Breaking the Greek's Rules. Anne McAllister
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undemanding woman who wanted an easy-to-get-along-with, undemanding husband. He wasn’t looking for love and he wasn’t looking for kids. He wasn’t looking to complicate his life.
He and his wife would share bed and board when they were in the same country and would attend each other’s duty functions when possible. Presently he lived in an apartment he’d restored in Brooklyn above his offices, but it was a bachelor’s pad. He wouldn’t expect his wife to live there. They could get another place close to her work. She could choose it. He didn’t care. He was perfectly willing to be accommodating.
So, really, how difficult could it be to find a woman willing to agree to his terms?
Harder than he thought, Alex admitted now.
His last three dates had seemed promising—all of them were professional women in their thirties. He’d met them at business social functions. They all had high-powered careers, fast-track lives, and nearly as many demands on their time as he had on his.
They should have been perfect.
But the lawyer had treated their dinner date as a cross-examination about his determination not to have children. The dentist bored on about how much she hated her profession and could hardly wait to quit and start a family. And Melissa, the stock analyst with whom he’d had dinner with last night, told him point-blank that her biological clock was ticking and she wanted a baby within a year.
At least Alex had had the presence of mind to say just as firmly, “I don’t.”
But that date, like so many of the others he’d had since he’d decided that it was possible to marry without anything as messy as love complicating the relationship, had gone downhill from there.
Which brought him back to the receipt he held in his hand.
Daisy.
He stared at the name Lukas had scrawled on the crumpled paper. It brought with it flickers of memories, a frisson of awareness. Honey-blonde hair. Sparkling blue eyes. Laughter. Gentle, warm words. Soft sighs. Hot kisses. He shifted in the seat of the cab. Once upon a time, for one brief weekend, Alex had known a woman called Daisy.
So maybe this was fate.
The hot-kisses, soft-sighs Daisy had wanted to marry him. Maybe the matchmaking Daisy would find him a wife.
“Think of it as delegating,” Elias had urged him pragmatically when he’d balked at Lukas’s suggestion. “You do it all the time at work.”
That was true. Alex had a whole staff at his architectural firm who did the things he didn’t have time for. They did what he told them, checked availability, researched zoning and land use and materials, sorted and sifted through piles of information, then presented their findings and recommendations, and left him to make the final decision.
It was sensible. It was efficient. And Elias was right: a matchmaker could do the same thing. It would be smarter, in fact, than doing it himself.
He would be leaving less to chance if he deputized a disinterested employee to find appropriate candidates. And he’d be spared the awkwardness of future dinners like the one he’d shared with Melissa last night. With a matchmaker vetting the candidates, he would only have to meet the really suitable ones, then decide which one would make the best wife.
It suddenly sounded promising. He should have dropped in on Daisy Connolly before this. But Alex didn’t ordinarily get to the Upper West Side. Today, though, he’d been working on a building project in the West Village and, finishing early, he’d had a bit of time to spare before he headed back to Brooklyn. So he’d plucked the paper out of his wallet and hopped in a cab.
Twenty minutes later he consulted it as he got out again on the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and the cross street on which Daisy Connolly had her office.
He hoped she hadn’t gone home already. He hadn’t made an appointment. It had seemed more sensible to leave himself the option of changing his mind if, when he saw the place, something about it made him want to walk straight on past.
But the street wore the New York City version of homey respectability. It was quiet, lined with four and five story brownstones, a few blocks north of the Museum of Natural History. The trees on either side of the street were all varying shades of gold and orange this early October afternoon, making it look like a photo op for an urban lifestyle magazine. Alex took his time walking up the block, the architect in him enjoying the view.
When he’d first bought a place to live in New York three years ago, changing his base of operations from Europe to this side of the Atlantic, he’d opted for an apartment in a high-rise about a mile south on Central Park West. Twenty-odd stories up, his aerie had given him a useful bird’s-eye perspective of the city, but it had literally kept him above it all. He hadn’t felt connected.
Two years ago, offered a chance to tear down a pre-war office building in Brooklyn not far from where his cousins Elias and PJ lived with their families, he’d found a purpose and a place where he was happy at the same time. He’d found another property on which to build what the owner wanted, and seeing a chance to make a useful contribution to the gentrification of a neighborhood in transition, he had snapped up the pre-war building for himself. Now he had his offices downstairs and his apartment on the fourth floor. He felt more like he belonged and less as if he were soaring above it.
He got the same feeling here on Daisy Connolly’s street. There was a laundry on one corner, a restaurant on the other. Between two of the brownstones he passed an empty lot which now held a small local playground with some climbing equipment, a swing and slide. One brownstone had a small discreet plaque by the door of the garden floor apartment offering herbs and organic seedlings. Another had a small sign for a chiropractor’s office.
Did matchmakers have signs? He felt an unwelcome flicker of awkwardness. When he found the address midblock, there was no sign. It looked like a version of all the rest—a tall, narrow, five story building with three stories of bay windows and another two stories above them of more modest windows—where once servants had dwelt no doubt. It was the color of warm honey, lighter than the traditional brownstone, and it sported lace curtains at the first floor bay windows making it look pleasant and professional at the same time.
Besides the lack of signs, there were no astrology signs or crystal balls in sight. No tiny fairy lights flickering in the windows, either. None of the “hocus-pocus” Lukas had mentioned. Alex breathed a sigh of relief.
He straightened his tie, took a deep breath, strode up the steps and opened the outside door. In the tiny foyer, on the mailbox for apartment 1, he saw her name: Daisy Connolly. Resolutely he pressed the buzzer.
For half a minute there was no response at all. Alex shifted from one foot to the other and ground his teeth at the thought of wasting the end of an afternoon coming all the way to the Upper West Side for nothing.
But just as he was about to turn away, he heard the sound of a lock being turned. The door opened into the shadow-filled front hall and he could see the silhouette of a slim woman coming to push open the door to admit him.
She was smiling—until their gazes met. Then the smile faded and the color drained from her face.
She stared at him, stricken. “Alex?”
Honey-blonde hair. Deep blue eyes. A memory of scorching hot kisses. “Daisy?”
Alex? Here? No!
No. No. No.
But all the time the word was banging around inside Daisy’s head, the truth—all six feet of his whipcord-lean, muscular, gorgeous male self—was staring at her in the face.
Why in heaven’s name couldn’t she have looked out the window before she’d answered the door?
The answer was simple: Alexandros Antonides was so far in her past she never ever considered that he might turn up on her doorstep.
She’d been expecting Philip Cannavarro.
She’d done