“Marry me.”
“She has your temper,” Rio said.
Rio smiled. It didn’t reach his eyes. “Whatever you need to tell yourself, agapi mou .” The wedding was in a Greek chapel on a private island. Lily wore a simple ivory dress — not because Rio was cheap, but because he’d insisted she choose. “I won’t costume you,” he’d said coldly. “You’re not a possession. You’re an investment.”
Rio stepped inside without being invited. His suit was Savile Row, his watch a Patek Philippe, and his presence filled her cramped flat like a tidal wave. “Your father owed me more than you know. And now you owe me.” lynne graham books
To save her family’s legacy, a down-on-her-luck florist agrees to a cold, temporary marriage with the ruthless billionaire who once broke her heart — but she never expected to fall for him again. Chapter One Rio Karras didn’t ask. He demanded.
By nightfall, she was installed in his Athenian penthouse — a palace of glass and marble overlooking the Acropolis. Her room was down the hall from his. The bed was cold. She lay awake, staring at the ceiling, remembering the boy who’d once brought her wildflowers and told her she was enough.
“I didn’t leave,” she whispered. “Your father—” “Marry me
She’d been eighteen. He’d been a struggling law student, not the heir to a shipping empire. They’d made love in her father’s greenhouse, and Rio had said, “One day, I’ll build you a garden by the sea.”
He helped her up, kissed the dirt from her cheek, and whispered against her ear: “I would have burned the world down to find you again.”
Lily laughed through her tears. “You already have a greenhouse?” “Whatever you need to tell yourself, agapi mou
Then his real father had appeared. The old man had shown Lily photos of Rio’s real fiancée — a shipping heiress. “Step aside, little flower,” the tycoon had sneered. “Or he loses everything.”
And for the first time in her life, Lily Hart — now Lily Karras — believed in happy endings.
He grinned. “Then she’s perfect.”
Rio’s gaze dropped to her mouth. “Then I sell everything tomorrow. Your employees — your elderly manager, Mabel, who needs hip surgery — will be on the street. Your grandmother’s rose garden, the one you’ve kept alive since you were twelve, becomes a parking lot.”