by Olivia Gates
He fell silent. After a moment, Nikolas sighed. “Is this lesson in Sarantos history going anywhere?”
“I’ll fast-forward to another era,” Aris said. “When your family first crashed into my life. I remember that first day like it was hours ago. And, Theos, how I envied you all your father. I wanted to impress him with everything in me. But I ended up making him despise me instead.”
“He didn’t despise you, Sarantos.” That was Lysandros, exhaling heavily. “It’s probably the main reason we did. He admired the hell out of you, always pointed to you when he was chastising us. ‘See how Sarantos dealt with this?’, ‘Sarantos wouldn’t have been so stupid!’, ‘Why can’t you be more like Sarantos?’ was all we heard for years.”
That was news to Selene. It was apparently shocking to Aris, as well. “Theos!” he exclaimed. “If he felt that way, then…why?”
Nikolas was the one to answer. “I didn’t know the answer to that until I read his diaries. He felt you becoming more detached and ruthless as the years went by. He felt he was sort of your surrogate father, thought it was his role to keep you in check, to try to steer you away from the abyss of leaving your humanity totally behind. And while we were totally in the dark about it, he was also aware of Selene’s attraction to you, thought he should shape you up into a man he could accept for his daughter.”
So her father had known. He’d never intimated that he did.
Oh, Daddy, why did you never tell me?
Nikolas’s next words cut short the surge of heartache. “He was also aware of your attraction to her, even if you didn’t realize it yourself.”
Then her father didn’t know everything. Aris hadn’t been attracted to her in the past.
Aris answered and demolished that belief. “Oh, I realized it. I wanted Selene from the first day I saw her. But I thought Hektor would never accept me. That she would never accept me. So I acted as the businessman who never bids on a hundred-percent losing proposition and stayed away.
“Then a miracle happened, and she reached out to me. But when she walked away, it was the easiest thing in the world for me to assume she thought she’d made a mistake. I left thinking I would never have another chance with her. But I came back, and realized I’ve been living in hope of this second chance. This time I demanded one, and she rejected me so hard I’m still aching. Then I discovered she’d given me Alex…. Yes, I am not so convoluted as you think me. I didn’t know about Alex, because I didn’t keep tabs on Selene. I couldn’t…bear knowing that she’d moved on, found someone to love. But when I knew she hadn’t…and then I saw Alex…I was scared as I’ve never been before in my life. Because another chance with Selene became a matter of life or death. And she wasn’t giving me one—in fact, she held up a mirror to me, showing me the worst that I feared about myself.
“But then another miracle happened. She gave me a chance, and this time, she didn’t only want me, she…got me, got the best out of me, made me realize I’m not the cold calculating man we all thought me to be. I can barely breathe with the magnitude of my love for her and Alex sometimes. I have no life without them now. I’d rather die than not have her, them, with me.
“But the real miracle was that she loved me back. And I didn’t understand how I could deserve to be loved by her. So when I heard the news about your coup with the contract, it made more sense to think that she didn’t love me as much as I did her, but chose to help her family against me.”
“You thought she gave us the info to preempt you?” Damon snarled. “And you say you love her?”
Lysandros said with the same ferocity, “Yeah, talk is cheap, Sarantos. You love her, you’d give your life for her, but you don’t have a smidgen of belief in her.”
“I didn’t have it in myself. It was my own insecurity, not a lack of belief in her. But I had my insecurity under control—until Alex’s accident almost uprooted my sanity, and then you surrounded me in her condo, lashed me with your triumph and with more insinuations that led me to believe my worst suspicions were true. I went berserk with pain and walked out.
“As soon as I left, I wanted to rush back, beg for anything she’d give me, even if her family would always come first. But I knew I had to prove that the contract and anything else from the past didn’t come into what we shared. So I had to take the contract back so I could give it to her, to refute your accusations.”
“So, you basically want to have your cake and eat it, too,” Damon argued.
“Yeah, who do you think you’re fooling, Sarantos?” Nikolas muttered. “So the contract is big, but not big enough for you.”
“And when we asked for something that is big,” Lysandros added, “you refused.”
“You’re damn right I refused,” Aris growled back, painting her a mental image of him and her brothers facing off like a pack of wolves, fangs bared. “You don’t get to put a price on what Selene, what Alex…what my family is worth to me.”
“So your refusal stands, huh?” Damon scoffed. “I figured it would. We’re talking more than twelve billion, after all.”
