CHAPTER ONE

      DAMIAN SKOURAS did not like weddings.

      A man and a woman, standing before clergy, friends and family while they pledged vows of love and fidelity no human being could possibly keep, was the impossible stuff of weepy women’s novels and fairy tales.

      It was surely not reality.

      And yet, here he was, standing in front of a flower-bedecked altar while the church organ shook the rafters with Mendelssohn’s triumphal march and a hundred people oohed and ahhed as a blushing bride made her way up the aisle toward him.

      She was, he had to admit, quite beautiful, but he knew the old saying. All brides were beautiful. Still, this one, regal in an old-fashioned gown of white satin and lace and clutching a bouquet of tiny purple and white orchids in her trembling hands, had an aura about her that made her more than beautiful. Her smile, just visible through her sheer, fingertip-length veil, was radiant as she reached the altar.

      Her father kissed her. She smiled, let go of his arm, then looked lovingly into the eyes of her waiting groom, and Damian sent up a silent prayer of thanks to the gods of his ancestors that it was not he.

      It was just too damned bad that it was Nicholas, instead.

      Beside him, Nicholas gave a sudden, unsteady lurch. Damian looked at the young man who’d been his ward until three years ago. Nick’s handsome face was pale.

      Damian frowned. “Are you all right?” he murmured.

      Nick’s adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed. “Sure.”

      It’s not too late, boy, Damian wanted to say, but he knew better. Nick was twenty-one; he wasn’t a boy any longer. And it was too late, because he fancied himself in love.

      That was what he’d said the night he’d come to Damian’s apartment to tell him that he and the girl he’d met not two months before were getting married.

      Damian had been patient. He’d chosen his words carefully. He’d enumerated a dozen reasons why marrying so quickly and so young were mistakes. But Nick had a ready answer for every argument, and finally Damian had lost his temper.

      “You damned young fool,” he’d growled, “what happened? Did you knock her up?”

      Nick had slugged him. Damian almost smiled at the memory. It was more accurate to say that Nick had tried to slug him but at six foot two, Damian was taller than the boy, and faster on his feet, even if Nicholas was seventeen years younger. The hard lessons he’d learned on the streets of Athens in his boyhood had never quite deserted him.

      “She’s not pregnant,” Nick had said furiously, as Damian held him at arm’s length. “I keep telling you, we’re in love.”

      “Love,” Damian had said with disdain, and the boy’s eyes had darkened with anger.

      “That’s right. Love. Dammit, Damian, can’t you understand that?”

      He’d understood, all right. Nick was in lust, not love; he’d almost told him so but by then he’d calmed down enough to realize that saying it would only result in another scuffle. Besides, he wasn’t a complete fool. All this arguing was only making the boy more and more determined to have things his own way.

      So he’d spoken calmly, the way he assumed his sister and her husband would have done if they’d lived. He talked about Responsibility and Maturity and the value in Waiting a Few Years, and when he’d finished, Nick had grinned and said yeah, he’d heard that stuff already, from both of Dawn’s parents, and while that might be good advice for some, it had nothing to do with him or Dawn or what they felt for each other.

      Damian, who had made his fortune by knowing not just when to be aggressive but when to yield, had gritted his teeth, accepted the inevitable and said in that case, he wished Nick well.

      Still, he’d kept hoping that either Dawn or Nick would come to their senses. But they hadn’t, and now here they all were, listening to a soft-voiced clergyman drone on and on about life and love while a bunch of silly women, the bride’s mother included, wept quietly into their hankies. And for what reason? She had been divorced. Hell, he had been divorced, and if you wanted to go back a generation and be foolish enough to consider his parents’ marriage as anything but a farce, they were part of the dismal breakup statistics, too. Half the people here probably had severed marriages behind them including, for all he knew, the mealymouthed clergyman conducting this pallid, non-Greek ceremony.

      All this pomp and circumstance, and for what? It was nonsense.

      At least his own memorable and mercifully brief foray into the matrimonial wars a dozen years ago had never felt like a real marriage. There’d been no hushed assembly of guests, no organ music or baskets overflowing with flowers. There’d been no words chanted in Greek nor even the vapid sighing of a minister like this one.

      His wedding had been what the tabloids called a quickie, an impulsive flight to Vegas after a weekend spent celebrating his first big corporate takeover with too much sex and champagne and not enough common sense. Unfortunately he’d made that assessment twenty-four hours too late. The quickie marriage had led to a not-so-quickie divorce, once his avaricious bride and a retinue of overpriced attorneys had gotten involved.

      So much for the lust Nick couldn’t imagine might masquerade as love.

      A