Mum,’ Bella carolled cheerfully as she was released from the high chair and set down to toddle somewhat clumsily round the room.

Lucy steadied her daughter as she almost fell over the toy box and ruffled her untidy curls. Curls, aside of the colour, just like her own, frizzy and ungovernable in humid weather, explosive when washed. Lucy looked back at her stepmother uncomfortably. She felt like an ungrateful brat for her reluctance to do what her father wanted her to do. ‘I’m just not interested in meeting anyone at present...maybe in a few months I’ll feel differently,’ she added without much conviction.

‘You had a bad breakup and you went through a lot alone afterwards,’ Iola acknowledged gently. ‘But your father’s a man and he doesn’t get it. I did try to explain to him that this is more of a healing time for you—’

‘Yes, that’s it, that’s exactly it!’ Lucy exclaimed, giving the older woman a sudden impulsive and appreciative hug. ‘I’m not ready right now, not sure if I’ll ever be though...’

‘Not all men are like Bella’s father. There are decent caring men out there,’ Iola reminded her quietly. ‘Nobody knows that better than me. I kissed a lot of frogs before I met Kreon.’

Lucy grinned and then laughed because her stepmother really did understand her viewpoint. A few minutes later, she left the town house and set out to walk to the small select Hotel Palati where she worked. Sited in an exclusive district in Athens, the hotel catered mainly to a business clientele.

Her father had met Iola when he’d engaged her as a PA in a property rental business that had eventually gone bust. But then Kreon had led a chequered ‘boom to bust and back again’ life and had been divorced once for infidelity. Lucy had respected his honesty with her. Even on the subject of her late mother, Kreon had proved to be painfully frank. Kreon hadn’t once whitewashed his own failings or hidden the fact that he had gained a criminal record over some pyramid selling scheme he had got involved with as a younger man. Yet in spite of that honesty, Lucy still wasn’t quite sure what actually funded her father’s comfortable lifestyle.

She knew that Kreon gambled and took bets on a near professional basis and that he was always enthusiastically involved in some hopefully lucrative business scheme of one kind or another. Whatever he did, he seemed to be successful at it. Even so, she would not have been entirely surprised to learn that some of his ventures skated a little too close to the edge of breaking the law. But basically because he and Iola had given Lucy and her daughter both the home and the love Lucy had never known before, she closed her eyes to that suspicion and minded her own business the best she could.

After all, there truly were shades of grey between the black and white of absolute right and absolute wrong, she ruminated ruefully. Nothing and nobody was perfect. Even at the height of her passionate infatuation with Jax, she had recognised that he was flawed and all too human. He had been moody, controlling, domineering and arrogant and they had fought like cat and dog on a regular basis because, while Lucy might be only five feet tall and undersized, she was no pushover. At heart, she was stubborn and gutsy and quick-tempered. Even if Jax hadn’t let her down so horribly, it would never have worked between them, she reasoned, feeling pleasantly philosophical on that score and firmly stifling the painful little push of heartache that still hollowed out her tummy. So, she’d had her heart broken just as Iola and thousands of other women and men had. It had only made her more resilient and less foolish and naïve, she told herself squarely.

The hotel manager showed her into the lofty-ceilinged back room, which had been comprehensively redecorated only weeks earlier with an opulence that was calculated to appeal to the more discerning customers.

Sometimes when Lucy daydreamed she wondered, if she had come from a more fortunate background, would she have become one of the elegant well-educated young businesswomen she saw round the hotel. Unfortunately she had been handicapped at the outset of life by her birth. Her parents’ marriage had broken down after her mother had had an affair.

‘Annabel always thought some better man was waiting for her round the next corner,’ Kreon had said wryly of Lucy’s mother. ‘I wasn’t rich and I lived by my wits and she had big ideas. We were living in London then where she was struggling to get the finance to set up her nursery business. But my father had returned to Greece after my mother died and he fell ill out here. I had to go to him. When I left London I had no idea Annabel was pregnant and when I contacted her to tell her that I was coming back she told me we were finished because she had met someone else. Now from what you’re telling me, it seems she may have learned that she had this dreadful disease and she didn’t want me around even though she had my child. I can’t understand that, I will never understand that...’

