The Antonides Marriage Deal Page 11

  “Nothing,” Elias said, staring out the window at the traffic heading into the city. It was the truth. He hadn’t done what he’d wanted to do for a long, long time.

  It was his own fault, of course. No one had forced him to do any of it. No one had held a gun to his head and made him marry Millicent. No one had demanded he take over Antonides Marine and abandon his dreams of his own boat-building business.

  And no one would have stopped him if he’d made love with Tallie Savas last night—least of all Tallie.

  It was his own bloody misguided sense of doing what was right. He needed to get over it, get past it, get a life. If he had a woman, he wouldn’t be tempted by the likes of Tallie Savas.

  So as soon as Dyson dropped him off, he rang Clarice.

  “How about tonight?” he asked her. “I’ll leave my phone at home. No mothers. No sisters. No business.”

  And definitely no Tallie!

  “Mais, oui,” Clarice said in her honeyed voice. “I would like that.”

  So would he, Elias promised himself. So would he.

  He picked her up just before eight. They had a good meal. Very elegant. Very French. They had some interesting conversation. At least he thought they did. The trouble was, he kept losing his train of thought. His brain kept flashing back to the night before—to the pizza he’d shared with Tallie, to the totally nonsensical conversation they’d had when she hadn’t been falling asleep—

  “But you see, it is still a problem,” Clarice said sadly.

  Elias’s mind jerked back to the present. “Problem?” What had he missed? “What problem?”

  “The business,” Clarice explained. “You said there would be no business. And yes, there is no business here. But you think about it—” she tapped the side of her head “—here, anyway.”

  He could hardly say it wasn’t business he was thinking about!

  His mouth twisted wryly. “I’m sorry. I’m just…distracted. We could go somewhere,” he suggested, reaching for her hand across the table. “Do something that would blot business right out of my mind.”

  He was sure she knew what he meant. But she smiled ruefully and shook her head. “I would invite you back to my place,” Clarice said, “but my sister is visiting from Paris.”

  “So you can come to mine.”

  Another shake of her head. “Not when my sister is visiting,” Clarice said. “I cannot be gone all night.”

  Elias squeezed her hand. “Another time?”

  She gave him a brilliant smile. “But of course.”

  He took her home and did manage at least to get a kiss before he left her on her doorstep. He told himself it was a start. But it might have been one more mistake, because it made him think about Tallie’s kiss. This one was nowhere near as memorable.

  No matter, he told himself resolutely as he walked home. He had a woman in his life again—a woman who promised a casual, easy relationship with no demands, no strings, no expectations.

  Exactly what he wanted.

  Monday brought Tallie in bright and early, as usual. With a Viennese delicacy, as usual. With carrot and celery sticks for him—as usual. She was bouncy and perky and, other than the silly purple cast on her ankle, she looked cheerful and well rested—as if Friday night had never happened at all.

  Good. Because he wasn’t going to think about it. Or her. He’d had two days to put the matter in perspective. And he had decided on the best course—he would forget it. And other than professionally, where he had no choice, he would ignore her.

  Which was easier said than done when she was sitting right across from him at a two-hour meeting and his mind kept flashing back to memories of what it had felt like to tangle his fingers in her wild, untamable hair.

  It was pinned and anchored today, of course. Only a few tendrils were escaping, but Elias’s fingers clenched into fists as he remembered the silken softness of those tendrils, the vibrant springiness of them, the total temptation of them—

  He jerked his thoughts back to the subject at hand. He didn’t look at Tallie again. He was tempted. He resisted.

  He was almost grateful when Rosie appeared halfway through the meeting to get him to take an urgent call. He was less grateful when it turned out to be Cristina.

  “I need to talk to you!”

  “Now?”

  “You haven’t been answering your phone. I’ve been calling you for days.”

  “I’m busy.” And he’d had no desire to spend his weekend mopping up a series of family disasters. Besides the flood of messages from Cristina, there had been several from Lukas about problems in New Zealand, a half a dozen from Martha demanding that he call her, a surprising message from his brother Peter suggesting that they talk, and, of course, the requisite dinner invitation from his mother who wanted him to meet someone called Augusta, whom she described as his “soul mate.” Elias seriously doubted that. Why would he want to answer any of them?

