Adonis in Athens, page 3
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Apollo was having a shitty day. He’d had to fire yet another receptionist who didn’t seem to think she actually had to give the staff their messages, and now his sales team was pissed because they were having to cover the phones and front desk. His father had called him at least a dozen times so far today, trying to keep up with the business he’d been too sick to participate in for the last year. His oldest sister was trying to set him up with one of her girlfriends, and now that they had no receptionist he was thinking his upcoming vacation in Santorini wasn’t going to happen.
Drumming his fingers on his desk, he stared out the window at the water. He loved the sea, and loved running his family’s shipping company even more, but there were days he just wanted some freedom back. He’d given up a lot to take over after his father’s stroke, and most of the time he didn’t regret anything at all. It was just once in a while, on a beautiful summer day like today, that he wished he could grab a towel, jump on his motorcycle and drive down to one of the many beaches he loved. He would go for a swim and then lie on the shore soaking up the sun. When he was sufficiently burned and sleepy, he’d go home, shower and take a nap. A day at the beach always relaxed him and when he woke up he’d call a few friends and go out for a beer or coffee, hanging out, flirting with beautiful women and basically enjoying life. Instead, he worked 10-12 hour days, six days a week, and met with his father almost daily during afternoon siesta to update him. Though they were technically closed on Sundays, he usually came in to the office to catch up on paperwork and other things that he was distracted from when the phones were ringing and clients were coming in and out.
Sighing, he sent the younger of his two older sisters a text, asking her to come in and man the phones. She would be annoyed, but that was too bad. He and Melina were close but she’d left most of this to him even though she got her share of the profits. While his father was still the owner and controlling partner, after his stroke, Apollo had been promoted to president and CEO of the company, with a salary that compensated him well. Before he’d taken over, he and his sisters had gotten small dividends from the profits after everyone was paid and all bills were covered. His father had taken a full salary and had begun giving Apollo a bigger share as he’d started grooming him to take over one day. Then he’d had a stroke and Apollo had been forced to sink or swim; since this was his family’s legacy as well as his future, he’d busted his ass to keep the company afloat. He’d done a damn good job too, using his double major from Yale in Information Technology and International Finance to bring the company not just into the 21st century, but to also infuse it with new clients and a fresh ideology. It had served them well and his father, though concerned at first, now bragged about how his son was a business genius.
A bored, overworked business genius, he thought in annoyance. He wanted to get out of here today so bad he could taste it, but even if he managed to get away for a few hours, he was expected at dinner at 2:30 and then his father would grill him instead of taking his usual nap during afternoon siesta. By the time all of that was done, Apollo would need to come back to the office. They stayed open until 8:00 on Thursdays even though clients didn’t usually come in that late, but they took a lot of calls from the U.S. who were anywhere from 7 to 10 hours behind them. He was setting the groundwork to open a branch of the company in Los Angeles and negotiations were going well, but he didn’t trust anyone else to get it started. He wanted to open the office himself, make sure it was done correctly, but that would leave the office here in Greece without a real manager. He didn’t trust the sales team to have access to bank accounts and other sensitive information, and while he trusted his sisters, they didn’t know the business well enough to handle it. The project was probably going to fall through because there just weren’t enough hours in the day, and it was disappointing, but he couldn’t be in two places at once and much as his father was getting better, he still had a long way to go.
His phone buzzed and he grabbed it absently, still lost in his thoughts. “Oriste?” Hello?
“You have a visitor!” Tasos, one of the sales guys, spoke with a hint of mischief in his voice.
“I don’t have any appointments,” Apollo muttered, glancing down at his desk calendar.
“I’m pretty sure she’s not a client,” he chortled. “She said her name is Paige Carter.”
He mispronounced the American name badly but Apollo still recognized it immediately and froze. Paige Carter?! His Paige? What the hell was she doing here?
“I’ll be right out,” he said shortly, hanging up. Holy shit, the girl he’d been dreaming about for three years was here in Greece? In his office?! What did that even mean? Had she come looking for him? He stood up and tucked his button-down shirt back into his slacks and ran his hands through his too-long hair, thinking he really needed a trim. Damn, he hadn’t thought he’d ever see her again, even though he thought of her more often than he wanted to admit.
Curious and just a little bit excited, he strode out to the front office as casually as he could. As he rounded the corner he saw her immediately. Her back was turned and she was reading one of their English advertisements that had been blown up and hung on the wall, but he would recognize those long legs and shapely shoulders anywhere. Her hair was shorter now—three years ago it had hung halfway down her back and he’d wrapped his fist in it while he’d been buried deep inside of her.
Shit! he thought with irritation, changing the direction his thoughts were going. Why was he thinking about sex with her? It wasn’t like he lacked in female companionship. They weren’t Paige, though, and he’d never had a connection with a woman like he’d had with the sweet American blonde, but that felt like a long time ago. She’d undoubtedly moved on and there was only one reason she could be here. The thought made him sad, but there was no help for it now. So he cleared his throat and spoke her name as calmly as he could.
“Paige? Is that you?”
