She had made the decision to marry him knowing that love was not involved. But she’d believed that they wanted the same things in the marriage, friendship, security for their child and yes, sex. She’d hoped that their physical compatibility would be a base on which to build their relationship, and she was sure she had not imagined the gleam of desire in Takis’s eyes at their wedding.
‘This conversation is pointless,’ he said, stepping away from her. ‘I have an early morning meeting in Athens before I’m due to fly to St Lucia to view a hotel that I am considering buying.’
‘You’re going to St Lucia without me?’ Disappointment tore through Lissa. ‘I thought we had come to Santorini for our honeymoon.’ He could not have made it clearer that he was not prepared to make room for her in his life. In Athens she’d thought he was giving her time to recover from her illness, but now she realised that he regarded her as a nuisance. Would he think the same of their son when he was born? she wondered sickly.
‘You have everything you need at the villa.’ Frustration clipped Takis’s voice. ‘The staff will take care of you.’ He started to walk towards the helicopter and Lissa followed him.
‘When will you come back? What am I supposed to do while you are away?’
‘You are on a paradise island and I’m sure you will find plenty to do. Stelios will drive you to wherever you want to go.’
Lissa noted how he avoided her first question. She watched him climb into the helicopter and wondered how she could have been so stupid as to think he might want to spend time with her or get to know her. She should have realised when he’d mostly ignored her in Athens that he wasn’t interested in her. But this was not just about her.
‘What about when our son is born?’ she demanded. ‘Will you use work as an excuse to hide in your office and ignore him too?’
Takis closed the door of the aircraft without answering her, and the whomp-whomp of the rotor blades grew louder. She would not cry, Lissa told herself sternly. He wasn’t worth her tears, but her vision was blurred when she watched the helicopter take off. Moments later it was a beacon of light in the dark sky, taking her fragile hopes for her marriage with it.
* * *
Takis stared out of the helicopter at the night that was as black as his mood. Even as the glittering lights of Athens grew nearer he fought the temptation to instruct his pilot to fly him back to Santorini and Lissa.
When she had run across the garden wearing a sexy dress that had surely been designed to blow any red-blooded male’s mind, he’d come close to forgetting that he could not have her. Could not allow himself to have her. He was determined to resist his desire for her. The damage had already been done and she was pregnant with his child, but he was not going to compound his folly by becoming more involved with her than was necessary. By letting her believe they could have anything more.
When they had arrived in Athens a month ago Lissa had still been fragile after her illness. Takis could not shake the guilt he felt that he was the reason she had almost lost her life. Her thyroid condition had become acute because of a hormonal imbalance caused by her pregnancy. He had taken a stupid risk one time when he’d made love to her and he would have to live with the repercussions.
He felt another stab of guilt as he remembered her disappointment when he’d left her behind on Santorini. Theos, he had not done anything to give her the idea that he’d taken her to the island for a honeymoon, he assured himself. He had kept his distance from her. Except when he had kissed her at their wedding, he recalled grimly. He had only meant it to be a token, a nod to convention when the wedding officiant had pronounced them married.
But Lissa had kissed him back and he’d been lost the instant he’d felt her mouth open beneath his. She had tasted like nectar, and he’d been powerless to fight his desire for her, which had rolled through him like a giant wave, smashing down his barriers. His wife tempted him beyond reason, which was why he had left her at the villa and instructed his pilot to fly him back to Athens.
The nagging ache in his groin mocked him. He could not give Lissa the relationship she wanted. Not even a purely physical one. And maybe she wanted more than that. He’d caught her looking at him with a wistful expression on her pretty face that had set alarm bells ringing in his head. He had married her because she and the child she carried were his responsibility. His to protect. But he felt uncomfortable when he thought of her accusation that he would ignore his son when he was born.
Takis could not imagine what it would be like to have a son. He did not know how to be a father. His own father had been a violent bully, and the only lesson Takis had learned from his childhood was how to survive. But love and tenderness? He knew nothing of those things.
When the helicopter landed at the house in Athens, he went straight to the private gym and worked out for hours in a bid to forget that this was his wedding night, and his beautiful bride was miles away. Eventually, when he was physically exhausted, he took a punishing cold shower before he crawled into bed, only for his dreams to be tormented by fantasies of having Lissa beneath him and hearing her soft cries of pleasure when he drove himself into her body.
Work was a distraction that Takis was glad to immerse himself in. He spent four days in St Lucia, finalising a deal to buy a hotel complex that would be a valuable addition to the Perseus hotel chain. To his annoyance he found himself imagining what it would be like if he had brought Lissa to the Caribbean with him and they’d honeymooned in one of the luxury lodges. If they’d made love on the private beach where the pure white sand ran down to an azure sea.
Back in Athens he spent long days at his office and when he returned to the house every evening he refused to admit that he missed Lissa being there, even though when she had shared the house with him he had avoided her as much as possible. Something that she had noticed, he thought with a stab of guilt, remembering her accusation when he’d left her at the villa that he used his work commitments as an excuse to stay away from her.
