A Tycoon Too Wild to Wed by Caitlin Crews

Author:Caitlin Crews
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2023-12-28T19:23:16+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

THEIR WEDDING DAY dawned bright and beautiful, as if Asterion had ordered it specifically from the gods to honor his name—or to celebrate the fact that he was achieving the very thing his grandmother had dared suggest he could not do. He was marrying a woman of noted and widely known virtue, despite his reputation.

Despite his well-documented monstrousness.

He would have ordered a complimentary rainbow or two from all the gods, old and new alike, had he known how to contact them.

His staff had been working at a frenzied pace ever since he’d announced his engagement, racing to cajole by any means necessary the required officials and priests to move more quickly than usual. And much more quickly than they liked. Asterion was fairly certain that his grandmother’s favorite church, the setting she would have preferred for the ceremony, had coldly extorted him to bypass the usual restrictions. The bishop himself had come in to grumble and frown and ultimately do as Asterion wished.

Most did.

Their proper engagement had occurred a week after the night they’d kissed. First he had apprised his staff and sent them off to change the world to suit him. Then he had gone to see the Martis family the very next day.

He had presented himself at the front door of the villa, bright and early. Though he had stood there some while, for it had taken a great deal of knocking and ringing to gain admittance. Then even longer to wait on the family in what must once have been a truly elegant receiving room.

Elegant was not the word for it any longer. The walls were notably cracked. There were indications that paintings had been removed from the walls. The seating arrangements looked as if they had been tossed together, suggesting that whatever elegance had once resided here, it had long since become a bit more of a jumbled collection of odds and ends dragged in from the rest of the sad, old house.

There was no dust. But bitterness seemed to hang over the room just the same, weighing down the beams of sunlight from outside that dared attempt to penetrate it.

This was the very room that boasted the windows he had crept past in the shadows the first night he had met Brita. It was no surprise that it was not a pleasant place.

He had been equally unsurprised at the hollow-eyed, clearly hungover family members who trickled in to greet him—eventually—because their appearances matched the harsh voices he’d heard that night.

There were roughly seven of them in total, assuming no more were lurking about in the villa, unable to rise to the occasion. The man, who he took to be Vasilis Martis. The clearly vain and overly precious woman at his side, who’d made it clear she was his wife. He saw a woman of about Brita’s age, who could only be the cousin she had mentioned, looking haughty and unfriendly. And two other males of the same features, marking them as members of the same clan, one with a sour-faced woman who sat beside him with ill grace.

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