And Lucy couldn’t understand it either because, just listening to Kreon talking, she had recognised that he had loved her mother and had planned to return to London to be with her. But the more Kreon had spoken of her mother’s beauty and her feverish love and need for fresh male attention, the more Lucy had suspected that there definitely had been another man and Annabel had burnt her boats for ever with Kreon shortly before illness had cruelly claimed her future.

Lucy had been two years old when Annabel was hospitalised and her daughter put into care. Her only memory of her mother was of a beautiful redhead lying in bed and shouting at her, so she wasn’t sure that the mother who had surrendered her to the authorities had been that much of a loss in the parent stakes. Kreon had described a flighty, selfish personality, ill-suited to the kind of personal sacrifices a mother was often forced to make. And when, to Lucy’s very great astonishment, Kreon had revealed that Annabel had actually had two other daughters being raised by her own mother somewhere in northern England, Lucy had been silenced by that shattering news.

Apparently she had two half-sisters somewhere, born from her mother’s previous liaisons. Some day Lucy planned to look into that startling discovery but she didn’t even know where you started in such a search because, not only had she no money to pursue enquiries, but also no names even to begin with. Naturally all these years on Kreon didn’t recall such details about Annabel’s background and history. After all, he had never met Annabel’s mother and had been stonewalled by Annabel when he’d asked to do so. All he had remembered was that Annabel never went to visit the two little girls she had left behind her and he had said that even then he had recognised that as a warning sign that Annabel’s attachments were of the shallow sort.

Lucy had counted herself lucky that she was not equally superficial because she adored Bella and would have laid down her life for her child, counting Bella as one of the few good developments in a life that had been far from easy or happy. On the other hand, had she cared less about Jax she would have been less devastated when he disappeared. My goodness, she had fallen apart at the seams and done stupid stuff, she recalled ruefully. She had been thrown off his father’s yacht and warned never to show her face at the marina again while being marched off by security guards. She had been shouted at, called nasty names and utterly humiliated in her fruitless pursuit of Jax. All because she was fundamentally stupid, she conceded with regret.

After all, it had been crazy of her to believe that she meant anything more to Jax than an easily forgettable sexual fling, and when he was done with a woman, he was definitely done. The crewman on the yacht had called her a cheap whore as he’d bodily manhandled her off the polished deck and forced her down the gangway. She had fallen, been hurt and bruised by that brutality and she had been pregnant at the time. That was one reason she had never told her father the whole truth about Bella’s parentage, preferring him to assume that Bella was the result of some one-night stand with a man in Spain. She knew Kreon would seek revenge and restitution if she ever told him the whole story.

So, in a way, staying silent was protecting her father from doing anything rash, she reasoned uneasily. Kreon was extremely protective. He would hit the roof if he realised that Lucy had been homeless even though Bella’s father was a rich man, who could so easily have helped her and their child. A rich man, who was also Greek. That information wouldn’t help either when Kreon was so immensely proud of his heritage.

But then Lucy had long since decided that rich people were pretty much untouchable, unlike the rest of humanity. The very rich had the power and the money to hold the rest of the world at bay and she saw the evidence of that galling fact every time she saw Jax in the media. Jax surrounded by bodyguards and beautiful women, never alone, never approachable, as protected and distanced from ordinary people as an exhibit in a locked museum case. Jax Antonakos, renowned entrepreneur and billionaire in his own right with a daddy who had billions also.

Her hands trembled as she set out china on the trolley awaiting her. She hated Jax now with the same passion she had once put into loving him. He had strung her along, faked so many things and she could never, ever forgive the fact that he had quite deliberately left her stranded in Spain without a home or a job or any means of support. That she had been pregnant into the bargain was just her bad luck, but then Lucy had little experience of good luck.

A cluster of chattering businessmen entered and she served the coffee, standing back by the wall to dutifully await any further requests. Beyond the ajar door there was a burst of comment and then a sudden hush and the sound of many footsteps crossing the tiled hallway outside. The door whipped back noisily on its hinges and two men strode in, talking into ear pieces while checking the exit doors and all the windows, and that level of security warned Lucy that someone tremendously important was evidently about to arrive. The security men backed against the wall in silence and two more arrived to take up stances on the other side of the room. The almost militaristic security detail seemed so over the top for a small business meeting that Lucy almost laughed out loud.

