That's Amore! (13 page)

Nick's mother's face turned red. "It's a longstanding Greek tradition that the terms of an acceptable dowry are worked out before a couple marries."

"The night before?" Efi's mother said.

Dowry? Had Mimi Constantinos just mentioned the word dowry? But that was something reserved for historical romance
novels,
wasn't it? The rich duke set to marry an even richer duchess until the poor shopkeeper's daughter catches his eye.

Why was she getting the impression she was cast in the role as the poor shopkeeper's daughter?

"We're not in
Greece
. We're in
America
," her father pointed out.

Efi suddenly felt faint.

Silence. Then Efi's mother held her hands out palms up. "All right, okay. This is nothing we all can't handle like rational adults." She stared at her husband next to her. "We knew this was coming."

Her father sat back in his chair. "We knew nothing. We suspected these bloodsuckers had their eyes on my money all along."

Efi gasped. So far as she knew, the Constantinos had money of their own. Plenty of it.

"Papa!" she said.

"It's the truth." He glared at her.

Mimi's hand fluttered to her neck. "I don't think what we're asking for is unreasonable."

Nick cleared his throat. "And just what did you ask for, Mother?"

His father spoke, "That they buy you a house. A respectable house in our neighborhood."

"Or at least provide a sizeable down payment on one," Mimi clarified.

Efi wasn't aware of any discussions being held involving a house.

"Something we were already prepared to do. It was to be our wedding present to our daughter," Gregoris said.

Efi stared at him, tears burning her eyes. "You were? Oh, Papa!" She grabbed his hand and squeezed it.

"But that's not enough for them. They have a list," her mother said.

"A list?" both she and Nick said at the same time.

Mimi moved a napkin that was hiding what indeed appeared to be a list. And a long one at that.

Efi raised both brows.

Nick reached for the list, grabbing it before his mother could stop him. "Buy Nick his own accounting firm." He stared at his parents. "I don't want an accounting firm. I'm happy where I am."

"Now you are happy. But in five years when you have three kids to feed? Will you be happy then?" his mother challenged.

Efi reached across and took the list from him.

A family vacation for ten Constantinos relatives—to celebrate Nick's and her union—to
Greece
during the high season of summer this year, four-star accommodations…

A new dining-room table for the Constantinos household to accommodate the new family members, to be bought at one of the most exclusive antique shops in
Detroit
…

An amount of cash to Nick's parents as a show of respect…

Efi's head swam with the words in front of her eyes.

Her father was right: this was blackmail.

"It is only fair," Stamatis said, straightening his tie. "Our son is going to support your daughter for the rest of her life. It is only fair he be compensated for this role."

"And how does a trip to
Greece
and a new dining-room table—not to mention cash for you—compensate Nick?" Efi couldn't stop herself from asking.

"We raised him," Mimi said.

"Christos kai panayia."
She muttered the Greek curse, getting up from the table so fast she knocked over her coffee cup. "My father's right. You are trying to blackmail us."

Nick began getting up. "Efi, this is something our parents should be discussing. We should stay out of it."

She stared at him. "Are you in on this …
attempt
to extort money from my family?"

"Such disrespect for the man who's going to provide for you and your children?" his mother asked.

Efi stared at her. "I don't need anyone to provide for me, thank you very much. I plan to work for what's mine."

Mimi Constantinos gasped as if the notion was inconceivable.

"Isn't it enough that we're paying for the wedding, including that overpriced party you threw the other night?" her father asked.

Her parents had paid for the Constantinos party? The one with the band and the dancing Aphrodite? She'd known her parents were paying for the wedding, and had even felt a bit guilty about some of expensive things her mother insisted on getting, but she hadn't a clue that they were also springing for the
Constantinos
' expenses. For all she knew, her father had also paid for their family to come over from
Greece
.

She suddenly felt ill.

"I'm going to leave the room before I say something I regret," she whispered, then turned on her heel.

It didn't help her mood one whit when she found Aphrodite standing smiling at her from the top of the steps.

"Stay away from my man," she told her cousin before she stormed into her bedroom and slammed the door.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Day six continued…

A
strident knock
at her bedroom door. "Efi, open the door. Now!"

Over the past hour, the plea had been made first by her mother, then by her cousin Aphrodite, and now by her sister Diana who, it was safe to say, probably only wanted access to the room because it was now hers, as well. The house was filled to capacity with relatives and unless her sister wanted to take up residence in the bathtub, Efi's room was it.

"Come on, Efi. You're acting like a twelve-year-old."

She stopped her pacing and strode toward the door and opened it. Diana appeared shocked, as did her mother, her aunt Frosini and every other female relative standing outside the door.

Efi grabbed her sister's arm and hauled her inside, slamming the door closed after her.

