by Sarah Morgan
‘Open your eyes, Kelly.’
Ignoring his commanding tone, Kelly kept her eyes tightly shut.
She was going to lie here in this safe, dark place until she’d worked out what to do.
He didn’t want children. It was just like her dad all over again, only worse.
How could she have been so completely and utterly stupid? How could she not have known?
‘Just because you’re not looking at me, doesn’t mean I’m not here.’ His voice rang with exasperation and something else: remorse? ‘Look at me. We need to talk.’
What was there to talk about?
He didn’t want kids and she was pregnant. As far as she could see, the conversation was over before it had even begun.
What was she going to do?
She was going to have to raise their child completely on her own.
Overwhelmed by the situation, Kelly screwed her eyes up tightly, wishing that she could magic herself back to her tiny cottage in Little Molting and lock the door on the world.
Through the haze of her panic she heard him say something in Greek. The next minute he’d rolled her onto her back and lowered his mouth to hers. Rigid with shock, Kelly lay there for a moment, and then the tip of his tongue traced the seam of her lips, his kiss so gentle that she gave a despairing whimper.
Sensation shot through her and she opened her eyes. ‘Get off me, you miserable—’ She thumped her fists against the solid muscle of his shoulders. ‘I hate you, and I hate your horribly shiny floors. I hurt on the outside and the inside.’
Alekos grabbed her fists in his hands and pressed them back against the pillows. ‘I thought you were nonviolent.’
‘That was before I met you.’
His answer to that was to lower his head again and deliver a slow, lingering kiss to the corner of her mouth. ‘I’m sorry you fell. I’m sorry you hurt yourself.’
Kelly tried to turn her head away but his hand held her still. ‘You hurt me far more than your floor. Stop doing that—stop kissing me. How dare you kiss me when this whole situation is so horribly complicated and impossible and—get off me!’
She tried to wriggle away from him but he shifted over her and used his weight to press her into the bed.
‘For both our sakes, lie still,’ he gritted. Kelly glared up at him but his hard, intense gaze filled her vision.
‘You’re not playing fair.’ She needed to get away from him. She needed space to think about what was best for the baby.
‘I play to win.’
‘Well, I’m not in the game any more. I give up. I surrender.’ Kelly twisted under him but he put one hand on her hip and held her still.
‘Stop moving,’ he breathed. ‘Kelly, I know what I said upset you, but you wanted me to be honest. You said you wanted to know what I was thinking.’
‘Well, how was I to know you were thinking such awful things?’ She strained against him but that movement brought her into direct contact with his body so she stilled. ‘You’re Greek! You’re supposed to want hundreds of children.’
His expression was suddenly guarded. ‘I don’t.’
‘I gathered that.’ Kelly gave a groan and squeezed her eyes shut. This scenario was so far removed from what she’d expected that she had no idea how to deal with it. She needed time to work things out. No matter what happened, this must not turn into one of those occasions where she just blurted out what was on her mind. No; this time she was going to think it through, come up with a strategic plan and implement it carefully. She’d tell him when the time was right—when she was properly prepared.
Once she’d made a decision, she’d share it with him, and not before.
Alekos traced gentle fingers over the bruise on her forehead. ‘You ought to take the tablets the doctor left.’
Wincing with the pain, Kelly opened her eyes. ‘I can’t take them.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I can’t take tablets. Don’t ask me why.’
‘They will stop your head hurting.’ Alekos sounded puzzled and a touch exasperated. ‘You just swallow them. What’s so hard about that?’
‘I just don’t want to take them.’
‘Why?’
‘I said, don’t ask me why!’
‘Just take them, Kelly.’
‘No, because I don’t want to take anything that might hurt the baby!’ The words burst from her mouth like a dam breaking behind a force of water and she felt an immediate rush of anger directed towards herself and him. ‘I didn’t want to say that. I wasn’t ready to tell you yet! I told you not to ask me why, but you pushed and pushed, didn’t you? I’m going on an assertiveness course.’
