CHAPTER 3

          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 dark head?

          Flynn had been only seventeen when Electa had first met Adrastos, still attending boarding school and reliant on her for everything. Falling in love hadn’t been an option she could afford to let happen…

          Yet she’d been unable to stop herself from falling hard and fast for Adrastos Leventis. And what Adrastos wanted, Adrastos got, by sheer single-minded force of will, which in Electa’s view, put him and Flynn in the same selfish club.

          Between the two of them, they had demanded so much from her that sometimes she’d felt stretched so taut in two different directions she’d thought she might actually snap in two.

          On one side of her, she’d had the brother who’d become such a handful to deal with, skipping lessons to go out on the town with his friends and constantly getting into scrapes, which meant she’d had to travel down to his school in Hampshire to deal with the inevitable fall-out. Then there’d been Adrastos on the other side, angry with her for pandering to her brother’s every whim.

          But at least she had felt vindicated when Flynn won a place at Cambridge. He hadn’t achieved that by spending every night out on the town. And he’d settled into university life over the last year without giving her very much grief.

          Then, she shook her head… because Flynn didn’t settle down at all. He’d just hidden it from her that he was still doing exactly what he wanted to do, even if that meant sneaking around her flat and stealing credit cards to pay for his excesses.

“I hate him so damn much, Electa!” Flynn said, with no idea what his sister was thinking. “It would’ve served him right if I’d gone on a real bender and completely cleaned him out. I should’ve bought a yacht or two, or a private jet like his to fly myself around in, instead of sitting in my room at uni spending his rotten money before he found out it was me doing the…”

          Flynn snapped his mouth shut, leaving the rest of what he had been going to say to slam around the room like a clap of thunder. Electa shot to her feet.

“Go on… Finish what you were saying…” she shook out.

          Biting out a curse, her brother lifted a hand and grabbed the back of his neck.

“Adrastos came to see me on campus today,” he confessed.

“He did what?” she asked trying to maintain her calm.

“Yes… He called me a weak, thieving, pathetic wimp and threatened to break my neck if I didn’t…”

          He stopped, clearly deciding to swallow down the rest of the insults Adrastos must have thrown at him.

“Well… The bottom line is,” Flynn went on huskily, “he wants his money back, and he told me that if I don’t give it to him, he’s going to take the matter to the police.”

          The police…? Electa sat down again.

“Now I’m scared because I don’t think he was bluffing, El. In fact, I know that he wasn’t.”

          So did Electa. Adrastos didn’t make threats unless he was prepared to carry them through, as she’d discovered in the hardest way there was. Bitterness suddenly grabbed at her insides, burning a hole in her ability to hold back from recalling that final showdown, when she and Adrastos had stood toe to toe like mortal enemies instead of loving husband and wife.

‘I’m warning you, Electa, go chasing off to your brother’s aid this time and I will go out and find someone else to take your place tonight. So, don’t test me if you’re not prepared to face the consequences of your actions…’

          She had gone to see and help Flynn. And he had found Maribel. And from one day to the next, their marriage was over. And she lost the love of her life, the only man she’ll ever love.

          Pulling back from where those memories wanted to suck her, Electa sat back in the chair.

“So, how does he expect you to pay him back one hundred thousand pounds?” Electa asked heavily, already suspecting what was coming before her brother loped over to the table and produced something from the back pocket of his jeans.

“He… Uhm… He said to give you this…”

          Flynn was holding out a business card, which he set down on the table in front of Electa. Looking down at it, she saw a name she knew so damn well… ‘Adrastos Evander Leventis’ was printed in the elegant black script below the Leventis family crest, which crowned just about everything in Adrastos’s world, from his high-end international investment empire to some of the finest vineyards in his native Greece and vast tracts of inherited land in the South of Spain and Italy.

“He wrote something on the back,” her brother indicated awkwardly.

          Reaching out, Electa flipped the card over with a set of ice-cold trembling fingers.

          ‘Eight o’clock. The apartment. Don’t be late.’

