One Night to Risk It All

CHAPTER FIVE


HIS ISLAND WAS BEAUTIFUL. He would never get tired of it. Of the fact that it was his. Of the fact that he now owned a place he possessed total control over.

Back in the compound, everything had been shared. Perhaps share was too generous a word. It had been fought over. There had been a serf class in the compound. The women, the security guards. And the security guards had had guns, which put the women square on the bottom rung.

And beneath that...

The children of those women.

Many of them had been given away by their mothers. Sold, Alex now realized, for drugs. He had spent many years feeling astonished, grateful, that his mother hadn’t done so. That she’d put some sort of value on him. That he’d stayed safe.

A miracle, it had seemed.

But then he’d found out the truth. And the truth hadn’t been rainbows and a mother’s love. No. The truth had been poison.

He was the monster he’d always despised. A tool that kept his mother near her favorite addiction. Not heroin, but Nikola Kouklakis himself.

The older man had, of course, kept her there since she was the mother of his son. Since Alex was his son. But Alex had discovered the truth and when his mother was no longer useful it had all come crashing down.

And Alex had run. Run away and never looked back.

And when he’d finally stopped, when he’d won enough card games that he had some money—money and this island—met enough people that he’d forged business connections and learned about the stock market, when he’d finally reached the pinnacle of success, that was when he’d looked back for the first time.

He’d looked back at all of the pain, all of the injustice, and then he’d looked at the one man who had risen above it. Clean, pristine and well-respected. Rich as god with a beautiful woman hanging on his arm.

And he’d known that next on his agenda was making sure that Ajax Kouros knew helplessness. That he knew fear. That he knew what it was to lose the things he loved.

And while he hadn’t destroyed the other man’s business yet, not for lack of trying, he did have Ajax’s fiancée.

And though he wasn’t actively using Rachel as revenge at the moment, that thought almost made him cheerful.

“Where are we?” Rachel asked as the plane touched down, white sand and turquoise sea rushing into view.

“An island near Turkey. I call it...” And he realized that earlier he’d told her his mother’s name. It made him feel exposed, to tell her what he called the island when she would know why. He cursed his moment of sentimentality. Cursed the fact that he still cared so much for a woman who’d never loved him back. Who had ended her life rather than spend her days with him. “I call it Meli’s Hideaway,” he said. “And before you ask, no, my mother never saw it. She...died just before I left the Kouklakis compound. But if she hadn’t...this is where I would have taken her. So she could have a rest, finally. Though she’s resting now, I suppose.” If she had given him a chance. If she had trusted in him at all. If the idea of being with him hadn’t been a torture she couldn’t bear.


“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice muted. “My mother passed away, too. It’s hard. Really hard.”

“Life is hard,’ he said, lifting one shoulder in a casual gesture.

“What? That’s it?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Life is hard and then you die. Is that better?”

She shook her head. “Not really. You’re not exactly enjoying the journey, are you?”

He stood up as the plane came to a stop. “Enjoying the journey is for another sort of person, from another sort of life. Someone like you, agape.”

“Well, I won’t deny that I have a great family. That I’ve been blessed to have a lot of nice things. Yes, I do enjoy the journey.” She was lying, though. He could sense it. Strange because when he’d met her in Corfu, she had exuded light. Joy. But he didn’t see those things in press photos of her.

It was like she was hiding that light most of the time.

“Were you going to enjoy spending the rest of your journey with Ajax?”

She nodded, her posture stiff. “Of course I would have. I care about him deeply.”

“But you don’t love him.”

“Oh, bah. Why are you people so fixated on love?” Alana had tried to talk her out of the wedding at the eleventh hour. Citing love as the primary reason. “I like him. I love him in a way. Sure it’s not an all-consuming kind of love, but—”

“But you aren’t crying your eyes out just at this moment, either,” he said.

“I have a lot on my plate here,” she said. “I just found out I’m pregnant.” She paused and swore. “Pregnant. Oh...I can’t even. I can’t even take all of this in. And I just ran out on my wedding. And I’m in Turkey. With you.”

“We’re not in Turkey. We’re on my island.”

“Yeah, big effing difference to me just at the moment.”

“If it’s any consolation, I feel similarly...run over. Is that how you feel?”

“Run over by a train, yes.”

“This doesn’t have to be difficult,” he said. He was about to propose marriage again. Yes, she’d brushed his mention of marriage off the first time, but she’d been shocked. She would come around, he was certain of it.

One thing he knew for sure, and that was that he refused to be a shadowy figure in the background of his child’s life. He would not be that man. He would be as different from his own father as humanly possible. As different from everyone in his family as humanly possible.

If you can be.

No. He wasn’t the same. He would love his child. He wouldn’t want to own his child, wouldn’t keep that child around simply to keep a link between himself and the person he was...obsessed with.

He would never be either of his parents.

“How is it going to be easy?” she asked as the door to the plane opened and a rush of thick, warm air filled the cabin.

“Perhaps it will fall somewhere between easy and difficult?”

“Perhaps,” she said, walking toward the exit.