  “Too busy for your family?” Cristina demanded.

  Yes, damn it. “I’m in a meeting. What do you want?”

  There was an infinitesimal pause. Then, “I want you to hire Mark.”

  “And I want a roast duck to fly over and fall into my mouth. Come on, Cristina. Get real. Not going to happen.”

  “See,” she wailed. “I knew you’d do that. You won’t even consider it!”

  “No.”

  “But—”

  “No, Cristina. I have to go. People are waiting.” He drummed his fingers on Rosie’s desk and glared at her for calling him out of the meeting.

  “She said it was urgent,” Rosie mouthed at him.

  “You don’t know him!” Cristina waited.

  “I do know him,” Elias reminded her. “That’s the problem.”

  “But I love him!”

  She loved Mark Batakis? Ye gods. Elias grimaced, then pinched the bridge of his nose and drew a deep breath. “And your undying love gives him what sort of job qualifications?” he asked politely.

  “I don’t know!” Cristina’s voice wobbled. “But you don’t have to be a smart-ass. Mark is no dummy. He can learn anything. He went to Yale after all. And…and he knows a lot about boats.”

  “He races boats, Cristina. Not the same thing.”

  “But boats are—”

  “Cristina,” Elias said with all the patience he could muster, “we don’t race boats. We have nothing to do with racing boats.”

  “We could,” she insisted.

  “We could build a rocket ship and fly to the moon, too. But we’re not going to.”

  “Even so. All I’m asking is for you to talk to him,” Cristina said tightly.

  “And give him a job.”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “No. Besides,” he said with considerable relish, “even if I wanted to, I can’t.”

  “You mean you won’t!”

  “No, I mean I can’t.” For the first time Elias felt kindly toward his father’s idiotic bet with Socrates Savas. “I’m not the boss anymore.”

  “What do you mean you’re not the boss?” Cristina demanded.

  “Didn’t you hear? Dad sold forty percent of the business.”

  “What? Dad sold—” His sister sputtered her disbelief.

  “Sold,” Elias reiterated. “Which makes him no longer president.”

  “Then you’re—”

  “No, I’m not,” he said with considerable satisfaction. “You want to get your boyfriend a job at Antonides Marine, Cristina, you’ll have to talk to the new CEO.”

  There was a pause, then Cristina said stoutly, “All right. I will. What’s his name?”

  “Her name is Tallie Savas.”

  It was going to be all right.

  Tallie kept telling herself that as she kept trying to convince herself—and Elias—that she had no memory of what had happened that night in her apartment. She had come in today determined to act as if nothing at all had occurred.

  And she thought Elias believed it.

&nbs
p; He looked at her oddly once or twice, but when she gave no sign, he focused on business.

  She wished she could.

  She wished she could stop remembering how he had kissed her, how firm and warm his lips had been, how springy his hair was, how rough his stubbled jaw had been, how hot his skin had felt beneath her fingers.

  She wished—

  She wished a lot of things—mostly that she’d never heard of Antonides Marine, that she had never taken this job, that she had never met Elias Antonides. He made her want the things she had wanted with Brian, things she’d put aside after Brian’s death, things she had promised herself she would only want again if another man worthy to step into Brian’s shoes came into her life—a man who loved her for herself, who wanted her and not her father’s money or his empire.

  A man, in short, who was nothing like Elias Antonides!

  She knew he didn’t want her father’s money or his empire. He simply wanted his own empire back! But he didn’t want her—not in the way Brian had. He didn’t care about her. Only about sex.

  She wondered why he’d stopped.

  God knew she wouldn’t have been able to. She’d been daft enough to think Harvey was her subconscious alter ego, her common sense. Under the influence of painkillers she didn’t have the common sense of a cat!

  A thought that didn’t make her feel any better.

