‘Yes,’ Lucy admitted, her cheeks burning.
Iola dragged the rest of the story of those six weeks in Spain from Lucy while Kreon sat fuming, his anger unhidden. ‘I knew his father, you know,’ he told them abruptly. ‘And he was a selfish, arrogant thug of a man too.’
‘Jax’s father? You knew him? How?’ Lucy asked, astonished by that admission.
‘My parents worked for the family of Heracles Antonakos’s first wife, Sofia, in London. Sofia and I grew up together and we never lost that friendship even though she lived in a very different world. She was only thirty when she died,’ Kreon revealed gruffly.
‘I’m really sorry I didn’t tell you the truth from the start,’ Lucy confessed. ‘I didn’t want to upset you—’
‘Never you mind about me being upset,’ Kreon told her through compressed lips. ‘Be grateful I’m here to support you. Antonakos sending in the lawyers straight off is your first warning of his plans—’
‘What do you mean?’ Iola interjected worriedly.
‘Well, was what happened this morning a nice or considerate thing to do to the mother of your child? Demanding DNA testing? Trying to browbeat Lucy into signing a confidentiality agreement? As a first warning shot, it tells us all we need to know...’
‘Jax is trying to protect himself. I can’t blame him for that,’ Lucy muttered ruefully, troubled by her father’s angry gravity and all too conscious that she was the cause of the lines of stress that had appeared on his weathered face.
‘He can protect himself all he likes but not at your expense or Bella’s,’ Kreon replied.
Lucy was anxious and preoccupied when she went into work that evening and she struggled to remember the drinks orders and deliver them back to the correct tables. Her father’s genuine fear of what Jax might be planning had seriously scared her. Not for the first time she wished she had the ability to get inside Jax’s head.
Earlier that day he had been strangely distant with her but very different in his wholehearted response to Bella. In retrospect it was hard to credit that he had been kissing her, touching her only the night before. Of course, that made sense, she told herself squarely. Everything had changed the minute she’d told Jax about their daughter. She recalled his glacier cool when she had first told him at his house and barely restrained a shiver of apprehension. Her father’s concern had set off all her internal alarms and had left her on the edge of panic and thinking thoughts she had believed she would never think again...
What if she simply upped sticks and vanished? She had done it before and she could do it again. But it would be wrong, her inner voice warned her sternly. It would be wrong not to give Jax the opportunity to form a relationship with his daughter. It would be equally wrong for Lucy to run away from the life her father and stepmother had generously offered her. Running away from her problems would be the childish thing to do and she wasn’t a child any more...
CHAPTER FIVE
‘SO, YOU ARE Lucy’s father,’ Jax commented, lounging back against his office desk with lethal cool, not a shade of what he was thinking revealed by his lean, darkly handsome features. ‘Where were you all the years Lucy was growing up in the care system?’
Kreon straightened his shoulders. ‘That’s my business and Lucy’s. She’s welcome to tell you if she wants. But I’m here now to protect the welfare of my daughter and my granddaughter.’
‘I don’t understand how you plan to do that,’ Jax remarked.
‘Oh, that’s very simple,’ Kreon told him almost cheerfully. ‘I have access to secrets that your father would kill to keep out of the newspapers—’
Taken aback, Jax laughed. ‘My father fears nothing. Is this some sort of clumsy blackmail attempt? I advise you to back off now before I call the police.’
‘That will be your decision but it won’t stop me sharing your family secrets with the press. In fact having me arrested will only add legitimacy to my claims,’ Kreon pointed out calmly. ‘Your father hates me. I will tell you that for free. But why do you think he leaves me alone? He is afraid of what I might know.’
‘You’re talking a lot of nonsense and I don’t intend to listen to it,’ Jax told him, crossing the room to open the door and hasten the older man’s departure.
‘Your brother, Argo, wasn’t your brother because he wasn’t your father’s child,’ Kreon delivered very softly. ‘I think Heracles only found that out after your brother died and, believe me, he does not want that humiliating truth spread across the newspapers.’
Jax froze, shock washing over him in an almost physical attack that pulled his every muscle taut to breaking point. In a driven movement he thrust the door shut again and swung violently round.