And then Jax walked in and she stopped breathing and any desire to laugh died in her suddenly constricted lungs...

CHAPTER TWO

THE INSTANT LUCY saw that untidy black hair and the gorgeous green eyes so arrestingly bright against his bronzed skin, she wanted to run and keep on running and only innate discipline kept her where she was while she questioned her reaction. Why should she want to run? What had she done to be ashamed of? She was not a coward, she had never been a coward, she reminded herself doggedly, unnerved by that craven desire to flee. Indeed if anyone should be embarrassed it should be Jax for the cruel way he had treated her.

Couples broke up all the time but the process didn’t have to be downright nasty. She hadn’t been a stalker. There had been no excuse for threats and no need whatsoever to run her out of the neighbourhood.

Recollecting that vicious goodbye, Lucy lifted her chin high. Seated centre stage at the circular table, the cynosure of all attention and conversation, Jax mercifully wasn’t looking round the room enough to notice her. Lucy might have overcome the urge to run but it did annoy her to find herself in a subservient role in Jax’s radius again. In a mad moment she had once fantasised about swanning through some swanky club some day looking like a million dollars and seeing Jax and totally ignoring him to demonstrate her disdain and overall superiority as a decent human being. But now that she was actually on the spot she discovered that she was indefensibly and horribly curious and could only stare at him.

He had kept his black hair short. Once he had worn it long but he had had it cropped not long after she’d first met him, hitting the more conventional note she had suspected his father preferred. In retrospect she found it hard to credit that they had once bonded over their absent fathers. Jax had admitted how recently his father had come back into his life and had shared his grief over the death of the half-brother he had loved, not to mention his mother’s abuse and infidelities. None of those deep conversations had fitted into what she assumed could be described as a typical short-term fling. But then that was Jax, a tough individualist, unpredictable, fiery and mysterious...the archetypal brooding hero beloved of teenaged girls with an overly romantic disposition, she concluded sourly.

That he was startlingly handsome had undoubtedly influenced the fantasies she had woven, she acknowledged, chewing at her lower lip, fingernails biting painfully into her palms. High cheekbones, strong clean jaw line, stunning eyes set beneath well-shaped ebony brows. Of course his mother had been a very famous and stunningly beautiful Spanish movie star and he had inherited her looks. In a big magazine article she had once read about him, which had been accompanied by a close-up photo, the journalist had raved about those dazzling wild green eyes and the spiky length of his sooty lashes.

Bella had his eyes. Lucy swallowed hard, recalling her feelings as her daughter’s blue eyes at birth had slowly transformed to an eerily familiar emerald in her innocent little face. Innocent, something Jax was not and had never been. And reading about his sexual exploits over the past two years had helped Lucy to understand that he had always been a selfish, ruthless womaniser but she had been too trusting and inexperienced to recognise his true nature. Her heart was fluttering a beat so fast behind her breastbone that she wanted to press a hand against it to slow it down.

And then the truth of her response hit her and she was aghast that in spite of everything her body could still react to the presence of his. He glanced up from the file he had been perusing and for a split second, a literal single heartbeat, she clashed in dismay with his fierce gaze. It was like an electric shock pulsing low in her pelvis, tightening bone and sinew, awakening sensations she had almost forgotten and had never felt since. Every pulse she possessed went crazy, her breath catching in her throat, her very skin as achingly sensitive as if he had actually touched her. And then that tiny moment was over and past as Jax blanked her and passed the file back to someone at the table while making some comment about profit margins.

Her Greek vocabulary was slowly growing but in unfamiliar scenarios she still got as lost as any non-Greek-speaking foreigner. And of course Jax was going to blank her, she told herself shakily. Had she really thought he would greet a worker bee as low on the proverbial food chain as a waitress? Her mouth compressed as she wondered anxiously how he would react to the news that he was a father were she to tell him. With furious hostility and denial, she reckoned, her skin turning clammy at the prospect. Jax had once been very upfront about the fact that he didn’t ever want children. Bearing that in mind, Lucy ruminated grimly, he should have been more careful to ensure that he didn’t get her pregnant.