“Half my fortune is more than twenty-four billion, Louvardis,” Aris snapped. “And no, you can’t have that. I’ll make my own offer.”
Selene’s heart constricted. She couldn’t bear it if he started some cold negotiation to lower the price.
Nikolas exhaled heavily. “Keep your offers, Sarantos. We want nothing from you. And Selene and Alex will sure as hell never need anything from you. We’ll make sure of that.”
“Guess you’re not as shrewd as we thought,” Lysandros mused. “You didn’t project that you stood to gain so much more if you made that investment in our goodwill and Selene’s support.”
“That’s right, Sarantos,” Damon taunted. “It was a test. You would have passed it, you idiot, if you’d agreed to it verbally. We would never have pushed for application. Now, anything you say or offer means nothing. Worse than nothing.”
Selene felt her heart splinter in her chest.
How would Aris answer them? What would he say?
The next moment he did. “I would have been an idiot if I’d taken your offer. As I said, in the matter of proving my commitment to Selene and Alex, I don’t bow to demands, but I, and only I, will submit my own bid. And here it is.”
She heard Nikolas’s grunt as something solid and padded seemed to land against his flesh.
In a moment she heard the sound of a briefcase being opened, then papers being passed around.
At last, Nikolas exclaimed, “You…madman. You mean this?”
Damon sounded as stunned. “Okay, where’s the catch? I can’t find it, but it has to be here.”
Lysandros chimed in, just as dazed. “Point it out and get done with it, Sarantos!”
“No catch,” Aris said calmly. “I think half my empire for Selene and Alex is an insult. They’re everything to me, and they deserve all of it. And everything I acquire from here on. You can now shred it all apart if you so wish, for all I care.”
Nikolas let out a resounding guffaw. “You are insane.”
“I didn’t even know you owned most of the Di Giordanos stock,” Lysandros said, a deep tinge of admiration entering his stunned voice. “And PrimeTech. And Futures Inc. Father was right. You are well on the way to global domination.”
Damon whistled. “And you’re really giving it all to Selene.”
“It’s nowhere near her worth,” Aris said. “All my assets are just a token. She owns all of me, and I’m offering her my life, under any terms she, and you, as her brothers and protectors, wish to impose. I botched my first two chances with her. I will offer anything if she will agree to give me a third, and final, chance. I only truly lived during those weeks with her and Alex. Will you help me have that chance to live again?”
And the paralysis that had deepened with each incredible word out of Aris’s mouth shattered. She rocketed into the room.
He seemed taken aback at the sight of her. “Selene…” His rise to his feet was
impeded by the same emotions ricocheting inside her, his eyes feverish on her face, making her feel treasured, needed, loved to her last cell. “I came to—”
She couldn’t bear for him to say one more word, to surrender any further. “I heard everything.”
His lips twitched, a tidal wave of heat entering his gaze. “Eavesdropping, agape mou?”
Before she could say anything more, a newly toddling Alex spilled into the room, fell flat on his face, came up on his hands and knees and ate up the distance between himself and Aris in an accelerated crawl, ending up launching himself at his father.
Aris groaned, his reddened eyes tearing as he swooped down and picked up Alex, as if he were diving after the heart that had spilled out of his chest.
Tears were now a constant stream flooding down Selene’s cheeks. Her heart almost burst with needing to throw herself into his arms and beg him to never let her go again. But she had to give him this moment with Alex first.
Suddenly, Aris kneeled before her, Alex and all. “Will you agree to marry me…again?”
She rained tears of joy on his face. “Oh, my love, I will agree to anything and everything you ask, for as long as I live.”
Alex was gazing up at her with the same expectation, shrieked with glee as her tears splashed on his gleaming cheeks. She swooped down on the two people who formed the soul that existed outside her body, hugged them with all her strength, showered them with her love and gratitude.
Aris gathered her with Alex between them, rocked on his heels as he broke out litanies of love and worship and relief. “My love for you and Alex has made me the person I was supposed to be before life forced me to steel my heart and hide inside my isolation. But don’t take my word for it. You can keep me on probation for as long as you see fit. In fact, I demand it.”
She squeezed him tighter, her tears running faster. “For all you put me through, for making me love you so much that I’m empty and lost without you, you deserve a few decades or so of probation.”
“I’ll outbid you,” he groaned against her cheeks, her eyes, her lips. “A life sentence, and beyond.”
