The Latin Lover

by Lucy Monroe

“I…uh…”

  “You will be my brother for real.” For a moment the numbness was pierced, and agony made her almost bend double, but she forced herself to straighten and pushed the pain away to that place deep inside where it could not make her cry anymore.

  “Phoebe? Are you okay?” He sounded like he really cared.

  “My mother is already making wedding plans,” she said, rather than answer that question again.

  It didn’t really matter what she said, did it? Her father had asked her the same thing after dinner. But if she said no would it make any difference? She knew it wouldn’t. Both her father and Spiros would simply feel compelled to convince her what a good man she was getting in Dimitri. Why it was “best for her” to go through with the wedding. And really? She didn’t want to hear it.

  “Is she?” Spiros asked, his voice tinged with something odd she made no effort to decipher.

  “Yes.”

  Another short silence. “You should probably expect Grandfather to put his oar in as well.”

  “He and Mama will have to battle it out.”

  “Not you too?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? Don’t you care what your wedding is like?”

  “No.” It wasn’t her wedding. It was a business merger…a wedding others wanted…and she was going along with it, but it wasn’t hers. It could not be hers and have the groom be the eldest Petronides brother.

  “Phoebe—”

  “I need to go. Mother has more plans she wants to go over.” She was sure that was true, but was even more certain she had to get off the phone. Talking to Spiros was too detrimental to the sense of detachment she needed so badly to get her through the next few weeks.

  She did not think her father or Theopolis Petronides would want a long engagement.

  “I’ll talk to you later.” Funny…he sounded as numb as she did.

  It must be a trick of her hearing. “Goodbye, Spiros.”

  He didn’t know it, but she was saying farewell to a lot more than a simple phone call. She clicked the phone shut before he had a chance to answer or say anything else. It was time to start her campaign to rid herself of a love that had caused her far too much pain and brought not nearly enough pleasure.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SPIROS left Phoebe yet another voicemail and then clicked his phone shut. For the past two weeks she had either ignored his calls or kept their dialogues short. She responded to one out of three e-mails with pithy notes that did not encourage further correspondence. Apparently she had decided to cool their friendship.

  He should be glad. With the attraction he felt toward her, it was no doubt for the best for them both. But he missed her. More than he’d thought possible. And every day that drew them closer to her marriage to Dimitri, Spiros hurt more.

  He couldn’t stand talking to or about Dimitri, he was so envious of what his brother had. Phoebe. So he avoided his family as assiduously as Phoebe avoided him.

  He was worried about her.

  She refused to discuss anything personal. He’d tried, wanting to somehow fix everything going wrong with and around them. But she’d refused. The one time, in desperation, that he’d brought up the kiss, she’d hung up on him and ignored any attempt to communicate for three days after. She was missing the spark that was so much a part of who she was and he didn’t know how to bring it back.

  When he asked how the engagement plans were going, she told him they were fine as far as she knew. As if her marriage to his older brother had nothing to do with her. He couldn’t be nearly as sanguine.

  Phoebe might say she was fine with the merging of their two families, but she obviously wasn’t. And there was nothing he could do about it. She shut him down when he tried to talk to her, refusing to acknowledge anything was wrong, and had managed to imply that her emotional state was none of his business.

  He knew it was his own fault, but that didn’t make it hurt any less. For the first time since she was a year old he felt disconnected from her. He had never realized before how much he relied on their relationship, how much it meant to him. It all left him feeling helpless.

  Something he had vowed to himself would not happen again after the death of his parents. He had been helpless in the face of his mother’s behavior, which had torn at the moorings of his family. Then death had snatched away the two most important people in the world to him.

  Since then he had not wanted to give anyone the power to hurt him. He had maintained a certain emotional distance, even from his older brother and grandfather. But Phoebe had climbed the walls around his heart as surely as she had climbed his body like a jungle gym when he was a boy and she just a toddling baby girl. No matter how much distance she thought they needed, this was too much.

  The prospect of her hurting and him having no way to fix it made him cranky as hell. His secretary hid from him, and the managers under his authority walked a wary path around him right now.

  He was not used to getting this sort of treatment. Of the two of them, he had always been more personable and approachable than his brother. But he’d overheard one of his employees saying she would happily transfer to Dimitri’s division just yesterday.

  Spiros sighed. Now, that was as good an indication as any that he was on the slippery slope to the most overbearing of Petronides male behavior.

  And damned if he could do anything about that, either.

  Phoebe read the announcement of her upcoming marriage to Dimitri in the society section of the paper. Everything about it was in order…was exactly as it should be, in fact. The only abnormality in the situation would not show up on the printed page. Though readers might find it odd that two individual pictures of the parties involved had been included rather than a joint one. Since she had yet to see Dimitri since agreeing to go forward with the marriage, that small anomaly could not be avoided.

  It was strange to her how the people around her acted like this should be a huge celebration, as if her and Dimitri’s marriage was the romance of the century. When in fact it couldn’t be further from that. Her mother and Theopolis Petronides were planning a wedding fit for royalty in one of the largest Greek Orthodox cathedrals in Athens. And though it felt like such a farce to her, she simply didn’t care.

