The Greek's Penniless Cinderella

PROLOGUE

XANDROS LAKARIS TURNED ABRUPTLY, winged brows snapping together over his dark eyes, deepening the lines around his well-shaped mouth.

‘Dammit! Just what do you suggest I do? Storm after her and drag her to the altar?’ he demanded rhetorically.

The man he’d addressed, Stavros Coustakis, sat back in his chair, eyeing his visitor impassively. He had grey-green eyes, unusual for a Greek—but then—unlike Xandros, with his long and illustrious family history—Stavros Coustakis knew little about his antecedents.

‘I’m a nobody,’ he’d readily admitted, with the worldly cynicism Xandros was well used to in this man whose daughter he’d been engaged to marry, ‘but I’ve made myself a very, very rich one.’

Those grey-green eyes hardened now at Xandros’s outburst.

‘No,’ he retorted. ‘It would do you no good. She has defied me and is therefore no longer my daughter.’

Xandros looked at him askance, his frown deepening. He knew Stavros was ruthless—a man few, if any, cared for—yet to hear him disown his daughter so casually was chilling. But he also knew that his own reaction to his former fiancée’s flight was, in fact, predominantly relief.

He had been in no rush to abandon his carefree bachelor lifestyle, indulging in the easy-going short-term affairs which—thanks to his dark good looks, wealth and elevated social position in Athens society—had always come easily to him. Still only in his early thirties, he wanted a few more years of it before he tied himself down in marriage.

It was a preference which he knew warred with the dual responsibility pressing heavily on his shoulders—not only to continue the ancient Lakaris family line, which could trace its heritage back to the imperial nobility of the long-vanished Byzantine empire, but also everything his father had impressed upon him all his life. That old money must continually be replenished with new or risk disappearing completely.

It was that necessity which had dominated Xandros’s childhood. His grandfather had fatally combined lavish spending with rash investments, and the family had come dangerously near the point of complete ruin because of it.

Financial worries had been paramount in his boyhood years, with his father plagued by unpaid creditors and even impending bankruptcy, his mother fearful that their beautiful, gracious family home in the countryside beyond Athens would have to be sold. His father had driven himself relentlessly to restore the Lakaris fortunes and reverse his own father’s unwise profligacy.

He had succeeded more than handsomely, restoring the Lakaris fortunes by the time his son had reached adulthood, but Xandros had grown up indelibly imprinted with the task of continuing his father’s work and ensuring that never again would they want for money—that the family’s wealth would never again be endangered, only enlarged.

An ideal opportunity to do just that—hugely—had presented itself in the prospect of undertaking a highly mutually lucrative merger with the Coustakis empire, its financial lines of business, from venture capital to insurance, that would fit ideally with the Lakaris portfolio.

Xandros’s father, before his untimely death, had been keen to press ahead with it—and not just for financial reasons alone.

Xandros was well aware that his late father had been very keen on pointing out that their ties with Coustakis could, and indeed should, be even closer. And that Stavros’s daughter Ariadne, despite her father’s rough-and-ready self-made origins, would, in all respects, make Xandros a highly suitable wife...

He could see why. Ariadne, though perhaps a little young for him, being only in her early twenties, ticked all the boxes. A striking brunette, intelligent and cultured, she socialised in the same elite circles as he did, and they got on perfectly well together. From his parents’ point of view Ariadne had the added advantage of not only being Stavros Coustakis’s heir, but also the fact that her late mother had come from a very good family and had been best friends with Xandros’s mother.

Moreover, Stavros Coustakis himself had become very keen on making the proposed business deal much more than a corporate merger.

‘I’ve a mind to be father-in-law to a Lakaris and have a Lakaris grandchild,’ he’d informed Xandros bluntly. ‘Being a nobody myself.’

For all his late father’s enthusiasm, and his mother’s urging, it had still not been an easy decision for Xandros to make, but in the end he’d gone for it.

And so, he’d thought, had Ariadne, who was keen to escape her domineering father as much as having any desire to marry. Okay, so neither of them was in love with the other, but they liked each other well enough, and he’d determined to do his best to be a loyal and supportive husband, and eventually a loving father to their children. That would have been enough, wouldn’t it?

Except the text he’d received that afternoon, making him rush hotfoot here to Stavros’s showy mansion in an exclusive suburb of Athens, had disabused him of that assumption.

Xandros—I can’t marry you after all. I’m leaving Athens. I’m sorry—Ariadne.

The words echoed again in his head now—as did the covert tug of relief that had sprung up in him as he’d taken in the implications of her rejection. With Ariadne removing herself from the frame, he was now free to make what he’d preferred all along—a marriage-free merger with Coustakis Corp.

He’d said as much to the man who was not, after all, going to be his father-in-law.

‘Very well,’ he said coolly now, his voice clipped. ‘Then that is that. Ariadne is no longer in the equation. However, as I have argued from the outset, marrying your daughter was never essential to our merger.’

