Harlequin Presents July 2017 Box Set : The Pregnant Kavakos Bride / a Ring to Secure His Crown / the Billionaire's Secret Princess / Wedding Night With Her Enemy (9781460350751)

by Kendrick, Sharon; Lawrence, Kim; Crews, Caitlin; Milburne, Melanie

  He let out a harsh breath. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, agape mou. You’re being—’

  ‘You keep calling me your “love” but I’m not, am I?’ she said. ‘They’re empty words. I want more than that. I deserve more than that.’

  ‘Look, you’re feeling let down about your father’s behaviour and it’s colouring your—’

  ‘This has nothing to do with my father,’ Allegra said. ‘This is to do with us. But we’re not an ‘us’, are we? Not in the true sense. We’ve married for all the wrong reasons and I can’t be in a marriage like that. It will be like living my childhood all over again. Never feeling good enough. Never feeling enough, period.’

  His brows came together over his eyes. ‘You’re not suggesting I’d carry on like your father? I told you I’d remain faithful. I promised you that.’

  Allegra shook her head at him. ‘Being faithful isn’t enough. I can’t be in a relationship that has a time limit. Every day that passes is a day closer to the one when you’ll tell me you want out. That’s not how a marriage should be. Even if you’re not unfaithful, you could still fall in love with someone else, because without a solid commitment to me it leaves the door wide open for it.’

  ‘I’m not going to fall in love with someone.’

  ‘It’s just as bad if you’ve ruled love out completely. I can’t spend the next couple of years of my life hoping you will change. It’s better to end it now. Before—’

  ‘What about your father? The ink is barely dry on the deal.’

  ‘You know something? Right now I don’t give a fat fig if my father loses everything,’ Allegra said. ‘He deserves to lose everything, including his wife and son. I’m not going to be the sacrificial lamb for him. I’ve done it all my life. Papered over the cracks he made in my mother’s and my life. I spent years compensating for his inadequacies but I’m sick of it. I’m reclaiming my life as of now, and it doesn’t include you, because of the reasons I’ve stated.’

  Draco showed no emotion. It was as if a curtain had come down on the stage of his face. Allegra kept hoping he would say something…the words she so desperately wanted to hear…even though, if he did, she knew she would doubt their veracity. But why didn’t he say them? What was so hard about saying ‘I love you’?

  ‘Is this about our living arrangements?’ he said. ‘If so, we can talk about a compromise. I was going to suggest it anyway, so…’

  Allegra shook her head. ‘Living together isn’t going to solve this, Draco. Surely you can see that? We want completely different things out of life. Ultimately, you want your freedom and I want… I want a baby. A family.’ There, she’d said it. Finally admitted the yearning that had been simmering inside her for the last few days. Maybe even longer…maybe since that night in London last December.

  He flinched in shock. ‘A baby? But you’ve always said you didn’t want—’

  ‘I know what I said but I’ve changed my mind.’

  ‘Then let’s have a baby,’ he said, blowing out a breath as if everything was sorted. ‘If that’s the only issue, then it’s easily solved. We’ll have a baby and—’

  ‘No,’ Allegra said. ‘I’m not having a baby to prop up a marriage that isn’t working.’

  ‘What do you mean it isn’t working?’ His gaze was forceful. Direct. ‘Last time I looked, it was working just fine.’

  ‘It’s not working for me,’ Allegra said. ‘I’m not going to be second best, Draco. I want to come first. I deserve to be loved for who I am, not for what I can do. That was the script of my childhood; I don’t want to follow it in adulthood.’

  His expression returned to its inscrutable mask, all except for a pulse at the base of his throat that seemed to be working a little overtime. ‘Is this your final decision?’

  Allegra set her chin at a determined height, even though everything in her was slumping, collapsing in despair. Why wasn’t he saying it?

  Tell me you love me. Tell me you don’t want to lose me. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me.

  ‘Yes.’

  He gave a slow nod. ‘We obviously can’t get the marriage annulled.’

