Kostas's Convenient Bride

by Lucy Monroe

  Codergirl: Andreas won’t like that.

  OnBroadway: Even better.

  Codergirl: You’re a troublemaker.

  OnBroadway: I can be.

  She let out a small laugh, only a little embarrassed when she realized someone might have heard. She looked around and realized Andreas was watching her, his expression brooding.

  Her phone buzzed with another text and she looked at it.

  OnBroadway: Just don’t make the same mistake I did.

  Codergirl: What’s that?

  OnBroadway: Being afraid to take a chance on a friend.

  People said that emails and texts didn’t convey emotions, but there was a wealth of feeling behind Jacob’s last string of words.

  Codergirl: What happened?

  OnBroadway: I lost my friend and the chance at more.

  “More texts from Jacob?” Andreas asked, his voice surprisingly mild, considering the tightness around his eyes and the tension filling his posture as he stood towering over her chair.

  “Yes, give me a second.” She wasn’t leaving her new friend hanging after that kind of admission.

  Codergirl: I’m sorry. You’re a good guy.

  OnBroadway: I have my career.

  It wasn’t enough, though, or Jacob wouldn’t have advised her to go for Andreas. Kayla understood loneliness.

  “Tell Jacob hello, but it’s not safe to text and walk.”

  Meaning they were going to be walking again very soon.

  She looked up at Andreas. “Are you bored, boss?”

  His jaw went rigid. “Not your boss. We have more sightseeing to do.”

  “You are being rude.”

  “In what way?” He leaned against the wall by her chair, and he might have looked relaxed but for the jaw hewn from granite, crossed arms and muscles bunched with tension.

  She waved her phone at him. “I am in the middle of a conversation.”

  “During our date,” Andreas bit out.

  What? They were on a date? How had she not realized that?

  He was talking again before she could get her whirling mind to formulate an answer. “Do you see me talking on my cell? Have I sent a single text?”

  “No.”

  “Because my attention is entirely on you.”

  Wow. Okay. This day was so not what she thought it had been. Nothing had been unexpected. He’d planned it as a date and all the sensuality had been part of it.

  “I thought you were busy looking at DIY.”

  He shrugged. “I get that. I also get that you are not the one invested in repairing ties that you frayed.”

  But Andreas was. He might not love her, but Andreas cared more about their relationship than any other one in his life.

  That mattered to Kayla. A lot.

  “We were having kind of an intense conversation. Let me just tell Jacob goodbye.”

  Andreas nodded, his expression closed. He stepped away to give her privacy.

  Codergirl: Off to see more sights. TTYL.

  She felt a strange relief and a thrill of happiness when Andreas took her hand as they left the bookstore. He seemed to have a destination in mind, using his hold on her hand to guide her along.

  For her part, she was just happy to take in all the color and texture. Tourists mixed with native New Yorkers, people moving quickly with a clear destination in mind, others stopping every couple of feet to take pictures. It was a magical mishmash of humanity.

  “You are people watching again.”

  “I like it.”

  “Considering how much time you spend on computers, some might find your fascination with our species odd.”

  Just because she was cautious about the friends she made and the time she spent with them in no way meant people were not endlessly fascinating to her. How they interacted with each other. The way their bodies often said things differently than what they said with their mouths.

  Yes, she found computers a lot easier to decode, but that didn’t mean she was giving up on trying to decode her fellow human beings. “There’s plenty to find odd about me, Andreas. I spent years of my childhood mute and still managed to skip grades.”

  He squeezed her hand, understanding wrapping around her, though no words were exchanged. Andreas was the only person she’d ever told about her past, and he’d never once made her feel like a freak because of it.

  “You responded to the abandonment of your mother by shutting the world out. It was natural that refusing to speak was part of that for you. You trusted no one with your words.”

  He’d gotten that, when none of her social workers had. Her first foster mom had, though, and she’d been the one to draw Kayla out of her silent isolation. Only to send her back into it with the woman’s death from breast cancer several years later.

  “It’s not the normal way to react to trauma. To just stop talking.”

  “You know how I feel about normal, Kayla.”

  Kayla grinned. “According to you, normal is boring.”

  “I refuse to allow anyone else to tell me what normal for my life is supposed to be. My father tried to tell me normal was a family with parents after my mother died, but what was normal about forcing me to live amid the very people who believed my mother was so beneath them, they never even spoke her name?”

  “Weren’t any of them worth getting to know?” Kayla asked.

  She’d never questioned him before on his wholesale rejection of the Georgas clan, but she could not imagine it. She had no family. Not a single distant cousin to call her own. He had so many and rejected them all.

  “I do not know. I refused to let anyone close enough to find out.”

  “And you don’t regret that? Not even a little bit?”

  “Why would I?” he asked with negligent arrogance.

  “Andreas, don’t you realize what I would give to have a single person I could call family?” She shook her head and then looked up at him. He was facing ahead, watching where they were walking. His expression hard to read in profile. “Someone I knew I could rely on to just be there?”

  “You can’t always rely on family. You know that.”

