by Penny Jordan
‘Lizzie, you mustn’t blame yourself.’ Charley tried to comfort her. ‘And as for realising what was happening—how could you when governments didn’t even know?’
Lizzie forced a small smile.
‘Surely if you tell the bank why you need to go to Greece they’ll give you a loan?’ Ruby suggested hopefully.
Charley shook her head. ‘The banks aren’t giving any businesses loans at the moment. Not even successful ones.’
Lizzie bit her lip. Charley wasn’t reproaching her for the failure of her business, she knew, but she still felt terrible. Her sisters relied on her. She was the eldest, the sensible one, the one the other two looked to. She prided herself on being able to take care of them—but it was a false pride, built on unstable foundations, as so much else in this current terrible financial climate.
‘So what is poor Lizzie going to do? She’s got this Greek threatening to take things further if she doesn’t go and see him, but how can she if we haven’t got any money?’ Ruby asked their middle sister.
‘We have,’ Lizzie suddenly remembered, with grateful relief. ‘We’ve got my bucket money, and I can stay in one of the apartments.’
Lizzie’s ‘bucket money’ was the spare small change she had always put in the decorative tin bucket in her office, in the days when she had possessed ‘spare’ change.
Two minutes later they were all looking at the small tin bucket, which was now on the kitchen table.
‘Do you think there’ll be enough?’ Ruby asked dubiously
There was only one way to find out.
‘Eighty-nine pounds,’ Lizzie announced half an hour later, when the change had been counted.
‘Eighty-nine pounds and four pence,’ Charley corrected her.
‘Will it be enough?’ Ruby asked.
‘I shall make it enough,’ Lizzie told them determinedly.
It would certainly buy an off-season low-cost airline ticket, and she still had the keys for the apartments—apartments in which she held a twenty per cent interest. She was surely perfectly entitled to stay in one whilst she tried to sort out the mess the Rainhills had left behind.
How the mighty were fallen—or rather the not so mighty in her case, Lizzie reflected tiredly. All she had wanted to do was provide for her sisters and her nephews, to protect them and keep them safe financially, so that never ever again would they have to endure the truly awful spectre of repossession and destitution which had faced them after their parents’ death.
Chapter Two
NO! It was impossible, surely! The apartment block couldn’t simply have disappeared.
But it had.
Lizzie blinked and looked again, desperately hoping she was seeing things—or rather not seeing them—but it was no use. It still wasn’t there.
The apartment block had gone.
Where she had expected to see the familiar rectangular building there was only roughly flattened earth, scarred by the tracks of heavy building plant.
It had been a long and uncomfortable ride, in a taxi driven at full pelt by a Greek driver who’d seemed bent on proving his machismo behind the wheel, after an equally lacking in comfort flight on the low-cost airline.
They had finally turned off the main highway to travel along the dusty, narrow and rutted unfinished road that ran down to the tip of the peninsula and the apartments. Whilst the taxi had bounded and rocked from side to side, Lizzie had braced herself against the uncomfortable movement, noticing as they passed it that where the road forked, and where last year there had been rolls of spiked barbed wire blocking the entrance to it, there were now imposing-looking padlocked wrought-iron gates.
The taxi driver had dropped her off when the ruts in the road had become so bad that he had refused to go any further. She had insisted on him giving her a price before they had left the airport, knowing how little money she had to spare, and before she handed it over to him she took from him a card with a telephone number on it, so that she could call for a taxi to take her into the city to meet Ilios Manos after she had settled herself into an apartment and made contact with him.
Lizzie stared at the scarred ground where the apartment block should have been, and then lifted her head, turning to look out over the headland, where the rough sparse grass met the still winter-grey of the Aegean. The brisk wind blowing in from the sea tasted of salt—or was the salt from her own wretched tears of shock and disbelief?
What on earth was going on? Basil had boasted to her that twenty per cent entitled her to two apartments, each worth two hundred thousand euros. Lizzie would have put the value closer to one hundred thousand, but it still meant that whatever value they’d potentially held had vanished—along with the building. It was money she simply could not afford to lose.
What on earth was she going to do? She had just under fifty euros in her purse, nowhere to stay, no immediate means of transport to take her back to the city, no apartments—nothing. Except, of course, for the threat implied in the letter she had received. She still had that to deal with—and the man who had made that threat.
To say that Ilios Manos was not in a good mood was to put it mildly, and, like Zeus, king of the gods himself, Ilios could make the atmosphere around him rumble with the threat of dire consequences to come when his anger was aroused. As it was now.
The present cause of his anger was his cousin Tino. Thwarted in his attempt to get money out of Ilios via his illegal use of their grandfather’s land, he had now turned his attention to threatening to challenge Ilios’s right of inheritance. He was claiming that it was implicit in the tone of their grandfather’s will that Ilios should be married, since the estate must be passed down through the family, male to male. Of course Ilios knew this—just as he knew that ultimately he must provide an heir.
Ilios had been tempted to dismiss Tino’s threat, but to his fury his lawyers had warned him that it might be better to avoid a potentially long drawn-out and costly legal battle and simply give Tino the money he wanted.
