The Antonides Marriage Deal

by Anne McAllister

  “No.”

  She didn’t matter. The only woman that mattered right now was standing across the room from him. Elias shut the door and leaned against it, just watching her, wanting her.

  “Well, I don’t know anything else,” Tallie went on, talking rapidly. “Theo’s my best brother, but he can be disgustingly closemouthed about things. I was just glad to see him. It’s been ages. He was exhausted. So we came back here so he could grab a nap. I wasn’t getting anything d—” She stopped abruptly and began again. “I came, too, because my ankle was aching. And…why are you leaning against the door?”

  Because it seemed like a better idea than walking across the room, ripping her clothes off and having his way with her. But the minute he thought it, he knew he was wrong. There was no better idea than making love to Tallie.

  “I’m not,” he said, and pushed away from the door, strode across the room and swept her into his arms.

  It was the first thing that had felt right all day.

  “Elias!” She stiffened for just a moment, then melted into his embrace. She wrapped her arms around, hanging on to him, holding him close as her lips met his.

  Kissing Tallie, touching Tallie, burying his face in her hair, breathing in the scent of her—it was heady and exhilarating and, oddly, like coming home, the more so because he’d spent the whole day dealing with things he’d rather not have dealt with—like Mark and Cristina—and the last two hours imagining the worst about Tallie and her dark-haired stud.

  And now she was here. In his arms. He was kissing her.

  And she was kissing him in return.

  She seemed just as eager, just as desperate as he was, pulling his shirttails out, sliding her hands up beneath it, stroking his hot skin, even as he was doing the same to her. Buttons popped; zippers slid.

  “Tallie!”

  “Mmm?”

  “We’re not going to make it to the bed if you— Tal!” His voice strangled as he sought to keep control.

  She stopped. Took her hands off him, holding them up in the air like some bank robber under the sheriff’s gun. Oh, God. He couldn’t think and make love to Tallie Savas at the same time!

  So who needed to think?

  He scooped her up into his arms and staggered into her bedroom where he lowered her to the bed.

  “Now, where were we?” she mused, smiling up at him. “Ah, yes, I remember.” And then her hands began their feverish work again.

  “Jeez, Tallie!” But it was exquisite what she was doing to him. Desperate for more, he slid between her thighs and into the warmth of her. And that place was the most right of all.

  And then it was his turn to stop, to shake his head no when she urged him on. “I want,” he said through his teeth, “to make…it last.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” Her question confounded him.

  A smile touched her lips and she gave a little wriggle against the sheets. “The sooner you get started, the sooner we can do it all again!” She shrugged and looked at him hopefully. “Just trying to be logical.”

  Far be it from him to defy logic.

  And when she kissed him again and urged him to respond, he knew he didn’t need any urging at all.

  “Whatever you say,” he muttered. Then he bent his head and kissed her again, long and deep and hard, as if he could imprint himself on her memory, as if he could brand her and make her his alone. And then he began to move.

  He didn’t make it last. He shattered in moments. So did Tallie, whispering his name as she arched into his final thrust. And then they lay, spent, still wrapped in each other’s arms.

  And still it wasn’t enough.

  He’d just had her—and he wanted her all over again.

  “They’re married! My baby is married! Cristina is married, Elias!” His mother’s voice bleated in his ear, increasingly more shrill with every sentence.

  And good morning to you, too, he thought wearily. She was not the first person he wanted to hear from today.

  He wanted Tallie to breeze into his office and tempt him with some bakery confection—or something else. But that wasn’t going to happen. She’d breezed in to the office, all right. She’d even brought some kolaches she’d made yesterday. But she had on her President Tallie hat. She was charming and friendly—and totally professional.

  Which meant, he supposed, that they were having an affair: passionate, torrid sex at night, business as usual during the day.

  He wouldn’t have wanted it any other way, of course.

  But still…

  “Elias! Did you hear me?” His mother demanded.

