Page 2 (1/2)

PROLOGUE

XANDROS LAKARIS TURNED ABRUPTLY, winged brows snapping together over his dark eyes, deepening the lines around his well-shaped mouth

‘Da her to the altar?’ he demanded rhetorically

The man he’d addressed, Stavros Coustakis, sat back in his chair, eyeing his visitor ireen eyes, unusual for a Greek—but then—unlike Xandros, with his long and illustrious family history—Stavros Coustakis knew little about his antecedents

‘I’m a nobody,’ he’d readily admitted, with the worldly cynicishter he’d been engaged to marry, ‘but I’ve made myself a very, very rich one’

Those grey-green eyes hardened now at Xandros’s outburst

‘No,’ he retorted ‘It would do you no good She has defied hter’

Xandros looked at hi He knew Stavros was ruthless—a hter so casually was chilling But he also knew that his own reaction to his forht was, in fact, predominantly relief

He had been in no rush to abandon his carefree bachelor lifestyle, indulging in the easy-going short-terood looks, wealth and elevated social position in Athens society—had always come easily to him Still only in his early thirties, he wanted a few e

It was a preference which he knearred with the dual responsibility pressing heavily on his shoulders—not only to continue the ancient Lakaris fae back to the i-vanished Byzantine e his father had impressed upon him all his life That old moneycompletely

It was that necessity which had dorandfather had fatally co with rash investerously near the point of complete ruin because of it

Financial worries had been paraued by unpaid creditors and even i bankruptcy, his racious family home in the countryside beyond Athens would have to be sold His father had driven himself relentlessly to restore the Lakaris fortunes and reverse his own father’s unwise profligacy

He had succeededthe Lakaris fortunes by the tirown up indelibly i his father’s work and ensuring that never again would they want for ered, only enlarged

An ideal opportunity to do just that—hugely—had presented itself in the prospect of undertaking a highly er with the Coustakis empire, its financial lines of business, from venture capital to insurance, that would fit ideally with the Lakaris portfolio

Xandros’s father, before his untimely death, had been keen to press ahead with it—and not just for financial reasons alone

Xandros ell aware that his late father had been very keen on pointing out that their ties with Coustakis could, and indeed should, be even closer And that Stavros’s daughter Ariadne, despite her father’s rough-and-ready self-hly suitable wife

He could see why Ariadne, though perhaps a little young for hi only in her early twenties, ticked all the boxes A striking brunette, intelligent and cultured, she socialised in the saether Froe of not only being Stavros Coustakis’s heir, but also the fact that her late ood family and had been best friends with Xandros’s mother

Moreover, Stavros Coustakis hi the proposed business deal er

‘I’ve a mind to be father-in-law to a Lakaris and

have a Lakaris grandchild,’ he’d infor a nobody myself’

For all his late father’s enthusias, it had still not been an easy decision for Xandros to one for it