Читать книгу Modern Romance February Books 5-8 - Шантель Шоу, Heidi Rice - Страница 14
ОглавлениеSIX MONTHS AGO Darius had wanted vengeance.
He’d gotten it. He’d ruthlessly taken Letitia Spencer’s virginity, then tossed her out into a cold winter’s night. He’d seduced her, insulted her. He’d thrown the money in her face, made her feel cheap.
It had been delicious.
But since then, to his dismay, he’d discovered the price of that vengeance.
In Darius’s childhood, back on the Greek island where he was born, his grandmother had often told him that vengeance hurt the person who committed it worse than the one who endured it. When the kids at school mocked his illegitimate birth, sneering at his mother’s abandonment—Even your own mitéra didn’t want you—his grandmother had told him to ignore them, to take the high road.
He’d tried, but the boys’ taunts had only grown worse until he was finally forced to punch them. They’d all been bloodied in the fight, but especially Darius, since it had been one against four.
“So you see I’m right,” his grandmother had said gravely, bandaging him afterward. “You were hurt worse.”
In Darius’s own opinion, that vengeance had been not only justified, but strategic. The boys at school had never taunted him again.
But this time, his grandmother had been proved right. Because Darius’s vengeance against Letty had hurt him more than he’d ever imagined.
Instead of quenching the flame, that night together had only built his desire for her into a blazing fire.
He wanted her. Every night for the last six months, he’d half expected Letty to contact him. Once her prideful anger had faded, surely she would want him back—if not for his body, then obviously for his money.
But she never had. And when he’d remembered the haunted look on her beautiful heart-shaped face the night she’d told him she loved him, the night he’d taken her virginity and tossed her ruthlessly into the dark, he’d had moments when he’d wondered if he might have been wrong.
But how could he be wrong? The evidence spoke for itself.
Still, in the months since their night together, his continual raw desire for her had made him edgy. He’d intended to remain as his company’s CEO for a year, guiding his team in the transition after the sale. Instead, he’d gotten into an argument with the head of the conglomerate and left within weeks. Darius could no longer endure working for someone else, but he’d signed a noncompete clause, so couldn’t start a new business in the same field.
Bereft of the twenty-hour workdays that had been the entirety of his life for a decade, he hadn’t known how to fill his hours. He tried spending some of his fortune. He’d bought a race car, then ten cars, then a race track. He’d bought four planes, all with interiors done in different colors. No. Next he’d tried extreme sports: skydiving, heli-skiing. Yawn.
Worst of all, he’d been surrounded by beautiful women, all keen to get his attention. And he hadn’t wanted a single one of them.
He’d been bored. Worse. He’d felt frustrated and angry. Because even with the endless freedom of time and money, he couldn’t have what he really wanted.
Letty.
Now, seeing her in the flesh, so beautiful—so pregnant—he hated himself for ever taking his vengeance. No matter how richly she’d deserved it, look where that thrill of hatred and lust had led.
Pregnant. With his baby.
Even wearing an oversize white T-shirt and baggy jeans, Letty was somehow more sensual, more delectable, than any stick-thin model in a skintight cocktail dress. Letty’s pregnancy curves were lush. Her skin glowed. Her breasts had grown enormous. With effort, he forced his gaze down to her belly.
“So it’s true,” he said in a low voice. “You’re pregnant.”
She looked frozen. Then she squared her shoulders, tossing her dark ponytail in a futile gesture of bravado. “So?”
“Is the baby mine?”
“Yours?” Her eyes shot sparks of fire, even though she had dark shadows beneath, as if she hadn’t been sleeping well. “What makes you think the baby’s yours? Maybe I slept with ten men since our night. Maybe I slept with a hundred—”
The thought of her sleeping with other men made Darius sick. “You’re lying.”
“How do you know?”
“Because your father told me.”
The fight went out of her. She went pale. “My...my father?”
“He wanted me to pay for the information, but when I refused, he told me everything. For free.”
