A Perfect Love: International Billionaires VI: The Greeks (2 page)

Yet now, like everything about him, the black had changed.

“He’s too much of a coward,” he snarled. “So I have the pleasure of informing you,
kardiá mou.
”

The nickname was too much. “Don’t call me that.”

The black gaze blazed, flared with unholy delight. “You don’t appreciate irony, Tamsin?”

She tried to wrestle her brain into working order, tried to find her way out of this nightmare, but it was no use. His presence and hate swallowed her whole. His terrible, treacherous threat. What could be worse than this? What could be worse than confronting all her old dreams arising from the ashes of her past as a menace?

But she’d absorbed a hard, bitter lesson at sixteen. One she’d learned again and again over the years. There was no way to win when confronted with disaster. The only thing a person could do was survive. “Tell me.”

“Your loving father…” His drawl elongated the words, edging them with icy contempt.

Haimon wasn’t her father. Once, when she’d been little, she’d hoped. Hoped he’d take the place of a father who’d abruptly disappeared from her life. However, her new stepfather wasn’t the paternal type and she’d quickly accepted she was nothing more than a piece of her mother’s baggage.

Raphael knew this.

He’d listened to her wistful dreams about her real father. He’d held her in his arms as she cried about some insult Haimon had thrown at her.

He knew. Too much.

“No more games.” Tam reminded herself of what she’d become. She ran this hotel. She managed the small staff. She paid the bills. Moreover, she’d successfully raised the twins for the last ten years. Two rambunctious, challenging, amazingly wonderful boys. She could handle anything.

She had to for the boys.

“Games?” Raphael’s mouth turned grim. “I’m not playing a game.”

“Then stop beating about the bush. Say what you have to say and leave.”

His gaze sharpened. Was he surprised she challenged him? Didn’t he realize she was different, too? She was not the loving, giving girl he’d known years ago. Her sacrifice to protect everyone, including him, had changed her forever.

“I’m not leaving,” he stated. “You and your father are.”

She didn’t waste her breath denying Haimon as a father. Because she only had breath enough to deny his demand, deny a reality too horrible to contemplate. “We aren’t going anywhere.”

“
Nai
, Tamsin, you are going. Out onto the street.” A confident smirk crossed his face. “I own this place, and I’m evicting you and your father.”

This building wasn’t merely a building. It didn’t only house the cheap hotel rooms and struggling businesses which paid for the little they had. This building was their home. The top floor was where she and the boys slept, played, dreamed. This building was the only thing they had.

She peered past the horror standing before her and glared into Hamion’s sunken eyes. “You told me you owned this place free and clear.”

“I did.” The shrug of old shoulders tinged the words with defeat. “Once.”

“Not now?” She couldn’t help the wail. What would she do? What would she do with the twins?

“He took out a mortgage a year ago.” Raphael’s voice was quiet, yet intense. “Which I bought.”

“But…but…” None of the thoughts and emotions running through her brain made any sense. She couldn’t seem to nail any of them down and put them in some comprehensible order.

“He’s late with the payments.” The deadly tone marched on.

“Not that late,” Hamion blustered.

“The contract you signed, old man.” The younger man appeared completely at ease, his arms casually crossed, his long legs planted solidly on the floor. The floor he claimed he owned. “Didn’t you read the contract? Were you as foolish as my father was years ago?”

The sharp tang of sheer rage filled the words. Yet she detected something else in the flavor of his voice. A hint of permanent, unbearable grief. All these years, and he still mourned. And exactly like before, she couldn’t comfort him; she couldn’t walk into his arms and hold him. The stark thought brought unwilling, unwanted tears to her eyes.

Raphael glanced her way and smiled. “Tears won’t do you any good,
kardiá mou.
They will not sway me from throwing you out.”

“I’m not—” She stopped. This man was no longer her Raphael. He wouldn’t believe a word she said. She needed to understand right now: he was the enemy. Somehow she had to find a way around this man and his threats in order to protect the boys.