‘What do you want?’ he demanded of the smaller man, refusing to think of what he had just been told, refusing to join the dots and acknowledge how well that revelation would dovetail with his own quite recent miraculous change of status within the Antonakos family.
‘In return for my continuing silence, I want you to marry Lucy.’
Jax stared back at him in savage disbelief. ‘Marry...her?’
‘She was a teenager when you wrecked her life. You owe her the security of a wedding ring. It doesn’t have to be a life sentence for either of you. But it would give her and Bella the safe harbour and the recognition they need to have a better life—’
‘She wasn’t a teenager!’ Jax raked back at him in furious rebuttal.
‘Lucy was twenty-one last month. We celebrated with dinner at that hotel where she works.’ Kreon shot him a sourly amused appraisal. ‘My wife tells me that teenaged girls do lie about their age occasionally.’
‘Twenty-one,’ Jax repeated thickly, fighting to master the violent anger lashing through him and a powerful urge to strangle Lucy for having dared to lie to him. ‘I would require proof of those allegations about my brother, Argo.’
And from an inside pocket Kreon produced a handwritten letter which he handed to Jax. It had been written and sent to Kreon when his father’s first wife, Sofia, was terminally ill. Unable to face death with such a weight on her conscience, Sofia had admitted the affair that had led to Argo’s conception, although she had not named her lover.
‘Why didn’t you come forward with this at the time of her death?’ Jax demanded harshly a few minutes later. ‘With this letter, you were in possession of facts that were unknown to everyone else involved.’
‘Sofia couldn’t have thought through what she was doing. Your father had just lost his wife and Argo had lost his mother and her letter would have destroyed them both. Back then Heracles had no idea that Argo wasn’t his son. What do you think he would have done?’ Kreon grimaced. ‘He would’ve disinherited the boy and cast him off.’
Jax stared at the wall, knowing that there was a fair chance his father would have reacted like that in the first heat of his fury. Once Sofia had let that genie out of the bottle there would have been no putting it back.
‘I didn’t want that responsibility. I’m not a cruel man. It was a secret that shouldn’t have been told. I never liked your father and he was a lousy absentee husband but, fond as I was of Sofia, once she was gone I preferred to mind my own business...that is, until an Antonakos threatened the security of my own flesh and blood.’
Long after Kreon had gone, Jax studied the copy of the letter the older man had allowed him to keep. He was still shaken even though the woman had died long before he was born. The contents of that letter would distress his father, although, like Kreon, Jax was inclined to believe that somewhere around the time of Argo’s death his father had found out that his eldest son was not actually his son. That would better explain why Heracles had found it possible to move on so fast from that loss and adjust his attitude to Jax almost overnight.
That new knowledge and understanding just about ripped Jax apart, not to mention his view of his family. He had looked up to the big brother he had never really got to know very well and he loved his father. And why did he love Heracles, who had proved to be a useless parent when Jax was young and in need of a father? Ultimately, he had recognised that the older man deeply regretted allowing his dented ego and workaholic ways to triumph over the ties of blood. Heracles was hopeless when it came to expressing emotion though and Jax had realised that he suffered from the same flaw. His father had stumbled on blindly after Mariana’s infidelity had made him a laughing stock in the media, protecting himself as best he could by avoiding his ex-wife...and unhappily that avoidance had included Jax.
Jax hadn’t really thought about how he actually felt about Heracles until that moment, but when he thought of his father being forced to see the tragedy of his first marriage spread across the newspapers he knew he couldn’t allow that to happen. Sofia had died after a long drawn-out fight against breast cancer. Heracles was domineering and manipulative and interfering but he had once adored his first wife and the son he had believed to be his.
Jax’s first act was to summon Zenas and tell his security chief that he wanted an in-depth private investigation carried out on Kreon Thiarkis and his daughter, Lucy. How the hell had something as basic as Lucy’s age been wrong in that file? Her parentage had been incorrectly recorded as well. Lucy did have a Greek father. What else could also be wrong? He needed the background and facts he could rely on. He also needed to check out Kreon’s ties to his father’s first wife, Sofia. And to his father. After all, it was his father who had sent that file to him.