He must have imagined that Lissa’s perfume lingered in the rooms at the Athens house, but he retreated to his study, which was the one room she had never entered, and tried to concentrate on financial reports for his expanding business empire to take his mind off his wife, who intruded on his thoughts with infuriating regularity.
A week passed, and another. Lissa phoned him several times, and the calls were invariably tense as she demanded to know if he intended to avoid her for the rest of her pregnancy, and beyond that, what was going to happen when their baby was born?
‘I don’t care if you want nothing to do with me,’ she told him. ‘But our son will care when he is old enough to understand that you have rejected him.’
But for the past couple of days Lissa’s name had not flashed on to his phone’s screen, and there had been no terse conversations, which had made Takis feel uncomfortable and guilty and unable to explain that he did not know how to be a father, or a husband for that matter. He had no role model to follow, apart from his own drunkard father.
The tenderness that he sensed Lissa hoped he would show their child, and perhaps her, simply was not in him. Maybe it had been once, but Giannis’s death had made him hard and cold. It was impossible to change who he was, Takis thought, justifying his behaviour, and tried to ignore his conscience, which taunted him that he was afraid to try to change.
He flew to Naxos to visit the hotel he owned on the island and deal with an issue that needed to be resolved. His suspicions that the hotel’s manager had been fiddling the accounts and moving money into a personal account proved correct. Takis fired the manager, whom he had trusted, and he was in a foul mood by the end of a frustrating day.
‘I thought you should see this,’ his PA said when they boarded the helicopter. Rena handed him a tabloid newspaper. ‘Page three.’
Takis turned to the page and managed to restrain himself from swearing loudly when he stared at the
photograph of a group of young people fooling around in a beach bar in Mykonos. He knew their type. The beautiful people, rich, bored, minor celebrities. Lissa was at the centre of the group and her smile seemed to mock him. His temper simmered as he read the caption above the photo, which had been taken the previous day.
Tycoon’s new wife parties with friends in Mykonos without her husband!
Lissa’s male friends were heirs to huge fortunes. They spent their time drifting around Europe’s fleshpots and had probably never worked a day in their lives, Takis thought furiously. Fury shot through him. What was Lissa playing at?
He called the direct number of the manager of the Mykonos hotel, Perseus One, and learned that Lissa had checked in two days ago and was not due to leave until after the weekend.
‘There has been a change of plan,’ Takis told his pilot. ‘You are to fly me to Mykonos before you take Rena back to Athens. I am planning to surprise my wife.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IT WAS DUSK when the helicopter flew low over Mykonos and landed in the grounds of the hotel. Perseus One was the first hotel Takis had bought when he’d established his hospitality business and he was proud that he had developed it to a level of breathtaking opulence demanded by its millionaire and billionaire clientele.
The marina was full of luxury motor yachts, and the hotel’s casino was packed. On an island renowned for a party atmosphere, Perseus One was the place the rich and famous flocked to every Friday evening when a well-known DJ hosted an all-night party.
Takis strode into the nightclub and scanned the crowded dance floor. Lissa’s pale blonde hair made her easy to spot. She was dancing with a guy who Takis recognised from the newspaper photo was Tommy Matheson—a lethargic young man whose only pursuit in life was spending his father’s billions.
Lissa looked stunning. She wore the red dress she’d worn the last time Takis had seen her in Santorini. It clung to her newly voluptuous breasts and the swell of her belly where his child lay.
Anger surged through Takis when he saw how other men looked at Lissa as if they were imagining her naked. How dared they gawp at her? She was his. He was stunned that he felt possessive and jealous. They were not emotions he had ever experienced before or known that he was capable of feeling.
He strode across the dance floor and dropped his hand on to Lissa’s shoulder, spinning her round to face him. The idiot she had been dancing with beat a hasty retreat after one look at Takis’s grim face.
‘What the hell are you playing at?’ he demanded, raising his voice above the pounding disco music.
Lissa tilted her head and looked at him. She did not seem surprised to see him. ‘I’m dancing and enjoying myself,’ she said coolly. ‘Is there a problem?’
He ground his teeth together. ‘I have warned you before not to play games with me, koúkla mou.’
‘Or you will do what, precisely? Take me to a pretty villa and leave me alone with no companionship and nothing to do except ask myself why I agreed to marry you?’
Her sarcasm further enraged him. ‘You are carrying my child,’ he snapped. ‘Do I need to remind you of the reason why it was necessary for us to marry?’ His eyes were drawn to the rounded swell of her stomach beneath the tight-fitting dress. Pregnancy made Lissa even more beautiful and sensual, and Takis longed to caress her gorgeous body. He clenched his fists to stop himself reaching for her. ‘You are my wife and I do not appreciate you making an exhibition of yourself in public.’
Her eyes flashed, and he realised that she wasn’t as calm as she made out. In fact, she was very, very angry. ‘I don’t understand why you should complain about me socialising with my friends. You have made it clear that you are not interested in spending time with me.’
She shrugged off his hand and carried on dancing, moving her hips sinuously to the pulse of the music and sending Takis’s pulse skyrocketing. He clamped his arm around her waist. ‘I want to spend time with you now. We’re leaving.’