He kept his eyes levelled on Stavros, seated at his heavily gilded desk, aware that he wanted out of this oppressively over-opulent mansion as soon as possible. His own taste was for minimalism, as in his own city apartment, or better still, the simplicity of his whitewashed, blue-shuttered villa on Kallistris.

Kallistris! The very name could lift his spirits! His own private island—his haven—a helicopter flight from Athens. The place he escaped to whenever his work or social life permitted. He had purchased it on attaining his majority, knowing that it would always be a safe haven for him, whatever life threw at him.

He would fly out there this very evening—spend the weekend, get away from all this. Away from a man he didn’t like, whose daughter he hadn’t really wanted to marry and now didn’t have to, because it seemed she hadn’t wanted to marry him either. Stavros Coustakis could forget about his ambitions for a Lakaris son-in-law and grandchild. It wasn’t going to happen.

But first he wanted a definitive answer on the one thing he did want—the merger he sought. His eyes rested on Stavros Coustakis now, as he waited for his reaction. Was it go or no go with the merger? He disliked being played—and with a party like Coustakis it was essential to meet hardball with hardball.

‘You’ll need to give me an agreement in principle,’ he said now, ‘or not.’

He glanced at his watch—a calculated hustle, as he well knew, and Coustakis would know, too, but that was the way the game was played.

‘I’m flying out to Kallistris this evening.’

He wanted to be there in time to watch the sun set into the bay, the moon rise over the headland...

His mind snapped back to where he was now, and his gaze fixed on Stavros. Something was changing in those pouched grey-green eyes—they held a caustic gleam that Xandros suddenly did not like.

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Stavros was saying. His tone was smooth—too smooth. ‘You see...’

There was a definite challenge in his voice now, which Xandros liked even less.

‘Since you are so keen on this merger to take place, I had hoped that you would be flying to London instead.’

He smiled. Not a nice smile at all. And every particle of Xandros’s consciousness went on high alert.

‘In order to collect...’ Stavros Coustakis’s smile deepened, and the smile was indisputably a taunt, just as the now blatant cynical amusement in his eyes was overwhelmingly provocative ‘...my other daughter.’

Xandros froze.

CHAPTER ONE

ROSALIE SIGHED, CROUCHING down beside her bucket of soapy water, a heavy-duty scourer in her rubber-gloved hand, and poured bleach over the disgusting, greasy, trodden-in gunk on the cheap vinyl floor in front of the equally disgusting grease-splattered cooker.

The rest of the kitchen was just as disgusting. Whoever had rented this house had been a pig. The whole place was filthy, from top to bottom, and cleaning it was a pig as well. But it had to be done.

She sighed again. Her rent was due, and she also liked to eat.

She felt a familiar emotion burn in her.

One day I won’t be doing this! One day I won’t be cleaning up other people’s filth and dirt! One day I won’t be living in a total dive and paying a fortune for the privilege! One day I won’t have a wardrobe consisting of clothes from charity shops! One day I won’t be never going out and living on beans on toast...

One day she wouldn’t be poor any more.

It was a poverty she’d grown up with. Her single mother, raising her daughter on benefits, had been plagued by lifelong ill health, and Rosalie had been her carer both as a child and into her twenties. She had never been able to make a life of her own. It had just been her and her poor, frail mum, living in a shabby council flat in the East End of London.

As for her father—he didn’t even know she existed. Her mother had told her as much, sighing over the one all too brief romance in her sad life.

‘I knew him for such a short time! He was foreign—so romantic!—working here in London on a construction site. Then I found I was pregnant, but he’d already left the country. I wrote to the construction company, to tell him you were on the way, but they couldn’t have been able to trace him because I didn’t hear back...’

And she never had either. Rosalie had written him off from an early age. All she and her mother had had was each other.

Rosalie’s face shadowed. And now she did not even have her mother. Her poor unhappy mother had finally succumbed to chronic lung disease in the chill grip of last winter. With her death Rosalie had lost the council flat and lost the disability and carer’s benefits she and her mother had lived on. But she had, she knew, gained her freedom.

Grieve though she did for her mother, she knew that finally, at twenty-six, she could belatedly start to make a life of her own. Make something of herself. Get qualifications, the ability to better herself, and escape from the poverty trap and the bleak, unlovely streets of her rundown part of the East End.

She sighed once more, scouring away at the filthy floor, feeling the small of her back aching. She’d been cleaning since eight in the morning, and now it was gone four. It would be another good hour’s work on the kitchen before she could lock up, hand the key in to the agency, then get back to her poky bedsit and her crucial, all-important studies.

She’d signed up for online classes in accountancy, and getting those vital qualifications was her exit route out of poverty. To pay for them, and to pay for her dump of a bedsit and to keep body and soul together while she studied, she did cleaning work all day—however exhausting.

