A Ring for the Greek's Baby

by MELANIE MILBURNE

  She heard him come in behind her but she was beyond caring about having an audience to her wretchedness. Right then and there, an entire football stadium of fans could have crammed in and she wouldn’t have cared. She flushed the toilet and dragged herself upright but Loukas already had a face cloth rinsed and ready for her. ‘Here you go.’

  She covered her clammy face with the cloth and then washed her face at the basin. She was acutely, intensely aware of him. Her bathroom was already on the phone-box-size side, but with him in there with her it shrank to the size of a tissue box.

  Loukas placed his hands on the tops of her shoulders from behind, his hips close to her butt cheeks. If she moved half an inch she would come into intimate contact with him. The temptation to lean back into his fortress-like body was nothing short of overwhelming. She gripped the edge of the basin to stop herself from doing it. She met his gaze in the mirror and a jolt of something sharp and electric shot through her system. His hips brushed her from behind.

  Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.

  How could she be thinking about sex when a minute ago she’d been yodelling over the toilet?

  ‘Let me take care of you, Emily.’ His voice had a note of determination. The note that made her want to forget all about female emancipation, park herself behind a picket fence and don a pinafore and oven mitts.

  Emily turned to face him, her teeth sinking into her lower lip. ‘Corfu does sound kind of nice...’

  He tipped up her chin and for the first time she saw a glimmer of a smile tugging up the corners of his mouth. ‘That’s my girl.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  LOUKAS WAS STAYING in Chelsea at one of the hotels Emily had never expected to go into for a drink, let alone stay the night in. Uniformed attendants with top hats greeted them when Loukas pulled into the bay in front of the stately entrance. The car doors were opened and she stepped out on to the strip of red carpet that led into the dazzling foyer. Her bag was whisked away and Loukas took her arm and looped it through his. ‘We’ll leave for Corfu after lunch tomorrow. I have a couple of things to see to first thing, but you can rest up here until it’s time to head to the airport.’

  Emily’s eyes rounded to the size of dinner plates when she stepped into the hotel. Corinthian columns divided the foyer, sprouting out of a sea of black-and-white tiles. A central crystal chandelier hung from the impossibly high ceiling and other glittering lights were placed strategically upon the walls. An ornate gold-framed mirror the size of her bedroom hung above a marble fireplace where some classic sofas and wing chairs were nestled to create a cosy setting.

  On the other side of the room was a black grand piano, so glossy the chandelier above was reflected in its surface in dozens of sparkles that looked like scattered diamonds. White-columned archways divided the massive space into sections and the reception was at the far end where more uniformed staff were in attendance. Loukas informed them Emily would be joining him in his suite and then led her to the bank of lifts through another archway.

  He held her hand while they waited for the lift, glancing down at her. ‘How are you doing?’

  Emily tried not to show how awestruck she was but she was pretty sure she was doing the kid-in-a-candy-store thing. Everywhere she looked was luxury beyond anything she had seen before. Even the lift call-button looked as though it was pure gold. ‘I’m fine, but I could do with something to eat.’

  ‘I’ll order some room service for you.’

  * * *

  A short time later, Emily sat propped up with several cloud-soft pillows on the acre of bed. She had a silver service meal on a tray table parked over her stretched out legs. Loukas was seeing to emails on his smart phone and had so far not touched his own meal set on a table beside him. She picked at her dinner, not wanting to overdo things in case she had another attack of nausea. In between cautious mouthfuls, Emily took the time to study him while he was preoccupied with business. His forehead was creased in a frown of concentration, his shoulders hunched forward as he scrolled through his messages. Evening stubble surrounded his nose and mouth and flared either side of his jaw in a rich, dark swathe that made her itch to run her fingertips over it.

  She remembered how that bristly skin felt against her smoother skin. After that night in his bed, it had taken days for the marks to fade from her face. And other more secret places. She’d had to use concealer to disguise it on her face and, every time she’d applied it, her stomach would free fall as she remembered the way the marks had got there.

  Loukas glanced up from his phone to catch her looking at him. ‘All done?’

  Emily hoped she wasn’t blushing but it sure felt like it. At this rate she could have moonlighted as a bain-marie. No dinner could ever go cold balanced on her cheeks. ‘I’m done. Thanks, it was lovely.’

  He rose from the chair and came over. When he leaned down to lift the tray off the bed, Emily put her hand on one of his arms and met his dark gaze. ‘You’re being awfully good about all this... I mean, this must be your worst nightmare, and here you are waiting on me and looking after me like I’m some sort of princess.’

  His eyes moved between each of hers, then he glanced down at her mouth. Loukas took a steadying breath, lifted the tray away and placed it on the table next to his untouched meal. He stood with his back to her and pushed a hand up his face and over the back of his hair but, rather than straightening it, it made it even more sexily tousled. He turned back around but his expression was impossible to read. ‘You’d better get some sleep.’

  ‘Where are you going to sleep?’

  He nodded towards the sitting room next door. ‘I’ll take the sofa.’

  Emily rolled her lips together and began to fiddle with the edge of the sheet. ‘You don’t have to do that. I mean, this bed is practically bigger than my flat.’