  At least spending time watching how her father handled himself in business had taught her that it was wise to give nothing away, to maintain her cool, to appear indifferent and unconcerned at all costs.

  So she’d done that. She’d come bearing apfelstrudel, had chatted easily with Rosie and Lucy, had endured Dyson’s teasing about losing a battle with a truck and had deflected Paul’s sympathy for her pain by joking about her “Barney cast.”

  And she’d smiled politely at Elias. He had smiled politely at her. Sanity prevailed.

  All the same she was glad when he had to go out of their meeting briefly to take a phone call. It was easier to concentrate when he wasn’t in the room. When he came back, she felt immediately edgy and aware again. She forced herself to concentrate on Paul’s charts and diagrams and endless monotonous commentary. She even managed to make a couple of points herself about her concern that Corbett’s, while a good business in itself, was perhaps not the direction Antonides wanted to go in.

  “Why not?” Elias demanded.

  And so she explained her feeling of enervation. “And it’s not just me,” she said. “No one here is particularly excited about this. No one is champing at the bit to buy in.”

  “We’re taking our time,” Elias said, “working out the ramifications. Crunching the numbers.”

  “Fine,” Tallie said. “But you’ve got to have more than numbers, even if they add up. You’ve got to want to do this, you’ve got to want to make seaworthy apparel.”

  Elias just stared at her as if she was crazy.

  “You do,” Tallie insisted. “You need passion.” And then she remembered another kind of passion they had shared the other night and her face flamed. She could actually feel the heat of the blood that rushed to her face. She pressed her lips together and focused on Paul, on Dyson, on anyone or anything but Elias. “I think Corbett’s is fine as a business, but maybe not our business,” she added quickly. “I just don’t think any of us wants to commit.”

  When she finally dared venture a glance in Elias’s direction, he was staring at the whiteboard behind Paul, as if he were deliberately not remembering Friday night, too. Thank God.

  Finally he looked around the room. No one else said anything either. “Yes? No?” They all looked at each other.

  Dyson cleared his throat. “She might be right,” he said slowly. “I mean, we’ve gone back to the drawing board on it how many times?”

  “Lots,” Paul muttered.

  Elias didn’t look totally convinced, but he didn’t disagree, either. “Okay. I told Corbett we’d let him know,” he said, finally allowing his gaze to meet Tallie’s. “We can talk about it in the morning.” He shoved back his chair and stood up. “Right now Dyson and I are heading out to Long Island.”

  Tallie felt an enormous sense of relief. So he wasn’t going to be in the office all afternoon? Yippee. “What’s there?”

  “Nikos Costanides’s boatyard.”

  “The Nikos Costanides?”

  Elias raised his brows. “You know him?”

  “Of him.” Right around the time she had met Brian, Nikos had been on her father’s short list of eligible Greeks. Because of Brian she’d never met him. Just as well because she had never been in Nikos Costanides’s league. While she had been dating her Navy pilot, Nikos had been squiring around some of the world’s most gorgeous women and being written up in scandal sheets on both sides of the Atlantic.

  After Brian’s death, when her father was again compiling his list, she learned that Nikos, the wild playboy, had in the meantime married, settled down, had kids and, thus, permanently removed himself from her father’s eligible list.

  “We went out and looked at the boat he’s building for Dyson on the weekend.” There was a light in his eyes that Tallie hadn’t seen before. “You might be right about the enthusiasm bit,” he told her.

  “Oh?”

  “We’ll see. I’ll leave my notes for you and we can go over them tomorrow morning, then call Corbett.”

  Tallie nodded. “That will be fine.” Very proper. Very cool. Very businesslike. Whew.

  Elias opened the door and she preceded him into the main reception area. A young woman was sitting there, idly flipping through a magazine.

  “Nine o’clock? I’ll just—” Elias broke off as the woman stood up. He scowled furiously at her. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Nice to see you again, too, Elias, dear.” She gave him a brilliant smile, sashayed toward him and kissed him on the cheek.

