Entering the master suite as Electa strode out from the dressing room, Maria pulled to a breath-catching standstill.
“You go out, Mrs. Leventis?” Maria asked, in a voice laced with disbelief,
Her reaction wasn’t that surprising when the last time she’d seen her, Electa had been in the bathroom while throwing up.
Now she was dressed in a breathtakingly elegant white linen dress touched with stylized brushstrokes of emerald-green. The dress skimmed Electa’s long slender figure and had couture sewed into every invisible seam.
The neckline was square, the bodice cinched into the waist by a shiny green belt, and the skirt skimmed midway down her amazingly long thighs. And the shiny green shoes she was wearing elevated her height by an
And the line went dead… Adrastos bit out a string of filthy curses. ‘Lost in the hills…’ He turned full circle, a set of long fingers scoring through his already disheveled hair, then grabbed hold of the back of his neck. She’d been gone for hours, so she could be anywhere. Adrastos tried to connect to her phone again, hoping to hear her voice again. But she wasn’t answering… He had no idea that Electa was simply ignoring his calls willing to try and save herself from that ugly situation. She kept touching the display and the buttons until she finally brought the satellite navigation screen to life, then she sat staring at the screen. It showed h
Trying to drag himself out of the dark place his mind had gone into, Adrastos blinked his eyes. The one small ray of light he could see in what Electa had just confessed to him, was that at least, this time she was standing here telling him, instead of running away to hide. And she had every right to feel scared. He felt scared. And the same damn issues that had torn their marriage apart twelve months ago were still hanging around, threatening to do the same thing again.“I bought the apartment from Maribel’s husband this morning. They have decided to move to the States,” he said, not surprised when Electa quivered in front of him. He’d hurt her by ignoring the import of what she’d said. But he was not ignoring it. He was cleaning it.“When I explained to hi
“So, what do you want me to do about it, Adrastos?”“You do absolutely nothing, Craig,” replied in a very calm manner Adrastos Evander Leventis, while sitting behind his desk, absorbed in the business report spread open in front of him. Craig Hardy continued to hover like a man in a quandary, frowning behind his spectacles because doing nothing wasn’t an option his employer could afford to take.“Adrastos, you know she is somewhere out there… And that she could make trouble,” he dared to offer, all too aware that the younger man didn’t take kindly to interference into decisions he made about his private life. When it came to a cut-throat mentality, Adrastos was a chip off the old block. When Kosmas Leventis, his father, had become ill and died suddenly three years ago, no one had expecte
Electa loathed debt. She was scared of it. Had been that way from the tender age of seventeen, when their parents had been killed in a car crash, leaving her and her then thirteen-year-old brother to find out the hard way how their privileged lifestyle had been mortgaged to the hilt. What bit was left after probate had finished liquidating their few assets had been barely enough to pay her brother’s boarding school fees for the next year. Electa had been forced to walk away from her own private education and take two jobs a day in an effort to survive. And she had worked and scrimped and carefully hoarded every spare penny she had earned so that she didn’t fall into debt. If it hadn’t been for a chance meeting with the owner of a top modeling agency, Electa dreaded to think where she and Flynn would’ve
In her endless efforts to make his life as comfortable as she could possibly make it for him, Electa had created a monster. A bone-selfish, petulant man-child who thought it was more than alright to steal someone else’s money if it got him what he wanted. What was it Adrastos had said during one of their fights about her brother? ‘You are in danger of creating a life-wasting lout if you don’t stop it.’ Well, that damned prediction had come true with a vengeance, Electa thought, only to toss that aside again with a stubborn shake of her head. For what gave Adrastos the right to criticize the way she’d handled a rebellious teenager when his own privileged upbringing had given him everything he wanted at the nod of his handsome d
Fresh from the shower, Adrastos took a call from the lobby informing him that his wife had arrived in the building. He was quite surprised and impressed almost. Electa was half an hour early. ‘Is this a deliberate ploy on her part to set me off or is she just running scared?’ he mused curiously as he rubbed his wet hair with a towel. ‘We’ll see…’ Adrastos didn’t think for a second that Electa had rushed over to his apartment because she was eager to see him. Only two things fired up his wife enough to make her expose any hint of weakness like this: her brother and money. He left out a third thing… which was him… There was a time when he was the first and last thing on her
Electa sucked in a breath, not wanting to think of him like that anymore. Not wanting to recall anything intimate about their time spent here together or the fact that there were times when they’d actually lived here in peace. Yet, right on the back of that desire not to remember, Electa saw herself, curled up in his recliner with her cheek supported on a cushion she’d filched from a living room sofa, slender white fingers idly twirling a ringlet of hair while she reading a book. ‘Sweet times from another life…’ Her throat began to hurt. Bare pink toes curling and uncurling in time with the music playing softly in the background. A glass of wine and a snack within lazy reaching distance and her handsome dark husband right there, with her... as always…
Like a man hewn from stone, Adrastos showed no reaction whatsoever to her quivering climb-down.“He is a thief, Electa!” he stated brutally. “Flynn stole your identity and committed credit card theft! And he did it with a complete disregard for the amount of money he was stealing from me. How can you, Electa, of all people, want to defend him for doing that?” She’d winced all the way through his cold judgment of Flynn, but still, it didn’t change a thing she felt.“Adrastos… He is my baby brother… the only family I’ve got…” she whispered. “Since I was seventeen, Flynn is all I’ve got in this world… Please, don’t hurt him…” And there it was, Adrastos recognized… The unconditio