  ‘Emily.’ The way he said her name in that stern schoolmaster tone made her feel like a child who’d been told she wasn’t allowed in the drawing room with the grown-ups.

  She couldn’t hold his gaze and focussed on the hem of the sheet instead. ‘Right, well, goodnight, then.’

  She saw his long trouser-clad legs appear beside the bed. He placed a gentle fingertip beneath her chin and elevated her gaze to meet his. ‘I shouldn’t have touched you in the first place,’ he said. ‘I was out of line. Way out of line.’

  Emily couldn’t peel her eyes away from the dark intensity of his. ‘Why did you make the first move that night, after the wedding?’

  His hand fell away from her face and he thrust both hands into the pockets of his trousers as if to keep them out of the way of temptation. ‘I was...on edge.’

  ‘On edge?’ Emily asked. ‘About what?’

  ‘Stuff.’

  ‘What stuff?’

  He drew in a breath and released it in stages. ‘Family stuff.’

  ‘Your father?’

  Something passed over Loukas’s features, like a tide of tension stiffening his facial muscles in degrees until his entire face was a mask set in stone. ‘That’s enough talking for now. I’m keeping you up. You look done in. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  Emily frowned as the door closed behind him. She considered going after him to pump him for more information but the long day was finally catching up with her. She was almost too tired to remove her contacts and place them in the solution container she drew out of her bag beside the bed, but remove them she did. Then she sighed and leaned back against the downy-soft pillows and within seconds her eyes drifted closed...

  * * *

  Loukas gave up on sleeping on the sofa, even though it was reasonably comfortable. He sat staring sightlessly at the view from the windows, barely noticing the beads of rain dripping down the glass. He’d cancelled all but one of his work commitments so he could get Emily out of London and safely on Corfu, where hopefully they would b
e left in peace until he got a ring on her finger.

  He hadn’t yet given his mother or his sister the heads up about Emily. Not that he was in regular contact with them. He’d visited Ariana after her recent surgery, but mostly he kept his distance, because every time he phoned or visited he was conscious of how it reminded her of what he had done to her. He figured, out of sight, out of mind worked best for all of them. Ariana, thankfully, remembered nothing of the accident, and she accepted the years of operations and physical therapy with admirable if not downright astonishing fortitude.

  But, even though they never talked of that day, it was something he could never forget. He had caused so much damage to his family, injuring his sister and destroying his mother’s marriage as well. Her husband had left just over a year after the accident, unable to cope with his wife’s absences while she helped Ariana in hospital and then the start of the long months in rehab.

  Loukas had watched in despair as the people he loved most in the world had lost everything that was dear to them. His sister had lost her ability to run, play and dance, her future stolen from her, never to be regained. Her mother had lost the love she had found after her bitter divorce from his father and had become a shadow of herself, physically gaunt and emotionally fragile, only managing to survive out of her fierce determination to claw back her daughter from death’s greedy jaws.

  Their lives had improved a lot over the years—Loukas had seen to that, providing them with everything they needed—but at the end of the day it still came down to the painful reality that Ariana was never going to do all the things her peers took for granted. His mother was never going to get those lost years back and, because she was Ariana’s full-time carer, there was no way she could have a life of her own.

  And it was his fault.

  How was he going to call his sister and mother to tell them about this new hurt he’d caused? He hated the thought of them opening a newspaper or news link and hearing about it that way, but how did you tell your family you’d got a girl you should never have slept with pregnant? Not that his mother would mind. If anyone was a frustrated grandmother it was she. He saw the way she looked longingly at passing prams and advertisements with babies and children in them. It was like a knife twisting in his gut to see how hard she tried to disguise it. But, because of his sister’s on-going health issues, there would be no grandkids other than his.

  Knowing he had taken away his sister’s chance of becoming a mother made his guilt about the accident all the harder to bear. It was one of the reasons he had never planned to marry and have a family—because why should he have that privilege when his sister could not? Every milestone of his would be a guilt trip instead of a celebration.

  Loukas got up from the sofa and crossed the suite to creak open the bedroom door. The light from the streetlights outside cast the bed in a beam of silver. Emily was curled up like a comma on the bed, barely taking up any space at all. Her brown-blonde hair was spread out over the pillow like a halo and her hand with its bandaged finger was tucked up near her chin, the other splayed on the sheet beside her head. She made a soft murmuring sound, rolled over and stretched like a cat, her small but perfect breasts rising under her top, the darker nipples showing through the fabric.

  Emily suddenly opened her eyes and saw him standing there. She sat bolt-upright and reached for a pair of glasses beside the bed, pushed them up her nose and then grabbed at the sheet to pull it up to her chin. ‘You gave me such a fright!’

  ‘Sorry. I was just checking you were—’

  ‘You could have knocked first.’ Her mouth was just shy of a pout. ‘How long have you been there?’

  ‘Not long.’

  She hugged her bent knees, giving him a look over the rim of her tortoiseshell glasses that reminded him of a child pretending to be a starchy librarian. ‘How’s the sofa working out for you?’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Liar. I bet your legs hang over the edge.’