“In fact,” he continued, his smile tight and taut. “Tears will only make this more pleasurable for me. I want both of you to suffer.”

Just as my father did
.

He didn’t have to say the words. They lay in his eyes. His dark black eyes.

She stared into those eyes and saw nothing of the boy she’d loved. Clearly, that boy had died ten years ago when his father had ended his life. Tamsin’s grief billowed inside her. She’d thought she’d done the right thing that long ago night. She’d been sure in her young heart she was saving him. But saving him for what? Saving him only for him to lose any trace of humanity?

For a moment, something flashed in those black eyes. His big body flinched; his mouth tightened. And his eyes…For a moment, Tam thought she saw something.

Then it was gone.

Rafe swung back to Haimon. “Since you didn’t read all the fine print, Drakos, I’ll enlighten you. One late payment and this place is mine. One.”

The old man sunk deeper in his chair.

“And you’ve missed three.”

“We live here.” Reality seeped into her skin like an oily claw of futility. “This is our home.”

“Not any longer.” He prowled to the door. “You were served with an eviction notice and today’s the last day you can live here.”

“I never saw any such notice.” Tam clung to a last strand of hope.

Her tormentor stared over at her stepfather. Her gaze followed his and what she saw on Haimon’s face cut any hope right out of her heart. “How could you keep this from me?”

“I have a deal in the works,” he mumbled. “I’ll have the money—”

“Too late.” Leaning on the doorframe, Rafael crossed his arms. “I don’t want your money, Drakos. I’ve got plenty of my own.”

“If you’ll give me some time—”

“I’ll give you nothing.” His words were like steel-edged nails. “I want you both out. If not willingly, then I will be glad to call the bailiffs in.”

Fury and fear mixed inside her, making it hard to think. Only emotion shot through the mess in her mind. “The boys,” she blurted.

“Ah, yes.” He straightened, dropping his hands to his sides.

Her love for her brothers swelled, settling her emotions and letting her think. He remembered the boys. She saw the memories in his black gaze. The times he’d lifted them into the pool and played with them. The picnic they’d had with the twins one day. The fun he’d had, laughing and rolling with them in the fragrant grass by the river. If she had to plead and beg, if she had to use those memories, she would. She would do anything to save their home for them. “The boys live here.”

“The boys.” Sudden fury flashed across his face. “How could I forget?”

“They have a home here.” Why did the memory of her boys make him angry? They’d only been three the last time he’d seen him. They’d done nothing to warrant any anger. She forced herself to continue, trying to find a foothold to negotiate with this man. “I’m…I’m their mother.”

“Actually, you’re not, are you?” The dark gaze pinned her to the floor. “Their mother was a whore, wasn’t she?”

“Don’t say that.” Rage wiped away any impulse to negotiate. “It’s not—”

“I speak only the truth.” The long, elegant fingers of his hands tightened into fists. He glowered at the old man sagging in his chair. “The boys aren’t yours, Drakos. Did you know that?”

The words blasted into the room like torches of fire. Her stepfather jerked in his seat, and if it were possible, his skin whitened even further. “What the hell are you insinuating?”

“I’m not insinuating anything. I’m telling you.”

The fear in her blood raced, roared, and Tamsin thought she might faint. “What are you telling us?”

“The boys.” Rafe looked right at her as he delivered the killing blow. “Are mine.”

T
hey were so young
. So impossibly young.

The boys.

They lay in a jumble of gangly legs, gawky arms, slack mouths, together on the opposite plastic couch. Exhaustion had carried them away an hour ago as they sat in this sterile hospital lounge. Waiting for a report about their father’s condition.

Their supposed father. Who’d collapsed at the news they were not his. Never his.

They are mine.

The words pumped in Rafe’s heart. They were Vounós. They were not Drakos’ or Tamsin’s.

