Tess giggles, and shakes her head. “No way.”
“What?” I ask, grinning. “It’s got a meat, a vegetable, a grain, a fruit and the tzatziki sauce is dairy. All the food groups.”
I pull out a chair and gesture for her to sit. After she’s seated I take the other chair and pick up my fork. “You going to chicken out on me?” I ask, knowing that Tess has a competitive streak.
Her brows pinch and she growls, “Oh, hell no.”
I laugh and watch as she lifts a forkful up, looking at it skeptically before she shoves it in her mouth and chews tentatively.
Her eyes grow rounder and she points at me with her fork. I lift mine and dig in, taking a big bite and chewing with gusto. “It’s really not that bad,” she says around the mouthful of food. “Right?”
I chew a couple of more times, then swallow. “Tolerable,” I answer. “I’m not convinced that tzatziki and bacon were meant to be friends, but other than that it’s fine.”
She laughs, and we settle in to our strange meal. She’s easy to talk to and I find myself telling her about my days playing soccer, hearing about her two state medals in high school swimming—not a surprise, having raced her at the party over the weekend and nearly lost. The only reason I was able to pull it off is that she was a fifty and one hundred-meter specialist, the shortest distances. She can beat me at those sprints, but in open water my endurance won out.
I’ve been telling her about the conference championship we won in college, detailing how Christos was stupid enough to show up to the semi-finals hungover. Instead of worrying about nixing our chances at the cup, our coach wanted to punish Christos, so he made him play the entire game.
“Christos was puking on the sidelines every time there was a throw-in, and the ref even had a talk with our coach about pulling him out, but coach refused.” I chuckle remembering that Christos was actually a pale shade of green when halftime came.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” I answer, standing and throwing both of our paper plates away. “You want to come to my office? I’ve got a bottle of wine in my desk drawer and the sofa is a hell of a lot more comfortable than these plastic chairs.”
She looks unsure but it’s only for a moment, then she agrees. It warms me all over that I’ve gained her trust enough she’ll sit with me in my office alone after hours.
When we get there, I pour her a small glass of merlot when we settle on the sofa, me at one end, turned to watch her. She’s got her feet up on my coffee table, and I resist the urge to pick up her legs and put them on my lap so I can rub those pretty toes.
“What did you want to know?” I ask once we’re both comfortable.
“Something kind of strange happened last week and I’m probably showing how inexperienced I am, but I’ve been confused ever since.”
I can tell she’s nervous to talk to me about it, but I don’t want Tess to ever be nervous with me again. I give her my most encouraging smile. “It’s okay. Like I said before, you’re an intern, you’re here to learn. There aren’t any dumb questions. Not with me.”
She returns my smile with a shy one of her own and as girly as it sounds, things flutter inside my chest. I try to brush it off and focus on what she has to say, even though that means looking at her soft pink lips and big blue eyes. I’m drowning, and while I’m an expert in the water, I can’t seem to save myself from this.
I continue to focus on listening as Tess tells me a story about the accounts she was assigned when she started work, and how there were mystery codes associated with them. She struggled to figure them out, asking various staff members here and in the Athens office, but it was Christos who finally told her they were some of our special accounts. My whole body tenses when she says the word—special. We don’t have special accounts at Stephanos. We don’t have special codes. We handle all of our accounts the same way. We have for as long as I’ve been working at the company—since I was fifteen and had my first summer job at the docks, loading and unloading the ships that Dad keeps in port here.
Christos lied to Tess. The only question is, why?
As much as I want to, I can’t out my oldest, dearest friend, my own blood, to Tess, a girl I’ve known for a few weeks. So I act as though these special accounts are the norm, and tell her to continue with the story.
She takes a deep breath. “Afterwards, I wanted to go through the other accounts I had to see if they had those codes. I realized that I’d given all of my work to Christos and I didn’t want to sit around for the next four hours with nothing to do. But when I went to open up the rest of the accounts all of my passwords were invalid.”
