They’d married in the small church on Sidiro two weeks after they’d declared themselves to each other. A month after that, Helena had come off the pill. They’d both been thrilled when she’d fallen pregnant a month later. They’d both been confounded when, four months after Freya’s birth, Helena had discovered she was pregnant again.
As she thought of Freya, she quickly scanned for her mother, who was on babysitting duty that day, and found her chatting, Freya on her hip, with her mother’s oldest sister. Her mother had come to stay in Agon when Freya was born and had never gone back. Seeing her daughter in a marriage of equals, with love and laughter always in abundance, had been all it took for her to see that the misery of her life would never change if she didn’t do something about it. Having since installed her in the guest wing of their new home, Theo and Helena were in the process of building her mother a home of her own, designed by Helena, close to their summer house.
Helena’s father continued to live in his city home. He employed a full-time housekeeper to look after him. The irony that her husband now paid someone to do the job she’d been forced to do for free was not lost on her mother. He’d met baby Freya only once. When he’d learned Helena planned to open her own architectural practice and would work from home, sharing an office with Theo—they’d made adjustments to the original design to include a vast office space for the pair of them to share—he’d pulled Theo aside and given him advice on the best ways to neutralise Helena’s wanton need for independence. Theo had laughed in his face.
Takis appeared, followed by four strapping young men, all carefully dragging a draped six-foot sculpture on a wheeled pallet. Another three men dragged a plinth on another pallet.
All the guests stopped chatting to watch.
Theo had placed one of the marble benches Takis had made in the vine section of their garden. The men placed the plinth next to it then they raised the other pallet to slide the draped sculpture onto it.
When they were done, Theo winked at her before striding to it. At the same moment, the staff they’d hired for the day—Natassa and Elli were too much like family to them not to be at the party as guests—spread amongst the guests with trays of champagne.
Helena accepted an alcohol-free sparkling wine while wondering what her devious husband had been up to behind her back. This had never been part of the script they’d planned for the day.
Theo called for everyone’s attention.
‘Thank you all for coming and for the excellent gifts you have given us. We will treasure them.’ Now he looked straight at Helena.
She held her breath.
‘The person I most want to thank is my wife. You all know I worship the ground she walks on...’ a peal of laughter and much nodding of heads ‘...and I thought it fitting that in this garden she created there should be a monument for me to worship her if ever I lose her for five minutes.’
Another peal of knowing laughter.
Theo nodded at Takis.
Takis pulled the sheet.
There was a collective gasp. The loudest came from Helena.
The statue was identical to the statue of Artemis in the Agon Palace gardens she’d sat beside when she’d first met Theo. But this Artemis had Helena’s face.
Tentatively, she placed a hand to it, felt the smooth, cold marble beneath the pads of her fingers.
‘What do you think?’ Theo whispered, sidling up behind her.
‘That you’re a sneaky, gorgeous devil and that I love you. It’s wonderful.’
‘It felt fitting. Like it brings us full circle.’
She turned to wrap her arms around him. ‘Thank you. I love it. I love you.’
‘I love you too.’
She gazed up at him. ‘Do you know what I think?’
He shook his head.
‘That if Artemis had met you, she would have forgone her vow never to marry too.’
His eyes gleamed. He smiled. And then he kissed her.
* * *
Wrapped up in the drama of His Greek Wedding Night Debt? Dive back into Michelle Smart’s passionate world with these other stories!
A Cinderella to Secure His Heir
The Greek’s Pregnant Cinderella
A Passionate Reunion in Fiji
Her Sicilian Baby Revelation
Available now!
Keep reading for an excerpt from The Spaniard’s Surprise Love-Child by Kim Lawrence.
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The Spaniard’s Surprise Love-Child
by Kim Lawrence
CHAPTER ONE
THE CLASSICAL MUSIC playing through the sound system—gifted by a famous old girl after her first platinum album—was almost drowned out by the combined din of young voices, the shuffle of feet and the scraping of chairs on the ancient wood floor as uniformed pupils filed into the school auditorium.
Though several of her colleagues were frowning at the noise levels, Gwen barely noticed the racket that echoed off the high rafters of the school’s Tudor hall. Her thoughts were wandering, though not far. The crèche—which had been the deal clincher when she was offered the job at Mere Grange—was not five hundred yards from where she was sitting beside the rest of the staff on the stage.
Despite a disturbed night that had made Gwen fear the worst, Ellie had seemed fine this morning. True, she had been a bit clingy when Gwen had dropped her off in the crèche earlier…but her temperature had been normal.…Gwen had checked it twice, but still the vague anxiety lingered. Was it maternal instincts or just guilt?
The former she’d always assumed to be an urban myth but she was now certain really did exist, and the latter, though she knew it was irrational, she had come to appreciate as a fact of life. Was it just her or perhaps single mums…or maybe all mums? She couldn’t be the only mum who felt that guilty tug every time she left her child in the crèche. For some reason even knowing that Ellie was well cared for and happy there didn’t lessen the feeling.