They were his. The last remnant of his brother.

And so very much like his brother Rhouben.

Ben
.

Grief clutched in his throat. The grief he’d managed to suppress as he’d held his sobbing mother when the news had come two weeks ago. A grief he’d stifled when he’d made the funeral arrangements. Grief he’d crushed with the memories of how irresponsible and negligent Ben had been for years. In reality, his older brother had been lost to him at the moment of their father’s death. He’d walked away from the emotional wreckage of their family, the collapse of the business, the destruction of the Vounó reputation. The companion of his childhood, the brother he’d adored and emulated, had deserted him as surely as his father had. As decisively as Tamsin had.

At the moment he’d most needed them all.

He’d dealt with it. Without letting emotion get in the way of what he had to do.

So it surprised him. This abrupt, overwhelming grief. This sudden sense he’d lost far more than his brother. This welling, gut-wrenching feeling he’d missed something important in his intense determination to make it
right
.

One of the boys grumbled in his sleep as he rolled over on the plastic couch.

The sound punctuated his grief like a straight pin stuck in his skin.

There was no time to grieve. There was far too much to do.

Rafe tore his gaze away from the slumbering teenagers. Glancing at his phone, he flipped through his messages. A message from his mother, who knew nothing of this trip. Not yet. Not until he had the twins in his hands would he reveal the startling, unbelievably wonderful news that Ben lived on in his children. A voicemail from his sister, asking if he could please stop by and talk to her husband about some new venture. Plus, a hundred messages from his business. Doctors pitching new medicines for his investment. Investors pleading to be brought in on the next deal. His PA wanting to know where he was and what he was doing.

He tried to focus. Focus on what needed to be done.

Yet, right now, in this silent room, inhabited by two boys who’d suddenly become the center of his universe, his usual responsibilities seemed so far away. Like a different life.

Theé mou
, how thankful he was for the impulse that had driven him to go through his brother’s belongings alone instead of shunting the work off to his grieving sisters. They would have been hysterical at the news of their lost nephews.

But no, it had only been his hands shaking as he’d scrolled through the long list of emails written by the whore. Only his startled eyes had read her threats, her entreaties, her demands. Only he had gasped when he’d seen Ben’s emailed response, admitting his paternal responsibilities, offering money for silence.

Memories had washed through him as he’d stared at the stark words.

The way Ben excused himself from the gatherings with the Drakos clan, even over their father’s strenuous objections. The time Ben had abruptly walked out of the room when he and his mother had been talking about the young Drakos toddlers. The moment Ben’s harsh voice had cut him off when he’d tried to explain how he’d fallen in love with…

Rafe clamped down on the old stupidity and instead, focused on who sat across from him.

The twins. Ben’s twins.

Memories were the past and not useful in this situation. He needed to focus on the future and his plans for these boys. He owed it to his late father. To his dead brother.

The inside of his throat ached. Raphael jerked his head around and pinned his gaze on the nurse’s station at the end of the hall. He swallowed. Swallowed again. Breathed in deeply. The clang of a hospital cart rolling past the quiet room served as a needed distraction.

He breathed in once more.

One of the boys murmured, turned on the plastic cushion and subsided into sleep again.

Another breath in, the smell of antiseptic filling his nostrils with the bite of chemicals. Clearing away the buzzing in his brain and the aching in his heart. Satisfying him that he’d found his control.

His plan before he’d known of his nephews had been to continue to use stealth and secrecy in destroying Drakos. He held the mortgage, but this had not been enough. He’d been steadily adding information about the illegal deals the old man was making. Loan sharking. Bookmaking. He wanted the man in jail, not merely homeless. He wanted Haimon Drakos humiliated as his father had been. He wanted to drag out his revenge like a long, slow march of death, cementing the old man into a seal-tight, inescapable box one solid stone at a time.

However, the existence of the boys had changed everything. There had been no time to lose. He could not allow his flesh and blood to be tainted any longer by Haimon’s influence.