I look at her for a moment, trying to process what she’s saying.
“It was a half hour after I told Christos about those codes, and in that thirty minutes I’d been locked out of every one of the accounts.”
The feeling of unease that began when she said Christos had special accounts magnifies now. It’s pretty obvious that Christos immediately locked her out of those accounts. What isn’t clear is why. Did he think she’d do something wrong with them? That’s sort of impossible though since all of the raw data about our accounts is unalterable. The books are the books, you can’t mess them up. All that Tess was doing is preparing reports based on that data. Something is very wrong, and my gut tells me I’m not going to like what I hear from Christos, but I can’t answer Tess’s concerns until I speak with him.
“You know,” I say, hating myself for lying, feeling the words come out of me like bile that I want to shove back down. “I think Christos may have a habit of putting new passwords on all of the accounts that come across his desk. Just so he can control who’s got access to them. He once got in trouble for a mistake that someone in the bookkeeping section had made. He’s sort of paranoid now.” I try to laugh it off, but my voice sounds hollow even to my own ears.
She watches me for a minute, her face neutral. I scramble to fix it.
“I’ll ask him though if it would make you feel better?”
She nods. “It would. I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be trouble. But I’m worried I did something I shouldn’t have and Christos didn’t want to reprimand me so he just locked me out instead.” She’s so earnest it breaks my heart. “But I need to know if I’ve made mistakes. No babying me, I need to know straight up. It’s the only way I’ll learn.”
My heart swells with admiration again for this beautiful woman with her ethics and her rules and her bravery. She’s so different than anyone I’ve ever known, and it amazes me how much I crave it. I crave her views, her drive, her steely determination. I love trying to support her in following the rules as much as I do trying to nudge her away from them. It’s a game that I could play forever—convince Tess to break a rule, then follow one to please her.
I’ve just promised to question Christos—that’s following a rule to please her. Now it’s time to see if I can get her to break one in return.
“You ever been to the water at night?” I ask as I grab the wine bottle off the coffee table in front of me.
She shakes her head, her expression suspicious.
“You trust me?” I ask.
She swallows, and I watch the motion, my whole body aching with the need that it drives through me. The need to run my tongue along that path up her neck, to her lips, inside her warm, wet mouth. My breath hitches and I clear my throat.
“Tess?” I ask softly.
“Yes,” she answers, her voice rougher than usual, her eyes dilated. “I trust you.”
I take her hand gently in mine. “Then let me show you something.”
Tess
I’m following Niko across the street toward the boardwalk along the harbor, and while I know I shouldn’t be doing this, I can’t stop myself. His hand is big and warm, and the air around us is fresh and salty. In the humid stillness the lights of a handful of boats out on the dark water are like stars in the vast inkiness of a night sky.
Neither of us speaks until we�
�ve reached the marina a couple of blocks away from the Stephanos offices.
“You okay?” he asks quietly.
“Yeah. But curious. Where are we going?”
He turns to look at me, and I’m breathless for a moment from his beauty. He’s wearing a white button down shirt open more than normal at the throat, his dark skin displayed to perfection in the V of the neckline. The sleeves are rolled midway up his forearms, and he’s wearing a big bulky watch on his left wrist. It’s metal, with all sorts of dials and gauges on it—expensive, substantive, complex—a reminder that he’s so much more than a twenty-something guy taking a walk with a girl. He’s wealthy, powerful, favored in every way.
He smiles, unaware that my hormones and my common sense are at war.
“We’re almost there,” he says as we turn to walk along one of the docks that jut out into the water of the harbor.
We walk on the dock as it shifts subtly from side to side, the water slapping against the wood underneath us. We’re midway to the end when he suddenly stops, turning to a boat looming in the shadows thrown by the moonlight.
“Come on,” he says, pulling me toward the railing along the deck of the ship.
“Wait, what are we doing?” I ask, resisting for the first time since we left the office.
