Page 58 of Modern Romance September 2025 1-4

Because the engagement and planned wedding had never been real.

Her father’s uncivil war with his old friend and former business partner turned enemy, Georgios Tsaliki, had escalated to the degree that Georgios had sabotaged the engines of their cargo fleet and Lydia’s father had retaliated by having millions of cockroaches and rats let loose in Georgios’s own fleet.

What had been treated in the press as an amusing rivalry between two rival shipping magnates had overnight become a scandal that had ballooned as old dirty tricks between them were either brought to light or rehashed with a brand-new slant.

The scandal had led to Antoniadis Shipping’s main investors threatening to pull their money.

If acted on, Antoniadis Shipping would go bankrupt.

Tsaliki Shipping hadn’t gone unscathed either.

Whilst not fatally wounded like the Antoniadises were close to being, its share prices had plummeted and, with no sign of recovery on the horizon, it was agreed that the only way to manage the situation and prove that the next generation were now in charge and that all the bad blood between the two families was over, was through marriage.

Petros Antoniadis’s son Thanasis would marry Georgios Tsaliki’s beloved stepdaughter Lucie.

Except it had been a match made in hell. Thanasis had been determined to hate Lucie and she in turn had grown to despise him.

Poor Lucie had thought Thanasis’s love for her was true and had opened her heart to him.

Lydia didn’t have to stretch her imagination very far to imagine how devastated Lucie must have felt to learn the truth and learn that she’d been so cruelly played and her injury weaponised against her.

‘He did what he had to do to save us all,’ her mother defended.

‘Well, he didn’t save us, did he?’ she cried.

‘My honourable brother who never lies…’ She shook her head in disgust. ‘You men, you’re all the same.

You lie and you lie and you lie, and now you have the nerve to sit there looking all injured and sorry for yourself?

You caused this, Thanasis. You. If you’d bothered to take me into your confidence instead of listening to that bastard Alexis, I would have told you not to do it.

I would have told you to level with her and now look what we’re left with! ’

‘I will find her and I will bring her back here. She will listen to me.’

The voice had come from behind her, its impact freezing her on the spot.

He’d reached them.

Like synchronised meerkats, her mother, brother and father all looked over her shoulder.

Lydia wasn’t sure if time really did stand still or if the roar of blood in her head made it seem that way, but in the time it took her to turn to face him, no one spoke.

She looked at the man she’d last seen in the flesh naked, and came within a breath of vomiting on the spot.

Summoning every ounce of her strength, she raised herself as tall as she could draw her short, curvy figure and crossed her arms. Then and only then did she meet the stare that had once melted her bones, and transferred all her anguish and loathing to him. ‘You will leave her alone.’

The blue-grey eyes held hers for the beat of a moment before snapping away from her. ‘Where is she?’

‘Gone,’ Thanasis replied in the same dull tone.

‘Where? How did she find out? Did her memories come back?’

‘I told her.’

‘You…’ The full, sensuous lips that had kissed Lydia senseless opened and closed as Alexis Tsaliki’s handsome face contorted in disbelief. ‘You told her? What the…?’

‘She needed to know.’

‘No, she needed to damn well marry you! Have you lost your mind?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where is she?’

No one answered. Lucie thought of the supply boat heading towards Kos and the figure she’d seen slip below deck and said, ‘Wherever she’s gone, it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t want to marry Thanasis and that’s the end of it.’

He didn’t even look at her. ‘Do you see all those yachts entering your waters, Thanasis? They are your guests. Your wedding guests. The press are on their way here too. If we don’t get her back right now it will be too late.’

‘It’s already too late,’ Lydia spat. ‘Lucie doesn’t want to marry him and I don’t blame her.’

It was as if her voice didn’t exist to his ears. His attention still on Thanasis, he said, ‘I can think of a few places she would go. I’ll get people on it. If you can—’

‘No.’ Thanasis’s inertia lifted off him like a blanket as he rose to his feet. ‘No. No search parties. We leave her alone. That’s all she wants.’

‘What’s the matter with you? Who cares what she—?’

A roar cut Alexis’s words off and then a split-second later he was on his back.

Another split-second later and Thanasis was on top of him, his fist raised to land another punch, but this time Alexis was prepared and before Lydia could even blink, he’d flipped Thanasis onto his back, his own fist raised.

It was the scream that stopped Alexis from slamming his fist into Thanasis’s face as the bastard deserved.

Breathing heavily, he pulled himself off him, wiped the blood seeping out of his lip with his thumb, and dusted himself down as he cast a disdainful eye over all the Antoniadises…except one. The one whose scream had stopped him giving as good as he’d been given.