Give in to Tino’s blackmail? Never. Ilios’s mouth hardened with bitterness and pride.
Inside his head he could hear his lawyer’s voice, saying apologetically, ‘Well, in that case, then maybe you should think about finding yourself a wife.’
‘Why, when Tino doesn’t have anything resembling a proper case?’ Ilios had demanded savagely.
‘Because your cousin has nothing to lose and you have a very great deal. Your time and your money could end up being tied up for years in a complex legal battle.’
A battle which once engaged upon he would not be able to withdraw from unless and until he had won, Ilios acknowledged.
His lawyer had suggested he take some time to review the matter, perhaps hoping Ilios knew that he would give in and give Tino the one million euros he wanted—a small enough sum of money to a man who was, after all, a billionaire. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that Tino thought that he could get the better of him by simply putting his hand out for money he hadn’t earned. There was no way that Ilios was going to allow that.
He had been attempting to vent some of the fury he was feeling by felling branches from an old and diseased olive tree when he had seen a taxi come down the road to the headland, stopping to let its passenger get out before turning round and going back the way it had come.
Now, still wearing the old hard hat bearing the Manos Construction logo he had put on for protection, his arms bare in a white tee shirt, his jeans tucked into work boots, he walked out from the tree line and watched as Lizzie looked out to sea, his arms folded across his chest.
Lizzie turned back towards the flattened ground where the apartments had been, shock holding her immobile as she saw the man standing on it, watching her.
‘You’re trespassing. This is private land.’
He spoke English! But the words he had spoken were hostile and angry, challenging Lizzie to insist with equal hostility, ‘Private land which in part belongs to me.’
It wasn’t strictly
true, of course, but as a partner in the apartment block she must surely own a percentage of the land on which it had been built? Lizzie didn’t know the finer points of Greek property law, but there was something about the attitude toward her of the man confronting her and challenging her that made her feel she had to assert herself and her rights. However, it was plain that she had done the wrong thing. The man unfolded his arms, revealing the outline of a hardmuscled torso beneath the dirt-smeared tee shirt tucked into low-slung jeans that rode his hips, and strode towards her.
‘Manos land can never belong to anyone other than a Manos.’
He was savagely angry. The hardness of the gaze from golden eagle eyes fringed with thick dark lashes speared her like a piece of helpless prey.
Lizzie stepped back from him in panic, and lost her footing as she stumbled on a rough tussock of grass.
As she started to fall the man reached for her, hard fingers biting into her jacket-clad arms as she was hauled upright and kept there by his hold on her. The golden gaze raked her with a predatory male boldness that infuriated her. He was looking at her as though…as though he was indeed a mythical Greek god, with the right and the power to take and use vulnerable female mortal flesh for his own pleasure as and when he wished. Sex with a man like this would be dangerous for the woman who was drawn to risk herself in his hostile embrace. Would he take without giving, or would he subjugate a woman foolish enough to think she could make him want her by overpowering her with his sensuality and leaving her a prisoner to it whilst he remained unmoved? That mouth, with its full bottom lip, suggested that he possessed a cruel sensuality that matched his manner towards her.
Lizzie shivered, shocked by the inappropriateness and the unfamiliar sensuality of her own thoughts. She tried to concentrate on something practical.
Somehow as he’d moved he’d also found time to push back the protective hard hat he was wearing, so that now she could see the thick darkness of his hair. She was five foot six. He was much taller—well over six foot—and of course far more powerful that her. Lizzie could see that the effort of holding her had hardly raised the biceps in his powerful arms, but that didn’t stop her from trying break free of him.
He stopped her with contemptuous ease, pulling her closer to him. He smelled of earth, and hard work, and of being a man. From somewhere deep down, in the place where she kept her most special memories, she had a sudden mental image of being held in her father’s arms in the garden at her parents’ lovely house in Cheshire, laughing in delight as she looked down from that height to where her mother was kneeling beside her two younger sisters. Those had been such wonderful years—years when she had felt safe and secure and loved.
But this man was not her father. With this man there would be no safety, no security, and certainly no love.
Love? She was so close to the dirt-streaked tee shirt that she could see the dark shadow of his body hair through it. She could almost feel the force of his hostility towards her. And she felt equally hostile to him. That was why her heart was banging into her chest wall and why her senses were recoiling from the intense awareness of him that his proximity was forcing on her.
What kind of awareness? Awareness of him as a man? Awareness of his maleness? Awareness of his sexuality? Awareness that within her something long denied, something starved of the right to express itself, was pushing against the barriers she had erected against it. Because of this man?
No, of course not. That was impossible. Her heart was thudding even more frantically, pumping adrenalin-fuelled denial through her veins. Why was she reacting to him like this? She had no interest in his sexuality. She must not have any interest in his sexuality. She must not want to stay here in his arms.
The panic caused by her own feelings had Lizzie demanding fiercely, ‘Let go of me.’
Ilios wasn’t used to women demanding to be set free when he was holding them—quite the opposite. Normally women—especially women like he knew this one to be: selfish, shallow, self-seeking women who cared nothing for others—were all too keen to inveigle themselves into situations of intimacy with him. Which was, of course, why he felt so reluctant to release her.
