Dinos grimaced. ‘You know what women are like about clothes. Toula has packed four outfits for our son’s wedding because she can’t decide which one to wear. But the green suitcase and the striped bag belong to Miss Stanford. She asked if she and her baby could come on the boat with us over to the mainland.’
Andreas gave a nonchalant shrug to disguise his anger. ‘You know how women change their minds. Miss Stanford has decided to stay on Louloudi. I’ll carry her bags back to the house.’ He glanced up at the grey clouds scudding across the sky. ‘I suggest that you and Toula leave before the storm breaks.’
The baby was lying in the pram when Andreas strode into the villa. He did not know where Isla was, and he was too furious to care. If he hadn’t returned from the cottage before Dinos and Toula had left on the boat, he would not have known until it was too late that Isla had gone, and taken his son with her.
His son. Andreas stood over the pram and felt a tightness in his chest when the baby fixed unblinking blue eyes on him. Eyes that were the same colour as his own. Everything inside him told him that Loukas was his baby. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath that hurt his chest. When he opened them again the baby’s rosebud mouth curved into a smile and Andreas felt as though an arrow had pierced his heart.
Emotions ran riot inside him and the fiercest, overriding emotion was something he had thought he was incapable of feeling with any depth. Love. Instant and all-consuming. His knees felt weak and a lump formed in his throat.
Something powerfully possessive swept through Andreas, compelling him to slide his hands beneath the baby’s small body and lift him out of the pram. He held him against his shoulder, marvelling at how tiny he was, how fragile and vulnerable. ‘My son,’ he said gruffly. ‘Geia sou. It means hello in Greek.’
His jaw hardened as he acknowledged the reality of the situation. He had a son who did not bear his name and who lived in England with his mother. But Loukas was half-Greek and he should grow up knowing how to speak the language of his father. More importantly, he would know that his father loved him.
Andreas’s parents had not been demonstrative and when he was a boy he had longed for their affection, but his mother had seemed to dislike him and his father had been too busy to give him attention. By the time he was an adult he had dismissed the concept of love as an irrelevance and assured himself he had no need of such an unreliable emotion.
He touched the baby’s hand and Loukas curled his tiny fingers around his forefinger. Andreas felt his heart swell until it seemed to fill his chest. ‘That’s right. Hold on tight,’ he whispered to his son. ‘I will never let you go.’
He glanced across the hall when he heard footsteps running down the stairs. Isla had changed into jeans and a pink T-shirt and her blonde hair was caught up in a loose knot on top of her head. Desire ran swift and hot through Andreas’s veins as he noticed how the faded denim jeans clung to her pert derrière.
‘What are you doing?’ Her face was flushed and she hurried forwards, hands outstretched to take the baby from him. ‘Was Loukas crying? I didn’t hear him.’
‘He wasn’t crying. I picked him up so that I could introduce him to his father. It should have happened when he was born but, thanks to you, I have missed the first four months of his life,’ Andreas bit out.
Isla’s startled expression turned to puzzlement when she noticed her suitcase and the baby’s bag that he’d brought back to the house. ‘I thought Dinos had taken my bags to the boat. Your attack of conscience is too late, Andreas.’ Her eyes glinted like polished steel. ‘I’ve decided to leave with Dinos and Toula and take Loukas back to England.’
His gaze narrowed. ‘You have to live on Louloudi for a month in order to claim your half-share, but if you fail to fulfil the terms of my father’s will, the island will belong solely to me.’ He made a derisive sound. ‘Do you seriously expect me to believe you will walk away from a multi-million-pound fortune? What game are you playing now?’
‘I’m not playing any game. I came back because Louloudi is Loukas’s heritage and I had the idea that I could bring him here sometimes. But I won’t risk him finding out when he is old enough to understand that you refused to accept him as your son. Of course the money would have been amazing. But I can work to support Loukas. Besides, wealth means nothing compared to love.’
‘I agree,’ Andreas said tautly. ‘Our son deserves to grow up knowing that he is loved by, ideally, both his parents.’
‘Our son? You have changed your tune,’ Isla snapped.
Her anger surprised Andreas. He had expected her to be more conciliatory. Theos, she had stolen his son from him and he would never regain the first precious months of Loukas’s life, he thought savagely. ‘If you were certain Loukas was mine, why didn’t you contact me when he was born? You had no right to keep him secret from me.’
‘No right?’ She glared at him. ‘You forfeited any right to be involved with him when you wouldn’t believe you were his father. You made the humiliating accusation that I’d slept with other men. Do you really think I’d have called you to announce his birth after the way you treated me?’
Loukas had fallen asleep and Andreas carefully laid him back in the pram. He pointed to the study. ‘We’ll go in there so that our voices don’t wake the baby,’ he told Isla.
After a moment she followed him into the room. He leaned his hip against the desk and ran his eyes over her, irritated to have to admit that it was not only anger simmering inside him.
Her slim figure belied the fact that she’d given birth a few months ago, and her T-shirt moulded the sweet curves of her breasts. He moved his gaze up to her face and glimpsed awareness in her eyes before her lashes swept down. It did not help his determination to resist her to know that she still wanted him.
