His lips thinned, a pulse throbbing on his jawline. ‘You made assumptions too. You ran out on me without giving me a chance. You didn’t even attempt to tell me the truth. You assumed that I would be furious that you worked for me and sack you.’
‘With good reason.’ Tabitha held her ground and tried to hold on to her train of thought which was threatening to slip away. His spicy scent had slowly mingled with the fragrant bougainvillea and was seeping through her airwaves with every inhalation. If she stretched out her hand, she would reach his chest. Her hand was begging her to do just that. ‘And you proved it when you tried to sack me the moment you realised I worked for you.’
‘I’d spent...’ He cut himself off and ran his fingers roughly through his hair. ‘I was angry. You say you didn’t tell me one lie, but you let me believe you were someone you were not. Or are you the person you pretended to be?’
‘I was that person once, but that was a long time ago, and I would say you were more than angry when I came to you and you realised I was nothing but a chambermaid. You were disgusted and don’t you dare deny it—it was written all over your face.’
‘I was disgusted with myself for falling for a woman who wasn’t who she claimed to be. I’ve been there before. My wife... You know I was married?’ It was a question framed as a statement.
The picture she’d seen of Giannis and his stunning wife on their wedding day flashed immediately into her mind, the way they had stared into each other’s eyes... It felt like a hand had grabbed hold of her heart and twisted it.
Since she’d arrived in Santorini, Tabitha had tried hard not to think of the woman who had shared his life here before tragedy had struck, because every time she did she had the sick feeling of stepping on another woman’s toes and something else, something much deeper and stomach-twisting, which she dared not think about in any depth.
But hearing him acknowledge his wife for the first time...
‘Yes.’ The clenching in her heart softened to imagine the hell he must have gone through losing the love of his life as he’d done. ‘I’m sorry for what happened to her.’
Giannis shrugged and raised his chin.
By the time of Anastasia’s death he’d grown to hate her but not as much as he’d despised himself for believing her lies.
That he felt guilt and a responsibility for her death were things he could not fathom. He hadn’t been driving that car. She had.
She’d been driving it to her lover.
‘I’d learned she was a gold-digger who was cheating on me.’
He watched Tabitha stiffen before he cast his eyes away from her to the dark sea before them.
Too many emotions curled through him when he looked at her. The spell she’d bewitched him with the night they’d conceived their child breathed powerfully in his blood stream, his desire for her threatening again to cloud his thoughts. How easy it would be to cup her beautiful face in his hands, plunder that enticing mouth and lose himself in the pleasure they had created together all over again.
Always he’d been the master of his desire, even during his short, ill-fated marriage.
With Tabitha he felt a breath away from losing control without even touching her.
A yacht sailed past them in the distance. He focused his attention on it, using it much like the anchor the yacht would use when it reached harbour, wherever that would be.
‘Anastasia tried to pass her lover’s child off as mine,’ he said in as emotionless a tone as he could manage. He heard a sharp intake of breath but ignored it. ‘She fell pregnant three months after we married. I should have been delighted but my gut told me something did not feel right. She had the scan done without me, only telling me about it after the fact, so I visited the obstetrician privately. I asked if the date of conception could be determined from the scan and learned that it could to a good degree of accuracy.
‘The child Anastasia claimed was mine had been conceived during the ten days I was in Brazil. It was not possible I was the father. I set a private investigative team onto her and learned our entire marriage was a sham. All she wanted was my money and the lifestyle. She never wanted me.’
He could not bring himself to tell Tabitha about his confrontation with Anastasia’s lover and his admission that she’d planned to leave him after the birth. Giannis would have been the legal father and liable to pay maintenance. Anastasia would also have been entitled to a good chunk of his money in her own right.
He’d just shared more with Tabitha than he had with anyone else. Not even his family knew Anastasia’s child had not been his. A man had his pride.
Anastasia’s actions had humiliated him. The bruises to his pride still lived in him.
But Tabitha’s child was his and, whatever virulent, dangerous emotions his child’s mother evoked in him, all that mattered was securing his child to his side.
‘It’s no secret that one of the reasons for me hosting the masquerade ball was to find a new wife,’ he said into the stunned silence. ‘The time was right. I’m thirty-five and I want to be a father before I’m too old to play football with my children. I wanted my next wife to be a woman who was independently wealthy. I do not want love in my next marriage—I’ve done love and it tastes bitter—but I wanted security in my wife’s motives for marrying me. You are carrying my child. It would be wrong of me not to give our child the same opportunities it would have had with the mother of my choice. As you won’t countenance me having custody of our child, the next best thing is for us to marry.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Tabitha must have misheard him, too dazed at his unexpected revelation about his marriage to have been listening properly.
She didn’t want to feel sorry for him but she did. What a blow it must have been to a man as proud as Giannis to learn he’d been cuckolded, and what a blow to his heart too. He must have been devastated.
No wonder he’d doubted Tabitha about the pregnancy. If she’d been in his shoes she might have demanded proof too.
