And in a way it was a lifetime. Her name was no longer Sheridan, or McKay. She was Ava Gekas, Giannis’s wife, and in a scarily few months she would be a mother.
‘Your bump barely shows,’ Becky—whom Ava had chosen to be her maid of honour—whispered when the two of them had entered the private chapel where the other guests were assembled and Giannis was waiting for her at the altar. The ivory silk coat-dress Ava had chosen instead of a full-length bridal gown was cleverly cut to disguise her pregnancy, and her bouquet of palest pink roses, white baby’s breath and trailing ivy made a pretty focal point.
Giannis was devastatingly handsome in a charcoal-grey suit that emphasised his lean, honed physique. Ava found she was trembling when she stood beside him, ready for the ceremony to begin.
‘Are you cold, glykiá mou?’ he murmured as he took her unsteady hand in his firm grasp. ‘I’ll warm you later.’ The wicked glint in his eyes brought soft colour to her pale cheeks. He might not love her, but their wild passion the previous night was proof that he desired her and gave her hope that they could make something of their marriage. For their child’s sake they would have to, Ava mused, and decided that the burst of winter sunshine was a good omen.
The wedding reception was held at a hotel in the village, and afterwards a car drove them to the airfield where Giannis’s private jet was waiting to fly them to Greece.
‘We will come back after the baby is born,’ he said when the plane took off and Ava gave a wistful sigh. ‘If you would prefer to live at Milton Grange, I can move my work base to England.’
She stared at him in surprise. ‘Would you really do that? I thought you wanted our son to grow up in Greece.’
‘We’ll make a safe and secure home for him wherever we live, but I want you to be happy, glykiá mou.’
Hope unfurled like a fragile bud inside Ava. She had been worried that Giannis might want everything his way, but it sounded as if he was willing to make compromises. She smiled at him. ‘I’ll be happy living at Villa Delphine. Spetses is a beautiful place to bring up a child, and thankfully it’s warmer than England,’ she said ruefully. ‘I’m looking forward to swimming in the sea.’
He laughed. ‘You won’t be able to do that for another few months. The sea temperature doesn’t warm up until about June.’
‘When the baby is due.’ She felt butterflies in her stomach at the prospect of giving birth. ‘It will be good to take the baby swimming when he is a few months old.’
‘And I’ll teach him how to sail when he is old enough. I was five when my father first took me sailing, and I loved the excitement of skimming over the waves in Patera’s yacht.’
Giannis rarely mentioned his father. Ava looked at him curiously. ‘Did your interest in boating have anything to do with your decision to run a cruise line company?’
He nodded. ‘My father ran a business giving chartered cruises around the Greek islands. The Nerissa was his first motor yacht. There was a lot of competition from other charter operators but, instead of getting into a price war, Patera’s idea was to offer a high standard of luxury on the boats, aimed at attracting wealthy clients.’ A shadow crossed his face. ‘After my father died, I continued to offer exclusivity rather than cheap cruises. The Gekas Experience was my father’s brainchild and I was determined to make it successful in his honour.’
‘You must miss him,’ she said softly.
‘I think about him every day. He was a wonderful man and a kind and patient father, as I hope I will be to our son.’ Giannis hesitated and Ava sensed that he was about to say something else, but he turned his head and looked out of the window and she felt his barriers go up.
The idea that he was hiding something from her was not an auspicious start to their marriage. But when they arrived on Spetses just as the sun was setting, Giannis insisted on carrying her over the threshold of Villa Delphine as if she were a proper bride and their marriage a true romance, as his staff who were waiting in the entrance hall to greet them clearly believed.
‘I have a surprise for you,’ he said as he took her hand and led her upstairs. He opened the door on the landing next to the master bedroom. ‘What do you think?’
Ava looked around the room that had been turned into a nursery, with pale blue walls and a frieze of farmyard animals. There was a white-painted cot that at the moment was filled with a collection of soft toys, but soon it was where their baby would sleep.