  “Yes, Ma. I know,” he said now, regretting that he had allowed Rosie to put the call through in the first place. But it had seemed smarter to get it over with before his mother had a chance to work up to full-blown hysteria.

  He had insisted yesterday, before he’d put them on the plane, that Cristina call their parents at once and tell them about the wedding.

  “When we’re in Bermuda,” she’d promised. “I’ll call them tomorrow. I want my wedding night without angst, Elias,” she said firmly.

  And he hadn’t been able to argue with that.

  She had obviously called bright and early this morning and given their parents the news. And just as obviously, whatever she’d said, it hadn’t been enough, and he was going to have to do mop-up work. As usual.

  “You were there,” Helena accused. “She said you were invited!”

  “They needed a witness.”

  “I would have witnessed!” Helena wailed. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Elias had to hold the phone away from his ear.

  “Because it wasn’t my wedding, Ma,” he said. “It wasn’t my decision.”

  “Since when do you let your sister make foolish decisions.”

  “It’s her life.”

  “You should have told me anyway. What sort of mother doesn’t go to her own daughter’s wedding?”

  “One who doesn’t know her daughter is getting married,” Elias said logically.

  “She didn’t even have a dress. I suppose she got married in some tacky spandex and combat boots.” Helena’s complaint was somewhere between a question and an accusation.

  “She looked fine,” Elias said. “She had a dress.”

  “What sort of dress?”

  He tried to remember. But he hadn’t been thinking about his sister. He’d been thinking about Tallie, who should damned well have been there witnessing the wedding with him. After all, it was her fault Mark now had a job in the firm and was part of his family.

  And Cristina’s dress? He couldn’t remember much.

  “I think it was purple,” he ventured.

  “Purple?” Helena invariably lapsed into Greek when the stakes were high. She lapsed now, rattling on furiously, making it sound as if the fashion police would arrest Cristina the moment she set foot again on New York soil.

  “She looked great,” Elias cut in. “And it was her wedding, so it was her choice. Mark liked it.”

  God knew why he was going out of his way to defend his sister. He had no great hopes that the marriage would last. But the deed was done. And he had to admit that Cristina looked more determined than he had ever seen her. And Mark had said his vows with a firmness that had surprised Elias.

  Of course, a ceremony did not a marriage make, as he well knew.

  “I should have been there,” his mother muttered.

  “You can be there for the baby.”

  “Baby? What baby?”

  Oh, hell. He’d forgotten she didn’t know about that.

  “Well, of course there will be a baby eventually,” he said hastily. “They’re bound to have one. Cristina loves kids. So does Mark,” he improvised. “And you’ll know all about it. It isn’t as if they can sneak off and do it. You’ll see it coming.”

  “A baby.” Helena’s voice had lost its shrillness and took on a gentle, musing quality. “Yes, I suppose they might.”

  “Of course they will.
” And Elias devoutly hoped she continued to sound that delighted whenever Cristina got around to telling her about the impending arrival. “Look, Mom, I’ve got a lot of work waiting for me…”

  “Yes, of course,” Helena said. “Not so much work these days, though? Now that Dad has hired that nice president girl to help you.”

  Nice president girl? Tallie? Whom his father had “hired” to help him?

  Elias wondered, not for the first time, just exactly what his father told his mother about the business. He also wondered what Tallie would think of her job description. He grinned, looking forward to telling her.

  “She works hard,” he told his mother, because that was very very true.

  “Good. So you will have time now. Yes?” Helena sounded as if she were rubbing her hands together in anticipation.

  “Mom, I—”

  “Yes,” Helena answered her own question. “Now you will have time to find yourself a wife.”

  “I had a wife,” Elias reminded her.

  “Bah. She was never the wife for you, Elias,” Helena said. She didn’t say I told you so because she hadn’t. But she’d always been concerned about his decision to marry Millicent, though all she had said was, “Are you sure she will make you happy, my son?”

