Sold for the Greek's Heir(17)

‘Men!’ Iola proclaimed dramatically at her elbow, making Lucy emit a startled laugh. ‘Thank heaven, Jax got them out of sight.’

‘What sparked off that punch?’ Lucy demanded in bewilderment.

‘Apparently Kreon and Jax’s father have some past history. Kreon didn’t go into detail but it’s obvious that Jax’s father hates him and almost didn’t come to his son’s wedding because he knew Kreon would be here.’ Iola rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t let it spoil your day.’

‘I shan’t,’ Lucy responded, stroking Bella’s curls distractedly while thinking that family relations promised to be taxing with their fathers at odds.

With Iola by her side, Lucy welcomed guests and chatted until she saw Heracles and Kreon emerge again together with drinks in their hands and actually speaking to each other. But when Jax strode back to join her, raw tension was still stamped on his lean, darkly handsome features.

‘Evidently you’re quite successful in the peacemaker stakes,’ Lucy remarked as he steered her into the function room to take their seats, mercifully moving her right before she had to greet Kat Valtinos, who looked ravishing in a cutaway emerald dress teamed with feathers in her hair.

‘No, they achieved that without any help from me. I only stayed to ensure that hostilities didn’t break out again,’ Jax admitted. ‘You still haven’t met my father and I need to explain what happened out there.’

‘Don’t break the habit of a lifetime and tell me something,’ Lucy urged with helpless sarcasm.

‘It’s not something I want to talk about but I must,’ Jax breathed stiffly. ‘However, it’s old history and nothing to do with us. No doubt you’re wondering why my father went for yours...’

‘Kreon does seem to be an acquired taste with some people.’

‘This is not a teasing matter,’ Jax censured.

As she settled down beside him at the top table Lucy was watching Heracles Antonakos make their daughter’s acquaintance. Bella was fearless and she stared up at the older man and handed him her stuffed rabbit. Heracles’s craggy face broke into a sudden unexpected smile and he sat down with Iola by his side and accepted the rabbit to make it walk across the seat beside him. Bella started to giggle and clutched at the leg of his trousers to stay upright.

‘He likes Bella,’ Lucy noted with satisfaction, willing to overlook and forgive a great deal if her daughter was accepted and appreciated.

‘He loves children.’ Jax fell broodingly silent and she glanced curiously at his lean, taut profile, helplessly admiring the classic perfection of it. ‘My father discovered after my brother, Argo, died that he could not have been his child. Argo needed a transfusion after the attack and I suspect it was discovered in the minutes before he died that he did not share my father’s or my rare blood group.’

Lucy’s eyes widened because she was completely disconcerted by that bombshell. ‘My goodness, Heracles must have been devastated to find that out—’

‘Particularly as he idolised his first wife and despised my mother...and me...for my mother’s infidelity. When he found out that he hadn’t fathered Argo he immediately suspected your father because of the close friendship Kreon had had with Sofia.’

Lucy winced. ‘I honestly don’t think it was that sort of friendship.’

‘It wasn’t. Kreon saw Sofia as a little sister. His mother, your grandmother on Kreon’s side, was Sofia’s nanny and as children Kreon and Sofia spent a lot of time together,’ Jax told her. ‘Unfortunately having married Sofia my father distrusted their friendship and became jealous.’

‘In other words, your father is an old dinosaur who can’t credit that a man and a woman can have a platonic friendship,’ Lucy commented, still watching Heracles as he lifted Bella onto his knee with careful hands.

‘I wouldn’t appreciate my wife being that friendly with another man either,’ Jax admitted.

‘Sadly I don’t currently have any close male friends to torment you with.’ Lucy sighed with unhidden regret on that score.

‘You’re a little witch,’ Jax growled, running his forefinger along the lush line of her full lower lip. ‘Why does that make me want to kiss you again?’

‘You love a challenge?’ Lucy whispered unevenly, meeting those stunning green eyes in a head-on clash and feeling more than a little dizzy with excitement, her lips parting.

‘But I don’t enjoy an audience,’ Jax countered, running a finger back and forth across the delicate bones of her wrist below the level of the table.

