Читать книгу Modern Romance August 2018 Books 5-8 Collection - Ким Лоренс, Julia James - Страница 18
ОглавлениеA BLAST OF bitingly cold January air followed Giannis through the door when he strode into TGE UK’s plush office building in Bond Street. He disliked winter and London seemed particularly gloomy now that the party season was over. Even the festive lights along Oxford Street had lost some of their sparkle.
He had spent a miserable Christmas with his mother, swamped by guilt, as he was every year, because he knew he was the cause of her unhappiness. For New Year he had stayed at an exclusive ski resort in Aspen. But as the clock had struck midnight he’d made an excuse to the sultry brunette who had hung on his arm all evening and returned to his hotel room alone.
Maybe he was coming down with the flu virus that was going around, he brooded. He was rarely ill, but it might explain his loss of appetite, inability to sleep and a worrying indifference to work, friends and sex. Especially sex.
When Ava had handed him the pink sapphire heart ring before she’d walked out of his apartment in Athens without a backward glance, Giannis had assumed that he would have no trouble forgetting her. He’d thought he had been successful when he’d danced at the New Year’s Eve party with the brunette whose name eluded him. But when Dana?—Donna?—had offered to perform a private striptease for him he had thought of Ava’s long honey-blonde hair spilling over her breasts, her cool grey eyes and her fiery passion and he had finally admitted to himself that he missed her.
There were a few unopened letters on his desk and he frowned as he flicked through them. His secretary at the UK office had been rushed into hospital with appendicitis shortly before Christmas. The temp who had replaced Phyllis should have opened his private mail and forwarded anything of importance to him. It was obvious that some of the envelopes contained Christmas cards, but as it was now the second week in January he was tempted to throw them in the bin. Exhaling heavily, he opened a card, glanced at the picture of an improbably red-breasted robin and turned it over to read the note inside.
The handwriting was difficult to decipher and he was surprised to see the name ‘Sam McKay’ scrawled at the bottom of the card. Giannis remembered that Ava had said her brother had struggled at school because he was dyslexic.
Dear Mr Gekas
I wanted to say thanks for letting me off about the damage done to your boat. It was desent of you. Sorry about you and Ava not getting married. Its a shame it didnt work out and about the baby.
Happy christmas
Sam McKay
Baby! Giannis reread the note twice more and tried to make sense of it. Whose baby? He looked at the date stamp on the card’s envelope and swore when he saw that Sam had posted it on the fifteenth of December—more than three weeks ago.
He could hear his heartbeat thudding in his ears as a shocking idea formed in his brain. Could Ava be pregnant with his baby? If so, then why hadn’t she told him? The blood in his veins turned to ice. What the hell had Sam meant in his badly written note when he’d said that it was a shame about the baby? Had Ava suffered a miscarriage? Or had she...?
Giannis swallowed the bile that rose up in his throat. The memory of when Caroline had told him that she was no longer pregnant still haunted him. He had felt as if his heart had been ripped out, but Caroline had regarded her pregnancy as an inconvenience.
He stared at Sam’s unsatisfactory note and sucked in a sharp breath when he thought back to the day three months ago at the apartment in Athens when Ava had acted so strangely. Had she known that she was pregnant but had decided that a baby would not fit in with her career?
Theos, he was terrified that history was repeating itself. First Caroline, and now Ava. Something cold and hard settled in the pit of his stomach. He had lost one child, but if Ava was expecting his baby he would move heaven and earth to have a second chance at fatherhood.
Giannis picked up the phone on the desk and noticed that his hand was shaking as he put a call through to his secretary’s office. The temp answered immediately. ‘Cancel all my meetings,’ he told her brusquely. ‘I’ll be out for the rest of the day.’
* * *
There was a ‘sold’ sign outside the terraced house in East London where, four months ago, Giannis had taken Ava to collect her passport before they had flown to Paris. If she had already moved away he would find her, he vowed grimly as he walked up the front path and hammered his fist on the door. If she was pregnant and hoped to keep his child from him, she would discover that there was nowhere on earth she could hide.