“Maybe he was lying,” she said weakly. She looked as if she might faint.
“Sit down,” Darius ordered. “I’ll get you a glass of water. Then we’ll talk.”
She sank into the old pullout sofa, her cheeks pale. It wasn’t hard for him to find the kitchen. The apartment was pathetically small—just a postage-stamp-sized living room, surrounded by an even smaller bedroom, bathroom and kitchen.
He looked around him, amazed that the onetime heiress of Fairholme, born into a forty-room mansion, was now living with her father in an apartment the same size as the room her mother had once used to arrange flowers off the solarium.
Old boxes and mementos were packed everywhere. The leftovers of her family’s former life—items that obviously weren’t valuable enough to be sold, but too precious to be thrown away—were clustered around the old television and piled tightly along the walls. A pillow and folded blanket sat beside the pullout sofa.
Darius walked across the worn carpet to the peeling linoleum of the telephone-booth-sized kitchen. Dust motes floated in the weak gray sunlight. The barred window overlooked an air shaft that faced other apartments, just a few feet away. With the bars across the window, it felt like prison.
It’s better than they deserve, he told himself firmly. And it was still nicer than his childhood home in Heraklios. At least this place had electricity, running water. At least this place had a parent.
Darius’s own parents had both left him, in different ways, two days after he was born. His unemployed father had discovered his newborn son crying in a basket by his door, left out in the rain by his former lover, a wealthy, spoiled heiress who’d abandoned the child she’d never wanted.
Fired from his job, Eugenios Kyrillos found himself unable to get another. No other rich Greek fathers, it seemed, wanted to risk their daughters’ virtue to a chauffeur who didn’t know his place. Desperate to find work, he’d departed for America, leaving his baby son to be raised by his grandmother in the desolate house by the sea.
The first time Darius had spoken to his father in person had been at his grandmother’s funeral, when he was eleven. Then his father had taken him from Greece, away from everything and everyone he’d ever known, and brought him to America.
Fairholme had seemed like an exotic palace, where everyone spoke a language he couldn’t understand. His father had seemed just as strange, the emotionally distant chauffeur of this grand American king—Howard Spencer.
And look what the Spencers had come to now.
Darius had long ago torn down his grandmother’s shack in Heraklios and built a palatial villa. He had a penthouse in Manhattan, a ski chalet in Switzerland, his private race track outside London. His personal fortune was greater than anything Howard Spencer ever dreamed of.
And the Spencers were now living in this tiny, threadbare apartment.
But instead of feeling a sense of triumph, Darius felt strangely unsettled as he walked through her dreary kitchen and poured a glass of water from the tap. Returning to the equally depressing living room, he handed Letty the glass, then looked at the folded blankets and pillow on the floor.
“Who sleeps on the sofa?”
Letty’s cheeks turned pink as she looked down at the sagging cushions. “I do.”
“You pay all the rent, and your father gets the bedroom?”
“He hasn’t been sleeping well. I just want him to be comfortable.”
Darius looked at her incredulously. “And you’re pregnant.”
“What do you care?” she said bitterly. “You’re just here to take my baby away.”
Well. True. His eyes fell on the empty suitcases. “Where were you planning to go?”
“Anywhere you couldn’t find us.”
Darius stared down at her grimly. After his conversation with Howard Spencer, he’d had his investigator check up on Letty and found she’d only recently left her job as a waitress. She was still broke. None of the other employees remembered seeing any men around her, except one waitress, Belle, who had described Darius himself.
It seemed that, contrary to all previous assumptions, Letty wasn’t a gold digger. Not with other men.
Not even with Darius.
In that, he’d misjudged her. After the way Letty had crushed him so devastatingly ten years ago, informing him that she was leaving him for a richer man, he’d believed Letty was a fortune hunter to the core.
It made sense. His own mother had abandoned him as a two-day-old newborn for the exact same reason. To Calla, Darius had been the embarrassing result of a one-night liaison with her wealthy family’s chauffeur. She’d been determined to marry as befitted her station. She’d cared only about money and the social position that went with it.