  What she should have asked, Elias thought, was, can you make her happy? Because obviously he had not.

  Now he shut his eyes. “Don’t start, Ma—”

  “She hurt you, Elias. But you cannot hide away forever.”

  “I’m not hiding!”

  “No, you are working. You are working every single hour of the day! And maybe that is not hiding precisely, but it does the trick.”

  He couldn’t argue. She wouldn’t listen. “I have to go.”

  But Helena, thwarted by her daughter, was not about to let Elias’s disastrous first marriage destroy the possibility of a second one.

  “I know the perfect woman. I was having my hair done last week. You know Sylvia Vrotsos who cuts my hair? She has a cousin who has a daughter—”

  “Mom! Stop!”

  “Beautiful girl. Sylvia had her picture there. You will love her. She’s smart. Beautiful and smart. Sylvia says she is getting an MBA!”

  Elias already knew a beautiful smart woman who had an MBA. He was sleeping with her.

  “I will invite her to dinner on Sunday,” Helena rattled on. “You can meet her then.”

  “I don’t—”

  “And if you don’t like her, Sophia Yiannopolis has a daughter who is a stockbroker who just broke off her engagement to a lawyer from New Haven.”

  “Mom!”

  But she was too caught up in her own ideas to even hear him. Thank God Rosie tapped on the door, then opened it and poked her head in.

  “Someone to see you. Says it’s important. How long?” she mouthed silently.

  “Now,” Elias mouthed back. “Mom, I have to go. I have a business to run.”

  “But the president girl—”

  “Goodbye, Mom.” He banged down the phone and glared at it. Then he looked up at Rosie. “Send him in.”

  She turned to the man in reception. “Mr. Antonides will see you now.” Then she stepped aside and a lankier, scruffier Antonides strolled in.

  “Hey, bro! How’s it goin’?”

  “Peter?”

  His brother was wearing faded blue jeans with holes in the knees and a bright-red Hawaiian shirt with palm trees on it. His jaw was unshaven, his black hair windblown and in need of cutting.

  “Don’t look so surprised. I told you I wanted to talk to you. You never called me back.” The voice was mildly accusing.

  “I’m busy.”

  Peter looked around. “So I see.” He held out his hand, and Elias shook it, still feeling a bit numb because “surprised” didn’t quite cover it.

  He hadn’t seen his brother in, what, three years? Peter had gone to Hawaii for college ten years ago—as far away from home as he could get and still be in America, he’d told Elias. He’d been back perhaps half a dozen times since. On the rare occasions he had been home, stopping by to see Elias at work had never been high on his list of priorities.

  He’d visited the Manhattan office once, about six years ago, and had hightailed it back to Hawaii the next day, confessing to Elias in a phone call weeks later that the mere sight of his brother neck deep in red ink and business ledgers while trying to sustain the family business had totally spooked him.

  “I don’t know how you do it,” he’d said.

  “Someone has to,” Elias had replied sharply.

  “Well, better you than me,” Peter’s tone had been fervent.

  Elias had only seen him once since. A few Christmases ago on his way out of the city, Peter had stopped by his old flat on the Upper West Side to see if Elias could lend him some money—money that, so far, he hadn’t paid back.

  And he didn’t need to think he was going to get more this time! Elias had had it up to here with irresponsible relatives. He sat down again and gestured toward the chair on the other side of the desk. But Peter didn’t sit down. He stared at the mural Martha had painted.

  “Nice. She does good work.” He didn’t have to ask who had done it.

  “Yes, she does.” Elias straightened the papers on his desk, then picked up his pen and rolled it between his fingers, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  But Peter wasn’t ready to drop it yet, apparently. He prowled around the office, juggled Elias’s sea-glass paperweight, tapped his fingers on the doorjamb, then shoved his hands in his pockets. Elias watched him warily.

  “Smart move coming over to Brooklyn,” his brother said finally. “Hell of a good view of Manhattan.”

