Bride Behind The Billion-Dollar Veil. Clare Connelly

       CHAPTER ONE

       CHAPTER TWO

       CHAPTER THREE

       CHAPTER FOUR

       CHAPTER FIVE

       CHAPTER SIX

       CHAPTER SEVEN

       CHAPTER EIGHT

       CHAPTER NINE

       CHAPTER TEN

       CHAPTER ELEVEN

       CHAPTER TWELVE

       CHAPTER THIRTEEN

       CHAPTER FOURTEEN

       Extract

       About the Publisher

       PROLOGUE

      Twelve years ago

      ‘LISTEN TO ME.’

      Thanos looked up at his brother, barely able to see him through the fog of rage and disbelief that shrouded his every thought and feeling.

      ‘We will get it back.’

      Thanos gripped the pen in his hand, returning his attention to the imperious black line at the bottom of the contract. A contract for the sale of Petó, the company their grandfather, Nicholas Stathakis, had built from the ground up. The company Thanos had learned to operate at his grandfather’s knee. The company that meant everything to him.

      ‘No.’ He dropped the pen to the boardroom table, extending to his full six and a half feet, striding across the room with a ramrod-straight back.

      He knew his half-brother was watching him, and he knew Leonidas was feeling the same sense of outrage and disbelief. Only Leonidas was somehow better at processing this. He was calm, outwardly, even as their world crumbled around them, whereas Thanos wanted to torch the building on his way out.

      He braced his palms on the floor-to-ceiling glass, looking out on downtown Athens. All of this they had once commanded.

      All of this, their father had destroyed.

      ‘We will get it back, Thanos,’ Leo repeated, with urgency. ‘But we must sell it for now.’

      Nausea split Thanos’s side. Sell it? Sell the jewel in their grandfather’s business empire? Because their father had tied the company to the mafia?

      Thanos ground his teeth together, locking his jaw intently. He wanted to say there was another way. He wanted to fix this. To make it better. And suddenly he was eight years old again, watching his mother walk away. He was eight years old and knowing himself to be the instrument of a family’s breakdown. He was eight years old and everything in this world was his fault. But this was so much worse.

      Nicholas had trusted Thanos with Petó, and he’d been careless. He’d trusted Dion Stathakis—their father—when he should have seen what was happening right beneath his nose.

      What could he do now?

      ‘I cannot bear to think of someone else running his business.’ Thanos’s voice cracked with the strength of his emotions.

      ‘Do you think I can?’ Leonidas growled, and Thanos turned to face his brother then, their eyes meeting with complete understanding. This situation was wrong. Wrong in every way.

      Leonidas softened his expression a little. ‘But this is the best possibility we could have hoped for. Kosta Carinedes wants Petó. His plan to fold it into his own logistics empire are sound, so too the rebranding he envisages. Petó will live on, Thanos, and it will continue to prosper.’

      Thanos’s stomach clenched. ‘But not by our hands.’

      ‘No.’ Leonidas’s eyes glittered in acknowledgement of that.

      ‘I will not live in a world where this company is not mine, Leonidas. One day, one way or another, Petó will be ours again.’

      Leonidas nodded slowly but Thanos wasn’t satisfied. ‘Swear it to me, Leo. Swear to me now that we will right this wrong—and all our father’s wrongs—even if it takes us the rest of our lives.’

      Leonidas expelled a soft, low breath. ‘I swear it. But you must sign the contract now.’

      Thanos nodded, knowing his brother to be correct. Still, he glared at the paper as though it were a writhing tangle of snakes at his feet. He lifted the pen with difficulty and hovered it over the page, his perennial tan paled to straw in that moment.

      He scrawled his name on the page and silently swore to himself, once more, that this wasn’t the end.

      This wasn’t over—not by a long shot. Petó was a part of his blood and his DNA, and it always would be.

       CHAPTER ONE

      ALICE TOOK A full ten seconds to remember who she was and what she was doing. For a moment, the appearance of one man had managed to skittle everything from her mind: her job, her responsibilities; the mountain of medical bills she had in her handbag waiting for her to wade through at lunch time; the credit card that was almost maxed, and the fact this temp position would be finishing in two weeks, meaning she’d yet again need to find a job; her mother’s worsening condition and Alice’s inability to find a proper long-term solution for her care. Every second of every day those considerations pursued her, but for a moment, with the sound of the elevator doors opening to the top floor of the glass and steel monolith that was Stathakis Towers, she found the chatter of her mind was silenced and all she could do was stare.

      Her almond-shaped brown eyes tracked his progress across the office, her pulse hammering her body from the inside out, the closer he came to her desk.

      Thanos Stathakis was here. In his office. In Manhattan.

      Despite the fact she’d temped for the man for five months, she hadn’t once laid eyes on him, outside the endless stream of photos that littered the Internet. Photos of him invariably in a state of undress, relaxed, surrounded by a bevy of supermodels and actresses, partying, drinking, living the kind of life Alice could barely imagine.

      The kind of life her father had also adored. The thought should have been sobering, but it wasn’t. She was almost mesmerised by the