‘I was shocked when you told me you were pregnant,’ he growled. ‘It didn’t seem possible that I could be responsible.’
She shook her head. ‘I didn’t want you to feel responsible for Loukas. All I hoped was that you would love him. Nothing else matters and material things aren’t important,’ she said fiercely. ‘Loukas deserves a daddy who will read him a bedtime story, who will comfort him when he’s scared and play football with him. More than anything, I hoped he would have a father who was better than my father—although it would be hard to be a worse one,’ she muttered.
‘You told me that your father wasn’t around when you were growing up.’
‘I know the name of the man whose genes I carry. His name is on my birth certificate and when I was a teenager I found him and told him that I was his daughter. But he didn’t want to know me. In fact he threatened to take out a court injunction to stop me pestering him.’
It was difficult not to feel sympathy for Isla, Andreas conceded. Her story gave him a better understanding of why she had behaved the way she had. But nothing altered the fact that she had deliberately denied him the first four months of his son’s life.
‘When a pregnancy scan revealed that I was expecting a boy, I decided to change my name by deed poll from Stanford to my mother’s name, Christie,’ she said flatly. ‘I didn’t want my son to bear the name of his grandfather who he would never know, and he is Loukas Christie.’
‘The fact that you’d changed your name would explain why you couldn’t be found. My security team did everything to try to locate you.’ He frowned. ‘Why didn’t you give Loukas my surname?’
‘You were not present when I registered his birth and so your details are not on his birth certificate.’
‘His birth certificate can be amended to include me as his father, and his surname will be changed to Karelis.’
‘No.’ Isla walked across the room and stood in front of him, her eyes stormy. ‘I don’t want to have to explain to him that he has his father’s name but there was no place for him in your life.’
‘You won’t have to do that because it’s no
t going to happen,’ Andreas said coolly. ‘My son will have my family’s name and he will grow up in Greece.’
Her eyes widened with shock. ‘Loukas’s life is in England with me. If you’ve decided that you want to have a relationship with him, then you can visit him. Maybe he could spend occasional weekends with you, or come to Greece for part of the school holidays when he is older. But while he is a baby he needs to be with his mother and I am taking him home.’ She stepped away from Andreas and headed for the door. ‘I must to go now. Dinos and Toula will be waiting for me.’
‘They have already left Louloudi.’
She stopped dead and swung back round to face him. ‘How do you know?’
‘I told them that you had decided to remain on the island. A storm is forecast and Dinos agreed with me that they should go before the bad weather made the crossing to the mainland uncomfortable.’
Temper flashed in her eyes. ‘I can’t believe you lied to Dinos and Toula. I refuse to stay here. You will have to call your helicopter pilot and tell him to come and collect me.’
He shouldn’t be enjoying this, but hell, Isla deserved to suffer a little after what she had done, Andreas thought grimly. ‘I’ll arrange for the helicopter to take you to Athens by all means,’ he drawled. ‘But Loukas stays here with me.’
Her jaw dropped and he pressed home his point. ‘My son is a Karelis and he will want for nothing. You say that material things don’t matter, but you know that is not entirely true. I can give him the kind of lifestyle that few people are fortunate enough to have. Security, luxury, the best education—and love.’ He pre-empted the word forming on her lips. ‘Make no mistake, I will love my son and I will be a good father to him.’
‘This is ridiculous.’ She marched back across the room and halted in front of him. ‘You can’t separate a four-month-old baby from his mother.’
‘You’re the one who wants to leave. I didn’t say that you have to go.’
‘I know what this is. It’s about power, isn’t it?’ Isla jabbed her finger into his chest. ‘You don’t really want Loukas. You didn’t even know he existed until an hour ago.’
‘And whose fault is that?’ Andreas gritted. ‘You changed your name so that I couldn’t find you.’
‘I didn’t...’
‘If you had contacted me when my son was born, I would have been there instantly. You told me that Loukas almost died at birth, but even then you didn’t give me the chance to be with him. But I have him now and I won’t allow you to disappear with him again.’
‘You can’t keep me a prisoner here,’ she yelled, and poked him in the chest again. Hard. The cool, composed Isla who Andreas had first met at his father’s house in London had turned into the fiercely passionate woman who had given herself to him in the cottage. Now it was anger instead of desire blazing in her eyes, but when he captured her hand before she could jab her finger into his ribs for a third time he watched her pupils dilate and knew she was fighting her awareness of him.
He tugged on her hand, jerking her closer so that their bodies were almost touching and he could feel the heat between them. Their chemistry was a potent force, and a complication he could do without, Andreas thought darkly. It tested his willpower to resist the temptation to lower his head and claim her mouth with his. Her eyes widened and her tongue darted across her bottom lip. It did not make it easier to know that she wanted him with the same urgency that pulsed hard and hot in his blood.
With a choked sound she wrenched her hand out of his grasp. ‘I hate you.’ She flung the words at him before she marched out of the study. A few moments later, Andreas glanced out of the window and saw her pushing the pram down the path that led to the jetty. He let her go. She could not escape from the island, and when she returned to the villa he was going to tell her how things were going to play out from now on. It was time he took back control.
