Greek’s Ring of Redemption
Clare Connelly
Prologue
EVEN AT THEbest of times, the island of Therasia Notia, deep in the Aegean Sea, covered in ancient, now-dormant volcanic mountains, was rugged and impenetrable. But when the wind howled and the heavens opened up with lashing rain, and the sky split itself asunder with shocks of light, Nikos Konstantinou could almost convince himself he was the only man remaining on earth.
Just as he liked it.
Just as he knew he deserved to be.
Alone, isolated, and left to suffer, for the sins of his past. Sins for which there was no hope of repenting—no hope of repairing. The mother he hadn’t been able to help, who’d turned to prostitution to keep a roof over their heads until she’d died, young and miserable. The wife he’d all but abandoned in his pursuit of success.
The life he’d once forged, through sheer grit, building his private equity business to the point of global domination, was now a distant memory. Though he kept himself apprised of operations, he was no longer hands-on in the way he’d once been—the satisfaction he’d drawn from those long, difficult days was now a poisoned chalice: something he was determined to deny himself. As penance, for what his ambition had done. The pain he’d caused.
He stood in the doorway to the small cabin he’d built, stone by stone, three years earlier, when he’d bought this island and come to it, not caring if he lived or died. Long, laborious days, finding rocks, carrying them up the steep hill, mortaring them into place until, eventually, walls began to take shape.
It had been a long time since Nikos had needed to work with his hands. Wealth had made him lazy, had risked turning him soft. Not that anyone who encountered him in the business world would ever have dreamt of describing him thus. No, Nikos was famed, not only for his competence, but also his ruthless determination.
It was that same determination that had seen him work twenty-hour days, losing himself to the empire he was intent on creating, at the expense of all else.
Even his marriage.
And his wife’s happiness.
At the time, it had seemed like a necessary focus. Not only had he known extreme poverty as a boy, he’d also experienced the galling frustration of being told that ambition was pointless—to give up on wanting more. His father had likely been trying to adjust Nikos’s goals to something more ‘reasonable’, but instead, he’d hammered the point into Nikos so hard that, with each scathing comment, Nikos’s determination had formed like steel.
He closed his eyes and took a step further, so the rain now lashed him, his thick, dark hair loose almost to his bare shoulders, the denim shorts he wore covering his body only between the hips and mid-thigh. He spread his arms wide, and surrendered himself to the heavens, the gods, that were said to have created this mountainous island as a prison for one of their erstwhile demi-gods. If they wanted him, they could take him.
For Nikos Konstantinou, one of the most successful billionaires in the entire world, had nothing and no one to live for, and every day, he wondered if it might be his last. His wife had died miserable, because of his neglect; surely he didn’t deserve anything other than the same fate?
Chapter One
GENEVIEVEWILSON COULDN’Tclaim that setting sail on her own across the Aegean was her stupidest mistake ever—clearly that honour rested on the day she’d said ‘yes’ to marrying her sadistic bastard of an ex-husband—but it was definitely in the top three.
After all, she hadn’t sailed since she was a child. Though she’d sailed then often, and had been very good at it, it turned out sailing was nothing like riding a bike. Some parts were muscle memory, of course. Others common sense. And if the waters had stayed calm, as they’d been when she set off, then most likely she would have been okay—if a little shaken by the experience.
But the storm that whipped up almost out of nowhere, turning the placid Aegean into a turbulent, washing-machine-like high tide, quickly began to rock her small craft from side to side in a way that was instantly terrifying. The rain made it almost impossible to see, and her hands kept slipping on the ropes. Every lesson her father had taught Genevieve, as a girl, seemed to wash out to sea.
Helplessness gripped her. Helplessness and misery. Would anyone even care if the boat capsized and she was lost to the depths of the ocean? Not her now ex-husband. There was no one else. Her father had died when she was little more than a girl, her mother a few years ago, after a series of strokes that had seen her hospitalised for more than a year, before she passed away in her sleep one night. Any friends she’d once been close to had fallen by the wayside as Genevieve had turned herself inside out to become the perfect political wife her senator husband had required, not even missing a step after her mother’s death, when her world had been knocked completely off course. Who was there to miss or mourn her?
The frigid and brutal reality of that was, if anything, a talisman to Genevieve. She’d been through too much to give up now. Finally, she had her freedom. At least, in a sense. Courtesy of her mother’s eye-watering hospital bills, she was too financially indebted to her ex, who was paying off the instalments, to know exactly how to explore her freedom. At least she was no longer under his complete control—no longer the perfect, submissive trophy wife to be used and humiliated by him depending on his whims and needs. She was setting out on the second phase of her life, a time of rebuilding. She wouldn’t die friendless and alone here, where no one would even think to look for her.
There was nothing for it. She needed to bring the boat to shore somewhere. A port in the storm, literally. She cast about, her eyes squinting against the hard-falling rain, until finally, a lightning bolt seemed to burst almost directly overhead, making her scream at the same time she recognised something silhouetted against the storm-darkened sky.
A mountain. And mountains in the middle of the ocean could mean only one thing: an island.
Tacking the boat to the south, she prayed that she could make it there, even as she continued to be rocked violently from side to side, so it was almost impossible to hold her course, let alone stay on board. Enormous waves crashed over the sides, dousing her, and then, finally, she was close enough to shore to jump from the boat. She leaped over the rail, and just in time! As she watched, and tried to work out how to get the boat aground enough to shore, it rocked high on a wave and then capsized, the sail snapping against the seafloor, so she cried out and pressed her hands to her mouth.
It wasn’t her most pressing concern, but in the back of her mind she hated to think how much it was going to cost her in damages to the hire company. She had no idea if the insurance policy she’d taken out would cover this sort of act of stupidity. What kind of person rode a sailing boat right into a storm?
That was a bridge she would cross down the track. If she lived to make it that far. For now, she needed shelter. She looked around, helplessly, eyes chasing the rugged coastline of this mountain. She’d become disorientated some time ago, and the map she’d taken from her small, mid-century hotel’s lobby, showing the Greek islands, had blown out to sea long ago. She had no idea which island she’d landed on, but she had a sinking suspicion that it might be one of those tiny, uninhabited ones. Which did not bode well for a woman who now had no phone, no handbag and no boat.
She couldn’t panic, though.
It had taken grit and determination to extricate herself from her marriage; these were skills she now knew she had in abundance.
Genevieve began to walk. She was so wet that her shorts and long-sleeved shirt were plastered to her body, and her shoes squelched as she moved away from the shallows and began to look around once more. She was in a cove, and there was no sign of habitation. But that didn’t mean the whole place was deserted.