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“I’m not.” She descended the stairs and he followed, his eyes on her curves, the way her white capris cupped her expertly. He was still a man, after all, regardless of how intense the day had been.

And she was still a temptation. It had nothing to do with how provocative her clothing was. It wasn’t, in truth. She exuded class. A kind of untouchable, crisp elegance that a man like him had rarely been exposed to.

Rachel Holt had come by her style and poise due to a lifetime of being immersed in wealth and culture, of being aware of cameras watching her every move.

Nothing like the way he’d grown up.

It was part of what he found so enticing. That prim little exoskeleton of hers. Perfect hair and makeup, even just after finding out she was pregnant and running out on her wedding. But he’d cracked all that open. Had seen her skin flushed pinker than that top she was wearing. Had seen her hair in disarray, her skin glistening with sweat...

He’d had those expertly polished nails dug deep into his shoulders, and that was something he couldn’t forget.

He shifted and tried to ease the pressure caused by his growing arousal. Nothing helped. Not when he had the back of Rachel Holt as his view. The rest of the island just didn’t seem to matter. And neither did anything else.

“And why is that?” he asked.

“Because I...don’t think I like you.” She looked up and around at the cypress trees that spread around them to create a canopy of green, and at the white sand beaches beyond them.

“There are some incredible ruins on this island. Colonial and Ottoman.”

“I was just in Greece. Ruins, we have them.”

“I am aware,” he said. “I was trying to make conversation.”

“Do you live in a ruin? Or do you have an actual house?”

“I have a house, but some people would argue I live in ruin.”

She snorted. “At this point, some people would argue that I do, too.”

“You are giving off a bit of a fallen-woman vibe,” he said dryly.

“Am I?” She sniffed her wrist. “I don’t feel any different.”

He turned and looked at her. “Not at all?”

Her cheeks flushed a deep rose. “No.”

“Interesting. Would you like to walk to the house or drive?”

“You’re in a tux,” she said. “You’re hardly dressed to walk.”

He looked down. “Indeed not. I’m a little disoriented. Could be because in New York it’s early morning. Which means I’ve technically been up all night.”

“You came from New York?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He looked at her, at those cheeks, still flushed from the sun and from...from whatever memories had come into her mind when he’d looked at her. “I came for you.”

“That simple?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you come for me?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and it was the honest truth. “Because I don’t want him to have you. Because I want you for myself. Because I think you’re beautiful and as of now you’re the only woman I can imagine having in my bed, and considering I would like to have sex sometime soon that’s very inconvenient, and even more so if you were to marry another man.”

She blinked. “That’s almost flattering.”

“Almost. A walk, I should think.” He took his jacket off and cast it onto the sand, then rolled his shirt sleeves up. “It might do something to shake off the time change.”

“Lead the way then.”

He started down a path that took them down near the beach and could have sworn at the absurdity of getting sand in his custom-made shoes. Shoes he’d bought with his own money and not the money earned by other people’s suffering. There, a reminder that he had transcended his blood in some way.

“So what do you do in New York?” she asked.

“I gamble with other people’s money.”

“What?”

“I deal in investments,” he said. “And I’m very good at it.”

“Isn’t that a bit unstable?”

“Sure. Can be. But I’ve made enough of a profit that I’m sitting on stable assets of my own, and I’ve made some wise purchases and investments myself.”

“Including an island.”

“I won this,” he said.


“You won it?”

“In a card game. It was one of the more interesting gambling experiences of my life. Yes, I was a literal gambler there for a while. At first with other people’s money.”

“How?”

“Card counting is a particularly useful skill. I happen to have the gift. I was a kid living on the streets doing card tricks for tourists and a rich guy picked me up, offered to kit me out to play in the casinos with his money, for a cut. I said ‘of course,’ naturally.”

“Naturally,” she said.

“I won a lot of money. And I got to keep part of it. Rented myself an apartment, started offering up an underground service. Until I had enough money to go gamble for myself at least once a week.”

“And?”

“I ended up in a high rollers’ game. There were things in that pot by the end that you wouldn’t believe, including a night with a man’s wife, which I turned down, by the way. But the island... I took the island.”

She looked hard at him, blue eyes glittering. “You’re really twenty-six, Alex?”

“Yes. And I was eighteen when I was doing that. From there, I figured I better decide what to do with the money I’d earned. So I walked away from the casino and started looking into investing. And I proved to have a knack for that so I thought...why not do it for other people? An extension of where I came from.”

“A self-made man,” she said.

He laughed. “None of us are really self-made, Rachel. We’re made with the aid or misfortune of other people. In my case, people had to lose money so I could gain it. Now, the people I make money for are aided by me, as I am by them. You are made by your father, by the media, and you were to be finished by Ajax, am I right?”

“Finished?”

“It’s how you were going to spend the rest of your life in comfort. You found a man who would close the loop neatly on everything you’ve built.”

“I don’t think of it that way.”

“No?”

“No.” She wobbled in the sand and he reached over and caught her arm, holding her steady. She froze for a moment, her eyes falling to his lips. She swallowed hard. “I don’t think of it...of him...that way. It’s not how it is.”

“Then how is it?”