‘I want us to marry,’ he repeated.
She twisted her face to look at him but all she found was his profile gazing into the distance, his jaw clenched, hands gripping the wall tightly.
Marriage?
That feeling of having slipped through the looking glass hit her strongly again, the pebbled ground beneath her feet starting to spin. ‘Marriage? You and me?’
‘If you marry me, our baby will not want for anything.’
‘That applies even if we don’t marry,’ she managed to croak. ‘You would still have to pay child support.’
Of all the things she had expected him to suggest about a way forward for them as parents, not once had it crossed her mind he would suggest this.
‘It is better for a child to have two parents together.’ Suddenly he turned his face to her. His eyes bored into hers with an intensity she could feel right in her core. ‘Marry me and our child will have a mother and father living under the same roof. Two parents available at all times. No being shunted from one home to another. No insecurities about which home is their home, no wondering which parent they are spending the weekend or school holidays with. And you would have greater security too—the law would give you that.’
‘Why offer this now? Only this morning you wanted to buy our child from me and cut me from its life.’ But, before he could respond, the answer came to her and all the sympathy she’d felt for him vanished. ‘Coincidence, is it, that you suggest marriage within hours of learning I was privately educated? Does it make me more acceptable to your standing in your world?’
His features darkened, becoming taut. ‘You insult me.’
‘You insult me.’ All the emotions she’d been trying to supress for so long, all her fears and insecurities, merged with the anger she hadn’t felt creeping up on her at his cruel words, colliding to crash through her in a wave. ‘You tell me you want us to marry in
the same breath as telling me I’m not the woman of choice to be mother of your child. You say I don’t disgust you, that my job isn’t an issue...’
‘It has never been an issue.’
‘But half the time you won’t even look at me!’
She’d hardly finished uttering the last word when two huge hands lunged at her and gripped her shoulders, pulling her to him. His piratical features only inches from hers, he snarled, ‘Look at you? You have turned my world on its head! I am trying to navigate my way through everything, trying to do what’s right and best for my child, but just sharing the same air as you distracts my thoughts. Yes, matia mou, I have an issue with looking at you but it’s not because I’m the snob you think I am. I look at you and all I want is to throw you over my shoulder, carry you to the nearest bed and rip the clothes from your body with my teeth.’
Heart thumping, Tabitha stared into the clear blue eyes that were filled with the same anger and desire that coiled in her and felt something low inside her melt.
And then Giannis’s mouth caught hers with a savage possessiveness that sent everything else inside her melting too.
Sticky warmth flooded her. The ache she’d carried inside her since the night they’d conceived their child bloomed as her senses filled with his spicy scent and dark, wine-laced taste. Wrapping her arms around him, she sank into the hungry urgency of his mouth.
One touch from Giannis was like the spark of a match on kindling: immediate and utterly combustible. And yet there was so much more than the flames licking her skin. There was a sense of rightness. Where she turned his world upside down, he righted hers. Being held in his arms...it felt as if this was where she was meant to be.
Their tongues wound together in a heady, sensuous exploration while his fingers threaded down through her long hair until he reached the base of her spine, evoking sensation that made her stomach contract and blood move relentlessly through her veins. Splaying his hand, he moulded her closer to him so the hard contours of his body were flush against hers.
She hardly noticed when his hands gripped her waist and lifted her from the ground to carry her effortlessly to the far wall covered in a tumbling display of flowers, not until her feet were placed back on the ground and she had to tighten her hold around him to stop her watery legs giving way beneath her.
His hard mouth wrenched from her lips to graze over her cheek and burrow into her neck, his hands pushing up her vest and bra, fingers brushing over her ribcage to her breasts to capture and knead the tender tips before capturing her breasts whole. A rich wave of sensation darted heavily through her sensitive flesh.
Capable fingers dragged down her belly to the button of her jeans and wrenched them open. His mouth crashed back onto hers at the same moment his fingers dipped beneath the band of her knickers and her gasp was smothered by the weight of his heady kisses.
Her body had become a playground of tingling nerves and her hips arched towards him of their own volition. When his fingers edged down through the soft curls of her pubis to the slick heat at the core of her womanhood, she writhed, helpless against the exquisite pleasure engulfing her.
The pleasure grew in intensity, a yearning growing with it, stronger, needier, reaching, searching, all of it centred on Giannis and his magical manipulations, until she reached the tipping point and she pressed her cheek to his throat and held him tightly as an explosion of rippling pleasure roared through her.
She was still awash with the waves of bliss flooding through her loins when he disentangled himself and stepped back, visibly fighting for air.
Pressing herself against the cold wall for support, she stared at him, dazed, fighting for her own breath.
His throat moved then he rubbed his head angrily.
‘You see what you do to me?’ he said roughly. ‘How can I hate you when you make me feel like this? What you do to me...’
What she did to him?
Had he not just seen—felt—what he’d done to her?
Hands shaking, she straightened her clothes and fumbled the buttons of her jeans back up.
She couldn’t speak, could only watch mutely as he strode heavily to the table and downed what was left of his wine.