Jax’s lean, chiselled features were rigid. He refused to look back in Lucy’s direction. He didn’t need to. That momentary image was stamped into his brain like a punch. What the hell was she doing in Athens? And her sudden appearance in his presence? Some sort of a set-up? And if so, why? Jax never took anything at face value any more. After all, he had once accepted Lucy for what she appeared to be and learned his very great error.

Bile tinged his mouth as he briefly recalled what he had read in that investigation file on her background: a string of drug offences stretching back years and convictions for soliciting sex. He had felt like a complete idiot. He had rushed off to see her, confront her even though it was late at night and then he had seen who she really was for himself...down an alley with a man enthusiastically giving up what she had made him wait weeks to enjoy.

Disgust and distaste flooded Jax, bringing back even less welcome memories of his mother’s rampant promiscuity and empty promises of fidelity. He had seen her cheating break more than one man who had adored her. His father didn’t know it because he had never dared to ask what his son’s life had been like with his mother but Heracles had not been the only man to be chewed up and spat out in pieces by Mariana, who had wilfully followed every stray sexual impulse. As for Lucy, she was a liar and a cheat and he did not forgive betrayal. The entire episode had been sordid in the extreme. So why was he remembering that she had given him the wildest, hottest sex he had ever had?

A stubborn push of raunchily sexual images infiltrated Jax’s hind brain even while he fought to hold them at bay and kept on talking about the project on the table. Hard as a rock behind his zip, Jax went rigid with angry aggression. How dared Lucy even walk into a room that contained him? He had always told himself that he had not inherited his father’s notorious temper and equally notorious ability to hold a grudge but just then he recognised that he had lied to himself. Had it been possible to bodily throw Lucy out, he would have done so!

One of the bodyguards nudged Lucy’s elbow and she glanced up, dragged from her own bemused thoughts with a vengeance. The older man indicated the coffee on the trolley and angled his head in his employer’s direction, clearly urging her to get on with her job.

Reddening all the way up to her hairline, Lucy unfroze in an effort to behave normally. Even so she had to fight a huge inner battle to force her legs over to the trolley and pour Jax a coffee when all she really wanted to do was empty the entire contents of the pot over his hateful, arrogant head. Without him looking once at her or indeed acknowledging her in any way, she settled the coffee at his elbow with a hand that trembled slightly. Next she laid out the snacks and topped up the cups, signalling the bar waiter at the door when one of the men requested a shot of ouzo to wash down his coffee.

From below screening lashes and the almost infinitesimal movements of his proud dark head, Jax tracked Lucy’s every move like a predator planning an attack. A blinding flash of memory assailed him: skin as translucent as fine porcelain in the dawn light, his fingers knotted into tumbling golden ringlets spread across a pillow, glorious bright blue eyes holding his, a tiny slender body with surprisingly sexy little curves reaching up to his. A little curvier than she used to be, he estimated abstractedly, remembering for a few seconds and then suddenly emerging again from that uncharacteristic reverie to answer a question, angrier and hotter than he had been in years.

The louse could at least have thanked her for the coffee, Lucy reflected with growing annoyance. Even a nod would have been acceptable but then Jax had always been a law unto himself, ferociously uncompromising and challenging, driven to succeed, survive and flourish as if it was in his genes. And perhaps it was. Only in a fantasy could there ever have been a scenario in which she believed that Jax Antonakos would settle down with a humble waitress... Bitterness gripped her and resentment shot through her like a sheet of lightning flashing off all her exposed nerve endings with painful effect.

Who the hell did Jax Antonakos think he was to treat her with such derisive dismissal?

Jax summoned Zenas, his head security guard, with an almost imperceptible flicker of his gaze and passed him a note. Zenas stood back to read it and confusion gripped his features for an instant before discipline kicked in and he left the room to do his employer’s bidding. Lucy paid little heed to the byplay and only tensed when her own boss appeared in the doorway and silently summoned her out into the hallway.