Alekos looked as though he’d been shot through the head at close range. ‘Baby?’
‘I’m pregnant, OK? I’m expecting your baby,’ Kelly shrieked. ‘That’s the baby you don’t want, by the way. So I think you’ll agree that we’re in a bit of a fix.’
White-faced and shaking, Alekos slid into the driver’s seat of the Ferrari, started the engine and pressed his foot to the floor.
Baby?
The word echoed through his brain along with all the associated feelings. A child depending on him. A child whose entire happiness was going to be his responsibility. A child crying on his own.
A thin film of sweat covered his brow; he swore fluently in Greek and pushed the car to its limits, taking the hairpin bends like a racing driver.
Only when a horn blared did he finally come to his senses.
Treading on the breaks, he stopped the car at the top of the hill, staring down across the olive groves towards the villa.
Kelly was down there somewhere, probably packing her bags.
Crying her heart out.
With a rough imprecation, Alekos looked away, trying to apply logic to a situation that required none.
A baby. All his life he’d avoided this exact situation.
And now.
Why had he been so careless?
But he knew the answer to that. One look at Kelly had driven rational thought from his head. Every time he went near her, he behaved in a way that was totally at odds with his ruthlessly structured life.
Yet it wouldn’t have been possible to find a less suitable woman if he’d tried.
She wanted four children.
Alekos broke out into a sweat. Just get your head round one, he told himself. That would be a start.
One baby. One baby depending on him. One baby whose entire future happiness was in his hands.
Alekos lifted his fist to his forehead, his knuckles white. Until this moment he’d never known what it was like to be truly afraid. But right now, right at this moment, he knew fear.
Fear that he’d let the child down.
Fear that he’d let Kelly down.
If he got this wrong, if he blew this, a child would suffer. And he knew only too well how that felt.
‘Theé mou, what are you doing on your feet? You should be lying down, resting.’ His hoarse voice came from the doorway and Kelly quickly scrubbed away her tears, feeling a rush of pure relief that he was still in one piece.
He hadn’t gone and done something stupid like driving off a cliff. He was still alive; she didn’t have his death on her conscience. Now she could be angry without worrying.
She pulled her nose out of the suitcase she was packing and turned.
Alekos was standing in the doorway to the bedroom, looking like someone who had just dragged himself from the wreckage of a car accident.
Alarmed, she scanned him for signs of injury. Maybe he had driven his car off a cliff.
She was the one who had bumped her head, but he was obviously in a far worse state. The moment she’d delivered the news that she was pregnant, he’d sprang from the bed like a competitor in an Olympic sprint, and he’d been out of the starting gates before anyone had said ‘go’.
But now he was back. And in a complete state, if his appearance was anything to go by.
His usually sl
eek hair was ruffled and his shirt was crumpled, but the resulting effect was one of such potent masculinity that the frantic crashing of her heart threatened to fracture her ribs.
If anything, Alekos was even more spectacularly attractive when he was feeling vulnerable than when he was strong and in control.
Kelly fought back an impulse to comfort him, reminding herself that this situation was already more than complicated.
This whole thing would have been easier if he hadn’t come back.
She hated the way he made her feel. This was a man who had walked out on their wedding day. A man who had just told her he didn’t want children.
So why did she just want to hug him?
‘I wasn’t expecting you back so soon. Normally it takes you four years to reappear after one of your avoidance sessions.’ Not trusting herself not to cry again, Kelly turned her back on him and stuffed the final items of clothing into her suitcase. It didn’t seem to matter what he said or what he did, he was still the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen, and just being in the same room as him was enough to send her pulse into overdrive. ‘Jannis said you’d taken the Ferrari.’ She snapped her mouth shut, remembering too late that she’d been determined not to let him know she’d been worried enough to check on him. Recalling the desperation in her tone when she’d asked Jannis if there were any steep cliffs close by, she blushed. ‘What are you doing back here?’