Lucy was breathing in rapid shallow little gusts, insanely conscious of her body responding to him on every level. She could feel her breasts full and constricted within the bodice of her dress, her distended nipples pushing hard against the scratchy lace of her bra and then there was the tight locked-down tension and heat between her thighs, not to mention the dulled little throb there that made her ache and stiffen her posture.

‘It’s showtime—but not for what we want,’ Jax murmured drily as Iola took a seat beside him and Heracles settled down beside Lucy with Bella still on his knee.

‘She’s very cute,’ Heracles said of her daughter. ‘She knows what she wants.’

‘Mum... Mum,’ Bella framed, lurching straight off Jax’s father into her mother’s arms and flopping down sleepily.

‘She needs a nap,’ Lucy sighed.

‘Where’s the nanny I hired for the day?’ Jax asked.

The older woman was already approaching Lucy, ready to take the tired toddler off her hands, but Lucy stood up. ‘I’ll come upstairs with you and get her settled.’

‘Your bride doesn’t take hints, does she?’ Heracles remarked with some amusement to his son. ‘You’ll have your hands full with the two of them.’

Jax, who very much wanted to follow his bride upstairs and have her settle him down, grimaced. ‘I know it.’

‘Well, you can’t make worse choices than I did. I won’t say anything more,’ his father declared piously. ‘With my track record, I can’t afford to preach, can I?’

‘No, you can’t.’

‘Three marriages ending in one death and two divorces and your mother was almost as bad. We didn’t set you much of an example, did we?’ Heracles sighed heavily. ‘By the way, I’ve set up the island for your honeymoon—’

Thoroughly taken aback, Jax frowned. ‘But you live on Tifnos,’ Jax objected, because he had been planning to take Lucy cruising round the Mediterranean on the yacht.

‘Tifnos is yours now that you’re a father. It was built to be a family home and I’m tired of living there alone in that great barn of a house. I’ve signed it over to you and I’m in the process of buying an estate outside Athens,’ the older man told him in a tone of finality. ‘It’s time for me to step back and make room for the next generation.’





CHAPTER SEVEN

LUCY CAME OUT of the room where she had left the nanny watching over Bella and smiled at the sight of Kreon waiting for her. ‘Dad? What are you doing up here?’ she asked with a grin. ‘Are you trying to escape all the polite chit-chat? Or have you heard a rumour that the food’s going to be bad?’

Kreon shifted uneasily on his feet, his face grave and troubled. ‘I have done something wrong and it concerns you.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Lucy laughed as he urged her into an alcove with seats.

‘Talking to Heracles made me see stuff...differently.’ Her father selected his words with an air of discomfiture as he sat down. ‘It made me appreciate that we’ve all had our tragedies and our triumphs but it’s how we deal with them that makes us who we are. I’d like to be proud of who I am but right now I’m not.’

Lucy narrowed her eyes in confusion. ‘You don’t sound like yourself.’

‘Jax’s father neglected Jax because he despised Jax’s mother, whom he divorced. He knows he can never make it up to Jax and he has to live with it every day, knowing that all those years he left his boy to deal alone with a very difficult woman,’ Kreon told her.

‘But you and I have a different history,’ Lucy reasoned, tucking that fresh information about Jax into her memory to take out and ponder at a more suitable time. ‘You didn’t even know that my mother was pregnant when you left London and she didn’t tell you later when she could have done—’

‘That’s not what I’m talking about,’ Kreon told her heavily. ‘For many years I hated Heracles Antonakos because he put me down over my friendship with his wife. I’m ashamed to admit that I took my resentment out on his son.’

Lucy’s smooth brow had furrowed. ‘In what way?’

‘When Sofia was dying, she had a letter sent to me in which she confessed her darkest secret. She didn’t have the nerve to tell her husband so she told me instead.’ Kreon drew a crumpled envelope from his pocket and passed it to her. ‘Give it to Jax, let him decide what to do with it now. In it Sofia confesses to having an affair and she admits that Jax’s brother wasn’t fathered by Heracles. I went to see Jax a couple of weeks ago and I threatened to take that letter to the newspapers.’