The front door opened and Ava’s eyes widened when she saw him. She quickly tried to close the door but Giannis put his foot out to prevent her.
‘What do you want?’ she demanded, but beneath her sharp tone he sensed her fear. Of him? He ignored the peculiar pang his heart gave and used his shoulder to push the door wider open so that he could step into the narrow hallway.
‘I want the truth.’ He handed her the Christmas card he’d received from her brother. Looking puzzled, she read the note inside the card and flushed.
‘I haven’t explained to Sam that I pretended to be your fiancée so you would drop the charges against him,’ she said stiffly. ‘I suppose he thinks I’m upset that our engagement is over—which I’m not, of course.’
‘Only one part of your brother’s note interests me,’ Giannis told her coldly. ‘Is the baby that Sam refers to my baby?’ He watched the colour drain from Ava’s face and felt dangerously out of control.
‘I don’t have to tell you anything. And you have no right to force your way into my house.’ She backed up along the hallway as he walked towards her.
‘Were you pregnant when you left Athens?’
Instead of replying, she spun round and ran into the sitting room. Giannis was right behind her and he found that he had to squeeze past numerous boxes. Evidently the contents of the house had been packed up ready to be loaded onto a removals van. He came out in a cold sweat, thinking that if he had not read Sam’s note for another few days he would have been too late to confront Ava.
‘Answer me, damn it,’ he said harshly.
Ava was cornered in the cramped room and she grabbed a heavy-based frying pan from one of the packing boxes. ‘Stay away from me,’ she said fiercely, waving the frying pan in the air. ‘I’ll defend myself if I have to.’
Giannis forced himself to control his temper when he heard real fear in her voice. ‘I’m not going to harm you,’ he growled. ‘All I want is your honesty. I have a right to know if you had conceived my child.’
After several tense seconds she slowly lowered her arm and dropped the frying pan back into the box. Her teeth gnawed on her bottom lip. ‘All right...yes. I had just found out that I was pregnant when I flew back to London.’
Giannis stared at her slender figure in dark jeans and a loose white sweater. Her honey-gold hair was tied in a ponytail and her peaches-and-cream skin glowed with health. She looked even more beautiful than he remembered. But she did not look pregnant. Surely there would be some sign by now? When his PA in Greece had been expecting, her stomach had seemed to grow bigger daily.
He shoved his hands into his coat pockets and clenched his fingers so tightly that his nails bit into his palms. ‘You said that you were pregnant,’ he said stiltedly, fighting to hold back the volcanic mass of his emotions from spewing out. ‘Does it mean that either by accident or design there is no longer a baby?’
Now she stared back at him and her eyes were as dark as storm clouds. ‘Accident or design? I don’t think I understand.’
‘Your brother said in the Christmas card that it was a shame about the baby. And before you left Athens you told me you wanted to focus on your career. Did you terminate the pregnancy?’
She reeled backwards and knocked over a box of Christmas decorations, sending gaudy baubles rolling across the carpet. ‘No, I did not.’
Giannis snatched a breath. He needed her to spell it out for him. ‘So you are carrying my child?’
‘Yes.’ Her voice was a whisper of sound, as if she was reluctant to confirm the news that blew him away. ‘Sam thought it was a shame that we had broken up when I am expecting your baby,’ she muttered.
Euphoria swept through Giannis but it was swiftly replaced with anger. ‘Why the hell did you try to keep it a secret from me? I had a right to know that I am to be a father.’
‘Don’t take that moral tone with me. You have no rights to this baby, Giannis.’ Colour flared on Ava’s pale cheeks and her eyes flashed with temper. ‘I know what you are. I’ve heard the rumour that you are involved with the Greek mafia.’
‘What?’ Shock ricocheted through Giannis. He wondered if Ava was joking, even if the joke was in very poor taste. But as they faced each other across the room full of packing boxes and spilt shiny baubles he realised that she was serious.
‘No doubt you will deny it. But I didn’t tell you about my pregnancy because I won’t take the risk of my baby having a criminal for a father.’ She crossed her arms defensively in front of her and glared at him.
