The Heiress Bride. LYNNE GRAHAM

weeks as business commitments would keep him out of the country during the following month. Ione’s startled gaze shot to Alexio, who seemed to be absorbing the news with a lot less surprise than she was. His lean, strong face was not even tense. Indeed, he shot her a long, lingering glance from heavily lidded dark golden eyes that burned hot colour into her cheeks and made her hurriedly look away.

      ‘The ceremony will, of course, take place here on the island,’ Minos decreed and he turned to study Alexio with a half-smile. ‘I see no reason why you and Ione should not then take up residence here.’

      Shock powered through Ione and her fork fell from her nerveless fingers with a clatter.

      ‘In her own home, my daughter would have the company of her aunt while you are abroad and she would also enjoy the continued security of a full protection team.’

      ‘No…no!’ Ione gasped in horror, driven into defiance by the stricken conviction that such an arrangement could only have been planned from the outset.

      Even as her dismayed aunt dug warning nails into her thigh below the table, Ione’s red-faced father was flying out of his chair like a jet-propelled steamroller and raising a punishing fist as he roared down at his daughter in a rage, ‘What did you say to me?’

      Mutely awaiting the blow about to descend and white as milk, Ione jerked as the crash of a chair falling backward sounded from the other side of the table.

      ‘If you lay one finger on her, I swear I’ll kill you!’ Alexio thundered with a raw aggression more than equal to his host’s.

      A silence beyond any silence that had ever fallen in the Gakis household fell at that point. Nobody had ever challenged Minos Gakis like that. Sheer disbelief had paralysed the older man’s heavy features as he slowly turned his big greying head to focus on his challenger. Ione wanted to throw herself across the table and stuff the tablecloth in Alexio’s big, stupid macho mouth before he got himself beaten up. What madness had come over him? Where were his much-vaunted brains when he most needed them? Her father had said that he needed Alexio but her father would still throw him off the island and destroy him sooner than swallow such an insult.

      Minos surveyed the younger man with outraged dark eyes and hissed. ‘So you think she’s your property now…eh?’

      ‘Yes.’ His lean, powerful face rigid, the surge of pure black rage that had powered Alexio was still in the ascendant.

      With an abruptness that made his female relatives flinch, Minos Gakis threw back his head and laughed with a derisive appreciation that curdled Ione’s quivering tummy. She would call the police. No matter what it cost her, if he let his henchmen hurt Alexio, she knew that this time she would call the police and inform on her own father.

      But a split second later, she could only watch with a dropped jaw as her father dealt Alexio a considering look of ironic approval. ‘You’re a man not unlike me. Possessive, protective of what’s yours. Well, then, you keep your mouth shut from now on!’

      Ione just closed her eyes, still sick from the threat of the violence that had so nearly exploded upon them all and equally sick with humiliation. The men resumed their seats. Alexio skimmed a probing glance at Ione and asked himself if he had been guilty of a crazy overreaction, for she did not seem grateful for his intervention. He had believed that her father had been about to hit her, but it was more probable that the older man had only been waving an angry fist in the air. After all, Ione had just sat there and would surely not have done so had she feared a blow. What grounds did he have to suspect Minos of abusive behaviour? And much might be forgiven of a man fighting terminal illness and looking death in the face, Alexio reminded himself with all the discomfiture of a young and healthy male.

      ‘I feel unwell. Please excuse me,’ Ione muttered chokily.

      ‘Yes, go,’ her father growled in a tone of disgust. ‘You have already done your utmost to spoil our meal!’

      Ione rose on knees that felt like jelly and left the room. Her head was pounding fit to burst and all courage was failing her. Alexio would agree to them living at the villa after their wedding. Why shouldn’t he? Such an arrangement would be very convenient for him. After all, it would give him complete freedom and he wouldn’t need to feel guilty about leaving her for long periods with her own family. Would there even be a honeymoon trip now? Alexio hadn’t wanted to go to Paris in the first place and her father would soon persuade him that a honeymoon was a waste of business time and energy. Tears running down her convulsed face, Ione stumbled into her bathroom and stared at herself in the vanity mirror.

      What an idiot she had been to believe that she could escape her father’s control of every aspect of her life! He had been way ahead of her in the planning stakes and she had been stupid not to foresee that likelihood.

      Ever since that letter from her twin sister had arrived within months of her eighteenth birthday, Ione’s mail had been vetted and scrutinised. Her sibling, Misty, had wanted contact with her and Ione’s father had been furious that the social services had unsealed the adoption records to aid such an approach to his adopted daughter without his consent. Ione had not been allowed to answer that letter and she only knew that her sister was or had been a Sicilian tycoon’s mistress because that had evidently featured in a more recent newspaper story that had come to her father’s notice. She had not seen that article herself. Her father had simply informed her that the sister she longed to be reunited with was a whore.