to see Nyssa. Savannah’s youngest had been born with the black hair and velvet brown eyes of her father.
Unmistakably a Kiriakis.
“People change. Their son is gone. Is it so strange Helena and Sandros should wish to know his off-spring?”
Savannah sucked in much needed oxygen and marshaled her thoughts. “Do they now acknowledge Eva and Nyssa as Dion’s?”
“They will when they meet them.”
No doubt. Both her daughters had enough physical characteristics of the Kiriakis clan that once seen their parentage could not be challenged, but that did not mean she was ready to introduce them to their family in Greece.
“How can you be so sure?” she asked, wondering how he knew of her daughters’ physical resemblance to their relatives.
“I have seen pictures. There can be no question Eva and Nyssa are Kiriakises.” The words sounded like an accusation.
“Dion’s pictures, you mean?”
She’d sent him frequent updates on the girls’ progress along with photos, hoping that one day he would show some inclination to acknowledge them. She’d felt her own lack of family and mourned her inability to know her own father and did not want the same grief visited on her daughters.
“Yes. I supervised the disposal of his effects from his Athens apartment.” Again Leiandros’s voice was laced with censure, as if she should have done the job herself.
After three years of separation and living independent lives on two different continents, she hadn’t even considered such a thing. “I see.”
“Do you?” he asked, his voice silky with unnamed menace and that awful sense of dread washed over her again.
“Have Helena and Sandros expressed a desire to meet them?”
“I have decided the time has come.”
And as the head of the Kiriakis clan, he expected the rest of the family to go along with whatever decision he made.
“No.”
“How can you be so selfish?” Condemnation weighted each word with bruising force.
“Selfish?” she asked, feeling anger roiling in her stomach, making it churn. “You call it selfish for a mother to wish to protect her children from the rejection of people that are supposed to love them, people that should have loved them since birth, but decided for their own obscure reasons not to?”
She knew she wasn’t being entirely fair. For six years, Savannah had believed Dion’s family had hated her because she was not the suitable Greek bride they had chosen for him to wed and therefore rejected her children. His phone call the night before he died effectively obliterated that theory.
Along with other stunning revelations, her dear husband had admitted that he’d been poisoning their minds with his insane jealousy, accusing her of infidelity, from almost the very start of their marriage. Helena and Sandros had what they believed to be legitimate reasons to question the parentage of Savannah’s daughters, but that didn’t make her any more willing to expose Eva and Nyssa to possible rejection and pain.
“Sandros and Helena will accept the girls with open arms.”
“Who do you think you are. God?”
Funny, she could actually sense the fury sizzling through the phone lines. He was not used to being questioned. He’d been in charge of the huge Kiriakis financial empire since his father’s unexpected death when Leiandros was twenty. At thirty-two, his arrogance and sense of personal power were as ingrained and natural to him as making his next million.
“Do not be blasphemous. It is unbecoming in a woman.”
She almost laughed out loud at how stilted he sounded, like someone’s maiden aunt giving lessons in etiquette. “I’m not trying to be offensive,” she replied, “I simply want to protect my daughters’ best interests.”
“If you expect those interests to include further financial support from the Kiriakis family, you will bring them to Greece.”
Savannah tried to draw in a breath, but it seemed to get stuck somewhere between her windpipe and her lungs. The edges of her vision turned black and she wondered with a sense of detachment if she were going to faint. Leiandros didn’t know it, but he was forcing her to choose between the elderly aunt who had raised her and the safety of her daughters’ emotions along with her own sanity.
It was her second worse nightmare. The first had already happened. She’d married Dion Kiriakis.
“Savannah!”
Someone was shouting in her ear. Her hand instinctively tightened on the phone and the room came slowly back into focus.
“Leiandros?” Was that thready voice hers?
How pathetic she must sound to the self-assured man on the other end of the line, but then she doubted anyone had ever forced him to do anything he did not want to.
“Are you all right?”
“No,” she admitted. The last of her emotional reserves seemed to have dissipated with his overt threat.
“Savannah, I’m not going to let anyone hurt Eva and Nyssa.” His voice reverberated against her ear with conviction and assurance.
But would he let them hurt her? “How can you prevent it?”
“You will have to trust me.”
“I don’t trust people named Kiriakis.” Her words came in the flat monotone she couldn’t seem to shake.
“You don’t have a choice.”
Leiandros hung up the phone, satisfied.
The opening gambit had gone to him. It would only be a matter of time before he captured her.
Savannah and her daughters would be flying to Greece the day after Eva’s school let out for the summer. Savannah had agreed only after extracting a promise from him not to instigate any meeting between Eva, Nyssa and their grandparents before she had an opportunity to speak to Helena and Sandros.
How could she now show such concern for her daughters’ emotional well-being when her lies about their parentage had denied them the love of their family since birth?
No doubt, her arguments were an attempt at manipulation. Perhaps she intended to try to use the girls as bargaining chips for a larger allowance. While her current stipend was substantial, it would hardly support the designer clad, jet setting lifestyle she had experienced while living with Dion.
He put through a call to his secretary. “Arrange for my jet to land in Atlanta to transport Savannah Kiriakis and her children to Athens two weeks from today.”
He cut the connection after giving his secretary other necessary details.
Savannah had balked at flying on his jet, but after he told her the plane had a bedroom the girls could use to sleep in comfort, she had agreed. If she’d remained insistent he would have given in to her. The first step in his plan was the most important: getting Savannah and the girls to Greece.
Savannah had to be on the chessboard in order to engage her in the game.
He would not allow an ocean and two continents to prevent him from exacting full payment from her for all that she had cost his family, all that she had cost him.
Savannah had committed the gravest of all sins against his family, that of withholding her children, using lies and manipulation to cheat Dion out of his fatherhood and Helena and Sandros out of their rightful role as doting grandparents.
That would end in two weeks time.
When he had first met Savannah, he had been drawn to her apparent innocence, to the impression of untouched sensuality she had exuded. So drawn he had kissed her without knowing her name or anything else