Married to the Devil of Crete

Three years of marriage to Dimitri Kallas have taught her exactly how small a person can learn to make herself. She knows which floorboards creak before he does. She knows how to read the set of his jaw the way sailors read a coming storm. And she knows, down to the euro, exactly how much money she needs before she can finally get her younger brother — and his wheelchair, and his medication, and the life Dimitri has spent years threatening to take from both of them onto a ferry out of Crete and never look back.She almost has enough.Then Nikos Adamos walks into the restaurant where she waits tables, and everything she's carefully built starts to come apart.He's the kind of wealthy that gets written up in shipping magazines. He's also, according to whispers she's not supposed to hear, the man who actually controls half the ports in the Aegean and every man who profits from them. He's twenty years older than her, terrifyingly patient, and the first person in longer than she can remember who looks at her like she's a person and not a problem to be managed.When the restaurant burns down under circumstances the police don't seem eager to investigate, Nikos offers her a position managing his household accounts. She tells herself it's only until she has enough saved to run. She tells herself she isn't the kind of woman who could ever be safe around a man like him.Then Dimitri turns up dead in his car outside a nightclub he had no business being near, and men far more frightening than her husband ever was start asking questions about her. Questions only Nikos seems able to make disappear.The solution he offers isn't a rescue. It's a marriage — his name, his protection, his ring on her hand — and a bargain she agrees to because the alternative is losing the only family she has left.She tells herself it's temporary. She tells herself she can survive anything, including him.She just isn't sure she can survive wanting him.