A frown line bisected the older man’s brow as he studied her. ‘Mr Antonakos wants to speak to you in private when he’s finished. I’m not sure how your father would feel about that request—’

Comprehension gripped Lucy fast. Andreus had no idea that she already knew Jax. He simply thought that Jax was trying to get off with her.

‘Please don’t mention this to Dad,’ she muttered unevenly, for that was not a connection she wanted made. Once a link of any kind was established, secrets could spill out.

Andreus cast open the door of a smaller room across the corridor. ‘Wait in there...but only if you want to,’ he added with deliberate meaning. ‘This is nothing to do with your employment here or with me. I have only passed on his request because I am very reluctant to offend so powerful a man.’

Lucy turned a slow, painful red, rage mushrooming inside her again as she imagined what her employer must be thinking. Jax wouldn’t care about appearances. Jax had never had to care about appearances. For an instant she almost walked away from the opportunity to tell Jax what she thought of him. But she was too nervous, too aware of what had happened the last time her very existence nearby had become objectionable to Jax Antonakos. He had paid her then boss in Spain to sack her and she had lost her job and the accommodation that went with it. That was the kind of power the super wealthy had. Her boss in those days had been outrageously frank with her, admitting that he couldn’t afford to keep her on when so much money to do otherwise was on offer and that he had had a poor summer season.

She paced the floor in the small room that was normally used as an office by the hotel housekeeper, thinking herself lucky that Jax hadn’t had a room in the hotel and called her there, which would have looked even worse. Why on earth after ignoring her would he have demanded a meeting? From his point of view that made no sense, she reasoned with a frown. After all, he had ditched her two years earlier without an explanation or even a text. He hadn’t turned up for their last date, hadn’t phoned, hadn’t done anything and when she had tried to contact him he had blocked her calls. Either he had simply tired of her or she had done or said something that had offended.

It hurt to look back and recall how many weeks she had tormented herself by pathetically wondering what she had done to annoy Jax. But nothing could have justified his subsequent behaviour in having her sacked and forced to leave the area like some vagrant whose very presence was offensive. That more than anything was what she could not forgive.

‘You literally have three minutes or you’ll miss your flight,’ Zenas warned Jax outside the door.

Jax strode into the room, absently wondering if there was actual truth in the idea that human beings needed closure following certain experiences because he could not imagine any other reason why he should still feel driven to confront Lucy. Two years ago, he had never wanted to see or speak to her again. But possibly curiosity provided more motivation than he was willing to admit, he reasoned impatiently, angry tension tightening his lean, darkly handsome features.

‘What the hell are you doing in Athens?’ Jax demanded.

Lucy spun round from the window to face him, inwardly reeling from the shock of Jax in the flesh standing close enough to touch. He was so tall and he radiated restive energy and dominant vibes in waves. Tensing, she lifted her head up but she still had to tip it back to actually see any part of him above chest level. Not for the first time her diminutive height struck her as an embarrassing flaw. Being almost child-sized often meant that people didn’t take her seriously or treat her like an adult. ‘What’s that got to do with you?’ she slung back sharply, her tone similar to his own.

Jax drew himself up to his full six-foot-three-inch height and glowered down at her, green eyes luminescent with rage because it had been two years since anyone but his father had challenged him. ‘Answer me,’ he ground out impatiently.

‘I don’t owe you any answers... I don’t owe you the time of day,’ Lucy traded with the kind of provocation that struck a deep and unwelcome note of familiarity with Jax.

‘You will answer me,’ Jax raked back at her in a raw undertone, watching as she angled her head back and struck an attitude, hand on hip. Strawberry golden curls slid round her shoulders, her hair falling round her heart-shaped face, accentuating the defiant blue of her eyes and the lush fullness of her rosy lips.

And that fast, that urgently, Jax wanted to throw her down on the desk and control her the only way he had ever really controlled her, with the seething passion that was the mainstay of his character. For the briefest of moments he allowed himself to imagine the hot, wet tightness of her and the pulse at his groin reacted with unbridled enthusiasm. He reminded himself that it had been a toxic relationship and that she had played him like a con artist with her stories, her fake innocence and her lies. A dizzy surge of rage ignited inside him like a threatening fireball.