With a jerky movement she got to her feet, tipping the dirty water down the sink and setting it to refill, pouring in fresh bleach. She fetched the mop to clean the rest of the floor, then frowned suddenly, turning off the water as she hefted the full bucket.

What was that she’d heard?

The sound came again and she realised what it was. The doorbell was ringing.

Still frowning, and wary, for this low-rent house was not in the most salubrious area, she went into the entrance hall, setting down her bucket and opening the door cautiously. The view out to the nondescript street was almost completely blocked by the tall, male figure standing there.

Rosalie’s eyes widened totally as impressions tumbled through her head. Tall, dark hair, incredible eyes and face...

Who on earth...?

She gulped silently, her gaze fastened on him helplessly. Then, abruptly, the man was speaking.

‘I’m looking for Rosalie Jones,’ he said, and his voice was deep and clipped and curt, with an accent she could not identify and had no time to think about.

Rosalie stared, still fixated on the overwhelming visual impact the man standing there was having on her. Then she realised what he’d just said.

‘Who wants to know?’ she asked sharply.

Apprehension spiked in her. No one who looked like the man standing there could possibly have the slightest business being in a rundown area like this! Everything about him was wrong here.

It wasn’t his foreignness—that was commonplace in London. She gave a silent gulp. It was that air of being from a different world altogether—smooth, urbane, cosmopolitan, sophisticated. A world of luxury and wealth...

The flash suit, the silk tie, the polished shoes, the gold pin on his tie...all wrong for this part of London...

And most of all it was wrong—totally wrong—that a man like that should be asking for her...

His expression had tightened, as if he wasn’t used to being challenged in any way.

‘I need to talk to her.’ His reply ignored her demand. He merely sounded impatient at her delaying tactic. ‘Is she here?’

Rosalie’s grip on the door tightened. ‘I’m Rosalie Jones,’ she said. She spoke reluctantly, and was about to repeat her question as to who wanted to know, but the expression on the man’s face had changed.

‘You?’ he said.

There was total disbelief in his voice.

The dark eyes skewered hers. ‘You are Rosalie Jones?’ His mouth tightened to a thin line. ‘Impossible,’ he said.

For a moment he just stared at her, that look of disbelief still upon his ludicrously good-looking face, and Rosalie found herself going ramrod stiff at the way he was looking at her. Because there was more than just disbelief in his face... There was something that suddenly made her burningly conscious of the way she was looking. Of what he was seeing.

Me, looking a total fright after cleaning this pigsty all day...

Then, suddenly, he stepped indoors, and another spike of apprehension shot through her, cutting off that burning self-consciousness.

‘What the—?’ she began indignantly.

But he had closed the front door, turning to her. That look of disbelief was still on his face, but he was modifying it, she could tell. Now it was a grim look, as though he were steeling himself to talk to her.

‘You are Rosalie Jones?’ he echoed. Incredulity flattened his voice.

She stared. Why did he sound disbelieving?

She tilted her face—he seemed very tall and overpowering in the small hallway, which was ill lit and shadowed now that the front door to the street was closed. It made her supremely conscious of the visceral impact of the man, from his immaculately cut sable hair to his polished handmade shoes, via his planed and outrageously magnetic good looks and those amazing long-lashed dark eyes, which were raking over her as if he found her assertion outrageous.

‘Yes,’ she ground out again. And this time she got out the question she needed to ask—right now! ‘Who are you, and what can you possibly want with me?’ she threw at him.

With a visible tightening of his mouth, he answered her. ‘My name is Alexandros Lakaris, and I am here because of your father,’ he said.

Xandros saw the girl’s expression go blank—and then pale with shock. His own feeling was not dissimilar, and had been ever since Stavros Coustakis had dropped his bombshell.

He could still hear the man’s voice echoing in his head, and the exchange that had followed.

‘Your other daughter?’

Xandros’s stupefied repetition of what Stavros had announced had fallen from his lips and the older man’s expression had not changed.

‘Yes. I have another daughter. She lives in London. I am expecting you to go there and bring her here.’

He’d paused, and that unholy glint had come into his eyes again.

‘Assuming, of course, you still wish to proceed with the merger you are so set on...’

Xandros’s face had tightened, as if turning to set plaster.

‘Tell me a little more, if you please, Stavros,’ he’d replied.

His voice had been neutral...unlike the emotion scything in his chest. But he had determined he would deal with those emotions later. At that moment he’d simply needed information.

Stavros had supplied it, still speaking in that deliberately unconcerned way that Xandros had known was a wind-up—one he was equally determined not to react to.

‘Her name is Rosalie Jones. She lives with her mother...or did until recently. I knew her mother...let me see, now...over twenty-five years ago, when I was working in the UK. It was a fleeting affair and we went our separate ways. However, I have always known