  It was not her fault that a ceremony that should be sacred was going to be conducted for the sake of business.

  It wasn’t the first time such a thing would happen and it would not be the last. She would play her part, but she would not pretend to the role of blushing bride when she was simply a form of barter—surety on a loan, the connection of two old and powerful business families.

  Her plan to starve the love from her heart was in full swing.

  She’d done a pretty good job of avoiding Spiros, keeping busy working with her father. His request that she work on the recovery package for Leonides Enterprises was no doubt an attempt to make up to her for selling her into marriage in order to save the company. But she found the work challenging, and felt a measure of gratitude for having it to keep her occupied.

  Not only did it make a good excuse to avoid Spiros, but she had immersed herself so completely in spreadsheets, industry research, meetings and the like that she had managed to duck out of almost all of the wedding plans. She’d also spent minimal time with her family in the past two weeks, eating only one dinner at home and leaving for the office before even her father did so.

  Papa had chastised her once for neglecting her family. She had apologized, and then continued on as she had been doing. Her mother had tried to get her involved in the wedding plans, but Phoebe refused to engage. Though she was very careful not to hurt her mother’s feelings, she refused to pretend like everyone else that this was her chance at happiness.

  Her life was forfeit for the well-being of her family, and while she did not begrudge them that—she loved them, after all—she would not buy into a fantasy that had no basis in reality. She had done that with Spiros, and would never again set herself up for the kind of di
sappointment she had experienced upon her return to Greece.

  Phoebe walked into the very exclusive and equally elegant restaurant. She had come directly from the office, taking a few minutes to freshen up before leaving the Leonides company headquarters.

  Her father and mother were at the table already. Her mother was beaming; her father wore the stoic expression he had begun to adopt the last week or so. He was under a tremendous amount of pressure—more than she could have envisioned, having only academic experience in business. But she understood what had gone wrong, and how a couple of poor decisions could lead to the decline of an otherwise solid company if those decisions were big enough. Papa’s had been.

  He carried the weight not only of bringing the company back, but of knowing he was directly responsible for the place it had gotten to. She did not envy him.

  Her brother was here as well, and he smiled with a typical teen look of borderline cynicism when he saw her. She smiled back, glad that he seemed unaffected by the stress pressing down on her and Papa.

  Her gaze scanned the others at the table, her smile sliding from her face. Spiros was there. Images and remembered passion swirled through Phoebe’s mind and body and she fought to tamp them down. How could the wall she’d fought so hard to build around her memories crumble so easily?

  He chose that moment to look up, his eyes catching hers. He was trying to convey something with his, but she refused to attempt to decipher what it was. She simply nodded in greeting, then went to say hello to her family, giving each one the traditional kisses on cheeks. Her brother, characteristic of his age, was less than enthusiastic in his teenage affection for an older sister.

  Just to torment him a little, she chose to sit beside him, so he wouldn’t be able to avoid all the hoopla dinner was destined to be.

  “I do not rate a real hello?” Spiros asked from a couple of seats away on the round table.

  “Good evening, Spiros.”

  His eyes narrowed, letting her know he was aware she knew exactly what he’d meant by a hello, and it had not been the word. But she wasn’t doing physical affection with this man. Just seeing him was putting her hard-won composure at risk. She was not putting it to further detriment.

  “Have you heard from Dimitri?” Spiros asked. “He and Grandfather were coming together.”

  “I haven’t spoken to Dimitri in nearly a year. I would not expect him to call me and explain his tardiness to his engagement dinner.”

  Spiros looked shocked. “You have not seen him since…since…?”

  “Since the last time our visits to our home country coincided.”

  “But that was last year!”

  “Yes.” And she was perfectly aware that Dimitri had been in Greece for the past few days, but he’d made no effort to contact her.

  Spiros looked furious. She couldn’t imagine why. Her relationship with his brother was nothing to him.

  Her mother patted Phoebe’s hand. “I am sure he will make up for his inattentiveness now that the engagement has been announced.”

  Phoebe smoothed her napkin in her lap. “It does not matter.”

  Spiros muttered something that sounded suspiciously like, “Like hell it doesn’t.” Then he frowned at her. “You have been very busy these past weeks.”

  There was no mistaking the censure in his tone.

  She shrugged. “I have been working.”

  “With your father?” he asked, looking genuinely interested.

  “Yes. I’m sure I told you that.” She had mentioned her temporary position at Leonides Enterprises during one of their few phone calls. Hadn’t she?

  “So he offered you a job after all?”

  “Of sorts,” she said noncommittally.

  Clearly if she moved to Paris to live with Dimitri she could not continue to work at Leonides Enterprises. They did not have an office in the City of Lovers. Her mouth twisted at the thought of that name for her future home. She was not even sure she would be sharing Dimitri’s bed. It was something they would have to discuss.