  ‘No…’

  ‘It will be embarrassing for both of us for a while,’ he said. ‘I won’t speak to the press and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t either.’

  ‘Of course.’ Why was he being so damn businesslike about it? So clinical and so composed, as if he wasn’t ripping her heart out of her chest with his bare hands. Didn’t that prove how little he cared? ‘Erm…do you want this back?’ Allegra touched the pendant around her neck. ‘And the rings?’

  ‘No. Keep them.’ Draco’s lips barely moved as he spoke, as if he resented the effort.

  Allegra swallowed a puffer fish of sadness, but by some miracle she stopped herself from tearing up. Her eyes remained dry and focussed on his. ‘I guess that’s it, then.’ She waved a hand towards the dining room. ‘You could stay for dinner but I expect you’d—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Right.’

  There was another silence so acute Allegra was sure she could hear her heart beating. Boom. Boom. Boom.

  ‘I’ll see myself out.’

  Allegra nodded, not sure she could take much more without showing the devastation she was feeling. Why wasn’t he putting up more of a fight? Why wasn’t he arguing his corner as he usually did? All he had to do was take her in his arms and show her what he found so difficult to say. Why was Draco walking away?

  Because he doesn’t love you.

  CHAPTER TEN

  DRACO WALKED OUT of Allegra’s house as if he was on autopilot. His emotions were in lockdown. Emotions he hadn’t known he had. He couldn’t think past the thought of her pulling the plug on their marriage. He’d been blindsided. Again. What sort of fool was he to have fallen for it? He’d thought it was going so well. Why was she doing this? Why now, after that wonderful week away together?

  All this talk of love… He hadn’t said those words to anyone since he’d said them to his ex. He had sworn he would never say them in a subsequent relationship, and he had never needed to, much less wanted to. But Allegra hadn’t said it, either. Somehow he had fooled himself into thinking she had, but then, he’d been wrong about that sort of thing before.

  It was the same as all those years ago…

  No. It was worse.

  Much worse.

  Back then, he’d been angry. Bitter. Furious.

  Now all he felt was…hurt. Pain like he’d only ever experienced twice before, while staring at a coffin containing his mother and then later his father.

  He had lost Allegra like he’d lost his parents. Without warning. Unexpectedly. They were there one minute and then they weren’t.

  Draco’s chest was so tight it felt as if he was having a medical event. His throat was so raw it felt as though he’d drunk battery acid and swallowed the gear stick. Sideways. He walked to his car and got inside, gripping the steering wheel while he pulled himself together. But his thoughts keep running like a ticker tape in his pounding head.

  Allegra wanted out.

  She wanted him out of her life.

  He was the one who was supposed to end things, not her. When he was good and ready. When it was time. She was supposed to be grateful he’d stepped in and saved her father’s business and saved her from being blackmailed into bed by some sleazy creep.

  Draco started the engine and backed out of the space. He had to get a handle on this. He couldn’t allow someone to destroy him. Not like this. Not emotionally. He didn’t do emotion. Or at least not emotion like this—the sort of emotion that pulled at every organ in his body until he couldn’t draw a breath.

  Fine.

  He would get out of her life. What had he been thinking, trying to make a marriage between them work? Their relationship was doomed to fail a
nd he was a fool for thinking he could pull it off.

  All you had to do was say you loved her.

  Draco braked on the thought. He didn’t love Allegra. He hadn’t fallen in love since he was nineteen and he wasn’t going to do it now. He no longer had the ‘falling in love’ gene. Caring was his thing instead. He was damn good at it too. Look at the way Yanni was improving. Look at what he had done for Iona. Look at the way he provided for his staff all over the globe.

  If Allegra couldn’t settle for being cared about, then it was her problem, not his. So, he was alone again? He could deal with it. Would have to deal with it. He wasn’t going to pay lip service to a concept he no longer believed in.

  If he ever had.