‘She’ll be fine. Stop fretting.’
Ellie turned to her friend Cassie, the head of English, with a rueful smile. ‘How did you know I was worrying about Ellie?’
‘Love, you’re always worrying about Ellie. You make parenting look easy but it must be tough doing it all alone.’
Gwen brought her lashes down in a protective sweep that shadowed her blue eyes. She had opened up more to Cassie than anyone else, but the other woman still only knew the bare minimum—just that Ellie’s father was not English and he was not in the picture.
Her slender shoulders lifted in a shrug as she pushed away the image of Ellie’s father that had slipped through the mental barriers she had erected, though, as she thought of him every single time she looked into her daughter’s beautiful eyes, it hardly seemed worth the effort.
Before she could be drawn into an internal debate on her past mistakes and awful taste in men—or at least one man—a shout emanating from just below the stage made her turn her head.
The same noise had caught Cassie’s attention.
‘I’ll have to go and help,’ Gwen said after a moment. Her classroom assistant, Ruth, was struggling to contain the energy and boredom of a class of twenty five-year-olds who, thanks to someone who hadn’t considered their lack of attention span, had been seated first in the auditorium.
‘Good luck,’ Cassie breathed, tacking on a low-voiced warning. ‘The head will notice you’re not sitting here with the rest of us and he won’t be pleased. He said “all staff”,’ she quoted, adopting the man’s distinctive clipped delivery.
‘I doubt
if one less bowed head is going to stop Lady Moneybags donating the money for the library extension. Anyway, he’d notice a lot more if one of my lot escapes—now that would make a bad headline.’
Gwen reached the front row just in time to cut off an adventurous member of her class before he slipped through a fire exit.
‘This way, Max,’ she said, touching the top of his curly red hair before she firmly took his hand and led him back to his seat. ‘Oh, you’re sitting next to William...not such a good idea.’ A fact that Gwen had learnt the hard way, and in class she now had them sitting on opposite sides of the classroom. ‘Move over, Sophie. Max can sit next to you. Excellent, now don’t move,’ she admonished, before moving down the row to where Ruth was sitting. ‘You almost lost one there.’
‘Sorry, Miss Meredith,’ Ruth said, smiling her gratitude.
Gwen smiled back, though it never made her feel anything but ancient to be called Miss by the young woman who was actually a year older than her. The prestigious fee-paying school was very keen on defined roles and did not encourage use of Christian names in the professional setting or, for that matter, romantic relationships between staff, although blind eyes were turned so long as people were discreet.
Gwen wasn’t interested in being discreet; she was simply not interested at all. In the odd quiet moment she wondered if her libido was dead, but not for long. Those moments were rare and the rest of the ninety-nine per cent of the time she was too exhausted to even think about it.
Even had she trusted her own judgment with men after her experience with Ellie’s father, romance was a pretty low priority for her these days. Now sleep, and maybe finding a few more hours in a day to sit down and read a book or do her nails—these were the things she lusted after. Gwen had well and truly left physical lust behind and she didn’t miss it one bit.
‘No harm done, Ruth.’
‘Max is pulling faces at me, Miss,’ Sophie complained.
‘Max!’
Gwen’s glance moved over the red head of the culprit, who was now looking angelically innocent as she scanned the faces of her charges occupying the first two rows, waiting until she had their attention before she widened her eyes and raised a finger to her lips. The result was nothing approaching calm, but the imminent possibility of someone swinging from a chandelier or making an escape bid receded.
‘It’s a miracle!’ she heard Ruth breathe. ‘How do you do it?’
Gwen rewarded her charges with a nod of approval and, more importantly, promised them a nature walk because they were being so good. She usually found the carrot a lot more effective than the stick. But before she could make her way back to the stage, the sudden lowering of the hum of youthful voices in the room indicated that she was too late to slip unobtrusively back to her seat, so instead she sat down on the bench next to Ruth as the head walked on the stage with their VIP guest speaker.
The head had a voice that filled the auditorium without effort and silence immediately fell. Barely listening to the introduction, Gwen kept her attention on her pupils, while hoping the guest speaker didn’t turn out to be as fond of the sound of their own voice as the head. A five-year-old’s attention span was limited, especially when they were bored, but hopefully they would fall asleep rather than run amok.
‘And now I give you Mr Bardales.’
Bardales... No, surely it was the Cavendish Prize that was being given by the benefactor that the new science block was named after? Bardales was a very different name with very different connotations for Gwen.
On the surface nothing changed. Outside she was a serene swan, with only the fluttering of the long curling lashes that framed her sapphire-blue eyes and the faintest quiver of the fine muscles beneath the skin around her wide mouth betraying that under the surface she was frantically duck paddling to stay afloat, a heartbeat away from...who knew? Total panic? She’d never gone there and she never intended to—it was all a matter of control.