But Letty wasn’t the same. At least not anymore.
Darius abruptly sat down on the sofa beside her. “Why didn’t you come to me when you found out you were pregnant? You had to know I would give you everything you needed and more.”
“Give? I knew you’d only take!” she said incredulously. “You threatened me!”
He ground his teeth. “We could have come to some arrangement.”
“You threatened to buy my baby, and if I tried to refuse, you would take the baby from me and—what were your words?—drive me into the sea?”
Darius didn’t like to be reminded of what he’d said six months ago. He’d rationalized his cruelty on the grounds of justice. But now...strictly speaking, he might have sounded a little less than civil, if not outright crazy. Irritated, he glared at her. “Drink your water.”
“Why? What did you put into it?” She sniffed the glass. “Some drug to make me pass out so you can kidnap me to a Park Avenue dungeon?”
He snorted a laugh in spite of himself. “The water came from your tap. Drink it or not. I just thought you looked pale.”
She stared at him for a moment, then took a tentative sip.
He looked around the tiny apartment. “Why are you living here?”
“Sadly, the presidential suite at the St. Regis was already booked.”
“I mean it, Letty. Why did you stay in New York all these years? You could have just left. Moved west where no one would know you or care about what your father did.”
She blinked fast. “I couldn’t abandon him. I love him.”
The man was a liar and a cheat, so of course Letty loved him. And she’d intended to raise their baby with him in the house, the man Darius blamed for his own father’s death. He ground his teeth. “Are you even taking care of yourself? Do you have a doctor?”
“Of course,” she said, stung. “How can you ask me that?”
“Because you’ve been working on your feet all day, until recently. And living in a place like this.” He gestured angrily around the threadbare, cluttered apartment. “It never occurred to you I’d want better for our child?”
She glared at him. “I wanted better! I wanted my baby’s father to be a good man I could trust and love. Instead, I got you, Darius, the worst man on earth!”
“You didn’t think so ten years ago.”
He immediately wished he could take the words back, because they insinuated that he still cared. Which he didn’t.
“Oh, you’re actually willing to talk about ten years ago? Fine. Let’s talk about it.” She briefly closed her eyes. “The reason I never showed up the night we were supposed to elope was because I was protecting you.”
His lip curled scornfully. “Protecting me.”
“Yes.” Her expression was cool. “The day we were going to elope, my father told me his investment fund was a fraud. It had stopped making money years before, but he’d continued making payouts to old investors by taking money from new ones. The Feds were already on his tail. I knew what was going to happen.” She lifted her luminous gaze. “I couldn’t let you get dragged into it. Not with all your big dreams. You’d just started your tech company...” She took a deep breath and whispered, “I couldn’t let my father’s crime ruin your life, too.”
For a moment, Darius’s heart twisted as he looked at her beautiful face, her heartbreaking hazel eyes. Then he remembered that he no longer had any heart vulnerable enough to break.
“You’re lying. You left me for another man. A rich man who could—how did you express it?—give you the life of luxury you deserved.” He snorted. “Though obviously he wasn’t much good. He must have dumped you the moment your father was arrested.”
“He couldn’t dump me.” She gave a low laugh. “He never existed.”
“What?”
“It was the only way I knew you’d let me go.” She lifted her chin and added with deliberate lightness, “I knew your weakness, even then.”
“Weakness?” he growled.
“You always said a man could be measured by his money. I knew you wouldn’t accept my just breaking up with you without explanation. So I gave you one. I told you I wanted someone richer. I knew you’d believe that.”
He stared at her. “It’s not true.”
“I’ve always been a terrible liar.” She looked sad. “But you still believed it. And immediately stopped calling me.”
Darius’s cheeks burned as he remembered how he’d felt that day. She was right.
He had loved her beyond reason, had been determined to fight for her at any cost. Until she’d told him she didn’t want him because he was poor. He’d believed it instantly. Because money made the man. No money, no man.