‘I live here.’ He sounded impossibly Greek. He kicked the door shut with his foot and strode across the bedroom towards her. ‘About the baby…’
‘My baby, not the baby.’ Her heart tumbled and Kelly tried to ram a shoe into her case. ‘Why won’t this stuff fit?’
‘Because you haven’t packed neatly.’
‘Life is too short to fold stuff neatly!’ Incredibly stressed, Kelly took her frustration out on the suitcase by ramming it shut. ‘Life is too short for a lot of things, and being with you is one of them. I wish I’d never sold your stupid ring, I wish I’d never come to Corfu in my gap year and I wish I’d never walked across your stupid floor!”
Alekos looked at her in confusion. ‘That was all in the wrong order.’
‘I don’t care if it was all the wrong order. Having your baby after we’ve split up is the wrong order, too! Everything in my life seems to happen in the wrong order. Most people think then act.’ Planting her bottom on the lid, she managed to snap the case shut. ‘I act then think, and if that’s not the wrong order I don’t know what is.’ Numb with misery, horrified with herself for losing it, Kelly flopped onto the edge of the bed, aware that Alekos was watching her with the same degree of caution he might show an unexploded bomb.
‘You are very upset, and I can understand that, but you are forgetting that when I said those things to you I did not know you were pregnant.’
‘What difference does that make?’
‘I was not trying to hurt you.’
‘That makes it worse. That shows you truly meant what you said, which puts us in a bit of a fix.’ Kelly stood up and hauled the little case off the bed, closing her eyes as a sudden attack of dizziness assailed her. ‘Get out of here, Alekos, before I kill you and hide your body under an olive tree.’
‘You should not be lifting heavy weights.’
‘Fine—I’ll drag your body there. I won’t lift it.’
‘I meant the suitcase.’ He breathed, and she pushed her hair out of her eyes, feeling foolish.
‘Oh; right. I knew that. Obviously. But the suitcase is on wheels. I can push it all the way to Little Molting if I have to.’ Grabbing the suitcase, she vowed never, ever to get involved with any man again—especially not a fiercely bright Greek man whose superior intellect made her feel the size of a grain of sand. Why hadn’t it occurred to her that he didn’t want children? Why hadn’t she spotted that?
And what was she supposed to do now?
She was having a child he didn’t want. She should have nothing more to do with him. His declaration should have killed her feelings stone dead.
But it hadn’t.
She was still crazy about him. She loved him as much now as she had four years ago.
Wishing that love could be switched on and off as easily as her iPod, Kelly wondered what he was going to have to do to her before she fell out of love with him.
Had she no self-respect?
Was this how her mother had felt when she’d realised that she was having the baby of a man who had no interest in being a father?
Alekos said something in Greek and jabbed his fingers through his hair. ‘I blame myself for not even thinking that you might be pregnant.’ His voice was hoarse as he struggled with the word. ‘But it didn’t occur to me. We didn’t—I mean, we did, but it was just the once. That time on your kitchen table.’
Kelly flinched. ‘Romantic, wasn’t it?’ Her sarcasm was met by taut silence and then he cleared his throat.
‘I made you pregnant on that one occasion?’
‘So it would seem. Let’s hope our child never asks how, or where, he was conceived.’
He dragged his hand over the back of his neck. ‘I assumed you were using contraception.’
‘Well, I wasn’t. Pass me those shoes, please.’
‘Shoes?’ Distracted, Alekos followed the direction of her finger and retrieved a pair of abandoned fuschia-pink stilettos from under the bed. ‘You shouldn’t wear those with your problem with walking.’
‘I don’t have a problem with walking.’ Kelly opened the case gingerly and fed the shoes in one by one, trying not to let any of the contents escape. ‘I have a problem with your floor.’
‘Why weren’t you using contraception?’ Dark lashes lowered over his eyes as he focused on the part of the conversation that interested him.
