Page 25 of Marcellus: House of Drakos

“I didn’t say it was all positive. It wasn’t.

It was more like fifty-fifty. Because he also said that although you weren’t an absent father, you were a very distant one.

And not because you lived in France most of the time.

But because you were emotionally distant.

You never asked about their personal lives.

If they had a personal problem they couldn’t just go to you and ask for advice because they felt you would judge them as weak or insufficient or some other negative label.

He said it was like they knew you, but they didn’t really know you at all.

And you never tried to know them. You kept a wall up between you and them, was how he put it.

But Niko is an emotional man. He needs that fatherly figure in his personal life more than in his professional life.

But he spoke as if he never got that from you.

And you’re the only one he wants it from.

He said his siblings feel the same way. Even their mothers, he said, feel the same way.

They all want you to be emotionally attached to them too.

Not just financially and professionally. That’s what he told me.”

It was an indictment against him, and Savannah expected him to do as any other man would do and deny it or try to make excuses. He did neither.

“His ass told you a lot,” he said.

Savannah smiled. “He did, yes. Some of the models at his fashion house said I was like a mother to him.”

“A mother? You’re in his same age group.”

“Give a take six years,” she said with a smile. “I didn’t like what they said, because I wasn’t trying to be anybody’s mother okay. But I got what they meant. Niko confided in me an awful lot. Not about everything. And probably not about most things. But he told me a lot.”

But she also said something else that caught Marcellus’s attention. “You still have no children?”

“No I don’t.”

“By design or?”

“I never met the right person during the height of my childbearing age, and now I’m thirty-seven years old. Do the math.”

Although she smiled, Marcellus could see her pain. “Don’t worry about it,” he said to her. “You’re still a baby. Thirty-seven is the new twenty-seven don’t you know?”

Savannah laughed, but she could see what Niko meant. He was an open man with her, more so than she would have thought he’d be, but she felt as if he had a wall up when he was around her too.

“Did you ever get married?”

“Nope. You?”

“No. Boyfriend?”

“Several.”

“I mean now.”

“No.”

Marcellus was oddly pleased to hear every one of her responses. “I don’t think I formally asked you this the last time we were communicating, but may I call you Savannah, or do you prefer Miss Richardson?”

“Miss Richardson for sure. Boy bye! Of course you can call me Savannah. Or Vanna if you prefer.” Then she looked at him. “But I guess you want me to still call you Mr. Drakos, hun?”

“The only woman who has ever shared my bed? Marcellus will do.”

“Isn’t Marcellus a Roman name? I assumed you were French.”

“My mother, who raised me alone, was half French/half Roman. So I’m both.”

But Savannah heard something else he’d said. She looked at him doubtfully. “Did I hear you right? Are you telling me that I’m the only woman to ever share your bed? That you’ve never had a woman in bed before?”

“Oh I’ve had plenty women in bed. More than I could ever count. But none in this bed. In this home.”

“So you don’t have a woman sleeping with you every time you come to America?”

“Goodness no. I go down that road only when it gets to be too much. But I sleep alone most nights.”

For some reason, Savannah was relieved to hear it. She thought he was a whore of the first order the way he was talking about never wanting to sleep alone. And maybe he still was a whore and wasn’t being candid with her. But she believed him.

But then that look of concern returned to Marcellus’s face and his look reminded her of why she was in his house to begin with.

And that sense of dread returned. “They almost killed him,” she said again.

“What I don’t understand is why would they nearly kill him if they want a ransom? If they didn’t plan on hurting him?”

She wasn’t stating anything that Marcellus had not already considered.

“It’s scary,” she said as tears welled up in her eyes. “Poor Niko.”

Marcellus could feel her pain. And he pulled her into his arms. “He’s going to be alright, Savannah,” he said to her. “I promise you that.”

Savannah cuddled up against him. When he pulled her all the way against him, she was surprised to feel his arousal, as if she was still turning him on.

She used to view men who only wanted her sexually in a very negative light, but it was different with Marcellus.

Maybe because he already showed his interest in her beyond her body.

But also because knowing that she could turn a man like him on, a man she considered as a good man, was huge in her eyes. She was pleased.

And the way he held her as she slowly began to drift off to sleep pleased her even more.

Marcellus was pleased too. Because for only the second time in his entire life he slept with a woman without sleeping with her.

And both times were with the same woman.