His throat felt tight as he looked at her, struggling not to believe she was telling the truth when every fiber of him believed her.
“And my father?” he said hoarsely. “Were you protecting him, too—getting him fired?”
“It’s true. I did have him fired. I told Dad I couldn’t bear to look at Eugenios because he reminded me of you. I did it because I was afraid my dad might ask him to invest his life savings in the bankrupt investment fund. My dad still believed he could fix everything then. I knew your father would give him his savings. He was loyal to the core.”
“Yes, he was,” he bit out. His father had always made his employer his top priority, even over his own son.
Darius couldn’t remember when his father had ever put his son first, over his job. He hadn’t attended Darius’s school events, not even his high school graduation. Being eternally at Howard Spencer’s beck and call, keeping the ten luxury cars all gleaming and ready, had been Eugenios’s total focus in life.
Oh, his father had fed and clothed him and given him a place to live in the two-bedroom apartment over the Fairholme garage that went with his job. But emotionally, they were oceans apart. The two men never talked.
Until that one awful day Darius told his father what he really thought of him...
But that memory was so white-hot with pain, he pushed it from his mind with all the force of a ball thrown from the earth to the moon.
Letty sighed beside him on the sofa. “I was trying to get your father away from Fairholme before he lost everything. But it was too late. He’d already invested his life savings years before. My dad had accepted it for his fund, even though it was such a small amount,” she said in a small voice. “As a favor.”
A small amount? His father’s life savings! The arrogance of them! Darius’s dark eyebrows lowered in fury.
“Howard Spencer is a liar and cheat,” he said harshly. “He destroyed people’s lives.”
“I know,” she whispered, looking down. She bit her full, rosy lower lip. “He never meant to.”
“He deserves to suffer.”
She looked up. “He has suffered. During his arrest and trial, I tried so hard to be strong for him. When he was in prison, I was there every visiting day. I cheered him up. Encouraged him. And all the time, I felt so scared. So alone.” She gave him a watery smile. “Sometimes the only thing I had to cling to was you.”
“Me?”
“At least I hadn’t dragged you down with me,” she whispered. “At least you were able to follow your dreams.”
Darius stared at her in shock.
Then he narrowed his eyes. She was trying to take credit for his accomplishments. To claim that if not for her sacrifice, he never would have made his fortune. She thought so little of him. Ice chilled his heart.
“And you expect me to be grateful?”
She looked startled. “I—”
“When you found out about your father’s crime,” he said tightly, “you should have come to me. I was your future husband. Instead, you lied to me. You cut me out of your life. Rather than asking for my help, you apparently believed I was so incompetent and useless, you felt you had to sacrifice yourself to save me.”
“No,” she gasped, “you’ve got it all wrong...”
“You never respected me.” He forced his voice to remain calm when his shoulders were tight with repressed fury. “Not my intelligence, my judgment or my strength.”
“Respected you?” she choked out. “I loved you. But I knew what was about to happen. I couldn’t let you drown with us. You had nothing—”
“You’re right,” he said coldly. “I had nothing. No money. No influence. You knew I couldn’t pay for lawyers or speak to politicians on your behalf. So you decided I was useless.”
“No.” She looked pale. “I just meant you had nothing to do with it—”
“You were my fiancée. I had everything to do with it. I would have tried to protect you, to comfort you. But you never gave me the chance. Because you believed I would fail.”
Her voice sounded strangled. “Darius—”
He held up his hand sharply. “But now I have made my fortune. Everything has changed. And yet you still intended to disappear and keep my child secret from me for the rest of your life.” A new, chilling thought occurred to him. “What story did you intend to tell the baby, Letty?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered.
“What were you going to raise my child to believe? That he or she had no father? That I hadn’t wanted him?” An old childhood grief he’d thought long buried suddenly shook the ground beneath his feet, like an earthquake threatening to swallow him whole. “That I’d purposefully abandoned him?”
