IT WAS THE fourth time he’d been called upon to act in this capacity at one of these events, but undoubtedly not the last. For each of the previous four weddings, Santos Anastakos had been required to stand dutifully at his father Nico’s side—best man, oldest son, quietly watchful—as his father had promised yet another woman to love her for as long as they both should live.
Santos’s expression as he surveyed the guests was unknowingly cynical. Despite the alleged joy of the occasion, Santos couldn’t summon much more than a vague degree of tolerance for his father’s proclivities. Proclivities that had seen him marry eight—nine, counting today—women over the span of his lifetime.
It’s different this time, Santos. This time, she’s ‘the one’.
Santos had long since given up arguing with his father about the foolishness of his marriage addiction. Similarly he’d abandoned firm suggestions that Nico get counselling for what had become an embarrassing and ridiculous tendency to fall in love faster than most people changed jobs.
All Santos could do was watch from the side lines and quarantine the Anastakos fortune from any fallout from the inevitable divorce. It was ungenerous to entertain such thoughts whilst standing at the front of a crowded, ancient church, listening to Nico and his latest bride proclaim their ‘love’ for one another.
How could that concept fail to earn his derision when he’d seen, over and over and over again, how quickly and completely love turned to hate and hurt? His own mother had been overthrown for the next Mrs Anastakos when Santos had been only three years old, and Santos had been shuttled between father and mother for the next few years before—at his father’s insistence—being sent off to boarding school.
As the chaplain joyously proclaimed the happy—for now, at least—couple man and wife, Santos grimaced. He had made himself a promise after his father’s third marriage had dissolved in a particularly bitter and public fashion: he would never be foolish enough to get married, nor to fall ‘in love’, whatever the hell that meant—and nothing in his thirty-four years had tempted Santos to question that resolve. Marriage was for fools and hopeless romantics—of which, he was proud to say, he was neither.