  Loukas glanced at the bottle of contact lens solution beside the bed and the little container she housed them in. ‘I didn’t know you wore contacts. Were you wearing them the night we—’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t take them out because...’ Her cheeks went a delicate shade of pink. ‘I didn’t have time.’

  ‘We were in a bit of a hurry, weren’t we?’ He came to sit on the edge of the bed next to her bent legs. ‘Can I get you anything? A drink?’

  ‘No, I’m good.’

  ‘Not sick?’

  She lifted her good hand and crossed her middle finger over her index finger. ‘So far, so good.’ She uncrossed her fingers and then, after a brief moment, reached out to touch his jaw, her soft fingertips catching on his stubble. Her eyes behind the glasses looked big and luminous, her mouth so soft and kissable he had to pinch his lips together to stop himself from leaning forward to kiss her. ‘I had beard rash for four days after that night we slept together. It cost me a fortune in concealer.’

  As she dropped her hand, Loukas lifted his own and traced a fingertip down the creamy slope of her cheek all the way to her mouth. He slowly circled its Cupid’s bow contours, watching as her lips trembled and quivered in response to his touch. ‘Kissing you was my first mistake.’

  Her pupils flared into dark pools of ink. ‘Your second?’

  ‘I’m about to make it right about now.’ He brought his mouth down to hers and tasted her lips. Once. Twice. Three times. She gave a soft, breathless sigh and he touched down again, lingering longer this time, feeling the suppleness of her mouth melding against his, making the blood thunder through his body and charge south to his groin. He had never tasted a mouth as sweet as hers. Sweet and yet smoking hot. Heat exploded from her mouth to his, lighting fires all over his flesh, making him gather her closer, desperate to feel her body against his.

  She wound her arms around his neck, her fingers playing with the ends of his hair, her soft mouth torturing his self-control.

  What self-control?

  Did he have any when it came to her? Every time he put his mouth on hers his willpower took leave without pay. Her little whimpers of encouragement made it impossible to pull back from her temptation. He deepened the kiss, exploring every corner of her mouth, enticing her tongue to play, flirt and mate with his. Loukas cupped her face in his hands, angling his head to gain better access, relishing the scent and texture of her skin.

  Her fingers were on his scalp, massaging him into a stupor. Her touch unhinged him, unloosed in him a primitive urge to lose himself in her like he had done with no one else before. He always kept control. Always. But, with her mouth fused to his and her hands moving over him, his need for her was almost frightening.

  He pulled back from her but kept his hands cradling her face. ‘You are a dangerous young woman.’

  Emily’s toffee-brown eyes were guileless and she quickly straightened her crooked frames with her finger. ‘Why?’

  Loukas brushed the pad of his thumb over her kiss-swollen bottom lip. ‘Because I can’t seem to keep my hands off you no matter how much I tell myself to.’

  Her hand came to rest on one of his wrists, her fingertips light as fairy feet. ‘I have the same problem.’ She moved her fingers to his mouth, circling it as he had done hers. ‘Should we be doing this?’

  ‘This?’ Who was he kidding? He knew exactly what this was. This was magic. This was irresistible. This was the only thing he could think about. The only thing he wanted.

  She leaned forward and pressed a feather-soft kiss to his mouth. ‘Touching and kissing and...stuff.’

  ‘Isn’t that what engaged couples do?’

  Her hand fell away from his wrist and her teeth began to work at her lower lip. ‘I waited seven years for my ex to propose and he never got around to it. I only met you a month ago and you never stop mentioning marriage. When are you going to take no for an answer?’


  He kept his gaze trained on hers. ‘We can’t retract our statement now without looking like fools. We don’t have to be married for ever. Just long enough to get the press off our backs. I’m not offering you the fairy-tale. Just a convenient arrangement so that our child gets a good start in life. After that, we’ll reassess if things aren’t working out.’

  Doubt flickered on Emily’s face and her eyes became downcast. ‘I don’t know... It seems weird to be marrying someone I hadn’t even met a month ago.’

  ‘You will never want for anything. I will make sure of that.’

  Twin pleats of worry divided her smooth brow. ‘It’s not about the money. We’re not in love with each other.’

  ‘Neither were Draco and Allegra but that seems to have turned out all right.’

  ‘But Allegra was always a little bit in love with him,’ she said. ‘We, on the other hand, are practically strangers. I hardly know anything about you and you expect me to marry you?’

  ‘This is the only way forward. We should get married as soon as possible and then the press attention will go away, just like it did with Draco and Allegra.’

  She narrowed her gaze. ‘You’d seriously get married to a stranger just to stop a little press attention? Really?’

  ‘We’re doing this for our child, Emily. Why wait? Do you want to be hounded for the next eight months, having cameras and phones and recording devices thrust in your face every time you step out the door? Strangers taking photos of you while you’re eating in cafés or restaurants or simply walking down the street? No. I didn’t think so. We’ll marry quickly and quietly and that will be the end of it. Problem solved.’

  Something passed over Emily’s face—a flash of panic followed by resignation. ‘Okay, we’ll do it your way. I’ll marry you.’ Her teeth kept going back to her lower lip. ‘How soon were you thinking of—’ she gave a tiny gulp ‘—doing it?’