“I don’t know!” Letty cried. “But you said you’d take the baby from me. I had no choice but to run!”
Darius stared at the woman he’d known for most of his life. He’d loved her for such a short, sweet time. He’d hated her far longer.
He himself had been abandoned by everyone who should have loved him as a child. His whole young life he’d never felt like he really belonged anywhere.
And then there was Letty.
He’d loved her so wildly, so truly, so recklessly. She had finally destroyed what was left of his heart. That had been Darius’s final lesson.
He was determined that his child would never learn such a lesson.
Darius’s jaw tightened. His child would be surrounded by love from the beginning. His son or daughter would have a solid place in the world and never doubt their worth.
The blindfold of rage and hurt pride lifted from his eyes. He looked at Letty, and suddenly everything became crystal clear. Calm settled over him like rain.
Their child needed both of them.
For the last decade, he’d tried to forget about the Letty he’d once known. About her character. About her kind heart.
He saw now that in Letty’s mind, her hurtful lies a decade before hadn’t shown disrespect, but love. She really had been trying to protect him. As she still was trying to protect her father.
As she was trying now, in her own misguided way, to protect their child.
Letty hadn’t betrayed him. She’d loved him, as recently as February, the night they’d conceived their child. Yes, she’d shown bad judgment ten years ago, lying to him, hiding the truth about her father. She’d continued to show bad judgment today, planning to run away with his child. A chill went down his spine to think of what might have happened if her father hadn’t called him today.
But it wasn’t entirely her fault. Her love blinded her. It made her weak. And after the cold way he’d treated her, and his threats to take the child, he couldn’t blame her for being afraid.
It didn’t make her a monster. It wasn’t enough of a reason to brutally separate her from their child. Not after he himself had known what it was to have no mother. No father. No real place in the world.
Their baby would have both parents and a secure, settled home.
Darius knew he had to rebuild Letty’s trust in him. He had to find a way to strengthen her occasionally faulty judgment with his own. If Darius was wiser, it was because he never allowed love to blind him. He always focused on the bottom line. So what was it here?
The answer was simple.
He had to make Letty his wife.
It was the only way to properly secure their child’s future. It would guarantee the stability of two parents and a permanent home.
And also, his body suddenly whispered, marrying Letty would permanently secure her in his bed.
The thought electrified him. That settled it.
“I misjudged you,” he said.
Letty glared at him. “Yes!”
“I treated you badly.”
“You think?”
“So let me make up for it now.” Leaning toward her on the sofa, Darius said, “I want you to marry me, Letty.”
Her jaw dropped. “Marry you!”
“I’ve realized now I blamed everything on you. It wasn’t your fault...”
“No.”
“It was your father’s,” he finished grimly. “He’s ruined your life. I won’t let him ruin our child’s.”
Her eyes were wide as she put her hands over her large belly. “You’re crazy. My father loves the baby, just as he loves me!”
“And what about the next time some thug decides to attack him? What if that man decides to hurt your father’s family instead?”
Letty’s expression became troubled. Swallowing, she whispered, “That wouldn’t happen...”
“No. It won’t. Because you and the baby will be miles away from Howard Spencer and safe with me.” He rose abruptly to his feet. “You will have to sign a prenuptial agreement...”
“I won’t, because I’m not going to marry you.”
She wasn’t joking or playing coy. She actually sounded serious.
Darius stared down at her in confusion. So many women were dying to marry him, he’d assumed that Letty—jobless, penniless, faced with threats on all sides—would be thrilled at the thought of being his bride. “Of course you want to marry me.”
“Marry someone I hate? Who hates me back? No, thanks.”
He couldn’t believe she was trying to fight him when it was the only practical solution. He gritted his teeth. It was that idea of love, once again interfering with all common sense!
“Have you thought this through?” Folding his arms, he regarded her coolly. “I could take you to court. Have you declared an unfit mother, selfishly placing our child at risk.”