‘We can change anything that you don’t like,’ Giannis said when she remained silent.
She swallowed the lump in her throat. ‘It’s beautiful and I don’t want to change a thing.’
‘I asked the builders to create a connecting door into our room,’ he explained.
‘Our room’ had a nice sound, Ava thought as she followed him through the new doorway into the bedroom and went unresistingly into his arms when he drew her towards him.
‘I love the nursery.’ I love you. She kept the words in her heart. Giannis did not love her and that made her feel vulnerable. She felt guilty that she had not trusted him at the beginning of her pregnancy, and it was understandable that it might take him a while to forgive her. But last night had proved that he desired her, and it was a start. She wound her arms around his neck, smiling at his impatient curse when he discovered the dozens of tiny buttons that fastened her dress.
‘Patience is a virtue,’ she reminded him sweetly, and he punished her by ravishing her mouth with his before he trailed his lips down her throat and tormented her nipples with his tongue until she pleaded for mercy. ‘I want you,’ she told him when they were both naked and he pulled her down onto the bed.
He grinned as he lounged back against the pillows like an indolent Sultan and beckoned her by crooking his finger. ‘Then take me,’ he invited. And she did, with a fierce passion that made him groan when she took him deep inside her and made love to him with her body, her heart and her soul.
Afterwards, when he held her in his arms and stroked her hair, Ava pressed her lips against his shoulder and silently whispered the secret in her heart. Give it time, she told herself when he kissed the tip of her nose and settled her against him.
‘Go to sleep, glykiá mou. You’ve had a tiring day,’ he murmured. They were not the words she longed for him to say, but she thought that he cared for her a little. For the first time since she had learned the truth about her father when she was seventeen, Ava finally relaxed her guard and allowed hope and happiness to fill her heart.
* * *
Springtime in Greece arrived earlier than in the UK and the countryside on Spetses was a riot of colourful red poppies and white rock roses with their bright orange centres. Pink daisies bobbed their heads in the breeze and the scents of chamomile and thyme filled the air.
Ava loved the island and quickly grew to think of it as her home. It helped that she spoke Greek, and she chatted with the locals in the market and the little cafés where she stopped for coffee when she went shopping in the pretty town around the old harbour. Some days Giannis travelled to his office in Athens by helicopter, but more often he worked in his study and joined her for lunch on the terrace.
He introduced her to his friends who lived on the island and Ava was surprised that some of them were married couples with children. She had been worried that he would miss his playboy lifestyle and she was heartened that he seemed comfortable and relaxed when they met up with other families.
The weeks slipped by and it seemed that every day the sun shone in the azure sky. The only black cloud to darken Ava’s sunny mood was Giannis’s mother. Filia had been away, staying with relatives in Rhodes, but when she returned to Spetses Giannis invited her to dinner at Villa Delphine.
Her sharp gaze flew to Ava’s baby bump. ‘I wondered why the wedding was arranged so quickly,’ she said with a sniff. ‘Giannis did not do me the courtesy of telling me that I am to be a grandmother.’
&nb
sp; Ava shot him a startled glance. It was strange that he hadn’t announced her pregnancy to his mother. During dinner she was aware of an undercurrent of tension that her attempts at conversation could not disguise. ‘Did you enjoy your trip?’ she asked Filia in a desperate bid to break the strained silence between mother and son.
Filia shrugged. ‘Loneliness travels with me wherever I go,’ she said as her black eyes rested on Giannis. Ava was glad when the uncomfortable evening came to an end. Filia gathered up her shawl and purse. ‘I hope you will act more responsibly when you are a father than you did with your own father,’ she told Giannis.
‘Do not doubt it. I will take the greatest care of my son,’ he replied curtly.
Later, Ava found him standing outside on the terrace. The night was dark, the moon obscured by clouds, but it emerged briefly and cast a cold gleam over Giannis’s hard profile. He looked remote and austere and she did not know how to reach him.
