The Antonides Marriage Deal. Anne McAllister

from the scrap pile without so much as a nod in his direction, then by God, Elias could certainly quit without looking back!

      “But…” Aeolus shook his head helplessly, his hands waving in futility. “You can’t.” His words were almost a whisper, his face still ashen. There was a pleading note in his voice.

      Elias frowned. He had expected sturm und drang, not a death mask.

      “Why can’t I?” he asked with studied politeness, a hint of a not very pleasant smile on his lips.

      “Because—” Aeolus’s hands fluttered “—because it’s…it’s written in the contract that you’ll stay on.”

      “You can’t sell me with the company, Dad. That’s slavery. There’re laws against it. So, I guess the contract is null and void?” Elias smiled a real smile now. “All’s well that ends well,” he added, managing—barely—to restrain himself from rubbing his hands together.

      But Aeolus didn’t look pleased and his color hadn’t returned. His fingers knotted and twisted. His gaze dropped. He didn’t look at his son. He looked at the floor without a word.

      “What is it?” Elias said warily in the silence.

      Still nothing. Not for a long, long time. Then, at last, his father lifted his head. “We’ll lose the house.”

      Elias scowled. “What do you mean, you’ll lose the house? What house? The house on Long Island?”

      His father gave an almost imperceptible negative shake of his head.

      No? Not the Long Island house?

      Then that meant…

      “Our house?”

      The family home on Santorini? The one his great-grandfather, also called Elias, had built with his bare hands? The one each succeeding generation of Antonides men and women had added to, so that it was home to not only their bodies but their history, their memories, their accomplishments?

      Of course, they’d had the house on Long Island for years. They’d had flats in London, in Sydney and in Hong Kong.

      But they only had one home.

      But his father couldn’t mean that. The house on Santorini had nothing to do with the business! Never had. It belonged to his father now as it had belonged to his father and his father’s father before him. For four generations the house had gone from eldest son to eldest son.

      It would be Elias’s someday. And, though he’d saved the company and all its holdings, none of them mattered to him as much as that single house. It held memories of his childhood, of summer days spent working building boats with his grandfather, of the dreams of youth that were pure and untarnished, though life was anything but. The house on Santorini was their strength, their refuge—the physical heart of the Antonides family.

      It was the only thing Elias loved.

      His fingers curled into fists. It was the only way he could keep from grabbing his father by the front of his emerald-green polo shirt and shaking him. “What have you done to our house?”

      “Nothing,” Aeolus said quickly. “Well, nothing if you stay on at Antonides.” He shot Elias a quick, hopeful glance that skittered away at once in the face of his son’s burning black fury. He wrung his hands. “It was just a small bet. A sailboat race. A bet I made with Socrates. Which boat—his or mine—could sail to Montauk and back faster. I’m a better sailor than Socrates Savas!”

      Which Elias had no doubt was true. “So what happened?”

      “The bet was about the boats,” his father said heavily.

      “I know. You raced the boats. So?”

      Aeolus shot him an exasperated look. “I’m a better sailor than Socrates Savas. I don’t hold a candle to his son Theo!”

      Elias whistled. “Theo Savas is Socrates’s son?”

      Even Elias had heard of Theo Savas. Anyone who knew anything about sailing knew Theo Savas. He had sailed for Greece in the Olympics. He had crewed in several America’s Cup races. He had done windsurfing and solo sailing voyages that caught the hearts and minds of armchair adventurers everywhere. He was also lean, muscular and handsome, a playboy without equal and, naturally—according to Elias’s sisters—the ideal of Greek manhood.

      No matter that he had been raised in Queens.

      “Theo won,” Aeolus said, filling his cheeks with air, then exhaling sharply and shaking his head. “And he gets clear title to the house—unless you agree to stay on as managing director of Antonides Marine for two years.”

      “Two years!”

      “It’s not much!” Aeolus protested. “Hardly a life sentence.”

      It might as well be. Elias couldn’t believe it. His father was asking him to simply sit here and watch as Socrates Savas gutted the company he had worked so hard to save!

      “What the hell did I ever do to him?” Elias demanded.

      “Do to him? Why, nothing at all. What do you mean?”

      “Nothing. Never mind.” There was no reason to take it personally. Socrates Savas did this sort of thing all the time. Still Elias ground his teeth. He felt the pulse pound in his temple and deliberately unclenched his jaw and took a deep, calculated breath.

      Two years. It was a price he could pay. He’d paid far bigger ones. And this wasn’t just about his life, it was the life of his whole family.

      He’d done everything else. How could he not do this?

      “All right,” he said at last. “I’ll stay.”

      His father beamed, breathed again, pounded him on the back. “I knew you would!”

      “But I’m not answering to Socrates Savas. He’s not running things!”

      “Of course not!” His father said, relieved beyond belief. “His daughter is!”

      The new president of Antonides Marine International hadn’t slept a wink all night.

      Tallie had lain awake, grinning ear to ear, her mind whirling with glorious possibilities and the satisfaction of knowing that her father was finally acknowledging she was good at what she did.

      She knew it wasn’t easy for him. Socrates Savas was as traditional as a stubborn, opinionated Greek father could be—even though he was two generations removed from the old country.

      In her father’s mind, his four sons were the ones who were supposed to follow his footsteps into the family business. His only daughter, Thalia, ought to stay at home, mend clothes and cook meals and eventually marry a nice, hardworking Greek man and have lots of lovely little dark-haired, dark-eyed Greek grandchildren for Socrates to dandle on his knee.

      It wasn’t going to happen.

      Oh, she would have married. If Lieutenant Brian O’Malley’s plane had not crashed seven years ago, she certainly would have married him. Life would have been a lot different.

      But since Brian’s death she’d never met anyone who’d even tempted her. And not for her father’s lack of trying. Sometimes she thought he’d introduced her to every eligible Greek on the East Coast.

      “Go pester the boys,” she told him. “Go find them wives.”

      But Socrates just muttered and grumbled about his four sons. They were even more of a mystery to him than Tallie was. If she desperately wanted to follow him into business, Theo, George, Demetrios and Yiannis, had absolutely no interest in their father’s footsteps—or his business—at all.

      Theo, the eldest, was a world-class open-ocean sailor. Tie him to an office or even stick him in a city and he would die. Socrates wasn’t sympathetic. He considered that his oldest son just “mucked about in boats.”

      George