He kept his hands in his pockets in case he was tempted to shake some sense into her. Not that he would ever lay a finger on a woman in anger, and certainly not the mother of his child. Giannis’s heart lurched as the astounding reality sank in that Ava was expecting his baby.
Five years ago he had lost his unborn child, but by a miracle he had been given another chance to be a father. A chance perhaps of redemption. He wanted to be a good father, as his own father had been, and he would love his child as deeply as his father had loved him. Emotions that he had buried for the last fifteen years threatened to overwhelm him. But he had to deal with Ava’s shocking accusation and somehow defuse the volatile situation.
‘Of course I deny that I belong to a criminal organisation because it’s not true. Who told you the rumour about me?’
‘I’m not prepared to say.’
‘It must have been at Stefanos’s party.’ Giannis knew he had guessed correctly when Ava dropped her gaze. He remembered that her attitude towards him had changed when they had spent the night on Gaia. She had left the party early, saying she had a headache. When she had been sick the next morning she had blamed it on a migraine, but she must have known then that she was pregnant.
Fury swirled, black and bitter, inside him at the realisation that Ava had tried to hide his child from him because she had believed an unfounded rumour. A memory flashed into his mind.
‘I saw you talking to Petros Spyriou at the party while I was with Stefanos. Did he tell you the ridiculous story that I am a criminal?’
‘I don’t know the name of the man who spoke to me.’
‘So you believed the words of a stranger without question and without giving me a chance to refute his slanderous allegations?’ When she bit her lip but said nothing, Giannis continued, ‘We had been lovers for a month before we went to Gaia, yet what we shared clearly meant nothing to you.’
‘What did we share, Giannis, other than sex and lies? You blackmailed me to be your fake fiancée so that you could trick Stefanos to sell his company to you.’ Her voice faltered. ‘When I heard a rumour that you use TGE as a cover for your criminal activities I didn’t know what to believe.’
‘So you ran away,’ he said scathingly. The savage satisfaction he felt when colour flared on her face did not lessen his unexpected sense of betrayal, of hurt, damn it, that she had so little faith in him.
When they had stayed on Spetses he had spent more time with her than he’d done with any other woman. Even when he had dated Caroline for nearly a year, their relationship had amounted to meeting for dinner a couple of times a week and occasional weekends together when their work schedules had aligned.
‘Petros Spyriou is Stefanos’s nephew,’ he told Ava. ‘Petros believes that his uncle should have put him in charge of Markou Shipping instead of selling the company to me. He is jealous of me, which is why he made up disgusting lies about me.’ Giannis gave a grim laugh. ‘Petros succeeded in scaring you away but he’ll find himself in court facing charges of slander and defamation of character.’
‘He said that a few years ago a journalist tried to investigate you but was dissuaded from publishing information that he’d discovered about you.’
Inside his coat pockets, Giannis curled his hands into fists and wished that Stefanos’s weasel of a nephew was standing in front of him. His criminal record had been expunged ten years after he’d served his prison sentence, which was standard procedure in Greek law. But somehow a journalist had found out about it and demanded money to keep quiet. Giannis had been loath to give in to blackmail, but coming soon after he’d broken up with Caroline, and the loss of his first child, his emotions had been raw and he’d been desperate to keep the details of his father’s death out of the media spotlight.
He had no idea how Stefanos’s nephew had found out about the journalist, and he guessed that Petros did not know what information the journalist had discovered. But the suggestion that there were secrets Giannis wanted to keep hidden must have been useful to Petros when he’d told Ava lies about him being involved with the Greek mafia. The story was so crazy it was laughable—yet Ava had believed Petros and as a result she had hidden her pregnancy, Giannis thought bitterly.
His jaw clenched as he remembered that while they had lived together at Villa Delphine he had been tempted to confess to Ava that he had been responsible for his father’s untimely death. Thank God he had not bared his soul to her. He certainly would not tell her the truth now. He could imagine her horrified reaction and he dared not risk her disappearing again with his baby.
‘Everything Petros told you was pure fabrication.’ He shrugged. ‘Believe me, or don’t believe me. I don’t give a damn. But you won’t keep my child from me. If you attempt to, I will seek custody and I will win because I have money and power and you have neither.’