‘Your mother is an unhappy woman,’ she observed quietly.
He stiffened when she placed her hand over his on the balustrade. His reaction felt like a very definite rejection that stirred up her old feelings of vulnerability. ‘I was the cause of her unhappiness,’ he said in a clipped voice, but he did not offer any further explanation and Ava was too uncertain of their tenuous relationship to ask him what he meant.
‘I’m going to bed,’ she murmured. ‘Are you coming too?’ When they made love she felt closer to him, emotionally as well as physically, and maybe she would find out what was on his mind.
‘I have some paperwork to read through and I’ll be up in a while.’ He brushed his lips over hers but lifted his head without giving her a chance to respond, leaving her longing for him to kiss her properly. ‘Don’t wait up for me.’
* * *
Giannis watched Ava walk back inside the house and swore beneath his breath as he pictured her hurt expression. He knew he should go after her, scoop her into his arms and carry her up to their bedroom, as he knew she had wanted him to do. Of course he wanted to make love to her. Sex wasn’t the problem. She was in the third trimester of her pregnancy and he found her curvaceous figure intensely desirable. Their hunger for one another was as urgent as it had always been—although she did not have quite so much energy and often fell asleep in his arms before he’d even withdrawn from her body.
He felt an odd sensation as if his heart was being crushed in a vice when he thought of her curled up beside him, her face flushed from passion and her honey-gold hair spread across the pillows. He loved to stroke his hands over the swell of her stomach where his son was nestled inside her. Sometimes when the baby moved, Giannis could actually see the outline of a tiny hand or foot. It would not be long now before the baby was here, but his excitement was mixed with trepidation. What did he know about fatherhood and caring for a baby? What if he made a mistake and harmed his son, as he had made a tragic mistake years ago?
Tonight, his mother’s reference to what he had done had reminded him of the fragility of life. As if he needed reminding, he thought grimly. He could never forget the consequences of his irresponsibility when he was nineteen, or forgive himself, as quite clearly his mother was unable to do. Now, as he awaited the birth of his baby, he missed his father more than ever. It tore at his heart to know that his son would not meet his grandfather, and would never know the affection and kindness that his patera had showered on Giannis. But he would love his own son as deeply as his father had loved him, he vowed.
He gripped the balustrade rail and stared across the beach at the black sea, dappled with silver moonlight. His father had loved the sea, and Giannis felt closest to him on Spetses. That was why he wanted his son to grow up on the island, and thankfully Ava seemed happy living at Villa Delphine. But would she be happy to live in Greece with him if he admitted that he had caused his father’s death and been sent to prison for driving after he’d drunk alcohol, which the coroner had suggested had been a likely reason for the fatal car crash?
She might decide that he was not fit to be a father and take his son back to England. The memory of Caroline’s reaction to his confession five years earlier haunted him. He could not risk losing his baby, and with a sudden flash of insight he realised that he did not want to lose Ava. He had married her so that he could claim his child, but over the past months since their wedding she had slipped beneath his guard.
His jaw clenched. If he wasn’t careful he would find himself falling in love with Ava, which had never been part of his plan. He had been in love with Caroline—at least he’d be certain at the time that he loved her, and her rejection had hurt. But the loss of his first child had hurt him far more. A voice inside him whispered that what he had felt for Caroline had been insignificant compared to the riot of feeling that swept through him when he thought of his wife.
Theos, what a mess. Giannis strode across the terrace and entered the house. He hesitated at the foot of the stairs before he turned and walked resolutely into his study, acknowledging self-derisively that work offered a safety net and a hiding place from his complicated emotions.
