Читать книгу Greek Bachelors: The Ultimate Seduction: The Petrakos Bride / One Night...Nine-Month Scandal / One Night to Risk it All - Линн Грэхем, Sarah Morgan - Страница 14

MADDIE winced at that direct hit. ‘Yes, but—’

Giannis focused on her with a fierce intensity that made her feel horribly like a condemned prisoner in the dock. ‘Is this the lie you mentioned?’

Maddie nodded reluctant confirmation.

Giannis lifted a strong hand and brought it down again in a compelling motion. A warning flare of gold was glimmering in his gaze. ‘You are not forgiven.’

‘I realise that this is a shock for you…’

Outrage was roaring through Giannis, who prided himself on his control of his temper. It was bad enough that she had disappeared, but that she should have done so when she carried his child incensed him. All those wasted months when they might have been together. ‘It is a great deal more than a shock—’

Coppery red curls streamed back from her oval face as her chin came up. ‘A disaster? That is how you labelled the possibility of me conceiving.’

‘That is unjust. You’re rewinding right back to the first day we met to quote a casual comment?’ Giannis shot back at her, fast as the speed of light.

‘What was casual about it? It wasn’t casual for me,’ Maddie protested painfully. ‘I may not have known it that day, but you were engaged. Yes, I accept that it was casual for you, and of course you didn’t want me to have your child. Why can’t you just admit that me falling pregnant is the worst situation you can imagine?’

His lean, darkly handsome face hardened. ‘Do not tell me how I think or how I feel,’ he intoned in sizzling disdain. ‘Don’t make excuses for yourself either!’

Maddie dealt him a defensive glance. ‘I’m not—’

‘You are—and it makes what you have done even more unacceptable. So I didn’t think you would conceive?’ Giannis flung up his hands and contrived to shrug his indifference to that angle of argument. His Greek heritage had never been more apparent to her. ‘But you did conceive and the instant that occurred everything changed for both of us.’

‘How?’ Maddie realised that she had very much underestimated the depth of his anger.

Stunning eyes fiercely intent, Giannis studied her. He moved away a little to get a better view. The lush mound of her once flat stomach was fast becoming a source of fascination to him. He could not recall ever looking at a pregnant woman before. He had not had the slightest interest. But this was different—she was different in that starring role. Somewhere deep within his male psyche a primitive glow of satisfaction burned with his every fresh appraisal of her altered figure. He was fertile. She was carrying his seed in her belly.

‘The child is mine,’ he pointed out. ‘From the first moment I had a right to be involved in every decision you made.’

Maddie was squirming, wishing he would stop glancing at her tummy as if he expected her to expand in girth before his very eyes, like Jack’s beanstalk. ‘That’s not how I see it.’

‘Then you had better learn to see it my way. Look at what a hash you have already made of things!’ Giannis launched in sudden fierce accusation. ‘How dare you go away without telling me you were expecting my child? What am I? Such a tyrant that you exclude me from what I should have known from the outset?’

‘I have not made a hash of things!’ Green eyes bright emerald with defiance, Maddie screwed her hands into fists. ‘I thought I was doing you and your fiancée a favour.’

‘Nonsense!’ Giannis raked back at her with lethal derision. ‘You took off without telling me because I was engaged. That was my punishment and your revenge—’

‘That’s an awful thing to accuse me of…As if I’d be so petty and selfish and downright spiteful!’

‘The first thing you can do is tell me where you have been all these weeks,’ Giannis informed her grimly.

Her brow was tight with tension and she rubbed it with her fingers. ‘I moved to Southend, but I had trouble with the landlord so I had to move on again—’

‘What sort of trouble?’

Her soft mouth compressed. ‘He kept on calling in to see me and it gave me the creeps.’

‘I would soon have dealt with him,’ Giannis growled, inflamed by that admission. ‘Why did you not phone me then?’

‘It wasn’t any big deal. But…’ Maddie worried at her lower lip and sighed unhappily, feeling ashamed that she had not managed the business of surviving more efficiently. ‘That second move left me broke, and it was hard to get work. With me in this condition, not every job was suitable either.’

Dragging his smouldering gaze from her, Giannis stood by the window, his tall well-built frame rigid, his broad shoulders straight as an axe handle. He was deeply aggrieved by her failure to approach him for support. Every word she spoke increased his displeasure. No woman had ever denied him his proper place in her life. No woman had ever behaved as though he could not be trusted.

‘So what happened to those fine principles of yours?’ he derided. ‘You were so proud of your ethics. Where were they when you walked away from me without telling me that you had become the mother of my child?’