  She might very well be the first married Greek woman to die a virgin, but she had no intention of allowing Dimitri access to her body if he kept a mistress. She also did not intend to tell him to get rid of the other woman. Every time she thought of having sex with the ice man, bile rose in her throat. So she avoided thinking of that aspect of her upcoming nuptials as much as possible.

  Spiros looked bothered about something. Phoebe reminded herself that, whatever it was, it was of no concern to her. She was marrying his brother.

  For the first time in two weeks the numbness of her soul was pierced, and the mental reminder of her future caused unwelcome agony deep in her soul. She looked away from Spiros and toward her brother, intending to ask about how school was going, but she couldn’t make the innocuous question come out.

  Not while she was screaming inside. How was she supposed to marry Dimitri when she loved Spiros? How could she spend family holidays with him while intimately tied to his brother? Even if it was in name only?

  Before the kiss Phoebe might have been able to do it, but now she felt like she would shatter at the mere thought.

  She would simply have to avoid family events in future. Dimitri would have to understand. If he didn’t—too bad. She wasn’t putting herself through that kind of hell on a regular basis. And maybe as time went on it would get easier. It had to.

  Unreturned love could not live forever.

  She forced her mouth to form words, asking her brother the question she’d meant to, only to receive a very teenage roll of the eyes. “We aren’t in school right now, sis.”

  “Oh. I guess I’m out of the loop, huh?”

  “Only a little,” he said, with humor-filled sarcasm. “Don’t sweat it. Mama says you are working like a slave at the company.”

  “Not a slave…but a lot of hours, yes.”

  “Will Papa expect the same of me right out of school?” Chrysanthos looked disturbed at the prospect. “I’m the son, and it’ll be worse, won’t it?”

  “There are some things going on right now—hopefully nothing like it will be happening when you finish school.”

  “You think so? I really wanted to do some traveling before buckling down to my destiny, you know?”

  She smiled. “I understand. You could always attend college overseas, like I did.” He was due to start university the following year.

  “You don’t think Papa would be disappointed if I don’t attend his alma mater?”

  “I think you have to do some things for yourself. You never know when that opportunity will no longer be open to you.”

  “Like you, you mean?” he asked shrewdly.

  Her heart stuttered. “What do you mean?”

  “You think I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m a teenager, not an idiot.” He gave her the most serious look he ever had. “If you are doing it for me, don’t.”

  She leaned forward and kissed his cheek with spontaneous affection. “Don’t worry about me, little brother. I’m a grown-up. I can take care of myself.”

  “Just so long as you aren’t sacrificing yourself to take care of everyone else.”

  Her brother’s concern when there had been nothing of the kind from her parents was almost enough to destroy her cool facade, but she took a deep breath and bucked up her resolve. “Thank you, but I will be fine.”

  They had been speaking in whispers, and when she looked up she caught a speculative look on Spiros’s features, the same stoic expression on her father’s, and a slightly worried frown on her mother’s.

  Phoebe pasted a smile on her face. “Has anyone phoned Tio Theo to find out what the hold-up is?”

  “I will call Dimitri,” Spiros said, and got up from the table to make the call.

  He returned moments later, looking pale and shaken.

  “What is the matter?” she asked, before she could think better of it.

  “It is Grandfather. He’s had another heart attack.”

  “
Another?” Phoebe asked with dismay. She loved that old man like family. “I did not know he had one before.”

  Her father looked guiltily away, while Spiros merely shook his head as if trying to clear it. “You were studying…learning of it would only have distressed you. He would not have had another if he had agreed to have the bypass surgery when the doctor recommended it.”

  “But he didn’t?” she asked in shock.

  Anger flashed in Spiros’s golden-brown eyes. “The stubborn old man refused until Dimitri promised to marry and give him grandchildren.”

  Thank goodness she was sitting down. Because if Phoebe had been standing her legs would not have held her up. Dimitri had had to be blackmailed into this marriage too? No wonder he had not contacted her. But how on earth did their families expect them to have any kind of happiness together when both the bride and groom were marrying against their will?

  She turned to her father and asked in an angrier voice than she had ever used with him, “Have you and Tio Theo lost your minds? Did nothing but family legacies mean anything to you?”

  Her father had the grace to look abashed, but it was far too little and far too late. Her own father was setting her up for the marriage from hell and he did not even care. The only thing that mattered to him was his precious company and his equally important—to him—pride.

  She said a word that had her mother gasping her name.

  Spiros looked like he’d been thinking the same one. “I have to go to the hospital.”

  And, despite everything that had happened, she could not let him down in his time of need. “I’ll come with you.”

  “We all will,” her mother said. “After all, Phoebe is practically family.”

  “Mom! Sheesh!” Her brother’s exasperated exclamation almost made Phoebe smile.

  Almost.

  After arranging transportation for everyone, Spiros led Phoebe to his car. No one said anything about her not riding to the hospital with her own family. Why would they? As far as anyone else was concerned Spiros and Phoebe were still the best of friends.