A Christmas Consequence for the GreekHis Innocent Unwrapped in Iceland by Lucy King & Jackie Ashenden

Author:Lucy King & Jackie Ashenden [King, Lucy & Ashenden, Jackie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2023-10-06T22:01:11+00:00

Orion watched Isla’s pretty blue eyes widen in shock.

He wasn’t surprised. It was, after all, a very shocking proposal.

Yet that had been the plan he’d been formulating for the past month, ever since he’d found out that Isla Kendrick was going to marry one of her father’s protégés. Orion simply couldn’t allow that to happen.

He’d been playing the long game for months now, deciding initially that he’d take the slow, careful approach with her. Then her engagement had been announced, which he hadn’t been expecting, and he’d had to rethink his plans.

He wasn’t in love with her—love wasn’t possible for him these days—but he’d admit to being in the grip of a singular...fascination with her.

It had all started at a business gala held at the National Gallery, where he’d found her standing in a small gallery away from the crowd, in front of a painting, and there had been a rapt look on her face.

He hadn’t known who she was, but she’d seemed illuminated, lit from within by something he didn’t understand and his interest had been caught. He’d checked the painting to see what it was that held her attention so completely. But it was only Van Gogh’s painting of a night sky.

Orion didn’t like it when he didn’t understand something. His instinct was always to make sense of it, so he’d gone over and asked her what was so interesting about the painting.

She’d smiled, like the sun rising on a midwinter morning, and started talking about the brushstrokes, the layers of the paint, the flowing motion of the painted sky and how they came together to form a beautiful, luminous whole. Her hands had moved as she spoke, as eloquent and graceful as her words, and he’d been...transfixed.

He’d never much appreciated art and the creative impulse was a mystery to him. He was a man who took things apart. He didn’t create. He’d tried once, long ago, to build something, but that had left him broken, so now he didn’t bother. Satisfaction came from looking at a system that wasn’t performing, at identifying why it wasn’t and what was broken, and then deciding what to do about it. Rather like a mechanic taking apart an old car and selling some parts for scrap, while reconditioning other parts to make it go better.

He was good at it.

So it was all very mysterious why he’d found looking at this woman while she talked about a bit of paint on a board so fascinating. There was something about her. About the way she came alive that consumed his interest so completely he hadn’t been able to do anything but stare.

That was the night he’d decided that he simply had to know more about her.

It hadn’t taken him long to discover that she was David Kendrick’s adopted daughter, Isla, the apparent heir to Kendrick’s underperforming Christmas company. Her adoption thirteen years earlier, at the age of twelve, had been a media sensation—‘Childless Christmas company magnate adopts orphan girl at Christmas time!’—and Kendrick had made much of her potential.

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