When she pulled back against him the movement of her body released the scent she was wearing, delicate and light. Deep down inside him something visceral and unfamiliar jerked into hot molten life. Desire? For a woman like this? Impossible. He released her abruptly, stepping back from her.
‘Who are you?’ Lizzie asked unsteadily, struggling for balance both physically and emotionally.
‘Ilios Manos,’ Ilios told her curtly.
This man was Ilios Manos? The man who had sent her that letter? Lizzie’s heart thumped into her ribs, its sledgehammer blow fired by shock.
‘Ilios Manos, the owner of this land on which you have no right to be, Miss Wareham,’ Ilios told her grimly.
‘How do you know who I am?’ The question had been spoken before Lizzie could stop herself.
‘Your name is on your suitcase strap,’ Ilios pointed out curtly, gesturing towards the brightly coloured strap wrapped around the handle of the small trolley case she had abandoned in the shock of discovering that the apartment block had gone.
‘What’s happened to the apartments?’
‘I gave orders for them to be knocked down.’
‘What? Why? You had no right.’ Her shocked disbelief deepened her anger, and also in some illogical way her awareness of him—as though she had developed some unwanted new sense designed exclusively to register everything about him and make her intensely receptive to that information. From the way the narrowing of his eyes fanned out fine lines around his eyes to the shape of his mouth as he spoke and her extreme awareness of the powerful maleness of his body.
‘I had every right. They were on my land. Illegally on my land.’
Lizzie struggled to clamp down on her awareness of him.
‘The land belongs to my partner, Tino Manos, not you.’
‘My cousin has ceded his right to the land to me.’
‘But you can’t just knock down a block of apartments like that. Apart from anything else, two of them belonged to me.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘they did.’
There was something about the way he was looking at her that made Lizzie feel extremely uneasy—as though she had unwittingly stepped into some kind of trap.
‘Tell me, Miss Wareham, what kind of greed makes a person ignore the normal rules of law to grab at something even when they know it must be fraudulent?’ His voice was deeply cynical, his whole manner towards her menacing and iced with bitter contempt.
‘I…I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Lizzie protested truthfully.
‘Of course you do. You were in partnership with my cousin. You have said so yourself. You must have known about the building regulations that were broken, about the suppliers and workmen left unpaid in order to build the apartments at a minimum cost to your partnership, and for the maximum ultimate profit.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ Lizzie insisted. But she could see that he didn’t believe her.
‘Have you any idea of the damage your greed has caused? The hardship it has inflicted on those you cheated? Or do you simply not care? Well, I intend to make sure that you do care, Miss Wareham. I will make sure that you pay back everything you owe.’
Ilios was angrier than he could ever remember being. His cousin had systematically tried to cheat him and manipulate him at every turn, and now Tino was even daring to challenge his legitimacy to what was rightfully his. Ilios could feel his fury boiling up inside him. His cousin might not be here to pay for what he had done, but his partner in crime, this Englishwoman who actually dared to lie to him, was here, and she would bear the brunt of his fury and his retribution, Ilios decided savagely.
‘Everything I owe?’ Lizzie objected, her heart sinking. ‘What do you mean? I don’t owe anybody anything.’
Her determination to continue lying to him hardened Ilios’s resolve to
inflict retribution on her. She was everything he most disliked and despised in her sex. Dishonest, and attempting to cloak her dishonesty with an air of pseudo-innocence that manifested itself in the way she was dressed—simply, in jeans worn with a tee shirt and a plain jacket—and in her face with its admittedly beautiful bone structure, free of make-up.
Just as that damn elusive scent she was wearing had made him want to draw her closer, to pursue it and capture it, so the pink lipstick that deliberately drew his attention to the fullness of her mouth made him want to capture her lips to see if they were as soft as they looked. Where another less skilled woman might have tried to use artifice to mask her deceit, Elizabeth Wareham used art—the art of appearing modest, honest, vulnerable. Well, it wouldn’t work on him. Anyone who did business with his cousin had to be as dishonest and scheming as manipulative as Tino was himself. Like attracted like, after all. She could try using her sexuality to disarm him as much as she liked. He wasn’t going to be taken in.
When Ilios Manos didn’t respond, Lizzie stiffened her spine and her resolve and repeated, as firmly as she could, ‘I don’t owe anyone in Greece any money, and I don’t understand why you think I do.’
‘I don’t think you do, Miss Wareham. I know you do—because the person you owe money to is me.’
Lizzie gulped in air and tried not to panic. ‘But that’s not possible.’
Ilios was in no mood to let her continue lying to him. ‘You owe me money, Miss Wareham, because of your involvement with the apartments built by my cousin on my land. Plus there is also the matter of the outstanding payments for goods and services provided by local suppliers to you.’
‘That isn’t my fault. The Rainhills were supposed to pay them,’ Lizzie defended herself.
‘The contract supplied to me by my cousin states unequivocally that you are to pay them.’
‘No—that can’t be possible,’ Lizzie repeated
‘I assure you that it is.’