He rolled his shoulders and breathed deeply before looking back at her. ‘I am serious about us marrying, matia mou, and I want you to think seriously about it too. Sleep on it. I don’t wish to fight you but be under no illusions—I will not accept anything less than being a permanent part of my child’s life. All a custody battle will do is give the press a meal to feed on and line our lawyers’ pockets.’
And then he left the terrace without looking back.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BY THE TIME Tabitha woke the next morning after a tumultuous night of very little sleep, she found Giannis had gone. Zoe, the housekeeper, handed her a note from him with a smile. All the note said was he had gone to work and would see her at dinner.
His absence was an unexpected mercy.
She wasn’t ready to face him. Not after what had happened on his terrace.
But she couldn’t deny that the sinking of her stomach at his absence felt very much like disappointment.
Back in her bedroom, she rooted through her limited wardrobe for something clean to wear that she wouldn’t swelter in. In Vienna she rarely left the hotel, and normally just stuck to wearing her work uniform, so had had little need for a summer wardrobe. Or a winter wardrobe. Without that uniform, she was stuck, especially in the Santorini summer heat.
She kneaded her forehead, nauseous that she needed to spend some of her savings on something as frivolous as clothes. She had few savings as it was. If things got ugly with Giannis she would need every cent she had...
Who was she trying to kid? If things got ugly with Giannis she had no hope of fighting him. Compared to those of a normal person her savings were pitiful. Compared to a billionaire’s they were laughable. He probably carried more in spare change than she had in her bank account.
After dressing in another pair of rolled-up jeans and the thinnest top she had, she left Giannis’s house and headed off in the direction she remembered driving through, which led to busy streets. Unfortunately she underestimated the distance and it was a good hour before she found civilisation. By then perspiration soaked her skin and clothes and she’d drunk all the water from the bottle she’d taken.
Thirsty, she stopped at a small café packed with holiday makers—at least she’d found a tourist hotspot, and if there were holiday makers that meant shops—and ordered a large glass of lemonade and a slice of pizza.
Finding a table tucked away in the corner, she waited for her order and sank back into her thoughts.
That was all she’d done since she’d left Giannis’s home. Walked and thought. Walked and thought.
Those thoughts continued to consume her as she ate her small lunch and then hunted for the shops selling cheap clothes, continued as she rifled through rows of generic beach dresses and as she tried on dress after dress, eventually settling on the cheapest two she liked the most and which might survive more than a couple of washes.
Her thoughts continued when she eventually, reluctantly, began the walk back to Giannis’s home.
To raise her child in that magnificent home on this beautiful island was the stuff of dreams. Fantasies. Her child would want for nothing.
But her child would want for nothing even if she refused. Legally, Giannis would have to pay child support.
If she married him, her child would have two parents under the same roof. That was the best way to raise a child. Everyone said so.
Except Tabitha’s happiest childhood memories were of when it had been just her and her father. She had only vague memories of her mother. She remembered the feeling of love and security she’d had with her and she’d always missed her, always felt a part of herself was missing, but she’d died before solid memorie
s could form.
Her father had remarried when Tabitha had been ten. He’d introduced Emmaline as her new mother. He’d married her because he’d been lonely and because he’d believed, his own mother having since died, that his pre-pubescent daughter needed a mother. The two older stepsisters his marriage had given Tabitha were supposed to have been an additional bonus for a lonely child.
If Tabitha didn’t marry Giannis that would leave him free to marry someone else who would become stepmother to her child.
A pain shot through her heart every time this particular thought entered her head and it was a pain that terrified her.
Because it wasn’t just the fear of a stepmother resenting her child, as Emmaline had resented her, or fear that that resentment could become as poisonous as Emmaline’s had become towards Tabitha. It wasn’t the thought of Giannis with another woman that hurt. It was the thought of Giannis gazing at another woman with the same intense devotion with which he had gazed at Anastasia.
Her thoughts darkened with each step, and her legs were aching as she ascended a particularly steep narrow road. A car appeared at the crest of the hill she was walking up and her heart began to thump before her brain had even fully registered it.
It was the sports car she’d seen parked at the back of Giannis’s house.
Pressing her hand to her chest, she tried to breathe through a throat that had closed.
This was the real reason she found herself shying away from doing the right thing by her child. Her attraction to its father was too strong, too overwhelming and more rooted than all the other emotions she felt towards him. She was the kindling to his flame. She had debased herself on his terrace, coming undone in his arms like a wildling, and for all his accusations about her doing things to him he hadn’t been the one to lose control. She had.
She thought of the night when they had conceived their child as a magical dream. There had been a connection between them she could never explain in words but she had felt it so acutely. It had breathed through every part of her. Falling into his bed had felt like the most natural thing in the world and she had closed her ears to all the dangers because she had been caught in a spell so wonderful she hadn’t wanted it to end.
The Greek's Pregnant Cinderella (Mills & Boon Modern) (Cinderella Seductions, Book 2) Page 9