"Hey! That hurt."

"You think you know pain? Try feeling what I am right now."

Her sister gave her a record-breaking eye roll. "Come on, Efi. While I won't pretend to know what happened tonight, from what Mom says, you're blowing everything way out of proportion."

Efi stared at her younger sister. "You want to stay in the room or do you want to go back out into the hall?"

Diana made a face.

Efi returned to her pacing.

Her younger sisters Eleni and Jenny had already moved their makeshift bed to their parents' room, to give the bride a quiet night's sleep as well as leave plenty of room in the morning for all the women who would be fluttering about getting ready for the ceremony.

Efi stopped and stared at where her sister stood with her arms crossed over her chest. "Can you believe what they're asking for?"

Diana looked genuinely puzzled. "Who?"

"Who? Who? I'll tell you who. The Constantinos, that's
who
."

No lightbulb went off behind her sister's eyes.

"I thought Mom briefed you on the night's goings on?"

"She told me you blasted Aphrodite."

"That's why she thinks I've locked myself in my room?" She walked toward the door and shouted at it. "This is not about Aphrodite!"

She hoped her mother and the relatives who had their ears pressed against the wood suffered some hearing loss.

Efi stood with her hands balled at her sides and gave a frustrated shout. "Only the Greeks would find the shallowest, most damning reason for my actions."

Diana sank down on top of their currently shared bed. It was just then that Efi remembered her sister would be inheriting the room with the view of the front lawn rather than her middle room with a view of a tree and the house next door.

Even Diana had motivation to see Efi gone.

"So if Aphrodite isn't to blame, what is?" Diana asked.

"What is?" Efi began pacing again, her entire body seeming to vibrate with suppressed emotion. "For starters, let's begin with Nick's parents trying to blackmail Dad for millions."

Diana's brows shot up.

Efi scowled. "Okay, not millions. But it might as well be, considering the list they presented him with tonight."

Diana sighed. "That's nothing new, Efi. A dowry is part of Greek tradition."

"We're not in
Greece
." She spoke the words slowly, with deliberate clarity. "And a dowry is maybe a thousand or two to put toward a down payment on a house, or a dining-room set…"

The mention of the furniture made her close her eyes and groan as she recalled her grandfather's bizarre behavior earlier in the day. Her grandfather still refused to apologize, and Gus, his best friend of the past twenty years, refused to drop the charges. The next time the two met would probably be in court.

She heard a sound on the other side of the door and stared at it.

"And yes, I'll admit, I have some issues with our cousin." She couldn't even bring herself to say Aphrodite's name. "I mean, how tacky can you get, openly targeting your cousin's groom the nights leading up to her wedding?"

Diana cracked a smile. "Tacky as tacky can get."

That earned a bit of a smile in return as some of the frustration ebbed from Efi's muscles. She sank down next to her sister. "You can say that again. It was all I could do not to slug her when I saw her with Nick earlier."

"What do you mean you saw her with Nick?"

Efi shrugged. "I guess she found a reason to go over to the Constantinos household, you know, because of a newfound friendship with one of Nick's cousins, and she needed a ride back here. Conveniently enough, Nick and his parents just happened to be coming here for dinner. So when I opened the front door…"

"Ouch," Diana said with a flinch.

"Yeah, ouch."

"You know Nick would never do anything, don't you?"

Efi stared at her wedding dress still hanging on the back of the door. Did she know? She wasn't sure. All she had to do was remember the way he'd danced with Aphrodite, the way he allowed her cousin to get her way, to make it appear as if she was making some headway with him, and Efi began feeling like a dowdy old maid all over again.

"Efi? You do know that, don't you?"

Efi shrugged. "Yeah … I guess."

"No, you
know.
Nick loves you. Always has, always will."

"Yeah, but he's had to go without for the past two weeks."

She realized what she'd said as she and her sister stared at each other. Then they burst out laughing.

Diana pointed a finger at her. "You know, that actually may be to blame for your mood tonight. Lack of sex has a strange impact on a person."

They heard what sounded like a gasp on the other side of the door. And Efi had to agree with what she guessed was her mother's response. "Diana, you may only be a year younger than me but I'd prefer it if you do not refer to sex in any manner around me until
you're
at least forty, okay?" Another eye roll.

"I don't know." Efi rubbed her stocking feet together, glancing at her shoes near the door where she'd kicked them across the room earlier. "Maybe this is what they mean when they talk about cold feet." She looked at her sister. "Do you suppose Nick is going through the same thing?"

Out of the long line of people who had tried to convince her to unlock her bedroom door, Nick hadn't been one of them. Of course, she knew her mother probably hadn't let him anywhere near the stairs, much less her bedroom door, but still…

He had to know something was wrong. Didn't he?