‘Because I didn’t need it. It seems I’m genetically programmed to give myself only to the lower forms of life. If there’s a decent, honest, family-loving man around, I go blind. Now you can go and beat your chest and do all the other things you cave-dweller, alpha males do.’ Kelly was about to reach for her case again when a strong, brown hand covered hers. She stared at his hand and swallowed. ‘Don’t touch me. What do you think you’re doing?’
‘I’m doing the things we cave-dweller, alpha males do,’ he drawled. ‘Like lifting heavy weights. If you want it lifted, I’ll lift it.’
‘It’s a suitcase, not a piece of fallen masonry. I can manage.’
‘I don’t want you to do anything which will harm the baby.’
‘My baby. My baby, Alekos! Stop calling it the baby. What if it can hear you?’ The tension exploded inside her, punctured by fears she’d been afraid to express even to herself. ‘What if it knows you don’t want it?’
There was a long silence during which he watched her with an intensity that made her heart race.
‘Don’t ever say that,’ he said thickly. ‘All right, I’m the first to admit that this wasn’t what I wanted—I wouldn’t have chosen this to happen—but it’s happened and it’s my responsibility. I’m not walking away from that.’
‘Forget it. I don’t want to drag you along behind the pram like some sort of prisoner of war. I’d rather do this by myself.’
‘Theé mou, I’m being honest, Kelly! That is what you wanted, isn’t it? If I said to you, yes, I’m thrilled about this baby, would you believe me?’
Choking back tears, Kelly bit her lip. ‘No.’
‘Exactly. I am telling you how I’m truly feeling. This has been a shock.’ The disordered mess of his usually smooth hair was an indication of how much of a shock. ‘But I will sort myself out. There is no way I would ever leave the baby without a father.’
‘My baby!’ Kelly yelled, putting her hands over her stomach protectively. ‘If you call it the baby again, I’ll punch you.’
Alekos drew in an unsteady breath. ‘How about our baby?’ he said hoarsely, and something unfamiliar glittered in his eyes as he stared down at her flat stomach. ‘How does our baby sound to you?’
‘It sounds like a particularly tasteless joke.’ Not even allowing herself to go there, Kelly reached for the phone. ‘How do I buy a ticket on a plane? I need basic Greek.’
Alekos’s response to that was to gently prise the phone out of her fingers. ‘You have a basic Greek,’ he said dryly. ‘Me. And I have no idea how to buy a ticket on a plane. I’ve never bought one. And neither will you. You’re going to stay here until we work this out. And stop talking about leaving. If the baby can hear you, then he will be feeling really unsettled by now.’
‘What is there to work out? I’m pregnant and you don’t want children, no matter how much you kid yourself you’ll do the right thing. Why don’t you want children, anyway?’ Exhausted by the dilemma in which she found herself, Kelly shot him an exasperated look. ‘Is your ego really that fragile? What sort of selfish, self-absorbed, playboy billionaire are you that you can’t even bring yourself to be out of the limelight long enough to have a child?’
Alekos looked at her, his face surprisingly pale, his magnificent bone structure highlighted by the sudden tension that gripped him. ‘The sort who knows exactly how it feels to come second to a selfish, self-absorbed father,’ he said flatly. ‘The sort who vowed never, ever to mess up a child’s life. The sort who lived through hell.’
Breathe, breathe, Kelly said to herself, wishing Vivien were here waving a paper bag at her.
Still stunned by Alekos’s confession, she was now completely torn, her plan to get on a plane and fly home blown to the wind by his totally unexpected revelation about his own childhood.
Yet staying didn’t make sense, did it?
If ever a relationship was doomed, it was theirs.
But the memory of his strained features was stuck in her head. And those words: the sort who vowed never, ever to mess up a child’s life.
Torn, she sat for a minute, telling herself that all that mattered was the baby. She had to put the baby first. And yet…