All their lives were changing.

He went to grab his briefcase, which he’d left by Alessandra’s corner office. Instead of picking it up and leaving, he found himself sitting at her desk, flipping through the portfolios of her work.

As much as he admired all her work, it was their wedding album he spent the most time looking through. These were the unofficial ones taken by Alessandra, a timeline from the start of their wedding week, when their first guests had arrived, right up to the moment they’d got on the dance floor for the Kalamatianos. His lips quirked to see a picture of a particularly beautiful but notoriously moody actress smiling for the camera with something black in her teeth.

His heart jolted when he turned the page over to find a montage of photos of the same face. All different angles, all different moods: some smiling, others distant, a couple frowning... One in particular held his attention. The face was staring directly into the camera, a wide, relaxed grin on the face, a soft yet suggestive look in the eyes, as if the person wanted nothing more than to take the photographer to a private room and make love to them.

Not have sex.

Make love.

of the

* * *

lavish splendour before, had walked past the mansions in the most affluent parts of Athens vowing that, one day, he too would live in a home like these. Villa Mondelli was the first of that particular type he’d actually been invited into. Not only invited to cross the threshold but to stay there for

as opulent as the villa and wealth beyond his dreams, he still felt that same

envy for the people who lived there, brought up with such easy

lost his own house and abdicated responsibility for his children onto his own father. Alessandra had been a baby. She’d grown up feeling responsible for her mother’s death, shunned by her father and raised by an often austere man who’d thought his child-rearing days long finished with. Her only source of love had been her older brother whom, despite all her grumbles at his interfering, she worshipped.

this vast house were the staff, people sharing a

ago had gone, replaced with the sad

richest men in the world. He had all the wealth and all the

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