Or Tamsin’s. Certainly not hers.

Yet the knowledge of the boys’ true paternity didn’t mean he wouldn’t continue to pursue Drakos. The police were interested in the information his security had provided them. Very interested.

Haimon Drakos had an arrest warrant waiting for him. If he survived.

“He’s going to survive.” Her silky, slurred voice reached him from the open doorway. The slight lilt she always edged her words with rasped along his nerves. He’d fallen for her husky voice, just as he’d fallen for her eyes. He’d relished the sexiness of it as she whispered in his ear. He’d dreamed endless dreams of what she’d say when he entered her for the first time.

A first time that had never happened.

Maybe this was the whole issue. Maybe the fact he’d never taken her body was the reason he still felt this unwilling lust for her. Maybe…

“Did you hear me?”

“
Nai
.” He looked up from his phone and managed an uninterested gaze. “I heard you.”

She stood tall and straight, somehow projecting a calm, centered manner even though her clothes were wrinkled and her long hair rumpled. Staring him down, she no longer gazed at him with fear or regret. All he saw in those leafy eyes was determination.

Determination to get rid of him.

Why did this spark a flame of rage in him? Why, when he wanted the same thing?

To get rid of her.

“He’s had a stroke, but the prognosis—”

His hand arced in a sharp move of rejection. “I have no interest in hearing the details. He survives. Good.”

“Good?”

“Good because I’m not done with him.” He straightened out of his slouch on the hard cushion.

“Haven’t you done enough?”

“No.” With an abrupt jerk, he stood. He was inordinately pleased when she took a step back.

“He’s an old man.” She glared, her eyes flaring with green heat. “Have some compassion.”

“My father was a young man.” Rafe found himself spitting the words at her. “Did Drakos show any compassion for him?”

His accusation punched into her, deflating the anger in her expression. A soft sigh spun out of her lush mouth, lingering in the air like wistful wisps of regret. “Their business dealings fell apart. It happens sometimes and years have gone by. Can’t you let it go?”

“Let it go?” He laughed. “No. I will never let it go.”

One of the boy’s heads lolled, then straightened. Black curls slipped across his forehead in a thatch of ebony youth. “Tam?”

“Sssh, Isaák.” With a quick step, she walked to the couch and brushed the boy’s tangled hair aside. “Aarōn is still sleeping.”

The kid curled his head into her palm like a kitten, not a man. Not a male Vounó. The woman had mollycoddled them; it was clear. It was also clear there was a strong attachment between the boy and Tamsin.

Both things needed to change. Immediately.

“May I have a private word with you?”

His clipped words hit her and the kid at the same time. She straightened, her back going rigid. The kid’s eyes widened as he peered past her to pin his sights on Rafe.

Until now, there hadn’t been time to properly introduce himself to the boys. Not as their supposed father had been raced to the hospital. Not as Tamsin had bundled them into her car, ignoring Raphael, and rushed behind the speeding ambulance. Not as the twins had huddled together on the hospital’s couch, staring at their mobile phones, too dazed by events to take in their surroundings.

The curiosity in the boy’s gaze was the opening he needed.

“I’m Raphael Vounó.”

If it were possible, her back grew stiffer. She whipped her head around and opened her mouth. The green of her eyes darkened in instant dread. She knew. She knew instantly what he intended. Just as she always had.

Rafe slammed the thought, the connection aside. He spoke the words that would forever change everything for his nephews. Spoke them with clear, precise purpose. “Your uncle.”

His claim crashed into the room like a comet. Exactly as he’d planned.

“What?” she gasped, turning to face him with a stare of blank astonishment. “You said they were yours—”

A biting surge of rage scorched his blood. “
O Theós na sas gamó̱to
!”

She flinched back as his curse wrapped around her. The boy slipped behind her, his face pale with instant fear.