“It’s okay,” he says softly, leaning into my ear, his breath sending a frisson of awareness down my neck and shoulder. “It’s mine.”
I look more carefully at the boat. It’s big. Not big like a yacht, but big enough that it has a cabin underneath the deck. I can make out a mast of some sort in the gloom, so it must be a sailboat. I’ve seen the occasional high-end sailboat out on Lake Michigan, but mostly we have boats for waterskiing there. Big motorboats that you pile people and equipment on for a day’s worth of sports and partying. There’s something much more classical about this boat. It’s like old family money next to the nouveau riche.
“This is yours?”
He chuckles. “It is.”
Then, before I know what’s happening he puts his hands on my waist and swings me up and over the railing onto the deck. I gasp, both at the sensation of flying and the feeling of his hands cradling me so strong and commanding. Once I’m safely on board he grasps the railing with both hands and pushes himself up before swinging his legs over and landing next to me, graceful as a cat.
“Welcome aboard,” he says with a grin so wide I can feel it as much as see it.
“So this is a sailboat?” I ask as I start to walk along the railing, trailing my hand on the cool metal and looking at the smooth deck under my feet.
“It is. A thirty-two-foot day cruiser.”
“You realize that means nothing to me,” I tell him.
He laughs. “It means that I can sail it by myself, and if I have to I can even sleep on it, but it’s not set up for long trips out at sea.”
“That’s what you have the yacht for.” I can’t believe I’m having a discussion about yachts as if it’s normal conversation.
He takes my hand and moves us around the small deck to a built-in bench along the back end. We sit and he leans back, relaxing into the seat and gazing up at the sky.
“You want to know the truth?” he asks, not looking at me.
“Always,” I answer, watching the way his thick hair shines in the moonlight, and crossing my arms so I won’t reach out to touch the silky strands.
“The yacht is nice and all, but it really doesn’t interest me that much.” He finally turns and looks at me, his expression is pensive, almost as if he’s worried I’ll think less of him after this confession. “It’s great for parties and all that, but you could be on a bus or a plane, or sitting around at your house when you’re on that thing. There’s no—” He pauses. “No sense that you’re on the water. No connection, you know?”
I nod my head, wanting him to go on, feeling as though this is the closest I’ve gotten to a glimpse of the real Niko, the soft inside of such a flawless exterior.
“I love the water. I have since the first time my dad took me out on a little dinghy he filched from the yacht one afternoon while we were cruising.
“But for me, it’s about feeling the water, not just touching it, but feeling it inside me. When I’m sailing and it’s going right—the boat, the wind, me, the ocean—we’re all working together in tandem. I’m part of something bigger than me, bigger than human beings or any of our constructs. I’m part of this wild, unstoppable thing that’s allowing me to work with it, and it could change its mind at any moment.”
He sighs, then chuckles. “Annd now the pretty girl thinks I’m nuts,” he jokes self-deprecatingly.
I put my hand on his arm and hear his sharp intake of breath. My voice is husky, and we’re both almost whispering in the quiet of the night.
“I don’t think you’re crazy, Niko. I think you’re smart and committed and kind of amazing sometimes. It’s inspiring that you have that connection with the water. I don’t think I’ve ever felt like that about anything.”
His eyes are so dark they’re nearly black, and his face is a relief in shadows thrown by the lights of the dock and the moon and the stars. He clears his throat and gently asks, “But I’m still also selfish and insensitive?”
“No.” I shake my head in conjunction with my response. My heart feels heavy inside my body, and I long to melt against him, lay my head on his shoulder, and pretend that we’re two people who could actually fall in love with one another. “I was wrong when I said those things. You’re incredibly generous, and more real than half the starving college students I know.”
We sit in silence, each stuck in our own thoughts, but I’m so aware of him. My skin tingles, and I hear every breath he takes, every smallest shift of his muscles.
“Stay right here,” he finally says, standing and disappearing down the stairs to the cabin. When he returns he’s got another bottle of wine and a blanket with him. He spreads the blanket out on the deck and uncorks the wine that he must have opened below.