Breathe, Gwen, she told herself. The breath left her parted lips in a slow, uneven, near-silent hiss as, like someone who had jumped in the deep end of the pool by accident, she kicked for the surface, leaving panic behind.
She brushed her forearms hard with her hands, rubbing the rash of goosebumps that had broken out over her skin. She despised her stupid overreaction, the first in a while. It had to have been a couple of months ago the last time she had experienced the dry-throated, heart-racing sensation of stepping off a cliff in the pit of her stomach. On that occasion it had been triggered when she’d seen a dark head standing out from the crowd in the middle of the busy shopping centre, but a moment later she had realised there was no definitive arrogant angle to his jaw, no big-cat fluidity to his stride. The sensation hadn’t lasted longer than a moment before her common sense reasserted itself and was followed by the sigh of relief that left her feeling foolish and annoyed with herself for allowing her overactive imagination to take control, even for a second.
The annoyance with herself was already kicking in hard as she tipped her head back to see the cause of her flashback. She had to tip it back some more as the guest was tall, the cut of his dark suit not disguising the power of his lean muscle-packed frame.
No, it hadn’t been a flashback; this was a flashback! And pulling free of it was not an option. Nearly three years suddenly slipped away and she was back in New York.
* * *
The bar was as cool and sophisticated as its clientele and Gwen, sitting perched on a tall stool, fitted right in; she was cool, she was sleek and she belonged...or at least she looked as though she did and that was what counted, she’d discovered. She imagined there would be a time when it didn’t feel as though she were playing a part. It would come; she’d only been in New York three months and she knew it couldn’t happen overnight. She focused instead on the positives, the most positive aspect being that her five-year plan was already off to a flying start.
The first month at work she’d been finding her feet, so anxious to make a good impression that she had been unable to hide it. She did what she’d done all through university, when she had known that if her plan was to succeed she needed a good degree—some people could party and still get good results, but Gwen knew she couldn’t do that; she had to focus solely on work. So she kept her head down, sacrificing a social life to achieve what she needed. It had taken her a few weeks before she’d realised that the same method was not going to work here. Simply putting in extra hours at the office was not enough; you needed to network outside office hours too.
The first time she had accepted an invite she had stood out like a sore thumb in her office gear, but now she’d become something of an expert at making a seamless transition from day to evening and had it down to an impressive five minutes in the ladies’ room to make the necessary adjustments.
Like anything in life, it was about organisation: first make-up refreshed, lips highlighted for the evening by a bold red lipstick, then her hair, released from the sleek ponytail secured at the nape of her neck; one quick shake and it fell in glossy waves down her narrow back. All achieved while she was exchanging the discreet studs in her ears for a pair of art deco jet chandelier drops.
The tailored jacket that had seen her through the day’s meetings was removed and the stark simplicity of the little black dress it had covered was jazzed up with an oversized art deco pendant tonight. The jacket, neatly folded, was inside her capacious designer bag along with the moderate heels she had swapped for a pair of spiky ankle boots; that part took two minutes, tops.
It was amazing what you could do when you were organised and Gwen was incredibly focused. That was how she had made it this far. She didn’t allow herself to be distracted; she knew what she wanted and then figured out the quickest way to achieve her goal. People had quickly started to notice. She’d overheard a conversation in the ladies’ room once, and she had wondered, curiously, who this ruthless person was that they were d
iscussing.
Then she’d found out it was her.
‘You’re just jealous, Trish, that Gwen has got the face and body to sleep her way to the top,’ had been one of the cruel comments she’d overheard.
Crossing one slim, shapely ankle over the other, she turned her head and laughed because everyone else was. The anger she had felt that day in the Ladies was spent now, but the memory still had the power to make the tension climb into her shoulders. She put her hand on the back of her neck and rotated her head from side to side to ease it.
In one aspect they had been right—she was determined to succeed—but the totally unfair implication that she ever would demean herself by sleeping her way to the top... It had hurt and made her want to rush out and challenge the women cattily bitching about her, but just as well the tears streaming down her face had made her reject this impulse, because it was far better to make them eat their words by simply being better than them, and proving herself.
Blurting out that actually she was a virgin would not have improved the situation; it was almost easier all round to be considered an ambitious slut with no morals.
‘You look fierce!’ Louise, who had been the new girl in the corporate finance department before Gwen had arrived, looked at her with raised eyebrows. ‘Do you want another drink?’
Gwen shook her head and smiled as she held her hand over her full glass. She turned and caught sight of herself in the mirror that lined the wall behind the bar. Her loose hair had a mirror gloss, but the cost, which had initially seemed enormous, of having her thick chestnut waves tamed by the hand of someone who was a superstar in the world of hairdressing had proved to be a good investment, she decided, taking a sip of her wine. She intended to make it last all evening—the buzz of being here in this city was all the stimulation she needed.
Gwen leaned in to catch what the woman beside Louise was saying.
His Greek Wedding Night Debt Page 17