Or did he take their relationship so much for granted that he believed no matter what, she would be at the church tomorrow on time?

Diana put her arm across her shoulders. "So are you done with your temper tantrum now?"

Efi squinted at her. Then she nodded and smiled. "Yes."

"Good. Mom says there's plenty of leftover
karithopita
and I'm dying to dig into it. Let's go."

Efi motioned for her sister to lead the way. She followed her to the door, opened it for her … then slammed it straight after, immediately driving the lock home so she was once again alone in the room.

It wasn't all that long ago that the idea of her mother's walnut cake seemed able to solve any dilemma. But now her problems loomed a little larger than a handful of walnuts, cake and syrup.

Somewhere around
midnight
the knocking finally stopped, the women probably surrendering to sheer exhaustion. The last word had come from her mother.

"We all know what you're going through now, Efi. Get some rest. Everything will look better in the morning."

Efi looked toward her dark window and the fringed purple lampshade reflected in it and sighed. She couldn't imagine anything looking better in the morning. Not the way she felt.

What had begun as a volcanic eruption had dissipated, but the lava flow had coated every inch of her insides so that she felt numb and … well, just plain different. In the course of twelve hours she had gone from a giddy bride to a reluctant bride with a heap of doubts.

She reached for her cell phone on the bedside table. Still no call from Nick. A thousand calls from Kiki, who had joined the women outside the door at around nine, but nothing from the one person she needed to
hear
from most.

She clicked the phone closed and put it back down.

If her family was to be believed, tomorrow her entire life would change. Overnight she would go from a young woman with dreams of taking over her father's pasty shop and turning it into a sweet lover's dream, to a wife with nothing to look forward to but her husband's dirty socks and the children, being a drain on him as he worked for her and their family for the rest of his natural life. Not exactly how she had envisioned their life together.

And just how exactly had she envisioned it?

She realized with a start that she really hadn't given it much thought beyond the wedding, the honeymoon and their cozy little apartment.

She pushed from the bed and wandered to her wedding dress. Somehow it seemed sullied by the day's events, the ivory white dimmed by her thoughts and the ache in her heart. She fingered the delicate lace,
then
before she knew what she was doing, she stripped out of the dress she'd worn for dinner and shrugged into the yards of white fabric. She couldn't do all the back buttons on her own, but she could do enough of them to hold the dress in place. She opened her closet door to access the full-length mirror on the inside and stared at her reflection.

She'd seen herself in the dress no fewer than a dozen times while making up her mind to buy the expensive piece and during alterations. But where her mind had been clouded by visions of being a princess on her wedding day, now her mind seemed frighteningly clear. It was just a dress. Nothing more. Nothing less. A dress that seemed to hide too much in the light of its glaring whiteness.

It was then she realized she couldn't go through with it. As much as she loved Nick, she couldn't go into that church tomorrow and pledge her everlasting devotion to him, without reservations, without doubt. There were too many questions floating around in her mind. Too many things she needed to know. Too far a place for her to get to before the ceremony.

Where that morning she'd been a girl feasting on the dream of a wedding, now she was a mature woman considering the consequences of her
actions.

If she let Nick's parents do what they wanted to do to her father, she'd never be able to look them in the face again. And Nick? He hadn't seemed shocked by their requests. In fact, he'd suggested that they allow their parents to hammer everything out.

Efi smoothed her hand down the pretty lace bodice. Is that what the future held? A life as the docile wife chained to home and hearth while her husband dictated the direction of their lives? Was she facing years of holidays and Sunday dinners sitting across from in-laws who saw her as a big price tag instead of appreciating her for the person she was?

A sense of panic so overwhelming ballooned in her chest she thought she might burst with it.

She stepped toward the door, listening to the other side of the wood. She didn't hear anything, but that didn't mean no one was there. She quietly unlocked the door and inched it slightly open to find Kiki, her mother and her sister lying on makeshift beds in the hall outside. Kiki met her gaze and began getting up. Efi quickly closed the door again.

Essentially they were blocking her in. Ironic that she had been the one to initially lock herself in. She had little doubt that if she didn't come out first thing in the morning, they would go in search of a battering ram and crash the door in to gain access. After all, no matter how she felt, or what she was going through, the show must go on.

She rushed toward the front windows and pushed the right one all the way up, staring at the ground below. When she was a teen she used to sneak outside by way of the branches of the old oak. But it had been a number of years since she'd done it.

"Oh, the hell with it."

Bunching up the skirt of her wedding dress, she swung one leg over the ledge, then the other, maintaining a death grip on the window. Her heart beat thickly in her chest as she reached for the nearest branch, fell short and tipped slightly forward.