“Come on,” he tells me, pointing to the blanket. He sits down on it, and takes a swig out of the wine bottle.
I join him, unable to help the smile that creases my cheeks. I think of how many women would give an arm or a leg to be on a sailboat in Greece with a super hot billionaire and a bottle of wine. When did my life become a romance novel?
“I didn’t have any glasses. Hope you don’t mind sharing the bottle even though it’s against hygiene rules or whatever.” He smirks, daring me to turn it down.
I roll my eyes. “There are some rules I’m willing to break.” I take the bottle and swallow a warm, spicy mouthful of the dark, fruity table wine.
Niko lies down on his back, one arm across his stomach and the other bent under his head. “You know most of these stars were named by the ancient people right here in these islands,” he tells me.
I take another swig of the wine before I set the bottle aside and lie next to him, staring up at the dense blanket of lights, so much brighter here than in Chicago with its big city light pollution.
“My dad used to read me this book that had all the constellations in it. It told all the myths that went with the constellations. I loved the Greek myths,” I tell him.
“Sometimes,” he answers, “when I’m sailing around the island, taking it easy on a low wind day, I try to wrap my head around the fact that human beings have been on ships sailing these waters, watching these same views for tens of thousands of years. I wonder what they thought about, what their boats looked like, who their families were.”
I turn to my side and look at his profile. The firm jawline, the straight nose and long eyelashes. My heart flutters and I swallow, my throat suddenly dry.
“Some of them were probably your great times twenty grandparents,” I say.
He turns his head to look at me and smiles, then rolls onto his side to face me. We’re inches apart, our breath mingling in the night air.
“Yes. I think about that too. When I was in boarding
school and college I came to realize how unusual it is to live in the place where your family has been for thousands of years. To know when you walk around each day that your great, great, great grandparents walked along these same roads, stared at this same slice of sky, touched these same grains of sand.”
My breath catches and my heart races as I feel his hand tentatively touch mine where it rests in between our bodies. I don’t move, and he gently clasps my fingertips. It’s such a sweet gesture that I melt into the deck of his ship, becoming a puddle of warm sensations, girlish fantasies and molten desire.
“I can’t imagine having a history like that. I barely know where my grandparents grew up, much less an ancestor who’s four or five generations back.”
He sighs, and his eyes blink shut for a brief moment. “I love it. I love Greece…” He pauses. “But I’m not sure if I love it enough.”
“What does that mean?” I wait for his answer, almost afraid to breathe.
He huffs out a sharp chuckle. “I’ve never told anyone this before.” He shakes his head as though he can’t believe he’s about to admit this to me, then he looks at me and all the pretense is gone, all that’s left is raw honesty, and somewhere in his eyes a plea for understanding.
“The whole heir thing—being the prince of Stephanos—I don’t always love it. I don’t always love the company or working there.”
“Oh,” I say, since it’s the only thing I can think of.
“Don’t get me wrong, I realize how fortunate I am, and of course I like the things—cars, houses, trips. This boat.” He grins. “But the longer I’ve been out of school…” He struggles seeming to search for the perfect word, then gives a little shake of his head. “Never mind, it’s ungrateful and it doesn’t matter.”
I feel his thumb on my hand slowly caressing my palm. Our fingers are interlaced now, our hands placed between our chests.
I reach over with my free hand and run my index finger across the prickly stubble on his jaw. He makes the tiniest noise, in the back of his throat, and I know it’s want, because I want too. I want him so badly right now that I physically ache. I shouldn’t. I’m the one who begged him to leave me be, told him we could only be friends. But that was before. Before he opened up to me, before I saw that he could be more than the box I’d put him in. I realize that he was never that guy—the inconsiderate rich guy. He was Niko, and I think Niko might actually be pretty fantastic.
The Heir: A Standalone Greek Billionaire Romance Page 11