“I don’t know. He’s a friend. And...maybe like a brother, almost, which I can see right at this moment is so ridiculous it’s... I don’t know why I thought I could marry him. I don’t know why at all. I thought caring could be enough. I thought it was enough.”

“Only because you’d never had passion.” He’d been the one to show that to her.

“Don’t be so smug—it’s nasty. Truly, I wouldn’t crow about it if I were you. Is there an easier conquest than a woman who’s still a virgin at my age? ‘Hard up’ doesn’t even begin to describe it.”

“That’s not what it was though. I myself was not particularly hard up, as you call it, and I still felt the electricity between us.”

She stopped short, arched one eyebrow. “Oh, really?”

“Yes,” he said. “Don’t deny that you felt it.”

“No, I mean, ‘oh, really, you weren’t hard up?’ What does that mean? When was the last time you were with someone else?”

“Jealousy, Rachel? I didn’t think you liked me.”

“I’m not jealous. I’m curious.”

“And if I tell you, you won’t be angry?”

“I’ve been angry at you for a solid month, Alexios. I’m not making you any guarantees on that score. You could breathe funny and make me angry at this point.”

“Don’t be dramatic. It had been a couple weeks by the time I met you.”

She sniffed loudly as she’d done at the airport, a sign of her pique, he was realizing. “It had been twenty-eight years when I met you, but whatever.”

“Are you saying I’m special, Rachel?”

“Heck. No. I am not saying that. I am not saying that even a little bit. I’m just saying—some of us don’t run around with our pants around our ankles all the time.”

“And you’re sure that Ajax was celibate the whole time you were together?”

“I...I just... I... Yes.”

“Probably you’re delusional,” he said. “As you were about marrying him in the first place.”

“Okay, Alex, answer this question. Has there been a woman since you were with me?”

“No.” She looked far too triumphant when he admitted that. This honesty thing where she was concerned really had to stop.

She seemed to bring it out in him. He’d held back next to nothing since he’d met her. He’d told her. About why he’d seduced her, about his mother, about why he hated Ajax.

Well, he’d told her most of it. There were things he couldn’t bring himself to speak out loud into an empty room. Much less share with with anyone else.

His house came into view. He’d had it custom built when the island passed into his control. It was completely modern. Square, with hard, clean edges, windows that faced the sea. There was no gilded excess, no old-world opulence.

That would have reminded him too much of the Kouklakis compound. And he had no interest in that. It was too much in his mind as it was.

Stale, filthy opulence. And a carpet stained with blood.

“It’s certainly different,” she said.

“Is it?”

“Very...minimalist.”

“I’d had enough Persian rugs and intricate carvings to last a lifetime. I wasn’t interested in living in it for the rest of my life.”

“Oh.”

“What about you?” he asked. “What sort of architecture do you prefer?”

Rachel paused on the path, his question hitting a nerve for some reason she couldn’t really identify. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know what sort of house you would have liked to live in one day?”

“Ajax’s house,” she said, bristling. “And his penthouse in the city. All nice places. And nothing not to like about them.”

“And before that?”

“I had an apartment. In New York.” She’d liked her apartment a lot, but she’d given it up before the wedding, naturally. But it hadn’t been a place for entertaining. It had been a place just for her. Giving it up had been a lot harder than she’d anticipated, in truth, but it wasn’t worth crying over. “And when I come to Greece I stay in the family vacation house.”

“If you were going to have a home built, what would it be like?”

“I don’t know, okay? I’ve never thought about it, but what does it matter? I was going to have a beautiful home with Ajax. Now I may very well end up being homeless because I just walked away from a deal that was essential to both my father and to Ajax. Because... Because...”

Suddenly her fists tightened. “You knew,” she said, her tone getting cold. “You knew and you’re over here pretending to be all honest and ‘marry me’ and crap, but you knew.”

He didn’t blink, his blue eyes focused on her.

“Whoever marries first gets my father’s company. That’s what you want. It’s not me, or hurting Ajax by taking my virginity or whatever else. It’s that you were going to try and get me to marry you so that you could screw him out of Holt. You’re trying to take my family business!”


“Rachel...”

“You—”

“If I had wanted that, if that was the route I’d decided to take, I would have sweet-talked you back in Corfu when you saw my ID. As it is, I let you go.”

“And then you came back. Were you going to make some sort of declaration of love and try to woo me away from the wedding and to...Vegas or something?”

The thing that was so unsettling about that prospect was the fact that it might have worked. That if she hadn’t found out she was pregnant, if he’d walked in and kissed her, and told her that he hadn’t stopped thinking about her for the past month, that he loved her, she would have probably dropped everything and run away with him.

Because she had feelings for him. Feelings that she couldn’t quite understand or deal with, but they were definitely feelings. Stupid, stupid feelings.

Feelings that should be utterly choked out by this most recent revelation.

“I don’t understand. Even if the past that you share—that you say you share... Even if it’s true I don’t know why you would want to destroy him so badly.”

“Of course you don’t,” he said, walking in front of her, toward the house, “because you live in a dream world, little girl. You don’t know anything about the way the world works. And you should be thankful for that.”