‘No court ruling would allow a baby to be separated from its mother,’ Ava snapped, but she had paled.
Giannis flicked his eyes over her, his emotions once more under control. ‘Are you willing to take the risk?’
* * *
His black gaze was so cold. Ava gave a shiver. It seemed impossible that Giannis’s eyes had ever gleamed with warmth and laughter. Or that they had once been friends as well as lovers. But their wild passion had resulted in the baby that was growing bigger in her belly every day. Giannis’s child. It was strange how emotive those two words were, and even stranger that when she had seen him standing on the doorstep her body had quivered in response to his potent masculinity.
She must be the weakest woman in the world, she thought bleakly. He had barged his way into her home and threatened to try to take her baby from her, yet her heart ached as she roamed her eyes over his silky hair and the sculpted perfection of his features. She had thought about him constantly for the last three months but, standing in the chaotic sitting room, he was taller than she remembered and his shoulders were so broad beneath the black wool coat he wore.
He was like a dark avenging angel, but was his anger justified? Had she been too ready to believe the rumour that he was a criminal because of her father’s criminality? Ava wondered. Supposing Stefanos’s jealous nephew had lied? If she hadn’t had that devastating conversation with Petros, she would have told Giannis as soon as she’d done the test that she was pregnant, and perhaps he would not be looking down his nose at her as if she were something unpleasant that he had scraped off the bottom of his shoe.
A loud knock on the front door broke the tense silence in the sitting room. She glanced towards the window and saw a lorry parked outside the house. ‘We’ll have to continue this conversation another time,’ she told Giannis. ‘The removals firm are here to take my mother’s furniture into storage now that she has sold the house.’
He frowned. ‘I thought this house belonged to you, and you had sold it because you planned to move away so that I couldn’t find you.’
‘I lived here with my family before we moved to Cyprus. My father had registered the deeds of the house in my mother’s name. After my dad...’ she hesitated ‘...after my parents divorced, Mum, Sam and I came back to live here, although I went away to university. My mother and her new partner have bought a bed and breakfast business in the Peak District.’
‘So where will you live? I assume you will need to stay in the East End to be near to your work. At least while you are able to continue working until the baby is born,’ Giannis said, the groove between his brows deepening.
She looked away from him. ‘I was made redundant from my job when the victim support charity I worked for couldn’t continue to fund my role. I’ve arranged to rent a room in a friend’s house, but I’m thinking of moving back to Scotland where property is cheaper and I will be nearer to Sam and Mum.’
She would need help from her family after she became a single mother, Ava thought as she hurried down the hallway to open the front door. The removals team trooped in and it quickly became clear that she and Giannis were in the way, when the men started to carry furniture and boxes out to the van.
‘You had better go,’ she told him. ‘My friend Becky, who I am going to stay with, offered to come over later to collect my things as I don’t have a car.’
‘I’ll put whatever you want to take with you in my car and drive you to her house.’ Giannis’s crisp tone brooked no argument. ‘Which boxes are yours?’
She pointed to two packing boxes by the window and when his brows rose she said defensively, ‘I don’t like clutter, or see the point in having too many clothes.’
‘Is that why you left the dresses that I’d bought for you during our engagement back at the apartment in Athens?’
‘I left the clothes and the engagement ring behind because you did not buy me, Giannis.’ The idea that he had paid for the designer dresses and the beautiful pink sapphire ring with money he might have made illegally was repugnant to Ava, and a painful reminder of her privileged childhood which she’d later discovered had been funded by her father’s crimes.
Giannis’s eyes narrowed but he said nothing as he picked up one of the boxes which contained her worldly possessions. But when Ava bent down to pick up the second box he said sharply, ‘Put it down. You should not be lifting heavy things in your condition.’
‘Who do you think packed all the boxes and lugged them down the stairs?’ she said drily. ‘Mum is busy getting her new house ready and I have spent weeks clearing this place, ready for the new owners to move in.’