‘If you don’t answer me you will live to regret it,’ Jax threatened in a wrathful undertone, every drop of his merciless Antonakos blood burning through him and hungry for a fight.

An angry spurt of fear made Lucy’s stomach turn over sickly. He was too influential to challenge as even her boss had reminded her. She knew Jax could cause trouble for her, maybe even for her father as well if she wasn’t careful. She might hate Jax but it would be insane to risk such penalties. ‘What am I doing in Athens?’ she repeated flatly. ‘I finally looked up my birth father and he lives here—’

‘But that was all lies,’ Jax breathed in momentary bewilderment. ‘You don’t have a Greek father.’

Her smooth brow furrowed with genuine confusion. ‘Lies? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I believe my birth certificate is as accurate as anyone else’s. At the moment I’m living with my father and his wife.’

‘That’s not possible,’ Jax told her, stiffening as a light knock on the door warned him that their time was up if he planned to make it to the airport. His long, lean frame swivelled as he half turned towards the door to leave, common sense and practicality powering him.

‘I just want you to know that I hate you and I’ll never forgive you for what you did to me,’ Lucy confided in a belated rush of angry frustration that she could not tell him what she really thought of him any more bluntly than that. In truth she wanted to scream at him, she wanted to throw herself at him and hammer him with angry fists for hurting her.

‘I didn’t do anything to you,’ Jax parried with complete cool.

‘It was vicious...what you did, unnecessary!’ Lucy condemned chokily, bitterness almost overpowering her along with a very human need to hit back. ‘Having me sacked? Leaving me penniless and homeless and forced to go back to the UK when I had nothing there!’

An ebony brow elevated at that improbable accusation of bullying behaviour on his part, Jax swung back to her just as another knock sounded on the door. Whatever else he might be, Jax prided himself on never having treated a woman badly. ‘I don’t have time for this and I shouldn’t make time for it either,’ he acknowledged grimly. ‘You’re a liar and a cheat—’

‘Of course you’re going to say stuff like that, rewrite history, because you’re so up yourself now,’ Lucy shot back at him in disgust as she thought about her innocent, trusting little daughter. ‘But I never lied to you or cheated on you and you never once thought about consequences, did you?’

He wanted her phone number but he wouldn’t ask for it, wouldn’t allow himself to ask for it. He knew what she was. He didn’t want anything to do with her. So, having reached that decision and feeling invigorated by it, he could not explain why he then turned back like a man with a split personality and told her to meet him for a drink the following evening at a little bar he patronised on the marina, a haunt of his for quiet moments, which the paparazzi had yet to discover. Even as he walked back out again, he was questioning the decision and regretting it, lean brown hands clenching into impatient fists. What the hell had he done that for?

But what had she meant by ‘consequences’? And how come she did have a Greek father when according to that file she did not?

He was simply curious, nothing wrong or surprising about that. His libido was not in the driver’s seat, he assured himself with solid conviction. Stray memories had briefly aroused him when he saw her again, nothing more meaningful. All men remembered incredibly good sex. Furthermore, he had a little black book of phonebook proportions to turn to when he felt like sex, hot and cold running women on tap wherever he travelled. That was the world he lived in. There was no way he could ever be tempted to revisit a manipulative little cheat like Lucy Dixon, he reflected with satisfaction.

Naturally, becoming the Antonakos heir had ensured that Jax became significantly more cynical about women. He didn’t listen to sob stories any more, he didn’t let his inherently dangerous streak of chivalry rule him. Indeed the sight of a woman in need of rescue was more like aversion therapy to him now. He knew from experience that that kind of woman was likely to be far more trouble than she was worth.

After all, how many times had he felt he had no choice but to race to his mother’s rescue? When the men she betrayed became violent as her lies were exposed? When she needed another spell in some discreet rehabilitation facility before she could be seen in public again? When he was forced to lie to protect her?