CHAPTER NINE
THE BOAT WAS no longer tied up next to the jetty. Isla hadn’t really expected it to be, but she had clung to the faint hope that Andreas had lied when he’d said that Dinos and Toula had gone to the mainland without her.
It was Andreas’s fault that she was stranded on Louloudi. How dare he make her his prisoner? But he wasn’t as clever as he thought. She had travelled to the island by water taxi and had stored the boatman’s number on her phone. All she had to do was call him and ask him to come and pick her and Loukas up and take them to Athens.
Isla looked up at the sullen clouds scudding across the sky. The sea was choppy and she didn’t like the thought of taking the baby in a boat, but she couldn’t stay on Louloudi when Andreas was threatening to keep Loukas in Greece. She was furious at his accusation that she had deprived him of his son.
It had occurred to her a few weeks after Loukas was born and they had both recovered from the traumatic birth that she should phone Andreas at his office—the only way she had of contacting him—to let him know he had a son. But the memory of his refusal to believe she had fallen pregnant by him, and his scornful suggestion that she’d had other lovers, had stopped her. She’d had enough rejection to last a lifetime and she was stunned that Andreas now appeared to accept Loukas was his son.
Her conscience reminded her that he had said he would love his child and he wanted to be a good father. If that was true, would it be better for Loukas’s sake if his parents could set aside their hostility and negotiate how they could both be involved with their son? She gave a bitter laugh. Andreas hadn’t sounded like he would negotiate when he’d insisted that Loukas would grow up in Greece. But if he thought she would hand over her baby to him, he was wrong. Her little son was all she had and she adored him. No one was going to take Loukas away from her.
Before she’d left the house she had hung her handbag on the handle of the pram, and now she searched through it and discovered that her phone and Loukas’s passport were missing. Andreas must have taken them, and she was trapped on Louloudi. Trembling with rage, she pushed the pram along the track that wound around the island, not trusting herself to return to the villa while she felt like murdering him. She had reached the furthest point on Louloudi when a helicopter buzzed overhead.
Maybe Andreas had changed his mind and was going to allow her to take Loukas to England, Isla thought hopefully. But another possibility made her go cold inside as she wondered if he intended to put her on the helicopter and send her away from her baby. She would fight him with every last breath in her body, she vowed.
To her surprise the helicopter rose into the sky and disappeared into the low clouds. A storm had threatened to break all afternoon and now raindrops stung her bare arms. She pulled up the pram’s hood over Loukas and began to walk quickly in the direction of the villa. Her feet slipped on the loose stones and she stumbled and gave a cry as pain shot through her ankle.
* * *
Where were they? Andreas pushed a hand through his wet hair as he strode along the beach. Isla and the baby had been gone for hours and dusk was falling. Panic made his heart thud painfully hard in his chest. The wind drove the rain into his face, and the waves crashing onto the shore threw up sprays of white foam.
He retraced his steps and reached the path leading from the beach to the villa. Ahead of him he spotted Isla and he felt a combination of anger and relief. She was walking slowly and leaning heavily on the pram.
‘Where the hell did you go?’ he demanded when he caught up with her. She was soaked to the skin and her face was ashen. ‘Why are you limping?’
She spoke with an effort. ‘I tripped and I think I’ve sprained my ankle.’
They reached the house and Andreas manoeuvred the pram up the steps and through the front door. Isla followed slowly and sank down onto a chair in the hall. She closed her eyes and her face was screwed up with pain. He looked at her feet and swore when he saw that her right ankle was twice the size of her left one.
‘You need to take your
shoe off before your foot and ankle swell even more,’ he told her as he knelt down and untied the lace of her trainer.
‘I can manage,’ she muttered. He ignored her and gently eased the shoe off her foot, grimacing when she gasped and turned even whiter.
‘I’ll get some ice and you will have to keep your foot elevated until the swelling goes down. You might have broken a bone.’
‘I’m sure it isn’t broken.’ She levered herself out of the chair and gave a sharp cry before sinking back down. ‘Oh, hell. Loukas will wake up soon for a feed.’ She ran a hand over her eyes. ‘I wish I had never brought him to Louloudi. And I wish even more that I hadn’t slept with you a year ago.’
‘Are you saying that you wish you did not have Loukas?’ An icy hand gripped Andreas’s heart. He realised that he had only been concerned about how he felt to have a child, and he’d never considered that Isla might have resented her unplanned pregnancy. She seemed devoted to Loukas, but what if she stopped loving him? Andreas had spent his childhood desperate to win his mother’s affection. He wanted his son to know that he was loved by both of his parents, but if Isla regretted sleeping with him, she might also regret the child who had been conceived as a result of their passion.
‘Of course I don’t regret having him,’ Isla said fiercely. ‘My baby is the best thing that has ever happened to me.’ A shiver ran through her and Andreas forced his gaze away from the outline of her nipples jutting through her sodden T-shirt.
‘I’m going to carry you upstairs so that you can change into dry clothes,’ he explained when she made a violent sound of protest as he lifted her up into his arms. Her breath hissed between her teeth and he guessed she was in too much pain to argue. ‘Loukas will be safe in the pram until I come back for him.’
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