Maddie shifted uncomfortably. ‘I really did think I was doing the best thing—’

‘But I listened when you talked about your principles and I trusted you.’ Giannis directed a chilling look of censure at her. ‘Yet you lied to me—’

‘It was an emotional time for me. I was feeling very guilty,’ Maddie muttered unhappily. ‘But I do see now that if I was involved in the break-up of your engagement then I shouldn’t have gone away after I discovered that I was pregnant.’

Giannis stiffened, and his brilliant dark eyes screened to a very wary glitter below his dense black lashes. That particular association of ideas disturbed him. She was moving way too far and too fast for him. ‘There was no connection. You played no part in the break-up,’ he emphasized, smooth as polished steel. ‘I hope that eases your conscience.’

‘Yes.’

But Maddie was quite unaware of her conscience at that moment. His sardonic response had struck like a dagger in the heart, and she felt so wounded by his blunt rejection that she did not dare to look at him. From that hurt came a deeper self-knowledge and a horrid sense of humiliation. The instant she had learnt that Giannis and Krista had split up she had grasped the first excuse to contact him and rush back to his side. How revealing was that? How full of herself she must have sounded when she made the assumption that their affair might have led to his change of heart about marrying Krista! She wanted to cringe.

‘Don’t tell me any more lies. I expect more from you, pedhi mou,’ Giannis concluded, keenly appraising her small figure again. Even as he looked, his anger at the way she had kept him in the dark steadily receded. Though pregnant, she was gorgeous. He was beginning to adjust to the shock of her new body shape. In fact he was finding her burgeoning figure distinctly pleasing. After all he, he acknowledged, was responsible for that change.

Maddie, on the other hand, was feeling more than a little fragile. He had knocked the emotional stuffing out of her. She was just a woman he had slept with who had got in the family way. As she brushed her curls back from her brow, her tummy gave a warning lurch of nausea. She was nothing special to him. Her forehead dampened with perspiration. But he had somehow become so very special to her. Terrified of being sick in his vicinity, she struggled to block that painful passage of thought. She snatched in a discreet gulp of oxygen in an effort to combat the wave of dizziness consuming her and backed blindly down into a seat.

‘Giannis, I…’ As the giddy attack of nausea worsened, Maddie leapt up again in a sudden movement, intending to leave the room. But darkness folded in on her like a suffocating blanket and she keeled over in a dead faint.

For a split second Giannis just surveyed her in horror. But then he reacted quickly. He hit the alarm on his watch to call his security team, and crouched down beside her to put her in the recovery position.

Maddie swam back to consciousness and loosed a startled moan as a camera flash almost blinded her. ‘What…what on earth?’

Mounting the steps to doors already flung wide for their entrance, Giannis tightened his arms round her slight frame. ‘Paparazzi,’ he growled. ‘They were waiting outside the hotel and they followed us here. Blood-sucking vultures!’

‘Where are we?’

‘A private clinic. I want you checked out.’

‘But I saw a doctor this morning,’ Maddie argued.

‘He didn’t do you much good,’ Giannis told her forcefully.

‘I haven’t eaten since breakfast, which was stupid of me,’ she groaned. ‘Put me down, for goodness’ sake. I can walk perfectly well!’

Striking ebony brows accentuating his frown, Giannis lowered her with great care to the floor. But when she tried to stand upright her head started swimming again, and she had to grab at his sleeve to correct her balance.

‘All talk and no action,’ Giannis censured, scooping her off her feet again. ‘Let me do what I do best.’

Maddie was belatedly conscious that other people were around: Nemos and his men, and medical staff. Just about everybody seemed to be staring at them. ‘Like bossing people around?’ she quipped.

The forbidding tension in his lean bronzed features eased, and he laughed in appreciation. He bent his arrogant dark head and whispered with husky mockery, ‘I do a lot of things better than other people, glikia mou.’

‘Showing off?’ Regardless of their audience, she was insanely tempted to wrap her arms round him and hug him tight. She wanted to trap the moment and the memory, so that she could take it out some time in the future, when he was no longer around.

He had taught her how vulnerable she could be. In leaving London she had done what she’d believed was best in a bad situation. But there had not been a day in the intervening weeks when she had not thought of him, missed him, and longed for even just five minutes back in his energising company.

Giannis settled Maddie down on an examination couch in a plush office, and turned to address the consultant gynaecologist who had evidently been awaiting their arrival.

Having banished Giannis, Maddie answered loads of questions. While she was being examined she confided that she thought there was nothing wrong with her aside of tiredness and hunger.