And yet at heart he had always known that his mother was a deeply disturbed and egocentric human being, undeserving of his care and respect. That was why his little sister, Tina, had died, he reminded himself bitterly. Mariana’s self-centred neglect of her younger child had directly led to the incident in which the toddler had drowned. But he had only been fourteen, so what could he possibly have done when so many adults had witnessed the insanity of his mother’s lifestyle and yet failed to act to protect either of her children?

Lucy walked home in a pensive mood. Of course she wouldn’t meet him, she told herself firmly. What would be the point? Bella! Jax was a father whether he liked it or not but she knew he wouldn’t like that news any more than he liked her. And why was her being in Greece such a big deal? What was it to him? It was not as though they were likely to bump into each other again in normal life. Jax lived against a backdrop of massive yachts, private jets and private islands. He didn’t rub shoulders with ordinary working people.

Yet a giant ball of despair was threatening to swallow Lucy up and she didn’t know why. Seeing Jax again, she recognised, had hurt and hurt much more than she had expected. It had brought back memories she didn’t want. She had loved him and had given her trust to a man for the first time ever. His sudden volte-face had almost destroyed her because she had given him so much she had felt bare to the world without him.

And yet he still wasn’t married. She had thought for sure that he would marry the wealthy heiress his father kept pushing in his direction, the very lovely but very bitchy Kat Valtinos. But then Jax was bone-deep stubborn. You could take a horse to water but you couldn’t make it drink and getting Jax to do anything he didn’t want to do was like trying to push a boulder up a steep hill.

Kat Valtinos had organised the party the night Lucy had met Jax on his father’s enormous yacht. Lucy’s memory wafted her back two years into the past. Back then, Jax had been in Spain setting up a new resort on the coast. When the caterers had mucked up with a double booking, Kat had personally trawled through the local bars seeking waitresses for the event.

‘You two will do,’ she had said to Lucy and Tara, looking them up and down as though they were auditioning as strippers. ‘You’re young and pretty and sexy. Just what men like. You put your make-up on with a trowel,’ she had told Tara critically and to Lucy she had said, ‘You need to show more leg and cleavage.’

If the money hadn’t been so good, Lucy wouldn’t have done it but back then she had lived on a budget where no tips meant stale bread and going hungry. Their boss didn’t feed them for free and they had no cooking facilities in their mean little attic room, which had been hot as hell up under the eaves above the restaurant kitchen. Any extra cash was deeply welcome in those days.

The party had been full of blowhard bellicose men talking themselves up in Antonakos’s company and drinking too much. One of them had cornered Lucy when she was sent to a lower deck to restock the bar from the supplies stored there. She had been trying to fight him off when Jax had intervened. Jax, blue-black glossy hair brushing his shoulders, green eyes glittering like shards of glass, who had dragged the guy off her with punishing hands and hit him hard without hesitation.

‘Are you OK?’ the most gorgeous guy she had ever seen had asked, pulling her off the wall she had slumped against, smoothing down the skirt the creep had been trying to wrench up. ‘Diavolos, you’re so tiny. Did he hurt you?’

‘Only a little,’ she had said shakily, trembling like a leaf and in absolutely no doubt that Jax had saved her from a serious assault because, with the noisy party taking place on the deck above, the lower deck had been deserted and nobody would have heard her crying out.

‘Take a moment to recover,’ Jax had urged, guiding her into an opulent saloon to push her down into a seat where her cotton-wool legs had collapsed under her as if he had flipped a switch. ‘What were you doing down here on this deck?’

He had issued instructions on the phone to a crew member to have the bar supplies refreshed. And the whole time she had just been staring at him like a brainless idiot, utterly intimidated by everything about him from the expensive quality of his lightweight grey suit and hand-stitched shoes to the sheer beauty of his perfect features from his edgy cheekbones to his sculpted mouth. It was the eyes that had got to her the most, the tender concern she’d seen there and then the budding all-male appreciation. He had the most stunning eyes and his rare smile had been like the sun coming out on a dark day.

‘Are you OK?’ he repeated.

Well, no, in fact from that moment she had never been OK again. Something she’d needed to survive had lurched into strange territory and softened to let him in, no matter that it had gone against sense and practicality and her life experience. She had truly never been the same since.

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