  * * *

  Allegra wasn’t sure how the press found out about her break-up with Draco but the newsfeeds were running hot by the end of the weekend. There was speculation on who was to blame for the split and she felt uncomfortable that most people assumed it was Draco. It seemed a little unfair although, given his ‘playboy’ track record and her quiet nun-like existence, it was an easy assumption to make. But it didn’t sit well with her sense of justice.

  Her father called and threatened to disinherit her for acting as lawyer to Elena but she’d simply hung up on him and blocked his number.

  Emily called around to her house late on Sunday night with chocolates, wine and a shoulder to cry on. ‘Are you sure you’re doing the right thing, Allegra? I mean, it’s only been a couple of weeks. Lots of marriages hit rough spots in the early days.’

  ‘I had to leave him,’ Allegra said. ‘He doesn’t love me. It’s a deal breaker for me.’

  ‘But some men are hopeless at admitting to loving someone,’ Emily said. ‘They literally can’t say the words.’

  Allegra sighed. ‘I just can’t bring myself to stay in a relationship that isn’t equal. I love him. I think I probably always have. But he cares about me. That’s not good enough. I want him to love me like I love him.’

  Emily snapped off a big chunk of fruit and nut chocolate, ignoring the wine she had poured earlier. ‘I don’t know… I can’t help feeling you’re making a big mistake. But who am I to talk?’

  ‘So, still no word from Loukas?’

  Emily’s shoulders drooped. ‘Nope.’ She eyed the chocolate in her hand for a moment then made a funny gurgling noise and dropped the chocolate to cover her mouth with her hand, her face draining of colour, as though someone had tapped the blood out of her body.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  Emily bolted out of the sitting room to the nearest bathroom. Allegra followed close behind and heard her being wretchedly sick. She pushed open the door and came over to where Emily was kneeling in front of the toilet. ‘Oh, you poor darling.’ She reached for a face cloth and rinsed it under the tap. ‘You must have caught a bug or something.’

  Emily buried her face in the cloth. ‘Yeah, or something…’ She came out from behind the face cloth and grimaced. ‘You think you’ve got problems. Wait till you hear mine.’

  Allegra frowned. ‘You’re not…?’

  ‘I haven’t done the test yet,’ Emily said. ‘I bought one—actually, I bought a couple—but I’m not game to do it. I keep hoping I’ll get my period. I’m never late. I’ve never been even a day late. You could set Big Ben by me normally.’ Her chin began to tremble. ‘What if I’m pregnant? What am I going to do?’

  ‘You’ll have to tell Loukas. I assume he’s the…?’

  ‘Yes…’

  ‘Are you going to keep—?’

  ‘Yes.’ Emily’s expression had a look about it of a lioness protecting its cub. She even placed her hand over her flat abdomen. ‘Of course I’m keeping it.’

  ‘You’ll have to tell Loukas.’

  Emily scraped her hair back off her face. ‘Yeah, really looking forward to that.’ She gave a rueful twist of her mouth. ‘You and I are a pair, aren’t we?’

  Tell me about it.

  * * *

  A few days later, Draco received a package in the post of Allegra’s rings and the pendant he’d given her. There was a short handwritten note expressing her concern that he was getting the blame for their break-up.

  But you are to blame.

  He freeze-framed the thought. The last few days had been some of the most miserable of his existence. It was like reliving the grief of losing his mother and father. The unexpectedness of it. The blunt shock. The how the hell do I cope with this? The pointless ‘what if?’s and ‘what could I have done to prevent this from happening?’.

  Draco couldn’t stay in his house with those gifts staring at him. They were the symbols of his failure. He walked out to the street but everywhere he looked he was reminded of what he had lost. Couples were walking hand in hand along the river. Families were picnicking on the lush grass, children playing and laughing in the summer sunshine. He saw a young father scoop a giggling toddler off the grass and hold her against him with a proud smile at her cuteness. His young pregnant wife came over and slipped her arm through her partner’s, and beamed up at him with such affection it made Draco’s chest tighten.

