The Antonides Marriage Deal Read online

  “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 Savas is a pirate. A scavenger! He buys up failing companies, guts them, then sells off what’s left for scrap!” Elias was yelling. He knew he was yelling. He couldn’t help it.

  “He 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 belonge
d 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 ideal of Greek manhood.

  No matter that he had been raised in Queens.

  “Theo won,” Aeolus said, filling his cheeks with air, then exhaling sharply and shaking his head. “And he gets clear title to the house—unless you agree to stay on as managing director of Antonides Marine for two years.”

  “Two years!”

  “It’s not much!” Aeolus protested. “Hardly a life sentence.”

  It might as well be. Elias couldn’t believe it. His father was asking him to simply sit here and watch as Socrates Savas gutted the company he had worked so hard to save!

  “What the hell did I ever do to him?” Elias demanded.

  “Do to him? Why, nothing at all. What do you mean?”

  “Nothing. Never mind.” There was no reason to take it personally. Socrates Savas did this sort of thing all the time. Still Elias ground his teeth. He felt the pulse pound in his temple and deliberately unclenched his jaw and took a deep, calculated breath.

  Two years. It was a price he could pay. He’d paid far bigger ones. And this wasn’t just about his life, it was the life of his whole family.

  He’d done everything else. How could he not do this?

  “All right,” he said at last. “I’ll stay.”

  His father beamed, breathed again, pounded him on the back. “I knew you would!”

  “But I’m not answering to Socrates Savas. He’s not running things!”

  “Of course not!” His father said, relieved beyond belief. “His daughter is!”

  The new president of Antonides Marine International hadn’t slept a wink all night.

  Tallie had lain awake, grinning ear to ear, her mind whirling with glorious possibilities and the satisfaction of knowing that her father was finally acknowledging she was good at what she did.

  She knew it wasn’t easy for him. Socrates Savas was as traditional as a stubborn, opinionated Greek father could be—even though he was two generations removed from the old country.

  In her father’s mind, his four sons were the ones who were supposed to follow his footsteps into the family business. His only daughter, Thalia, ought to stay at home, mend clothes and cook meals and eventually marry a nice, hardworking Greek man and have lots of lovely little dark-haired, dark-eyed Greek grandchildren for Socrates to dandle on his knee.

  It wasn’t going to happen.

  Oh, she would have married. If Lieutenant Brian O’Malley’s plane had not crashed seven years ago, she certainly would have married him. Life would have been a lot different.

  But since Brian’s death she’d never met anyone who’d even tempted her. And not for her father’s lack of trying. Sometimes she thought he’d introduced her to every eligible Greek on the East Coast.

  “Go pester the boys,” she told him. “Go find them wives.”

  But Socrates just muttered and grumbled about his four sons. They were even more of a mystery to him than Tallie was. If she desperately wanted to follow him into business, Theo, George, Demetrios and Yiannis, had absolutely no interest in their father’s footsteps—or his business—at all.

  Theo, the eldest, was a world-class open-ocean sailor. Tie him to an office or even stick him in a city and he would die. Socrates wasn’t sympathetic. He considered that his oldest son just “mucked about in boats.”

  George was a brilliant physicist. He was unraveling the universe, one strand at a time. Socrates couldn’t believe people actually had theories about strings.

  Demetrios was a well-known television actor with an action-adventure series of his own. His face—and a whole lot of his bare, sculpted torso—had recently been on a billboard in Times Square. Socrates had averted his eyes and muttered, “What next?”

  But he wouldn’t have believed it if anyone had told him.

  Yiannis, the youngest of Tallie’s four older brothers, who was as city-born and -bred as the rest of them, had, five years ago, finished a master’s degree in forestry and was living and working at the top of a Montana mountain!

  It was Tallie who had always been determined to follow in her father’s footsteps. She was the one with the head for business. She was the one who had worked in stockrooms and storerooms, in warehouses and shipping offices, doing everything she could to learn how things worked from the ground up.

  And she was the one her father had fired more than once when he’d found her working in one of his companies.

  “No daughter of mine is going to work here,” he’d blustered and fumed.

  So she’d gone to work for someone else.

  He hadn’t liked that any better. But Tallie was as stubborn as her old man. She’d gone to university and done a degree in accounting. She’d taken a job in California, crunching numbers for a mom-and-pop tortilla factory. And while she was there, she’d learned everything from how to make tortillas to a thousand ways to cook with them to the cleverest way to market them. Then she’d gone back and got her MBA, working on the side for a Viennese baker who taught her everything he knew. If she were ever going into business for herself, Tallie decided, it would be in baking. She loved making cakes and tortes and pastries. But she preferred that as her relaxation.

  Eighteen months ago, MBA in hand, she’d applied for another job with one of her father’s companies—and had been turned down.

  So she’d gone to work for Easley Manufacturing, one of his biggest competitors. She’d been doing well there and had recently been promoted. She was on the fast track, the boss had told her. She’d hoped word would get back to Socrates.

  Obviously it had.

  Two weeks ago he’d rung and invited her to dinner after she got off work.

  “Dinner?” she’d echoed. “With whom?”

  Had he dredged up another eligible Greek, in other words?

  “Just me,” Socrates said, offended. “I’m in the city. Your mother is in Rome with her art group. I’m lonely. I thought I’d call my daughter and invite her to a meal.”

  It sounded perfectly innocent, but Tallie had known her father for twenty-nine years. She knew suppressed excitement when she he
ard it in his voice. She accepted, but not without reservations.

  And when she’d met him at Lazlo’s, a Hungarian restaurant on the Upper East Side he’d suggested, she had looked around warily for stray males before she went to sit at the table with him.

  But Socrates hadn’t come bearing Greeks for a change. Instead he’d offered her a job.

  “A job?” Tallie had done her best to hide her incredulity while she found herself glancing outside to see if the late-May sun was still shining. The words hell froze over were flitting around in her brain. “What sort of job?”

  Her father waited until the server had brought their dinners. Then he said in his characteristic blunt fashion. “I’ve just acquired forty percent of Antonides Marine International. They build boats. As major stockholder, I get to name the president.” He paused, smiling. “You.”

  “Me?” Tallie’s voice squeaked. She blinked rapidly. Now she was sure that hell had frozen over. Or that she’d lost her mind.

  But Socrates picked up his knife and fork and cut into his chicken paprika and said with a shrug, “You’ve always said you wanted to come into the business.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “So now you’re in.”

  Tallie shook her head, mind still whirling. “I meant…I didn’t mean I expected you to buy me a company, Dad!”

  “I didn’t buy you a company,” he said, enunciating every word. “I acquired part of a company. And so, I have a say in how it’s run. I want you to run it.”

  Tallie wet her lips. Her brain spun with possibilities, with potential—with panic. She tried to get a toehold on her thoughts. “I don’t— It’s so…sudden.”

  “The best opportunities often are.”

  “I know.” But still…she needed to think. To consider. To—

  “So, what do you say?”

  “I—” Her tongue seemed welded to the roof of her mouth.

  Socrates smiled gently and regarded her over a forkful of chicken. “Or maybe you were just talking. Maybe you don’t think you can do it.”

  By God, yes, she could do it!

  And she’d said so.