A cough brought them out of their surrender to the bliss of finding each other again. They all turned to her brothers.
Lysandros was gaping at them. “All right. This is…disturbing.”
Damon snorted. “Tell me about it. This love thing is now officially the scariest sickness I’ve ever seen. Seeing Sarantos of all men in this condition is definitely creepy.”
Nikolas nodded his emphatic agreement. “It’s enough to make me run the other way the next time I see an attractive woman. I don’t want this to happen to me.”
Damon shuddered dramatically. “You and me both.”
Aris smirked at her brothers. “You better get down on your knees and pray this, or even a fraction of this, happens to you. It would be the one thing that would make your life worth anything.”
Her brothers rolled their eyes as if on cue.
Damon then looked at Selene in open amazement. “And to think our kid sister has the power to tame the world’s biggest monster, have him on a leash purring and rolling over this way.”
Lysandros nodded. “Guess we’ll have to take her really seriously from now on.”
Nikolas eyed Aris in consideration. “What worries me now is how the hell we’ll adjust from considering you public enemy number one to brother-in-law.”
“It’ll be a real challenge…Aris,” Lysandros said, letting the name slide off his tongue, clearly not liking its taste.
“Don’t.” Aris winced. “You keep on calling me Sarantos. Or don’t call me anything, if you prefer. But you don’t get to call me Aris. That’s Selene’s and only Selene’s.”
“Fine, what’s-your-name.” Damon laughed. “I’ll be watching you.”
Lysandros added, “Ditto. I think it’ll take another decade for me to wipe from my mind what the past ten years of you engraved in it.”
At that point, Apollo, whom she’d left at the mansion while she and Alex were away and hadn’t yet taken back home, scampered into the office and made a beeline for them, including Aris in his warmest welcome of his family.
Damon cracked a booming laugh. “All right. Maybe we don’t need to keep a close eye on you after all, Sarantos. Granted, you’re an uncanny enough businessman that your ‘proofs’ might ultimately mean nothing, while Selene loving you is of no consequence in my eyes, since she’s a woman and can be fooled. But Alex’s love for you gave me pause. Now Apollo seals the deal. A cat is the ultimate litmus test. If he thinks you’re okay, and evidently can’t get enough of you, you can’t be all bad.”
Nikolas and Lysandros laughed. Selene laughed, too, a new rush of relief and elation surging through her.
Even if all the heartache she’d suffered hadn’t led to uniting with Aris, it would have been worth it to see her brothers at ease together for once. Their love for her and their stand against what they’d perceived as a common enemy had made them put their differences aside. She could only hope, now that those unifying factors were no more, they wouldn’t become estranged again.
But for now, she couldn’t think about that. She only had one thing on her mind. Aris.
Leaving Alex and Apollo with her brothers, she grabbed Aris and his “briefcase of sacrifice” and ran them up to her old room.
The moment they entered, she pushed him against the door, climbed him, owned every inch of flesh she could reach with lips and hands made aggressive in her yearning.
He surrendered to her, letting her devour him, brand him, own him, a litany of bass groans rumbling from his depths. “S’aghapo, Selene, s’aphapo, apape mou.”
And she sobbed, “And I love you, my love, my Aris. I’ve loved you forever.”
He growled, took over.
He took her to her bed, threw them both down on it in a tangle of entwining limbs and lips and lingering sighs.
She didn’t know how or when, but he had them both naked, their flesh mingling, straining against each other with the fevered need to merge, to never part again.
Suddenly, before he could complete their union, she pushed him away.
He fell to his back. His shock became fierce protest as he realized why she’d left him.
While he was unable to move with the blow of aborted arousal, she jumped off the bed, zoomed to the briefcase, extracted the documents and ran to her paper shredder.
His protests died as the machine devoured the last of the papers. He approached her, her demigod who’d brought her back proof of his worthiness of forever.
A challenge was tingeing the love blazing on his face. “That’s just one copy of endless ones I can order made.”
She kissed him silent. “I order you not to make any.” He enfolded her in his arms and she whispered against his adoring lips, “All I’ll ever need is for you to be mine, to let me be yours.”
“I am, all yours. Always have been, always will be, for as long as I live.” He swung her up in his arms, fused her against his heat and hunger, murmured hungrily against her lips, “Now, about being mine…”
ISBN: 978-1-4268-8920-2
THE SARANTOS SECRET BABY
Copyright © 2011 by Olivia Gates
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