Letty rose to her feet in turn, matching him toe-to-toe, though he was bigger by a foot in height and at least sixty pounds of muscle. She narrowed her eyes. “You could try.”
In spite of himself, he almost smiled. Another thing he’d forgotten about her character. She fought harder for others than she ever did for herself.
“You really think you can handle a custody battle? You think there are waves of lawyers out there, willing to support Howard Spencer’s daughter pro bono, when all they’d get for their trouble is a lot of bad PR?”
Her cheeks flushed, even as she lifted her chin defiantly. “We’ll see, won’t we?”
But beneath her bravado, her expression was soft and sad. Her long dark ponytail gleamed in waves down her back, and his eyes strayed to the roundness of her belly and full breasts, voluptuous beyond belief. In this moment, Darius thought she looked like everything desirable in a woman—the perfect image of what any man would dream of in a wife.
He suddenly imagined how she might look in court. Whatever her father’s sins, if she did find a good attorney, she could be packaged and sold to the presiding judge as the poor, innocent, poverty-stricken waitress threatened by the cold, power-hungry billionaire. No matter how many legal sharks he hired, Darius wasn’t guaranteed to win. There was some small possibility he might lose.
He abruptly changed tack.
“Does our baby deserve to have parents at war? Living in here—” he motioned to the peeling wallpaper, the cracked ceiling “—instead of my penthouse? Does he deserve to grow up in poverty without the protection of his father’s name? Without my love?”
Letty looked stricken. “Our baby could still have your love.”
“He deserves everything I can provide. Are you really so selfish as to make our child suffer for the sake of your own angry pride?”
He saw emotions struggle on her face. She really was a terrible liar. He knew he was very close to getting what he wanted—her total surrender.
“We could make our marriage work,” he murmured. “Our son or daughter would be our priority, always.”
“Son,” she said unwillingly.
He looked at her sharply.
She took a deep breath, then slowly smiled. “We’re having a boy.”
“A boy!” The nebulous idea of a baby suddenly solidified in Darius’s mind. He could imagine his son smiling, playing soccer, laughing, hugging him. And the fact that she’d revealed that detail proved how close she was to agreeing to his proposal. His resolve solidified. Stepping closer, he said softly, “Marry me, Letty.”
Looking uncertain, she bit her lip. “It would be a disaster. Not just for me. For you. Don’t you know how much people hate me?”
“Not once you’re with me,” he said confidently.
“You don’t understand how bad it is...”
“I’m sure you’re exaggerating.” He’d all but won. Now that his unborn child was secure, he was already jumping ahead to the thought of enjoying Letty’s surrender in full, imagining her naked and writhing with desire in his arms. He wanted to take her back to the penthouse immediately. Then he remembered. “I am hosting a charity event tonight. The Fall Ball.”
She looked impressed in spite of herself. “You’re hosting that this year?”
“We can announce our engagement to all of New York.”
“It’s a mistake!”
“Let me worry about that.”
“Okay, but...”
“But what?”
A shadow crossed her face. “But I don’t love you anymore.”
He felt a strange emotion, deep down inside. He crushed it down before he could identify what it was.
“I do not need your love. I can assure you that you’ll never have mine. Love is for children. I just need your compliance.” When she still hesitated, he took a deliberate step back. “Or I can walk out that door and go straight to my lawyer.”
Letty looked wistful in the gray light from the small window. She sighed sadly. “Have it your way.”
“You’ll marry me?”
She nodded.
He felt a surge of smug masculine triumph. “Good choice.”
Pulling her roughly into his arms, he did what he’d yearned to do for six months and kissed her.
From the moment he felt her lips against his and tasted her sweetness—her mouth, her tongue—he was lost, and at the same time, found. Her lips parted, and as she melted against him, he savored her surrender. His body and long-dead soul roared back to life.
Letty wrenched away. “But first, you’ll take me to your charity ball tonight. And see firsthand what it would be like to actually have me as your wife.”
“Good—”
“Just remember.” She gave him a crooked smile. “You asked for it.”