She turned and nearly took his breath away. Damn, she was still gorgeous, with that luscious lower lip that protruded just a little and her strikingly expressive hazel eyes. When she smiled, it felt like a punch in the gut; it was that magnetic.
“Hi.” Her voice quavered slightly, betraying her nervousness, but she put on a brave front. “I hope you don’t mind I stopped by without calling.”
“Of course not!” He walked out from behind the counter and didn’t hesitate to hug her tightly, kissing her once on each cheek, as was the Greek custom.
Paige’s breath caught when he wrapped his arms around her and she was helpless to stop herself from hugging him back, breathing in his delicious aftershave and allowing herself just a few seconds to remember the feel of those hard muscles and smooth, tanned skin.
“It’s good to see you,” he said softly, meeting her eyes. “Come on back to my office and you can tell me what you’re doing in Greece.” He ignored his gaping employees, knowing he would be grilled within an inch of his life once she left.
“Sure.” She followed him down a hallway that led to offices and he opened a door at the end, allowing her to walk in ahead of him. She paused at the view, her mouth falling open slightly. “Oh my gosh, this is gorgeous.” Two walls of the corner office had floor-to-ceiling windows and waves bounced and crashed onto the sea wall alongside a pier that was practically steps away.
“It makes it hard to work some days,” he admitted, grinning at her obvious pleasure.
“I don’t know if I’d ever get anything done if I worked in an office like this!”
He laughed. “I grew up coming in here, but it truly doesn’t get old.” Instead of sitting behind his desk, he took the chair next to hers and tried not to stare. He still thought she was the most exquisite woman on earth. Maybe not beautiful by celebrity standards, but everything he’d ever wanted in a woman physically. Blond, with big hazel eyes, a mouth made for kissing and a little brush of freckles across her nose that gave her a girlish look.
“You’re probably wondering why I’m here.”
“I can guess,” he said slowly.
“Yeah, so, I almost got engaged and realized I needed to find out one way or another if we’d, you know, really gotten married.”
He arched one dark, thick eyebrow, unsure why the idea of her getting engaged made him sad. “You almost got engaged?”
She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “It was such a clusterfuck! You wouldn’t believe…” Her voice trailed off. “Sorry, you don’t need to hear about my life.”
He chuckled. “Considering we’re married, it might not be a bad idea.”
She met his gaze in surprise. “You’re not mad?”
“Mad? Why would I be mad? I’m just surprised you didn’t check before now. I figured that would have been the first thing you did after I left. Since I didn’t hear from you, I assumed we’d been drunk and confused and it didn’t happen. Not legally anyway.”
She flushed. “I was embarrassed and kind of afraid and then…” She swallowed. “Then my period was late and I was distracted. I did a pregnancy test every single day for two weeks until I finally could be sure that I wasn’t.”
He wasn’t sure why, but he needed to know. “Would you have called me if you’d been pregnant?”
She looked shocked. “Of course! I wouldn’t have made any decisions like that without talking to you…” Now it was her turn to hesitate. “Would you have stepped up and been a father?”
His green eyes grew warm and serious. “No question. Even if I’d had to move to the U.S. until you finished school or whatever. We did that together, Paige—we were drunk but not the entire time we were together. I distinctly remember a lot of sober sex…”
She turned bright red but nodded. “Oh, I remember almost everything about those three days…just not the actual wedding part.” She sighed and opened her bag. “I, well, I thought it might be time to take care of this but I wanted to see you in person. It felt…wrong to send these in the mail.” She held out the divorce papers.
Apollo took them slowly, willing the disappointment in his gut to go away. “I see.” He didn’t even look at them and instead focused on her face. “You want to end it.”
She frowned. “Well, I mean…we don’t really know each other and live thousands of miles apart. I have a family, a life and a career in Las Vegas. You obviously have a good job here working for your dad and—”
“I don’t work for my dad anymore—I’m the CEO now.”
She smiled, and not only did it reach her eyes, it seemed to permeate her entire face. “That’s wonderful—how exciting for you! But it just drives home my point: this isn’t something we could even give a trial run to see if we still like each other. I have to leave in four days and—”
“You came all the way to Greece for four days?” He couldn’t wrap his head around the idea of spending that many hours on an airplane for only four days at the destination.
She flushed. “I can’t afford to stay any longer. The flight wiped me out and I hate having credit card debt. The hotel is $200 a night and between the car from the airport, food and a little sightseeing, I’ll be paying this trip off for months.”
“But you came in person instead of just calling and mailing me the papers.” He cocked his head. “Why, Paige?”
She gave a tiny shrug. “The truth? I think about those three days a lot. I’ve never had a spark with a guy like I had with you and I’ve romanticized it in my head for three long years… I figured it was time to see you and get it out of my system.” She swallowed. “And I was telling the truth before—we’re married. Maybe we were young and foolish, and it was a stupid, drunken thing to do, but we’re married; legally, willingly married. We consummated that marriage and spent three days laughing and sharing and loving—I don’t believe you have to be in love to love someone—and that kind of loving relationship deserved a formal, respectful goodbye.”