‘I can hear two heartbeats,’ the consultant told her quietly. ‘I’m almost certain you’re carrying twins.’

Maddie sucked in a startled breath and then, thinking of her lost twin, Suzy, she slowly began to smile.

Giannis was pacing outside the room when she reappeared, seated in a wheelchair. ‘They won’t let me walk either. I’ll be finished as soon as I have a scan,’ she told him apologetically. ‘You know…I’m fine.’

‘No, I don’t know it. That’s for the medics to say. I’d like to be present for the scan.’

Maddie acquiesced, because she was feeling a little intimidated by the level of attention she was receiving, not to mention her swanky surroundings. From the minute the doctor urged her to watch the monitor, however, she was entranced by the astonishingly clear images in 3D, delivered by the state-of-the-art ultrasound equipment.

‘That’s a baby…’ Giannis whispered in stark amazement. He had expected to see very little that was recognizable, and certainly not a tiny face.

‘Oh, he’s so…so beautiful,’ Maddie framed chokily.

Giannis closed a hand over hers. ‘Are we having a boy?’

‘Do you want to know?’

‘Yes, I think I’d like to,’ Maddie confessed.

‘This one is a boy…’

‘You can tell even at this stage?’ Giannis was studying the monitor in awe. ‘So we are to have a boy. But what did you mean when you said “this one”?’

‘I’m having twins,’ Maddie told him, suddenly appreciating that she had yet to share that information with him, and feeling sad that she had imposed that division between them.

‘It’s a little difficult to be sure with the babies in this position, but I’m almost certain the other is a girl,’ the consultant added.

‘Theos mou…twins.’ Giannis was stunned, and his lean, shapely hand tightened on hers, his thumb and forefinger gently massaging her wrist. As spellbound as she was, his attention was held by the brilliant clarity of the images.

‘Are they healthy?’ Maddie pressed anxiously.

The reassurance she received eased her instinctive concern. She was urged to stop worrying, eat more, and get plenty of sleep.

Giannis tucked her back into the wheelchair with great care. He was in a daze. Two children—his son and daughter—his blood. He was astonished by his sense of satisfaction and his even stronger sense of anticipation. He had always believed that he did not care whether he had children or not. But the instant those tiny faces had appeared on the screen something very fundamental had changed in him. Out of his wondering pride had grown a fierce feeling of protectiveness towards Maddie and the babies she carried.

‘I’ll take you home now. You can eat, just like the doctor ordered, and then rest.’

As Giannis spoke, the limousine pulled away from the rear entrance of the clinic where it had picked them up. She stared out at the camera-wielding paparazzi, pelting in mad frustrated flight round the corner, having realised too late that they had missed their quarry’s exit from the clinic.

‘My City apartment isn’t far from here.’

Her face shadowed, and she closed her hands together on her lap, deliberately not looking at him. ‘No, please. That wouldn’t be a good idea. I’d rather go to a hotel—’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Giannis interposed in an incredulous tone.

‘Hotels are very expensive, but that’ll do fine if you can’t sort me out with anything else in the short term,’ Maddie reasoned doggedly. ‘I do need your financial help right now. I’d be grateful if you helped me find more permanent accommodation and made it possible for me to manage on my own.’

‘But you’re not going to be your own. I’ve no intention of letting you out of my sight, pedhi mou.’

Maddie sent him a sidewise glance and collided unwarily with gilded bronze eyes filled with level enquiry. Her heart seemed to flip inside her chest. Just a glimpse of his lean, darkly handsome face could make her ache with emotion, need, and the most terrible hunger. So she dragged her scrutiny from him again and stared woodenly into space. She had never been sensible with him. In fact she had been stupid, immature and weak. But now that she was pregnant the time for such self-indulgence was past. Her babies needed a mother who behaved like an intelligent adult.

‘Giannis…will you listen to me for a moment?’ she asked tautly. ‘I need to be independent. I wouldn’t feel comfortable in your apartment. You slept with me and I fell accidentally pregnant. That’s the only reason I’m here with you now. You don’t need to pretend that there’s anything more.’

Giannis did not like the sound of what he was hearing. She was pulling away from him just when he wanted to manacle her ankle and wrist to his side. ‘But there is more—’

‘No, there isn’t.’ There was a choky sensation at the foot of Maddie’s tight throat, because it would be a long time before she forgot his confident declaration that she had had nothing whatsoever to do with his broken engagement. Yet even if his honesty had hurt she was grateful for it. Her hopes and dreams had tumbled like sandcastles met by the tide. She loved him. She was absolutely hopelessly in love with him. But he didn’t feel the same way. She had to learn to live with that reality, and the less time she spent in his vicinity the better.