‘From now on you will not do any strenuous activity that could harm my baby,’ Giannis growled. His accent was suddenly thicker and he sounded very Greek and very possessive. Ava supposed she should feel furious that he was being so bossy, but her stupid heart softened at his concern for his child. Since she’d left Athens she had debated endlessly with herself about whether she should tell him she was pregnant. One reason for not doing so was that she had assumed he would be angry at having fatherhood foisted on him. She was surprised by his determination to be involved with the baby.
She had already given the house keys to the estate agent and when she walked down the front path for the last time Ava realised that she was severing the final link with her father. Number fifty-one Arthur Close was where Terry McKay had plotted his armed robberies and controlled his turf. He had been a ruthless gangland boss, but to Ava he had been a fun person who had built her a treehouse in the garden. She had been utterly taken in by her father’s charming manner but finding out the truth about him had left her deeply untrusting.
After the bitterly cold wind whipping down Arthur Close, the interior of Giannis’s car was a warm and luxurious haven. Ava sank deep into the leather upholstery and gave him the postcode of Becky’s house.
‘Put your seat belt on,’ he reminded her. But, before she could reach for it, he leaned across her and she breathed in the spicy scent of his aftershave. He smelled divine, and for a moment his face was close to hers and she hated herself for wanting to press her lips to the dark stubble that shaded his jaw.
He secured her seat belt and she released a shaky breath when he moved away from her and put the car into gear. Did her body respond to Giannis because it instinctively recognised that he was the father of her child? How could she still desire him when she did not know if she could trust him? she wondered despairingly. The sight of his tanned hands on the steering wheel evoked memories of how he had pleasured her with his wickedly inventive fingers. Stop it, she told herself, and closed her eyes so that she was not tempted to look at him.
He switched the radio onto a station playing easy listening music, and the smooth motion of the car had a soporific effect on Ava. She’d been lucky that she’d had few pregnancy symptoms and the sickness she had experienced in the first weeks had gone. But the bone-deep tiredness she felt these days was quite normal, the midwife had told her at her check-up. It was nature’s way of making her rest so that the baby could grow.
When she opened her eyes she wondered for a moment where she was, before she remembered that Giannis had offered to take her across town to Becky’s house. So why were they driving along the motorway? The clock on the dashboard showed that she had been asleep for nearly an hour.
She jerked her gaze to Giannis. ‘This isn’t the way to Fulham. Where are you taking me?’ Panic flared and she unconsciously placed her hand on her stomach to protect the fragile new life inside her.
‘We are going to my house in St Albans. We’ll be there in about ten minutes.’ He glanced at her. ‘We need to talk.’
‘I don’t want to talk to you.’ She reached for the door handle and Giannis swore.
‘It’s locked. Are you really crazy enough to want to throw yourself out of the car travelling at seventy miles an hour?’
His words brought her to her senses. ‘I have nothing to say to you. You...threatened to take my baby from me.’ Her voice shook and she sensed that he sent her another glance.
‘I was angry,’ he said roughly.
‘That doesn’t make it okay to speak to me the way you did.’
‘I know.’ He exhaled heavily. ‘I don’t want to fight with you, Ava. But I want what is best for the baby, and I do not believe that being brought up in a bedsit and being dumped in a nursery for hours every day while you go to work is anywhere near the best start in life that we can give to our child.’ He paused for a heartbeat and said quietly, ‘Do you?’
Unable to think of an answer, she turned her head to look out of the window so that he would not see the tears that had filled her eyes when he’d said our child. For the first time since she had stared in disbelief at the positive sign on the pregnancy test, she felt that she wasn’t alone. It made her realise how scared she had been at the prospect of having a baby on her own, with no one to share the worry and responsibility with. Her mother was busy with her new life and partner, and her brother thankfully seemed to be sorting himself and enjoyed working on their aunt and uncle’s farm. There was no one she could rely on apart from Giannis. But, despite his assurance that he wasn’t a criminal, she did not know if she believed him.
They left the motorway and drove through a small village before Giannis turned the car through some wrought iron gates which bore a sign saying ‘Milton Grange’. At the end of the winding driveway stood a charming Georgian house built on four storeys, with mullioned windows and ivy growing over the walls.
