CHAPTER 2

          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 ended up.

          By then she’d been burning both ends of the candle for twelve long, miserable months, serving behind one of the beauty counters in a London department store by day, and serving tables in a busy City restaurant by night, before going home to her miserable flat to sleep like one exhausted and then getting up to repeat the same routine again the next day.

          Then Eden Rafferty happened to come to her counter to buy a perfume. Eden had spotted something marketable in Electa’s reed-thin figure, quite exaggerated in those days because she hadn’t been getting enough to eat, her chocolate eyes, and the bright auburn hair set against her dramatically pale skin.

          Without really knowing how it had happened, Electa had found herself propelled into the unnatural world of high fashion, earning the kind of money that could still catch her breath when she thought about it.

          Within months she was the model everyone wanted on their catwalk or on the front cover of their magazines. She’d spent the next three years following the fashion drum around the world.

          She’d stood for hours while designers fitted their creations to her long slender figure, or posed in front of cameras for glossy fashion shoots. And she had willingly accepted every single second of it, coveting the money she earned so she could keep Flynn safe in his boarding school environment.

          In Electa’s view, that was her proudest and greatest achievement… being able to ensure that Flynn never missed out on a single thing his more privileged schoolfriends enjoyed doing.

          When he’d won a place at Cambridge, Electa had felt as happy and as proud as any parent could, and she’d done it all without once being tempted to take on debt. Not even once… Not ever…

“Flynn… Please, talk to me… We need to solve this somehow. And I promise I’ll help you, but I need to know… How much did you lose?”

“You see, El… It’s all right for you,” her little brother broke his silence. “You’re used to having money to play with, but I’ve never had any for myself.”

“Are you kidding me right now? I give you an allowance, Flynn, and I’ve never denied you a single thing you’ve asked for over and above that!”

“It was the asking that stuck in my throat, sis.”

          Oh, okay… Tightening her arms across her body in an effort to crush the pangs of hurt she experienced at that totally unfair response, it took Electa a few seconds before she could dare let herself speak again.

“Come on, Flynn,” she urged heavily then. “Just get it over with and spit out how much it is we’re discussing, here.”

          With a growling husk of reluctance, Flynn quoted a figure which blanched the color out of Electa’s face.

“Oh, sweet God… You’re joking, right?! Please, tell me it’s a prank…” she whispered.

“I wish…” he laughed thickly.

‘A hundred… Did you just say a hundred thousand pounds?”

          Turning around, Flynn flushed.

“Alright, alright… You don’t have to beat me over the head with it.”

          Oh, but she did!

“How…? Where the heck did you get the credit to spend a hundred thousand pounds on speculation, for goodness’ sake?”

          Silence came charging back at her as they stood with the width of the kitchen between them. Electa was as taut as a bowstring now, with her arms rod-straight at her sides, and her brother with his chin resting on his chest.

“I’ve asked you a question, Flynn. Would you do me the courtesy of answering,” she breathed unsteadily.

“It was… Uhm… Adrastos,” he growled.

“Ad-drastos…?”

          For a horrible second, Electa felt so light-headed she thought she was actually going to faint. She tried for a breath and didn’t quite make it.

“Are… Flynn, are you telling me that… Adrastos has been encouraging you to play the stock markets?”

“Of course, he hasn’t!” her brother flung back in disgust. “I wouldn’t take his advice if he did. I hate him… you know that. After what he did to you, I…”

“Then… what are you saying?” Electa asked trying to understand the role her soon-to-be ex-husband played in this. “Explain it to me, Flynn, because I’m really confused here as to why you’ve even brought his name into this!”

          Flynn scuffed a floor tile with a trainer-shod foot.

“I used one of your credit cards.”

“What are you saying…? I don’t use credit cards!”

          She had the usual cash debit cards everyone needed to survive these days, but never, ever had Electa dared to own a credit card. In her mind, a credit card tempted you to go into debt, and debt was no good.  

“I used the one that Adrastos gave to you.”