  This was what Allegra wanted. Connection. Love. A family.

  Didn’t he want it too? Deep, deep inside was a locked compartment of his personality that secretly ached for what that young couple had. His parents had had it but it had been snatched away with his mother’s early death. His father had done his best—more than his best—to provide a happy family life, but the threat of loss had hung over Draco and his father, until finally it delivered its felling blow.

  Draco had shied away from loving people since because he always lost them. His mother, his father, his ex. Even his boss and mentor Josef had died soon after selling him the business. He had closed off his heart to protect himself from further loss, yet, by doing so, he had lost the person most important to him.

  He had lost Allegra.

  But, unlike with his mother and father, Draco could fix this.

  He loved her.

  Really loved her. Not just cared about her. But loved her with every cell of his being. Why else had he all but frogmarched her into marriage? He had married her before anyone else could because he loved her too much to see her suffer with a man who wouldn’t respect and treasure her the way he would. His streak of protectiveness was a cover-up for love.

  Everything he felt about her was real. Real love. Love that lived, breathed and blossomed for a lifetime. The sort of love he’d been too frightened to own because he didn’t want to lose it. Like he had lost it when his gold-digger girlfriend had decided she wanted someone richer than him. But what he’d felt for that girl was nothing to what he felt for Allegra. He had blocked his feelings for so long, but they were seeping through the armour around his heart until it was all but bursting out of his chest.

  It was time to fess up and win back the girl of his dreams. The love of his life.

  Yes, that was exactly was what Allegra was—his life.

  * * *

  Allegra got home late after a mediation meeting ran over time and still the husband refused to settle. She thought longingly of that week, sailing around the Greek islands with Draco, when dirty divorces were the last thing on her mind. Not a minute went past without her thinking of him, wondering how soon he would find someone else once their marriage was formally over. She could have drawn up the papers herself, or got one of her colleagues to do it, but her heart wasn’t in it. She would leave it to him to sort out. He was the one who’d wanted the marriage in the first place. It was his mess to undo.

  She had only just got inside and slipped off her coat and heels when the doorbell rang. Something about how the bell rang made her pulse pick up its pace. Emily did a quick ‘one-two’ buzz. Her neighbour on the left held it down for three counts and the neighbour on the right used the brass door-knocker
instead.

  This sounded…urgent. Insistent. ‘I’m not going away until you answer’ insistent.

  Allegra peered through the peephole and her heart did a backflip as good as any Olympic gymnast. She opened the door with a hand that felt more like an empty glove than a hand. ‘Draco…’

  ‘May I come in?’

  She held open the door. ‘Of course.’ Allegra closed the door and turned to face him. ‘Did you get the package with…? Oh, you’ve brought it with you.’

  Draco placed the package on the hall table and turned to face her again. ‘You didn’t actually say you loved me the other day.’

  Allegra licked her suddenly dry lips. ‘I… No. I didn’t see the point since—’

  ‘Then let me be the first to say it.’ He took her by the upper arms in a gentle grip, his dark, lustrous eyes meshing with hers. ‘I love you.’

  For a moment she just looked at him, completely stunned. She had longed to hear those words for so long and now she’d heard them she was too overcome with emotion to speak. She gazed into his eyes, her heart thumping so erratically, as if it was looking for an exit route out of her chest. ‘You’re not just saying it to get me to come back to you?’

  His hands tightened as if he was worried she was going to slip out of his grasp. ‘I’m saying it because it’s true. I love you so much it, scared me to admit it. I’ve been a fool, Allegra. A stubborn, block-headed fool. Can you ever forgive me for putting you through the last few days? If you’ve felt even a quarter of the despair I’ve felt then I deserve to be horsewhipped.’

  She touched his face, not sure if this was really happening.

  He loved her. Draco loved her.

  ‘I love you too. I think I may have done so since I was sixteen. But it’s grown from a silly crush to love of such depth and intensity, I can hardly describe it. I just know I feel it and I can’t imagine ever not feeling it.’