  “My mom, your mom’s family...they aren’t all there is. Families are there for each other. Just because we haven’t lived it, doesn’t mean we haven’t seen it. Just look at how Bradley’s family is. They are all so close. Look at Jacob’s sister, she’s mad at me because I ditched our date. Family.”

  “You think I could have had that with a Georgas cousin?” Andreas’s voice was filled with mocking doubt.

  But she wasn’t going to back down just because he got a little snippy. “You don’t know you couldn’t. You don’t know your dad wouldn’t have given you something more than you let him.”

  She knew that right there might be pushing him too far, but she’d thought for a long time the biggest problem between Andreas and his father was that they were too much alike. Both as stubborn as each other. Both arrogant. Both sure they knew what was right.

  And for a time in Andreas’s life, Barnabas Georgas had the power to impose his will on his son. Without a true father-son relationship to temper that imposition, all it did was make Andreas despise the man more than he already did for the way Barnabas had treated Melia Kostas.

  No attempts to make things better were going to work because Barnabas Kostas had irreparably damaged his bond with his son from the very beginning.

  Andreas stopped in front of a glass building they’d seen from the boat on their harbor tour.

  He turned to face her, no problem seeing how he was feeling now.

  An expression of stunned disbelief tinged with anger covered his face. “Are you kidding me? That asshole did nothing but what he wanted and only for the benefit of his own consequence.”

  “He was spoiled. Used to getting his own way. I doubt he knew any other tactic but the one he took with you.”

  “His loss.”

  “One I bet he feels to this day.”

  “You don’t really believe
that.”

  She sighed. “I don’t know, okay? But it’s possible. Maybe there was more going on than you realized. He went about it all wrong, but maybe he didn’t know how to deal with a son who hated his guts before they ever met.”

  “I had reason.”

  “I know you did.” Barnabas Georgas had given Melia Kostas money for an abortion and to leave Greece.

  She’d been ostracized by her family when she would only do one of those things, rejected by the man she’d loved, but she’d kept her son and raised him to the best of her abilities. And from all accounts, Melia had been an amazing mom.

  “But circumstances change. People change. They learn to regret choices they made.”

  She’d often wondered if her mom had ever regretted abandoning her. She’d always assumed the answer was no. After all, in order to contact Kayla, all she’d had to do was go through social services.

  “What is going on here, Kayla?” Andreas asked. “Why are you saying these things?”

  “I’m talking to you like a friend.”

  “We’ve been friends for eight years. You’ve never said anything like this to me before.”

  “I’ve never felt like I could.”

  “Why now?”

  “I’m not holding back anymore.” Besides, if his animosity for his family was enough to drive him into hiring someone like Genevieve, then it wasn’t healthy for Andreas to hold on to that grief so tight.

  He might not see it that way, but Kayla wanted her friend happy, not trapped in a life where everything he did was to prove himself to a family he claimed to despise.

  Andreas was silent for several seconds, but then his lips tilted up in a half smile, the expression in his gorgeous green eyes still solemn. “I like you being honest with me. It will take some getting used to, this no-holds-barred approach to you sharing your opinions with me, though.”

  “I’ve always been honest with you.”

  “But perhaps not so forthright.”

  She couldn’t deny that she’d held back a lot. Her love, for one.

  He turned toward the building, tugging on her hand. “Are you ready?”

  “For what?” But then her eyes registered what was inside the glass enclosure.

  A vintage carousel. Beautifully hand-painted horses on brass poles in all the traditional colors covered the circular platform, their livery done in jeweled tones, the artistry both garish and magnificent.

  “You want to go on a merry-go-round?” she asked, disbelief washing over her even as she was wholly charmed.

  He grinned. “Who doesn’t want to ride a carousel?”

  She looked around them, making a production of examining his back.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking for evidence of the pod-person replacement.”

  “I am not a killjoy.”

  “You are Andreas Kostas, synonymous with driven, focused and determined. I was positive amusement-park rides weren’t even in your vocabulary.”

  “As you pointed out, we are on vacation.”

  “I am on vacation...” Her voice trailed off for a second, Kayla searching for what to say. “You are... I’m not sure what you are doing here.”

  “I thought I’d made myself very clear. I’m here until you come home, hence we are both on vacation.” The impatient, never-stands-in-a-line Andreas Kostas got in line with Kayla and waited his turn to pay for their tickets.

  “So, we are going to ride a carousel.” Because that made so much sense. Oh, and by the way, they were on a date. That was apparently part of this now-joint vacation too.

  Was Kayla losing her mind, or had Andreas gone around the bend?

  “Exactly.” He sure didn’t sound crazy, just very determined.

  But determined to do what?

  Kayla was shocked at how inexpensive the tickets were, in the city where even the McDonald’s coffee cost more than it did back home. Delighted by the gorgeous paint job on the horse Andreas helped her climb onto, she was unsurprised when he stood beside her, rather than taking his own horse. In a way, his refusal to actually ride the merry-go-round helped her feel less disconnected from reality.

