The Antonides Marriage Deal

“Go pester the boys,” she told him. “Go find them wives.”

But Socrates just muttered and grumbled about his four sons. They were even more of a mystery to him than Tallie was. If she desperately wanted to follow him into business, Theo, George, Demetrios and Yiannis, had absolutely no interest in their father’s footsteps—or his business—at all.

Theo, the eldest, was a world-class open-ocean sailor. Tie him to an office or even stick him in a city and he would die. Socrates wasn’t sympathetic. He considered that his oldest son just “mucked about in boats.”

George was a brilliant physicist. He was unraveling the universe, one strand at a time. Socrates couldn’t believe people actually had theories about strings.

Demetrios was a well-known television actor with an action-adventure series of his own. His face—and a whole lot of his bare, sculpted torso—had recently been on a billboard in Times Square. Socrates had averted his eyes and muttered, “What next?”

But he wouldn’t have believed it if anyone had told him.

Yiannis, the youngest of Tallie’s four older brothers, who was as city-born and -bred as the rest of them, had, five years ago, finished a master’s degree in forestry and was living and working at the top of a Montana mountain!

It was Tallie who had always been determined to follow in her father’s footsteps. She was the one with the head for business. She was the one who had worked in stockrooms and storerooms, in warehouses and shipping offices, doing everything she could to learn how things worked from the ground up.

And she was the one her father had fired more than once when he’d found her working in one of his companies.

“No daughter of mine is going to work here,” he’d blustered and fumed.

So she’d gone to work for someone else.

He hadn’t liked that any better. But Tallie was as stubborn as her old man. She’d gone to university and done a degree in accounting. She’d taken a job in California, crunching numbers for a mom-and-pop tortilla factory. And while she was there, she’d learned everything from how to make tortillas to a thousand ways to cook with them to the cleverest way to market them. Then she’d gone back and got her MBA, working on the side for a Viennese baker who taught her everything he knew. If she were ever going into business for herself, Tallie decided, it would be in baking. She loved making cakes and tortes and pastries. But she preferred that as her relaxation.

Eighteen months ago, MBA in hand, she’d applied for another job with one of her father’s companies—and had been turned down.

So she’d gone to work for Easley Manufacturing, one of his biggest competitors. She’d been doing well there and had recently been promoted. She was on the fast track, the boss had told her. She’d hoped word would get back to Socrates.

Obviously it had.

Two weeks ago he’d rung and invited her to dinner after she got off work.

“Dinner?” she’d echoed. “With whom?”

Had he dredged up another eligible Greek, in other words?

“Just me,” Socrates said, offended. “I’m in the city. Your mother is in Rome with her art group. I’m lonely. I thought I’d call my daughter and invite her to a meal.”

It sounded perfectly innocent, but Tallie had known her father for twenty-nine years. She knew suppressed excitement when she heard it in his voice. She accepted, but not without reservations.

And when she’d met him at Lazlo’s, a Hungarian restaurant on the Upper East Side he’d suggested, she had looked around warily for stray males before she went to sit at the table with him.

But Socrates hadn’t come bearing Greeks for a change. Instead he’d offered her a job.

“A job?” Tallie had done her best to hide her incredulity while she found herself glancing outside to see if the late-May sun was still shining. The words hell froze over were flitting around in her brain. “What sort of job?”

Her father waited until the server had brought their dinners. Then he said in his characteristic blunt fashion. “I’ve just acquired forty percent of Antonides Marine International. They build boats. As major stockholder, I get to name the president.” He paused, smiling. “You.”

“Me?” Tallie’s voice squeaked. She blinked rapidly. Now she was sure that hell had frozen over. Or that she’d lost her mind.

But Socrates picked up his knife and fork and cut into his chicken paprika and said with a shrug, “You’ve always said you wanted to come into the business.”

“Yes, but—”

“So now you’re in.”

Tallie shook her head, mind still whirling. “I meant…I didn’t mean I expected you to buy me a company, Dad!”

“I didn’t buy you a company,” he said, enunciating every word. “I acquired part of a company. And so, I have a say in how it’s run. I want you to run it.”

Tallie wet her lips. Her brain spun with possibilities, with potential—with panic. She tried to get a toehold on her thoughts. “I don’t— It’s so…sudden.”

“The best opportunities often are.”

“I know.” But still…she needed to think. To consider. To—

“So, what do you say?”

“I—” Her tongue seemed welded to the roof of her mouth.

Socrates smiled gently and regarded her over a forkful of chicken. “Or maybe you were just talking. Maybe you don’t think you can do it.”

By God, yes, she could do it!

And she’d said so.

Socrates had beamed, the way a shark must beam when an unsuspecting little fish swims straight into his mouth. Tallie knew it. She could almost hear his jaws snap shut. But she didn’t care.

Whatever agenda her father had in offering her this job, she had her own agenda—to do the best damned job she could do and prove to him that she was worthy of his trust.

The two weeks she had to spend working out her notice at Easley’s had given her time to break in a replacement and do a crash course of reading everything she could get her hands on about Antonides Marine International.

What she’d learned about its history had made her even more eager to get to work. It was an old and respected boat-building company that had fallen on hard times and over the past eight years had been in the process of righting itself and moving ahead. While there was no change in leadership—Aeolus Antonides was still president (until today!)—his son had been running things. And apparently the son had done rather well. He’d economized and streamlined things, getting back to basics, redefining and refocusing the company’s mission. Recently she’d read that AMI appeared poised to branch out, to test the waters in areas other than strictly marine construction. It was on the brink of expansion.

Tallie could hardly wait to be part of the process.

And now, she thought as she stood on the pavement and stared up at the old Brooklyn warehouse that was the home of the offices of Antonides Marine International, she was.

Amazingly the address was only nine blocks from her flat. She had expected some mid-Manhattan office building. Six months ago, she knew, she would have been right. But then AMI had moved across the East River to Brooklyn.

Tallie understood it was a cost-cutting move. But there was a certain rightness to it being here in DUMBO, the neighborhood acronym for its location “down under the Manhattan Bridge.”

DUMBO was a vital, happening place—lots of urban renewal going on, considerable gentrification of the old brownstones and even older warehouses that sat on or near the edge of the East River. It was that energy, as well as the more reasonable rents, that had drawn her to DUMBO. She imagined it had drawn the management of AMI as well.

But looking around in the crisp early morning light, Tallie could see that it belonged here anyway, in the old five-story brick warehouse in the process of being restored. Within sight of the old Navy Shipyards, it was where a shipbuilding company—even the corporate offices thereof—ought to be.

Feng shui, her friend Katy who knew these things, would have said. Or maybe that was just inside buildings and where you put your bed. But it felt right. And that made Tallie smile and feel even better.

She was early—way early—but she couldn’t wait any longer. She pushed open the door and went in.