          Electa blinked. The one that Adrastos gave to her… The credit card attached to Adrastos’s bottomless financial resources that she had never used, though the card still languished in this apartment somewhere, like a…

“I came across it in your bedside drawer last time I was here and…”

          Electa sucked in a painfully sharp breath.

“You went through my private things?”

“Oh, hell…” her brother groaned, shifting his long body in a squirm of regret. “I’m sorry, sis!” Flynn cried. “I don’t know what came over me! I just… I needed some money, and I didn’t want to have to ask you for it. So, I went looking to see if you had any spare cash hanging around the flat. I saw the card lying there in your bedside drawer, and before I knew what I was doing, I’d picked it up! It had his fancy name splashed all over it… the great and glorious ‘Leventis Bank’!”

          Flynn rasped out the name, revealing the depth of his dislike for a man he had never tried to get along with.

“At first, I meant to cut it into little pieces and post them back to him with a… message. Then I thought… ‘why not see if I can use it to hit him where it will hurt him the most’? It was really easy, actually… One hundred thousand pounds out the window… unfortunately…”

          Electa stopped listening at ‘easy’. She was so sure that she was going to really faint away this time that she reached for a chair and sat down on it, lifting up a set of icy fingers to cover her trembling mouth.

          ‘Oh, dear God… Not Adrastos… Not now…’

          Closing her eyes, she gave a helpless shake of her head.

“I don’t want to believe you could do this to me,” Electa whispered against her cold fingers.

“Well… What do you want me to say?” her brother choked out. “I did a stupid thing, and now I’m sorry I did… But he was supposed to take care of you, Electa! You deserved to be taken care of for a change. Instead, that fucking bastard cheated on you with that floozy… that Maribel Ruiz and… Well, now look at you.”

          She flicked her startled eyes open.

“Wh-what’s wrong with me, Flynn?”

          Flynn let loose with a short laugh as if she’d made a stupid joke.

“You are the shadow of yourself, sis… You used to have the kind of career most girls only dream about, Electa. I couldn’t look around without seeing you plastered on a billboard or a magazine somewhere. You were famous… You were fabulous. My friends used to envy me for having such a gorgeous sister. They’d fight each other for a chance to meet you. Then Adrastos came along turned you inside out. You stopped modeling because Adrastos didn’t like it…”

“Flynn… That’s not true…”

“The hell it isn’t!”

          His face was hot with anger now.

‘He was a selfish, arrogant, superior bastard who wanted to rule over you like a tyrant. He didn’t like your job commitments… He didn’t even like your commitment to me.”

          There was a bit too much truth in that part for Electa to argue with it. Adrastos had demanded her exclusive attention. In fact, Adrastos had been demanding all-around… her attention, first call on her loyalty, the full extent of her desire for him focused on him between the sheets…

“Now you work at a lousy reception job for the same modeling agency that used to roll out the red carpet every time you walked into it. And you struggle to make ends meet again while he flies the world in his private jet, and I daren’t ask you for an extra penny anymore without feeling as guilty as sin. Adrastos Leventis owed me big time for what he did to you, Electa, and you just let him get away with it… as if…”

“Let’s just make one thing straight… He owes ME, not you!” Electa flared in response to all of that. “Adrastos was MY mistake, not your mistake, Flynn. He never did a single thing to you! Ever! Do you hear me?”

“Are you kidding?” her brother flared back. “He robbed me of the sister I used to be proud of and left me with the empty shell I’m looking at now! Where’s your natural vibrancy gone, Electa? Your stylish sparkle? That man took them!” he yelled answering his own bitter question. “If Adrastos hadn’t married you and then cheated on you, you wouldn’t be floating through life like a plastic bag, looking like the stuffing has been knocked out of you. You would still be flying way up there at the top of your profession, raking in the money, and I wouldn’t have needed to use his credit card to play the markets because you would have financed me!”

          Of everything he had just thrown at her in that last bitter flood, the part making its biggest impact on Electa was seeing the truth about the brother she so totally adored staring her hard in the face.

“Wow…” she said totally bemused and it was all she could say for a few seconds.