The Greek's Surprise Christmas Bride / Proof Of Their One-Night Passion. Louise FullerЧитать онлайн книгу.
to inform Leo that his daughter, Elexis, was on the brink of an engagement and no longer available. Leo suppressed a sigh, not of disappointment because his current mistress was considerably sexier than Elexis; however, he had warmed to the concept of marrying her because she was vaguely familiar to him.
‘However, I have a granddaughter,’ Isidore admitted grudgingly, surprising Leo with that information. ‘As I’m sure you’re aware, my son went off the rails…’
Leo nodded, for the world and his wife were aware that Julian Livas, product of his father’s first marriage, had taken to drugs and drink and manic bad behaviour from an early age. He had died in his twenties from his excesses. Isidore had Elexis later in life, with his second wife.
‘Two months ago, I learned to my surprise that Julian did have a child with a woman in London. He didn’t marry the woman concerned, so my grandchild was born out of wedlock,’ Isidore revealed with old-fashioned distaste. ‘Letty is twenty-four and single. You can still become my heir if you take her as a bride… I have no one else, Leo. Elexis’s chosen husband is a television presenter with no interest in taking over my business, and I would very much like to retire.’
‘And this… Letty?’ Leo questioned with a frown, for he considered it an ugly name.
The older man grimaced. ‘You couldn’t compare her to Elexis. She’s plain and plump but she’d marry you like a shot because she needs money for her family.’
‘Plain and plump’ didn’t exactly thrill Leo either. He mightn’t want a wife for entertainment in the bedroom but, understandably, he wanted a presentable woman. His black brows drew together in complete puzzlement. ‘Why aren’t you helping her family?’
The expression on Isidore’s thin face shuttered. ‘She approached me for help but, as far as I’m concerned, if my son wasn’t prepared to marry her mother, I shouldn’t be expected to provide for their child, now that the girl’s an adult.’
‘And yet you’re willing to make this girl your heiress,’ Leo remarked wryly.
‘If she marries you. That’s different. She has Livas blood in her veins and I will accept her then. But she’s lowborn,’ Isidore murmured broodingly. ‘She doesn’t speak Greek. She has not been raised with our traditions and you may not find that palatable. She works as a care assistant in a home for the elderly.’
Leo’s brain could not even encompass the concept of a wife who worked in so humble a capacity. Born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth to a family who had enjoyed wealth for generations, he had no experience whatsoever of what it was like to be born poor. ‘In your opinion is your granddaughter likely to be the maternal type?’
‘If you can judge her by the way she fights and argues in favour of her siblings’ welfare, I would say so…’
Leo was frowning again. ‘Siblings? Julian had more than one child with her mother?’
‘No. Only Letty is Julian’s child. Her mother had the two younger boys with another man,’ Isidore clarified with compressed lips. ‘I gather that relationship didn’t last either and now the mother is ill or disabled or something.’
‘Tell Letty what I have to offer and send her to me,’ Leo advised with all the arrogance of his wealthy forebears. ‘I am willing to marry her if I find her acceptable but, for the children’s sake, she must be a good woman.’
An unexpected laugh erupted from Isidore, startling the older man almost as much as it startled Leo, who had always viewed Isidore as humourless. ‘Leo…what would you know about good women?’
Faint colour accentuated the high exotic slant of Leo’s cheekbones and he lifted a brow and nodded in grudging acknowledgement of that accurate question. Even so, he was very conscious of his duty towards his nephews and nieces and he was determined not to land them with a nasty stepmother, such as he had had to endure. In truth, however, he knew much more about calculating, cruel and greedy women than he knew about the other type.
On his flight back to London, Leo decided to look into Letty and have her investigated but was instead forced to have her late father’s history explored because Isidore had neglected to give him Letty’s surname. By the time he arrived back in London, a file awaited him and the information within was unexpectedly interesting. Juliet, known as Letty, Harbison was a much more thought-provoking bride-to-be than her socialite Aunt Elexis had ever been. Leo’s rarely roused curiosity was stimulated.
Unaware of the high-flying plans afoot for her future, Letty stared at the loan shark on their doorstep. ‘You’re breaking the law,’ she told him sharply. ‘You are not allowed to harass and intimidate your debtors.’
‘I’m entitled to ask for my money,’ he told her fiercely, a thin little man in a crumpled suit, another man, unshaven and thuggish in shape, poised behind him, his sidekick, Joe, who had attempted to thump her little brother for trying to stand up to him on his last visit. He had backed off when Letty wielded the cricket bat she kept behind the door.
‘You’ll have your payment as soon as I get paid, just like last month and the month before,’ Letty responded, squaring her shoulders, honey-blonde hair caught up in a ponytail bouncing with the movement, her green eyes clear and steady. ‘I can’t give you what I don’t have.’
‘A little bird told me you have rich relations.’
An angry flush illuminated Letty’s creamy skin as she wondered if one of her brothers had let that dangerous cat out of the bag. ‘I asked. He wouldn’t help.’
‘He might help soon enough if you was unlucky enough to have an…accident,’ Joe piped up ungrammatically, baring crooked teeth in a smile that was a grimace of threat.
‘But if I were to have an accident, you wouldn’t be getting any money at all,’ Letty pointed out flatly and closed the door swiftly, seeing no advantage to continuing the dialogue.
‘Rich relations’, she thought wryly, thinking back to her one meeting with her Greek grandfather, when he had visited London on business. A cold, unfriendly man more hung up on the reality that she was illegitimate rather than showing any genuine interest in her actual existence. No, contacting Isidore Livas had been a dead end. She had soon worked out that no rescue bid would be coming from him. He had shaken her off like the poor relation she was.
While her mother, Gillian, hobbled painfully round the tiny kitchen of their council flat on crutches and tried to tidy up, Letty made a cheap but nutritious evening meal for her family. Her two brothers sat at the table in the living room, both of them engaged in homework. Tim was thirteen and Kyle was nine. Letty considered her half-brothers marginally less useless than she considered the rest of the world’s men.
There were no towering heroes in Letty’s depressing experience of men. Her father, Julian, had been a handsome, irresponsible lightweight, incapable of fighting his addictions to toxic substances. He had lived with her mother and her only once and for a brief period, after a more than usually successful stay in a rehab facility, but within months he had fallen off the wagon again and that had been the last Letty had seen of him.
Yet, tragically, meeting Julian Livas had derailed her mother’s entire life. Gillian had been a middle-class schoolgirl at the exclusive co-educational boarding school where she had met Julian. A teenage pregnancy had resulted and when Gillian had refused to have a termination her parents had thrown her out and washed their hands of her. Letty had always respected the hard struggle Gillian had faced, simply to survive as a young mother. As a single parent, Gillian had subsequently trained as a nurse and life had been stable until Gillian fell in love again.
Letty grimaced as she thought of her stepfather, Robbie, a steady worker and a likeable man but, underneath the surface show of decency and reliability, a hopeless womaniser. When Gillian could no longer live with his lies and deceptions, they had had to move on and inevitably their standard