          Seeing Adrastos’s handwriting after so much time was like a slap across her face. If she’d had it in her, Electa would have scratched out a dry, mocking laugh. The underlined ‘don’t’ was the ultimate command from a man who’d grown very intimate with her most annoying sin… her absolute lack of punctuality.

          She’d kept him waiting at airports and restaurants. She’d kept him kicking his heels in their apartment while she rushed around like a headless chicken, getting ready to go out.

          Electa caught a sudden sharp glimpse of Adrastos waiting for her, looking tall, dark, and fabulously turned out for a night at the theatre, lounging stretched out in a chair with his eyes closed, his silky black eyelashes resting against his high-sculpted cheekbones, his wide, full and sensual mouth wearing the look of long-suffering patience he could pull off with such excruciating effect.

          Adrastos had lost all patience with her, and perhaps she’d deserved it, Electa acknowledged, but enough to send him into the arms of another woman? And not just any woman but his ex-girlfriend.

“Are you going to do it, Electa? Will you go and see him?”

          Having to blink to bring herself back from where she had gone off to, Electa swallowed thickly and gave a nod of her head.

“Oh, sis… You’re the best… Thanks.”

          Her brother heaved in a long breath.

“I knew you wouldn’t let me down.”

          ‘So did Adrastos,’ Electa thought.

“Listen, sis…”

          Flynn shuffled his feet.

“It’s already seven o’clock, so… since you don’t need me, I’ll go now… So you can… get ready…”

          Desperate to escape now he’d done what he’d come here to do, Flynn was already heading for the door when Electa stopped him.

“Flynn? The credit card?” she prompted. “Where is it?”

          She watched his shoulders give a wincing twitch.

“Adrastos took it.”

“Perfect,” Electa murmured and watched him flinch again as her meaning struck home.

          Flynn now knew he had lost her trust in him. Her home had always been his home. Her brother had his own bedroom here, his own key… He’d had the same things at the apartment she’d shared with Adrastos. He was family.

          ‘You should be able to trust family.’

          As if he knew what she was thinking, Flynn twisted around to aim her a glancing look of remorse.

“I really, really am sorry, El,” Flynn husked out painfully. “I’m sorry for all of it. But especially, for dropping this part on to you.”

          He’d done that because he had no other option. He’d done it because she’d always been there to fight his battles for him.

“I promise you on my life I won’t ever do anything like this again.”

          Looking up at him, Electa saw their father’s hair and nose and their mother’s eyes and mouth. The aching urge to just get up and go over there to hug him, reassure him that everything was going to be alright, almost got the better of her. But for the first time since she’d taken responsibility for him, Electa controlled the urge.

“I’ll call you later, Flynn,” was all she said, and after a few more seconds of helpless hovering, he turned and slunk away, leaving her alone with Adrastos’s business card and that oh-so brief message to stare at.

          ‘Eight o’clock. The apartment. Don’t be late.’

          Electa felt a pang of wry appreciation for his slick, short way of getting his message across. She wasn’t a fool. She knew the divorce papers would have landed on Craig Hardy’s desk today, and this was Adrastos’s response to them… with her brother sent along to deliver it and add a bit of clout.

          ‘A lot of clout,’ she extended.

          ‘Eight o’clock. The apartment. Don’t be late.’

“This time I won’t,” Electa murmured.

          She drew in a deep, fortifying breath.

“Well, I can do that. I really have to,” she told herself, aware that she really didn’t have a choice.

          However, she would not be turning up in the role of a wimpy victim Adrastos was expecting to see, she determined grimly as she rose to her feet. Her brother might see her as a pathetic creature with all the stuffing knocked out of her, but she wasn’t and would never be that weak!

          She’d spent too many years fighting her own battles to let fear of what Adrastos Leventis could do to Flynn grind her to a quivering pulp now. On that bracing reminder, Electa tossed her hair back over her narrow shoulders and stepped across the kitchen to catch up her bag.

          A minute later she was standing in her hall, dragging on her coat as she followed her brother out of the door.