Snow had been falling lightly for the last half an hour and the bay trees in front of the house were dusted with white frosting. But, although the snow looked pretty, Ava was glad to step into the warm hallway where they were greeted by Giannis’s housekeeper.
‘The fire is lit in the drawing room and lunch will be in half an hour,’ the woman, whom Giannis introduced as Joan, said when she had taken their coats.
‘What a beautiful house,’ Ava murmured as she looked around the comfortably furnished drawing room, decorated in soft neutral shades so that the effect was calming and homely.
‘I bought it as an investment,’ Giannis told her. ‘But it’s too big, especially as I do not live here permanently. I arranged for a charity which provides help to parents and families of disabled children to use the top two floors as a respite centre. Builders reconfigured the upper floors and in effect turned one large house into two separate properties.’
Ava sat down in an armchair close to the fire and furthest away from the sofa where Giannis took a seat. He gave her a sardonic look but said evenly, ‘Would you like tea or coffee?’ A tray on the low table in front of him held a cafetière and a teapot.
‘Tea, please. I should only drink decaffeinated coffee, but actually I’ve gone off coffee completely since I’ve been pregnant. Just the smell of it made me sick at first.’
He frowned. ‘Do you suffer very badly with morning sickness? It can’t be good for the baby if you are unable to keep food down. Are you eating well?’
‘I’m fine now, and I’m eating too well.’ She gave a rueful sigh. ‘If I’m not careful I’ll be the size of a house.’
‘You look beautiful,’ he said gruffly. Ava swallowed as her eyes met his and she felt a familiar tug deep in her pelvis. He was so handsome and she suddenly wished that the situation between them was different, and instead of offering her a cup of tea he would whisk her upstairs and make long, slow and very satisfying love to her.
‘How far along is your pregnancy?’
‘I’m eighteen weeks. At twenty weeks I am due to have another ultrasound scan to check the baby’s development and I’ll be able to find out the sex.’ She bit her lip. ‘It’s possible that I conceived the first time we slept together in London.’
‘As I recall, neither of us slept much that night,’ he drawled in that arrogant way of his which Ava found infuriating.
‘But now we must deal with the consequences of our actions,’ she said flatly.
He took a sip of his coffee and said abruptly, ‘I would like to come to your scan appointment. Do you want to find out the baby’s sex?’
‘I think I do. I suppose you hope it’s a boy.’ If the baby was a girl, perhaps Giannis would lose interest in his child. Her hand shook slightly as she placed the delicate bone china teacup and saucer down on the table.
‘I will be equally happy to have a daughter or a son. All that matters is that the child is born safe and well.’
His words echoed Ava’s own feelings and her emotions threatened to overwhelm her. She was too warm sitting by the fire, but she did not want to move nearer to Giannis. Instead she pulled off her jumper and only then remembered that the strap-top she was wearing beneath it was too small. The material was stretched over her breasts, which had grown two bra sizes bigger. She hoped he would assume that the flush she could feel spreading across her face was due to the warmth of the fire and not because she’d glimpsed a raw hunger in his eyes that evoked a molten heat inside her. She tensed when he stood up and strolled over to where she was sitting.
‘You said that you are currently without a job, so how were you planning to manage financially?’
‘My old job in Glasgow is still available. Working as a VCO is not a popular or well-paid career,’ she said ruefully. ‘I will be entitled to maternity pay for a few months after the baby is born, but then I’ll have to go back to work to support both of us.’
‘I want to be involved with my child,’ Giannis told her in a determined voice. ‘And of course I will provide financial support for you and the baby.’
‘I don’t want your money,’ she said stubbornly. She could not bear for him to think that she had trapped him with her pregnancy because he was wealthy.
‘What you want and what I want is not important. The only thing that matters is that we do the right thing for our child, who was unplanned but not unwanted—am I right that we at least agree on that?’ he said softly.
His voice was like rough velvet and Ava nodded, not trusting herself to speak when she felt so vulnerable. ‘What do you suggest then?’ she asked helplessly.
He hesitated for a heartbeat. ‘I think we should get married.’
