.

crazy. Because when she took chances, she got hurt. Because when she trusted, it came back to haunt her. On her knees, her chest burning so bad she could hardly breathe, she remembered exactly why she’d taken to hiding herself.

      Never again. She would go back to Ajax, to safety. And if Alex told him about tonight, she would beg for his forgiveness. She stared ahead, eyes dry and burning like her insides.

      She would forget the heat and fire she’d discovered tonight. She would forget Alexios Christofides.

      CHAPTER THREE

      HE’D TOLD HIMSELF he wasn’t going to the wedding. He’d told himself so as he’d boarded a plane in New York that was headed for Greece. He’d told himself so as he’d reclined in first class, accepting more glasses of wine than he normally would during travel.

      He’d told himself so as he drove from the airport to the Holt Estate, where he knew the wedding was being held.

      Everyone knew where the wedding was being held. It was international news. The wedding of enigmatic businessman and heartthrob Ajax Kouros to the beloved Holt Heiress. Photos of the event would cost a premium, the world waiting with bated breath for information, for a glimpse.

      It had been shoved in his face on every news publication since he’d left Corfu. Since he’d been thrown out of Rachel Holt’s bed.

      Rachel.

      He couldn’t think of her without aching. That soft skin, that smile. The way she’d made love with him, all enthusiasm and clumsy motions. She had been inexperienced—well, non-experienced—but she had wanted him.

      Never in his life had he been wanted like that. Not just in a sexual sense.

      At some point over the course of that night he had forgotten. That he wasn’t just Alex. That she wasn’t just Rachel.

      He had been a man, who wanted a woman. Not a man twisted and bent on revenge.

      But her sweet voice piercing his sleep with Alexios had brought him straight back. And then it had all gone to hell. He hadn’t enjoyed that moment. Hadn’t enjoyed her realization that he was Ajax’s enemy.

      That fact had surprised him. And then when she’d asked, with tears in her eyes, that he not tell Ajax, he damn well hadn’t done it.

      And what was the point of going to all that trouble to have Ajax’s woman if he didn’t let him know it? He’d clearly passed the point of seducing her up the aisle so he could rob Ajax of his acquisition of Holt, a fact he’d learned was contingent on the marriage, so at the very least he could stop their marriage and deprive him of the company that way.

      And yet he hadn’t made the call.

      It was a mystery to him. As was the fact that he was now at the Holt Estate with an expertly forged invitation. A forged invitation that allowed him to be one of the few guests admitted early to enjoy canapés and a tour of the grounds.

      He’d had his personal assistant start working on the invitation a couple of weeks ago. Merely a precaution. And it had turned out to be a good thing, since he was here.

      He hadn’t been planning on coming, but it was always nice to cover your bases. If there was one thing Alex knew for sure, it was that life had no place for the lazy or the honest.

      It was best to be hardworking and morally flexible.

      He handed the invite over to the woman standing at a podium. She was dressed all in black, her blond hair pulled back into a neat bun. Everything about the décor, from the ribbons to the flowers, was restrained. Elegant. Nothing unnecessarily frilly or romantic.

      The picture of the woman Rachel seemed to be in the media, but not the woman he’d met that sun-drenched day in Greece.

      He was filing that away. It could be useful information.

      The woman scanned a code on the back of the invitation—that had been the tricky part, but his PA was friends with an acquaintance of Ajax’s PA, which made getting in to reproduce the sequence on the codes possible—then smiled at him brightly when it made a nice sound that gave him the impression it had been approved, and gestured behind her.

      “Follow the path to the garden. You’ll find that refreshments are already being served, Mr. Kyriakis.”

      Nice alias. Seeing as he’d lived his entire adult life with one, he knew a good one when he heard it.

      “Thank you.”

      He followed her instructions, and the neatly groomed path, to the back of the house. It was expansive, with rows of chairs set up facing an altar and the sea. Everything was white. Crisp and pure.

      Again, very like the Rachel the media was so fond of. Nothing like the woman he’d experienced.

      The woman he’d experienced hadn’t seemed so pure when she’d been with him. Legs wrapped around his hips, her breath hot on his ear as she’d moaned her pleasure.

      Heat washed over his skin. Prickles of sensation that bloomed from his neck and down his arms. He flexed his fingers, tried to shake off the sensation. It wasn’t as though Rachel was the first woman he’d had.

      There were any number of options available to a young man who found himself out on the streets and unsupervised from the age of fourteen. If nothing else, hooking up had often given him a bed to crash in, and he’d had no complaints about that.

      So why on God’s depraved earth was he so fascinated by a night of sex with a virgin? He couldn’t fathom it.

      Perhaps it was extra satisfying because he had taken her from Ajax. Because he’d robbed him of what he had been surely saving as a wedding night prize. Why else would he have left her untouched?

      Just thinking about the man, being this close to him, made his stomach burn. If he hadn’t decided years ago that assassination was a bad plan, he would have been considering it now.

      Well, he was imagining it, but he wouldn’t really do it.

      He was a bastard—life had made him that way. But he wasn’t entirely cold-blooded. Unlike Ajax.

      Unlike their father.

      No matter his position now, Ajax had been there, just as Alex had been. A young teenager who had taken advantage of the excess on offer.

      The women, like Alex’s mother, who would have done anything for their next fix. Who were slaves in every way. Victims. Living in poverty while surrounded by opulence. Kept on a leash of addiction, and in his mother’s case, a strange attachment to the master of the manor.

      A twisted thing she’d called love. The kind of love that, when severed, had left her to bleed out onto the floor. A crimson stain in Alex’s memory that he could never wipe away.

      Years and success wouldn’t change that. Wouldn’t bring her back. And yet Ajax stood at the top now, unaffected. With a family. A woman who had always appeared, to Alex, at least, to love him.

      He looked unscathed, unspoiled. Ajax could pretend at respectability all he wanted but Alex knew the truth.

      Because the truth was in him, too. But at least he never played as if he was anything other than a bastard. Ajax played as though he’d walked through it all and come out clean.

      Alex knew he would never be clean.

      He curled his fingers into fists and looked up at the house. There was a small group of people headed inside, led by a woman wearing black, which was clearly the uniform of the event staff.

      He started in their direction, melting into the back of the group. Everyone was rapt, paying close attention to what the woman was saying about a fresco on the exterior wall that had been moved from an old church. Blah blah. He didn’t care.

      Greece was old. Like that was news.

      He’d spent nights in more crumbling ruins than he could count. He was a fan of mod cons. As long