‘You’re all finished. You understand that, yes?

Everything you have…’ He snapped his fingers together.

‘In weeks it will all be gone. The losses my family have suffered will take time for me to recoup but I will recoup them, whereas you will have nothing to build back from because it will all be dust, and you will only have yourselves to blame.’

‘And you,’ said the voice he most hated, the voice whose scream had stopped him in his tracks. ‘We will have you to blame too, and every member of your family that chose to lie and deceive a woman when she was at her most vulnerable. I don’t know how you sleep at night.’

He tuned out the inflection of tone that suggested the speaker was talking about more than his stepsister. ‘My conscience is clear,’ he said tightly.

‘That’s because you don’t actually have a conscience… Oh, look, here comes your family. How delightful. Is that really all the Tsaliki spawn squeezed on that tender? You should tell them to be careful—all those egos in one boat could make it capsize.’

Alexis took a long breath through his nose before fixing Lydia with a swift warning stare. ‘Unless you want to lose any hope of salvaging something from this mess, I suggest you watch what you say about my family.’

She laughed. ‘Or what? You’ll bankrupt us? Those wheels will be turning as soon as the news breaks. We’re finished, remember?’

‘Damage limitation might buy you some time…’ There was a tap on his shoulder. He turned to find Elektra Antoniadis’s lined face gazing up at him.

He could almost feel sorry for the Antoniadis matriarch. Possibly he would have done if she hadn’t been looking at him with such loathing.

‘Threaten my daughter again and I will personally see to it that you never father children.’

He gave a bark of laughter. ‘I didn’t threaten your daughter, I warned her, in the spirit of friendship, not to use that cutting tongue of hers to slander my family.

You still have time to prepare for damage limitation and I would have thought you would want me on side when you launch it—after all, you already know to your cost that my family makes a very bad enemy. ’

The older woman didn’t even blink, turning her long nose in the air and saying, ‘More threats. We don’t need or want your help or your friendship , and if my daughter chooses to use her cutting tongue to speak the truth about a family of degenerates then all I can say to that is that I wholeheartedly support her.

Now come, baba . We have some damage limitation to be getting on with. ’

To Alexis’s surprise, Thanasis and his father had already walked away without him even noticing, and then his heart sank when Lydia shook her head and blew out the fringe from her eyes. ‘I’ll catch up with you—I’ve got some people I need to practise sharpening my tongue on.’

‘Okay. Just don’t get cut yourself.’ Elektra eyed Alexis as she said that, then gave her daughter a kiss before hurrying after the two Antoniadis men.

Left alone with the one person he’d planned to actively avoid for the whole of his time spent on this damned island, Alexis clenched his jaw and kept his gaze fixed on the tender carrying his family across the sea to the jetty.

‘You’ve obviously got something on your mind so whatever you’ve got to say to me, get it over with,’ he said roughly.

‘I’ve got my own damage limitation to be getting on with. ’

‘I’m pregnant.’

Her words didn’t so much hang in the air as swing on a giant Newton’s cradle, the silver balls knocking together to create a sudden deafening roar in his head.

‘Say that again,’ he dragged out.

‘I’m pregnant.’

His chest tightened into an ice-cold ball. The pendulum swung again. Slowly, Alexis turned his head to face the woman standing beside him.

Her stare, what he could see of it beneath her enormous blonde fringe, was fixed ahead at the sea, her chin lifted, a picture of what would be serenity if not for the tremors racking her shoulders.

‘You…’ He had to swallow to speak. ‘You are certain?’

‘I had my first scan last week.’

‘How…? Why…?’ It was like he’d forgotten how to talk. ‘Why have you waited all this time to tell me?’

‘I wasn’t going to tell you until the baby was born but Lucie running away changes everything. My job pays a pittance and my family are on the verge of bankruptcy so there is no way I can support the baby on my own now.’

There was a shout in the distance. He barely heard it, would have tuned it out completely if Lydia’s stare hadn’t flickered over to the direction it had come from.

‘Your family are here. You should go to them. We can talk later. Don’t mention the baby to anyone—I think everyone’s got enough to be stressed about today.

We can tell everyone once we’re married. ’

He’d barely picked his jaw up when the hazel eyes he’d never wanted to lock stares with again landed on him. ‘I’m sorry, Alexis, but I won’t have my child born into poverty. I need you to marry me.’

Her words had barely sunk in when she’d walked away and disappeared into the surrounding trees.