Her words touched him, and ironically, he agreed with everything she’d said. Although they certainly couldn’t have been truly in love when they’d drunkenly stumbled into that chapel, they’d shared something special based on chemistry, instinct and at least a little bit of compatibility. Love, even if it was seeded in chemistry, had to have played a part in their subconscious minds because why else would they have done what they did?
“I’ve thought about you a lot too,” he admitted, putting the papers on his desk and staring out at the water again. “I wondered how you were, what you were doing…and if you’d moved on.” His eyes met hers with an unspoken question and she looked down.
“Kind of.” She couldn’t help but be honest. “It was hard not to think about you, wonder if we really were married, and it was always in the back of my mind.”
“But you never went to verify one way or the other.”
“I was afraid,” she admitted softly. “All I had left other than the memories was the possibility that we were still linked by marriage.”
“If you’d gone to find out for sure, and it turned out it wasn’t legal, or we hadn’t done it at all, you would have had to let go of the fantasy.”
She nodded, shocked that he’d instinctively understood what she hadn’t been able to verbalize.
“Why didn’t you want to let it go?” he asked curiously.
She smiled, meeting his gaze without hesitation. “I live a pretty simple existence. Those three days were the most exciting, wonderful days of my entire adult life and, well, the rest doesn’t matter.”
“Tell me,” he pressed. “You came all this way and one signature—” he motioned to the papers on the desk, “—is the end of all of it. You might as well say what you want to say.”
“The way you made me feel, the sex, the fun we had—I’ve never experienced anything like it since and it’s probably holding me back.”
“From what?”
“Relationships, love…everything. I had to get some closure, remind myself that it was just a silly, albeit wonderful, college fling. Now we’re older and live halfway across the world from each other. It’s time to let go.”
He couldn’t explain why he hated the idea of her letting go of her fantasy of him; he loved that she thought about and romanticized their incredibly brief but intensely passionate time together because he’d done it too. He’d never forgotten her; her laughter and zest for life, the way she’d come undone when he’d made love to her—God, he was an idiot. His friends would laugh him out of the country if they knew the way he felt when he thought about her.
“Apollo?” She was staring at him in confusion.
“I never moved past the memories either,” he said finally, standing up and walking over to the picture windows that normally brought him so much joy. “My father started grooming me to take over the company not long after I got back to Greece and last year he had a stroke. I still had so much to learn that I didn’t have time for anything else, so I kept the memories of our time in Vegas close. They kept me sane when I was so busy I couldn’t breathe, and made me smile when I had dark days. You have no idea how happy I am to see you.”
“Really?” She was fighting a plethora of emotions that ran the gamut from excitement to nervousness and confusion. It was supposed to be simple; he would go with her to the embassy, sign the papers and she would walk out of his life, burying those memories forever. Instead, he was making her stomach do funny things and her heart beat in an irregular pattern.
“Do you want to get out of here?” he asked impulsively. “I can’t think sitting here in my office and I’m sure the guys are falling all over themselves to figure out who you are.”
She smiled shyly. “I’m nothing special—they probably didn’t even notice me.”
He frowned slightly, walking over to her and reaching out to lift her chin with the fingers of his right hand. “You’re beautiful, Paige. Why would you say that?”
“I’m not beautiful!” she laughed. “I’m cute with a very girl-next-door look. No one thinks I’m beautiful!”
“I do.” He looked into her eyes and saw both pleasure and disbelief, and he wished he could prove to her just how gorgeous she was. If only he had more than four days to do it.
“You’re sweet,” she whispered in a husky voice, unable to deny that the chemistry was still there, practically sizzling between them.
“Let’s go for a drive,” he whispered back. “If you keep looking at me like that, I’m not going to be responsible for my actions.”
She quickly got to her feet and turned away, nodding. “Yes, okay, let’s do that.”
He grabbed his keys and opened the door, letting her walk out in front of him again. They’d just gotten to the outer office when his sister Melina breezed in. “Kalimera!” she called out. Good morning!
“I’m taking the rest of the morning off,” he told her briskly, knowing a Greek version of the Spanish Inquisition would start if he didn’t make a hasty exit. “Tell Mama I won’t be at dinner—my friend from college is here and I’m going to take her for a drive.”
Melina’s mouth fell open but Apollo had grabbed Paige’s hand and all but yanked her out the door the minute he finished talking.
“You’re acting weird,” she whispered, hurrying to keep up.
“Sorry!” He pulled out his keys and pressed the key fob to unlock the door. “You don’t understand Greek families—this is going to be big news within 15 minutes, no matter who I tell them you are. Look at the time. If someone like my mother, my other sister or my friend Xristos doesn’t call in the next 10 minutes, I’ll give you 20 euros!”
She giggled as he opened the door for her, which made him smile too.
“We’ll see how funny you think it is when they’re grilling you for two hours about the number of babies the women in your family have had!” he said, putting the key in the ignition.
She laughed outright this time, shaking her head. “It’s not like I’m going to meet your family!”
“You just might,” he teased. “I could make that happen just because you laughed at me—then we’ll see how funny it is!”