‘Maddie…’ Giannis chided, ready to fight bone and sinew until she came round to his point of view. If she didn’t stay in his apartment she would be a constant source of worry—for how else was he to know where she was, who she was with, and whether or not she was looking after herself properly?

‘I hope you’ll take an interest in our children when they’re born, and that we can both behave like civilised people,’ she muttered feverishly, her eyes hot and scratchy with the tears she was fighting back, that were forcing her to bend her head.

Giannis was about to inform her that a threat to stray with their unborn children away from his care and custody was an act of unjust and warranted aggression which he refused to accept. But then something happened to change his mind. A single drop of moisture splashed down onto her tightly clenched hands. It was a tear. He froze in shock. She rubbed at her eyes and sniffed, murmuring a muffled apology.

‘Please don’t!’ she gasped in dismay, shifting away as though he was contagious when he attempted to put an arm round her.

Giannis was fiercely frustrated by his feeling of powerlessness. She was trembling, clearly distressed, but he was not allowed to hold her or offer comfort. He passed her a pristine linen handkerchief. She mopped up in a no-nonsense way that would have made him smile at any other time. Tears, which he had previously disdained as a base feminine weapon, had a disturbingly strong impact on him when it was Maddie doing the crying. She made him feel like a huge bully. She was tired, unhappy, and pregnant with his children. He did not want to upset her or intimidate her into doing his bidding. For the first time in his life he reined back his strong personality and shelved his arguments along with his impatience. For her sake, he decided to go slowly and take her to a hotel.

The next day Maddie got up after a night of undisturbed slumber. She had an entire suite to herself, and a good meal, a warm bath and a comfortable bed had put her to sleep within minutes of her head touching the pillow. She had got her crying over with in the bath.

Her luggage from the bed-and-breakfast place where she had been staying in Reading was waiting for her when she wakened. Dressed in casual chino pants with a stretchy waist-band and a green T-shirt, she had just finished eating her breakfast when someone knocked on the door. Assuming it was Room Service, coming back to clear the table, Maddie opened the door without making use of the spyhole.

‘I see you know who I am. May I come in?’ Krista Spyridou asked.

Maddie went white, and then red with discomfiture. It was Krista who closed the door and strolled gracefully across to a chair to make herself at home. Maddie could not take her eyes off the other woman. With her fabulous platinum blonde hair falling round her narrow shoulders like a silk curtain, and her turquoise eyes slashing a bright slice of colour in her flawless face, Krista’s glowing perfection took Maddie’s breath away.

‘I can see you’re embarrassed,’ Krista remarked with enviable poise. ‘But there’s really no need to be. I have the solution to all our problems.’

Aghast at the descent of a woman whom she knew she had wounded, Maddie hovered in the centre of the carpet. ‘I don’t know what to say to you. You must hate me.’

‘Why? If it hadn’t been you in his bed it would have been some other woman. Giannis lives by his own rules, and I wouldn’t dream of interfering. I feel privileged to be a part of his life. He’s a very special man,’ Krista murmured with a cool smile. ‘But this pregnancy of yours does create a problem.’

‘How did you even know I was pregnant?’ With Krista talking as though her relationship with Giannis was ongoing, Maddie’s unease was increasing at a rapid pace.

‘Haven’t you seen the pictures in the newspapers yet? They were taken yesterday, outside the clinic. Not very flattering of you, I’m afraid. But you’re definitely pregnant.’ Krista released a musical laugh. ‘Anything relating to Giannis Petrakos is always very big news.’

Maddie tried to hide her chagrin. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t want to talk about my private life with you.’

‘If you care about the future of your twins, you will listen to what I have to say.’

Maddie went very still. ‘How did you know I’m having twins?’

Krista looked calmly back at her. ‘How do you think? Giannis told me…’

Maddie’s skin went clammy and she turned away, speared by that declaration like a fish on a hook. She felt quite sick at the idea of Giannis discussing her predicament with this woman. She also felt rather scared of this beautiful blonde in her ice-blue designer suit, with diamonds twinkling in her earlobes and at her slender throat.

‘Let’s concentrate on why I’m here,’ Krista continued. ‘I have a proposition to put to you.’

‘I don’t want to be rude…but what’s any of this got to do with you?’ Maddie was struggling desperately to retain some semblance of dignity. ‘I understood that you were no longer engaged to Giannis.’