Rafe tried to stop, tried to control the billowing ball of anger and resentment and pure hurt pummeling inside. But it was too much, too ugly of an accusation to ignore. “Did you think, Tamsin,” he managed to breathe in a gasp, as fire roared through his lungs. “Did you really think I would sleep with your mother when I was seventeen and then four years later be with you—”

“No.” She lifted one hand, as if ready to reach out and touch him. “I wasn’t thinking straight.”

Stepping away from her, he kept his body rigid, afraid of what he might do to her if she actually touched him and set him to flame.

“Rafe, I’m sorry.”

He didn’t want her apology. He wanted nothing from her. Nothing. Pacing to the long window at the side of the room, he stared out at the whispered beginnings of dawn.

“Then, who…” she stuttered to a stop. The boy murmured at her side.

“Ben.” He forced himself to turn and confront her wide eyes and white skin. “Who else would I be talking about?”

She frowned as one of her arms wrapped around the silent boy standing at her side. “You can’t be sure—”

“I’m sure.”

The utter confidence in his voice shook her. He saw it in the way her shoulders tensed as if hit, the way her one hand tightened at her side.

“What does he mean?” The boy glanced at Tamsin, confusion wrinkling his brow. “Who is this Ben?”

“Never mind.” Patting the boy’s arm, she gave him a tight smile. “He’s lying.”

“I don’t lie.” He stared at the boy. The one who mattered. “I never lie.”

The statement came out of him as an accusation. Precisely as he meant it to be.

Tamsin got it. Got the message.
She and her mother and Haimon were the liars
. Her mouth tightened. “My mother—”

“Was a whore.”

“Rafe.” She placed a gentle hand on the boy’s black curls as if to push him away from the horrible, true allegation. “She was their mother too.”

Frustration at her interference, at the fact she was right in this case, pulsed through him. He’d been so consumed at throwing all of this at her like barbs, like knives, he’d missed the impact his words might have on the boys.

His boys
.

“They need to know the truth, but first you and I need to get some things straight.” He waved his hand at the doorway. “Privately.”

Her gaze darted to the door and back to him. Reluctance was written across her face. Yet his stare and stance must have convinced her she’d rather hear what he had to say alone, than chance him stating whatever he had to say in front of the twins.

Time enough to talk to the boys. After he’d taken care of getting rid of her.

“Isaák, stay here with Aarōn. I’ll be right back.”

“But—”

She dipped down and placed a comforting kiss on his brow. “Everything will be fine.”

Nai
, everything would be fine. For the twins. Not for her.

She circled past him as if he was a live wire, and he felt like it. Charged with his mission. Electric intent zipping through his blood. He paced behind her as she walked down the hall, the low murmur of the nurses at the station doing nothing to break through the circle of awareness twitching around them.

He hated this connection. Hated it.

Still, he wasn’t a man to deny what was in front of him. Her measured pace, her baggy grey trousers, her tense posture should have been asexual. There was no swing of her hips or tight silk on her body or sultry looks over her shoulder as he followed her. Nothing that hinted at womanly favors offered which would stoke a man.

None of it mattered. He burned for her.

Stopping in front of a red vending machine, she turned to face him. The lights colored her blonde hair pink, her pale skin rosy. She glanced at him and the shock of those eyes shot through him afresh, torching the fire inside him to instant inferno. He took the fire and twisted it, tightened it around his hate for her.

“I’m taking the boys.” He pitched his voice low, but the steaming edge of his hostility colored each word.

He had to give her credit; she didn’t crumble in the face of his declaration of intent. She didn’t cry or wail or shriek. Or beg. She merely stared at him with a grim determination of her own.

Damn her. He wanted to see her fall apart. He needed to see it.

“Today.”

She waved the word away as if it were a fly. “No, you’re not.”

So stoic. So certain. So seemingly impervious to him.

“You can fight me,
kardiá mou.
Actually, I hope you do.”