She glared at him. ‘You can’t frogmarch me out of the nightclub.’
‘I think you will find that I can. Keep walking,’ he advised her, ‘unless you want me to carry you out of here.’
Lissa must have realised that he was serious, and she huffed out a breath as she walked beside him across the lobby. A lift whisked them up to the private suite that Takis kept for when he visited the hotel.
‘Why do you object to me meeting my friends?’ She rounded on him.
‘I object to you courting the attention of the paparazzi.’ Takis thrust the newspaper into her hand. ‘A photo of my wife flirting with another man in a hotel that I own is not the sort of publicity I want for my business. You have made a fool of me.’
Lissa stared at him. ‘I wasn’t aware that the photo had been taken, or that it was published in the tabloids. What, do you think I wanted this to happen?’ she demanded when he looked disbelieving.
‘It’s an occupational hazard. You attract attention.’
‘You think I deliberately sought media interest?’ She paled. ‘Well, if that was my plan, it worked. You have been avoiding me for weeks, but when you saw my photo in the newspaper you couldn’t get here fast enough so that you could criticise me, just like my grandfather used to do.’
‘The situation is not the same,’ Takis growled, guilt knifing him in his gut when he saw the shimmer of tears in Lissa’s eyes. He guessed they were tears of anger. She was trembling with fury, and the air between them crackled with temper, hers and his.
‘It’s exactly the same,’ she snapped. ‘The only way I can get your attention is by behaving badly in public.’
‘We are not in public now, and you have my undivided attention.’ He did not know if he had moved or if Lissa had, but he was standing in front of her, so close that he saw her eyes darken and he heard the sudden quickening of her breaths. Takis was aware of the exact moment the spark between them caught light. He could not resist her, he didn’t even try.
He bent his head and claimed her mouth, kissing her with a desperation that on one level appalled him. He had no control when it came to this woman. An alarm rang in his mind, reminding him of the one other time he had abandoned all control when he had kissed his stepmother. This was different, he assured himself. He was not an impressionable teenager who had been convinced that his stepmother’s occasional kindness to him was a sign of affection. Marina had broken his youthful heart and taught him that trust was a fool’s game.
He lifted his head and stared at Lissa’s lips, softly swollen from his hungry kisses. A hectic flush highlighted her cheekbones, and Takis knew she felt the tumultuous desire that was a ravenous beast inside him. He tightened his arm around her waist, bringing her body into even closer contact with his. But he tensed when he felt a rippling movement where her stomach was pressed against him.
‘Was that...?’ He could not disguise his shock.
Lissa smiled. ‘Your son is saying hello to his daddy.’
Takis was shaken. Even at Lissa’s scan, when he had seen the image of a baby on the screen, he’d felt a sense of unreality. But the movement he’d felt within her belly was not an inanimate image. It had been made by a tiny foot or fist. His son. A child he had never wanted, but nevertheless the baby deserved to have a kind and caring father. Takis did not know if he had those qualities in him. He rather doubted it. If he allowed himself to soften even a little, he might just fall apart.
He stepped back from Lissa and saw her stricken expression. Takis knew he needed to say something, but the longer the silence stretched between them the harder it became to think of anything that she might want to hear.
‘Our son will be born in a few months and you had better get used to the idea,’ she said in a low, intense voice that had more impact on him than if she had shouted. ‘You promised to protect and love him, but I have seen no evidence that you will do so.’
‘I prom
ised to protect and provide for my child,’ he corrected her. ‘He will want for nothing.’
‘He will want his parents to love him. Every child needs to be loved, and when they are not it causes terrible damage. I know, because my grandfather withheld his love from me, and I felt worthless. I won’t allow you to make our son feel that he is unwanted by you or a burden,’ she told Takis fiercely. ‘I won’t allow it.’
* * *
Lissa opened her eyes and looked around at an unfamiliar room before she remembered that she had spent the night in the second bedroom in Takis’s private suite at the Perseus hotel. She had intended to return to her own room, but Takis had arranged for her things to be brought to his suite and she had deemed it safer not to argue with him.
They had both needed to calm down after their blazing row over the photo that had appeared in the tabloid newspaper. Lissa forced herself to be honest about her decision to meet Tommy in Mykonos after she’d seen on a social media site that he was visiting the island, which was a popular party venue. She’d felt lonely and abandoned at the villa in Santorini. Damn it, Takis had abandoned her.
It had occurred to her that the paparazzi would probably be in Mykonos, keen to snap pictures of Tommy and his celebrity friends. She hadn’t consciously hoped to provoke a response from Takis, but in the cold light of day she was sickened by the realisation that she’d behaved like she used to do when she had desperately sought her grandfather’s attention.
Lissa ran her hand over her stomach and felt the little fluttery movements of her baby kicking. It was an incredible sensation that she had wanted to share with Takis. But his expression when he’d felt their son move had been hard to describe. He’d looked shocked, but there had been something else in his eyes. There had been fear, Lissa realised as she recalled Takis’s expression. It had only been a flash of emotion before his features had reassembled into those hard angles that she found so fascinating.
Nine Months to Tame the Tycoon--An Uplifting International Romance Page 11