  He stood close, an arm around her, one strong hand curled over the glistening black mane of her horse. His other hand rested on her thigh. Her body’s instant reaction to his nearness, to the sensation of being surrounded by him, overwhelmed her senses.

  She could barely hear the music piping through the loudspeakers over the pounding of her heart in her ears. Her skin felt too tight for her body, the need she’d thought sated in the car was suddenly roaring through her again. Her olfactory glands inundated with his scent, that special spicy musk that had only ever meant one thing to her. Andreas Kostas.

  “Are you enjoying yourself, Kay-love?” he asked, his thumb rubbing a light pattern against her thigh that was driving her to distraction.

  “Yes.”

  He chuckled. “Oh, now, that sounds promising.” He leaned down, nuzzling her ear. “I love the smell of your hair.”

  “It’s the coconut oil in my smoothing product.”

  “It’s you.”

  The carousel started to slow and Andreas whispered, “You were wrong about something you said earlier.”

  “What?”

  “You said you don’t have a single person you can count on, no matter what. You do, Kayla. You have had for eight years. You have me.” With that soul-destroying statement, he stepped back.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE CAROUSEL CAME to a complete stop. Somehow, Andreas made sure she came off her horse on the side he stood on and her body pressed against his. “My mother loved the carousel in Portland. She took me often as a child.”

  Kayla found herself mesmerized by the look on Andreas’s face as well as the glimpse into his childhood before the Georgas debacle that seemed to define so much of his adult endeavors.

  “Are you sure it was your mom who liked the carousel?” she forced words past a suddenly dry throat to tease. “And not a small boy named Andreas who liked riding the horses?”

  Andreas’s smile was something so special, Kayla could barely breathe. “It may have been. And now you have another secret of mine to keep.”

  She met his gaze, imbuing her own with as much sincerity as she could. “Your secrets are safe with me.”

  “Even my intransigence with my family?”

  “Even that.”

  “Do you want to try to find your family?” he asked.

  It wasn’t a new question, not that he’d ever asked it, but she had asked herself that very thing many times. And she still didn’t have an answer, so she remained silent as they left the carousel and started walking again.

  “I don’t know. She abandoned me at a truck stop, you know?” Kayla finally broke the silence between them. “Why would a mom do that? I wasn’t a baby. I was three years old. I was never adopted, Andreas.”

  “I know that.”

  But did he understand what it meant? Not only had Kayla not been a child worthy of a family taking on permanently, but her long-term residency in foster care meant her own mother had never come back for her. “She could have found me, through social services, until I was eighteen. If she’d wanted to.”

  “No doubt the woman who gave you birth is a lost cause.” Andreas’s face reflected a ruthlessness few saw, but which she knew didn’t bode well for whoever was on the receiving end of that look. “You might have more family besides her, though.”

  “If I had grandparents, aunts or uncles, wouldn’t she have left me with them?”

  “I do not think you can make assumptions about that, Kay-love. I have many Kostases and Georgases in Greece and while not one of them lifted a hand to claim me, to help my mother in all the years she worked so hard on her own, you cannot be certain your own mother even told her own relatives about you. They could be decent people.”

  Or they could be just like the woman who’d abandoned her. That was what had prevented her from hiring a private
detective to find what family Kayla might have, the fear of more rejection. “So could yours.”

  “For me, it does not matter,” Andreas dismissed. “I do not want family that rejected the woman who gave everything for me.”

  “Do you think they ever regretted it? Your mother’s parents, I mean. They must have, after she died.”

  Andreas shook his head, his expression tolerant. “Your heart is so tender for a computer geek.”

  “Whatever.” She wasn’t a pushover, but Kayla wasn’t the cynic Andreas was either.

  “My mother invited her parents to come to America to meet me, more than once, and they refused. They maintained contact via letters only. However, they wanted to see me after Georgas acknowledged me.”

  “You refused them.” Kayla had no doubts on that.

  “Naturally.”

  “Your father allowed it.” That surprised her.

  “He never acknowledged my mother, so why would he want to recognize her family as part of my life?” Andreas asked, giving voice to Kayla’s curiosity.

  “But he was open to doing so?” she confirmed.

  “He was seeking some way to cross the divide between us.”

  And, man, Barnabas had picked the worst possible way to do that particular thing. “Let me guess, it never occurred to him to simply ask you what you wanted.”

  “I wanted to return to America and change my name back to Kostas.”

  “Neither of which fit his plans to make you his heir.” Barnabas Georgas had never stood a chance, for all his money and power, not when it came to his only child.

  “No.”

  “What is he doing for an heir now?”

  “I have no idea, but there are several first cousins. He’s spoiled for choice, if he weren’t so spoiled to having things his own way.”

  She almost said Pot, meet kettle, but knew that would hurt Andreas and that was not her intention. “Are you so sure he only came after you because he wanted an heir? It sounds like the family had that role covered.”

  “Not from his loins, and to a man like the Greek business shark Barnabas Georgas, that’s what matters.” The disgust in Andreas’s voice was absolute.

  But then his father had wanted Andreas aborted, so for the man to come around later looking for an heir had to have really hit Andreas on the raw.