  She was one of the most gorgeous women Tallie had ever seen. Tall and striking, with short spiky dark hair that had the casual ruffled elegance that only came with a high price tag, and cheekbones you only saw in magazine ads. Everything about her, from her trendy clothes to her perfectly applied makeup added up to make her one stunning young woman—exactly the sort who would attract a man like Elias. Even though he didn’t seem especially delighted to see her, there was no denying they made a spectacular couple.

  Was she the woman he’d stood up on Friday night?

  Tallie vaguely remembered him making a phone call, telling someone he couldn’t make something, apologizing. Maybe she’d told him off and they’d had a fight and that was why he was glowering at her now.

  “Go home,” he said brusquely.

  “No. I won’t. You said talk to the president!”

  Elias’s expression darkened. “For God’s sake—”

  “President?” Tallie frowned.

  The young woman’s gaze fixed on her, brown eyes alight with curiosity. “Is this—”

  “Yes,” Elias said through his teeth. “It is. And you can’t talk to her now. She’s busy.”

  “She doesn’t look busy,” the young woman said matter-of-factly. “Are you?” she asked Tallie.

  “It’s lunchtime,” Elias said.

  “Then we’ll have lunch.” She held out her hand to Tallie. Her nails were well shaped and beautifully manicured. Tallie’s were short and utilitarian, good for kneading pastry dough. “I’m Cristina.”

  “Cristina?” Tallie looked to Elias for an explanation.

  She got one—short and furious. “My sister!”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  TALLIE Savas was having lunch with his sister.

  The very thought made the hair on the back of Elias’s neck stand straight up. What Cristina, with her big mouth and her ungovernable brain, might do or say to Tallie was horrifying to contemplate. There were plenty of loose-cannon genes in the Antonides family, but Cristina’s were the loosest.

  He had half a mind not to go to Long Island with Dyson at all. But
he could hardly change his mind when Tallie was smiling delightedly and saying she’d love to have lunch with Cristina, and his sister was grinning like the Cheshire Cat and waggling her fingers at him and saying not to worry at all, that she knew just the place to take the new president of Antonides Marine.

  He shuddered to think. In fact, he expected to spend the entire day distracted by what was happening back in Brooklyn.

  But Nikos Costanides was a compelling man.

  Elias had never met him before Saturday when Nikos had dropped by the boatyard to pick something up and had found Dyson there showing Elias his new, nearly finished boat. A twenty-two-foot gaff-rigged sailboat, it was every bit as fantastic as Dyson had claimed it would be. And when Nikos, who had only come to pick up some files he’d left at the office, discovered that Elias had a serious boat-building background, he’d invited them back this afternoon. And he was waiting for them when they arrived, eager to show them around.

  Costanides Custom Boats was the stuff of Elias’s childhood dreams. That it should have apparently been Nikos’s dream, too, surprised him. While he hadn’t known Nikos, he was acquainted with Stavros Costanides, Nikos’s father. The elder Costanides was a friend of his own father. They played golf together now and then. It was always interesting to watch them because Aeolus always tried hard and enjoyed the exercise, and Stavros Costanides was there to win. No more, no less. He was everything Elias’s father was not—tough, astute, hard as nails.

  Nikos, from everything Elias had been, was a far different story. He was the star of every cautionary tale Elias had ever been told. Stories of Nikos the wild care-for-nothing playboy, bane of his father’s existence, were legion and oft repeated.

  “You don’t be like that Nikos Costanides,” his mother had said, shaking her finger at him. “You settle down with a nice girl. You work hard. You take care of business.”

  God knew he’d tried. He’d done everything the family had ever expected him to—and more. He’d had no choice, of course. Not if Antonides Marine were going to survive. For all the good it had done him.

  Nikos, he decided, had got the better deal.

  All those years he’d spent avoiding working for his old man—“the only work that matters” according to Stavros Costanides—Nikos had not simply spent squiring beautiful women around. He had been working as hard as his old man, just not for Costanides International. Virtually tossed out on his ear because he wouldn’t toe the familial line, Nikos had gone to university in Glasgow to train as a naval architect, then set up a custom boat-building business with a friend in Cornwall.