  “Yes,” Elias agreed. “But I didn’t come for the view.”

  “Obviously,” Peter said, taking in Elias’s windowless room. “It’s all about finances, isn’t it?”

  “They are a consideration,” Elias kept his voice even.

  Peter nodded. “So how’d you like to be on the next big boom? Make a bundle. Sound good?”

  Peter? Talking money? Talking about making money? Elias tried to bend his mind around that.

  “Spell it out,” he said at last.

  “I’ve been working on a windsurfer.”

  Working on a windsurfer seemed, to Elias, an oxymoron. Windsurfers were play, no matter how much time you spent on them and how much money you went through while you were doing it instead of getting a real job.

  But he held his tongue as Peter rambled on, talking about how he’d come up with this new idea while he was repairing an old one. His brother, in the throes of enthusiasm, had always been hard to follow. He waited, strangling his pen.

  “Look,” Peter said. “I’ll show you what I mean.” He went back out into the reception office and returned carrying a two-foot-square portfolio, which he proceeded to open on Elias’s desk.

  There were drawings, lots of them, surprisingly detailed and with lots of numbers and arrows and references to velocity and wind power, and Peter seemed intent on explaining it all to him—how it was a departure from current windsurfers, how it was faster and more maneuverable, and how it would be easy to manufacture and very appealing to the market. Peter covered all the bases, rambled on for half an hour at least. Then he stood back and looked down at Elias.

  “So,” he asked, “what do you think?”

  Elias, who had actually been thinking about how he could get Tallie to come to his place tonight—maybe work late and offer to make her supper—blinked. “Think? About what?”

  “About the windsurfer,” Peter said with barely controlled impatience. “Didn’t you hear anything I said?”

  “Yes, of course.” Well, sort of. Elias shrugged. “It’s…interesting.”

  “So, do you want to do it?”

  “Do what?” Surely Peter wasn’t asking him to go windsurfing.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Elias! I came all the way from Honolulu to show you the plans, to give you first shot—”

/>   “First shot? At what? At building windsurfers?” Elias stared at him.

  “Yes, damn it!” Peter snapped at him.

  “Then, no, damn it, I don’t.”

  It was Peter’s bad luck to be the last straw. Elias was fed up with the lot of them—with his father, who only wanted to play golf, do lunch and sail; with his mother, who only wanted grandchildren and expected him to provide them; with Cristina, who was already irresponsibly providing a grandchild no one was supposed to know about yet; and now Peter, Mr. Surfer Dude, who only put in an appearance when he wanted something and now had some lame-brained idea for a windsurfer that would undoubtedly support his beach-bum lifestyle while draining money away from Antonides Marine!

  Peter’s jaw clenched, his eyes flashed. Then with barely controlled violence, he shuffled the papers back into a stack, slammed the portfolio shut and gripped it under his arm. “Thank you for your serious consideration,” he said, sarcasm dripping.

  “It’s been so good to see you, so heartening to know you’re as supportive as ever. Don’t bother to see me out.”

  Everything in the room rattled when the door slammed behind him.

  For a long moment Elias didn’t move. He just sat there in the silence and wondered what the hell else could happen.

  Would Martha show up to announce that she was running away with the gypsies? Would Lukas send a telegram from the back of the beyond saying that he was going to live out his life on a Himalayan mountainside and eat nothing but betel nuts.

  There probably weren’t betel nuts in the Himalayas, but when had logic ever governed anything the rest of the Antonides family wanted to do?

  Elias stared at the door, waiting for disaster and wishing for Tallie to push it open and smile at him and make him whole again.

  She didn’t.

  Because, he reminded himself, life wasn’t like that. So he opened the folder on his desk and tried to concentrate.

  He couldn’t.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “TALLIE? You’re not listening!”

  “Of course I’m listening, Dad.” Well, sort of. Trying to at any rate. In fact, her brain was wrestling with a far more important issue—what had happened during last night’s lovemaking with Elias.