But when he switched on his laptop and read the email that pinged into his inbox from the journalist who had tried to blackmail him five years ago he felt a hard knot of fear in the pit of his stomach, knowing that he could never escape from his past.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
AVA HAD NO idea what time Giannis had come to bed the previous night. With only six weeks to go until her due date, she often felt a bone-deep tiredness and, despite her efforts to remain awake and talk to him, she had fallen asleep. In the morning she had seen an indent on the pillow next to her where his head had lain, and when she’d gone downstairs he was already working in his study.
But at least his black mood seemed to have lifted and he greeted her with a smile when she reminded him that she had a routine check-up with the midwife. In a couple more weeks they would move into the apartment in Athens so that she would be near to the private maternity hospital where the baby would be born.
‘I’ll come to your appointment with you,’ he offered. ‘But it’s too far for you to walk into town. Thomas can take us in the horse and carriage.’ His phone rang, and his smile faded and was replaced with a disturbingly harsh expression when he glanced at the screen. ‘I’m sorry, glykiá mou, I need to take the call. What time is your appointment?’
‘In half an hour, but I want to do some shopping first. Thomas will take me to the town, and I’ll see you later.’
Cars were not allowed in Spetses Town, and Ava enjoyed the novelty of travelling in an open-topped carriage, shaded from the hot sun by a parasol and listening to the sound of the horse’s hooves clipping along the road. She gave a soft sigh of contentment. Her life at Villa Delphine was idyllic and Giannis’s tenderness towards her lately made her feel cherished in a way she had never felt before. For some reason he had a difficult relationship with his mother, hence his tense mood last night. But Ava was focused on becoming a mother herself and pregnancy cocooned her from the real world.
At the clinic, the midwife listened to the baby’s heartbeat and was satisfied that all was well. ‘I’ll give you your medical notes so that you can take them to the maternity hospital on the mainland when you go into labour,’ the midwife explained as she handed Ava a folder.
Out of idle curiosity Ava skimmed through her notes. She spoke Greek fluently but she was not so good at reading the language, and she assumed she must have misunderstood the last sentence on the page.
‘Does it say that a blood sample will be taken from the baby when he is born?’ Her confusion grew when the midwife nodded. ‘Is it standard procedure in Greece?’
‘Only when a paternity test has been requested by the parents,’ the midwife told her.
Ava’s heart juddered to a standstill. She certainly had not requested a test to prove the baby’s paternity. But Giannis must have done so—which meant he
must have doubts that the child she was carrying was his.
Somehow she managed to walk calmly out of the clinic and smiled at Thomas when he helped her into the carriage. But she felt numb with shock. Since she’d married Giannis, she had believed that all the misunderstandings between them had been resolved and they did not have secrets. But all this time he had suspected her of trying to foist another man’s child on him. She felt sick. So hurt that there was a physical pain in her chest.
When she arrived back at the villa and heard the helicopter’s engine—an indication that Giannis was about to leave the island—anger surged like scalding lava through her veins. She almost collided with him in the entrance hall as she ran into the house, and he was on his way out.
He looked tense and distracted, and he frowned when she thrust the folder containing her medical notes at him. ‘I need to talk to you.’
Concern flashed in his eyes. ‘Is there a problem with the baby?’
‘The baby is fine. The problem is you.’ As she spoke, Ava asked herself why Giannis would be so anxious about the baby’s welfare if he really believed it wasn’t his child.
‘Why did you ask for a paternity test to be carried out when our son is born?’ she demanded. ‘Don’t try to deny it,’ she said furiously when his eyes narrowed. ‘The request for a blood test is written in my notes. Do you think that when I left you after we had been to Stefanos Markou’s party, I immediately hooked up with some other guy?’
‘No,’ he said tersely. ‘But at the time I asked for the paternity test I thought it was possible that you had already been pregnant before we slept together in London.’
She shook her head. ‘How could you doubt my integrity like that?’
‘Like you doubted me when you believed a jealous man’s lies about me being a criminal?’ he shot back. He raked his hand through his hair, and Ava noted that he avoided making eye contact with her. ‘Look, something important has come up and I have to go to Athens.’
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