Crowned for the Drakon Legacy

by Tara Pammi

  Gut twisting, Mia tried to ward off the panic flooding through her veins. A relationship with Nikandros was the last thing she needed in her life.

  * * *

  So why wasn’t he running?

  Nikandros ran a hand though his hair, staring as color fled Mia’s honeyed skin.

  Why was he thinking of marriage when there were a hundred things already muddying their relationship? Was he being driven yet again by his impulses?

  No answer came forward.

  Except that he still wanted her. Beyond madness. Still. Again. As if wanting Mia was a part of his own makeup now.

  And she wanted him, for all her protests. Nothing could hide the darkening pupils nor her stuttering breath every time he ventured close.

  He’d looked up old girlfriends in Drakon just as an exercise and had felt nothing. Yet, even snarling at each other with Mia was more exciting than anything he’d felt in a long time.

  Her eyes wide, her mouth trembling, she looked at him as if he were the only man in the world for her. As if she wanted nothing but for him to kiss her again.

  He wanted to kiss the confusion away from her mouth, he wanted to forget the world outside—forget Andreas and Theos and bloody Drakon and lose himself in her again, to find that peace that had settled over him when he’d held her.

  To chase that inexplicable connection he’d found with her.

  This fiery need between them, it should’ve been a red flag even that night. They’d come together like an explosion that first time.

  So he’d indulged, again and again. He’d pushed them both to the edge, desperate to lose himself, desperate to fix the emptiness he couldn’t seem to outrun.

  The consequences—nothing good had ever come from Nikandros indulging his emotions like that. Nothing but destruction came of him weakening and giving in to his impulses.

  “Nik, listen to me. As long as we keep your...role in this quiet for now, I’ll be fine. Once the baby comes and the furor has calmed down, we can discuss visitation rights. I’m glad you think the child’s well-being is important.”

  “My role in this?” he taunted, his ire rising.

  “I...will never come forward at a later time and demand anything. You cannot expect me to uproot my life and stay in Drakon while you continue...your reckless playboy lifestyle.”

  “You will have time to state your requirements of this marriage, as I shall tell you mine. There’s no other choice but to make it work. My child will not be born a bastard.”

  The blood drained from her face, leaving the honey gold of her skin washed out. “What?”

  “Whether now or years later, it will out that it is mine. If it’s not your doctor, it will be your best friend. Or your landlord. Already, there has been a leak, yes? And the world will call it another bastard from the House of Drakos. The media will hound it for the rest of its life.

  “That is not acceptable. This child will be born in wedlock and inherit everything that is rightfully his or hers.”

  “You’ve lost your mind.”

  The more her panic rose, and she stood straight and stiff like a glass pane about to break, the more Nikandros’s own resolve solidified. The restlessness that had clawed at him all these months, was this the answer?

  He’d realized the daredevil lifestyle had begun to lose its glitter.

  Was it time for a new direction in his life?

  An attraction that defied all the usual conventions and a child on the way—was it enough to make a marriage?

  It had to be. For he could never walk away from his own child. And this was not an impulse. Or a challenge. This was the only rational way forward. For both of them.

  “No, I’ve never actually been this lucid before. We will marry as soon as possible.”

  Mia kept shaking her head and moving away from him, as if physical distance could push him out. “For one thing, I never want to marry again, and even if I did for some life-changing reason, I wouldn’t marry a man like you.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” he bit out, forgetting his every tenet to keep this civil.

  “You’re not the sort of man a woman wants to tie herself to in marriage, Nikandros. Your dangerous career, your death-defying stunts...your reputation with women—constancy and stability are not in your dictionary.

  “I will not spend the rest of my life with a man like you.”

  This was the price of his obsession. The price of going too far. Of all the women in the world, it had to be his friend’s ex, the one woman he should have kept away from, who was going to be his child’s mother.

  It was as if he’d gone for the worst sort of woman for him and invited her into his life. Damn it, why couldn’t he just walk away? Why couldn’t he make an arrangement like his father had done with his sister, Eleni?

  To this day, Nikandros did not know what had attracted him to her that day on the field. But instead of pulling out that splinter, he had fed his obsession, let it dig deep into him for so long that he had no memory of a day when he hadn’t wanted Mia.

  She was a jagged thorn nestled far under his skin. A conquest he couldn’t quite conquer. “This from the woman who looked me in the eye and told me to take her without question...”

  Mia looked away, images of their moon-kissed bare limbs tangled in the sheets drenching her. Even now, when she could feel those shackles that terrified her pulling her to him, she couldn’t regret her actions that night.

  But letting Nikandros into her life—Nikandros, who pursued thrill after death-defying thrill as if his sanity depended on it; Nikandros, who walked away from his family in pursuit of that lifestyle—it would break her like nothing before.

  Didn’t he see that they would only bring out the worst in each other? That, in a few years, he’d resent her at best and hate her at worst?

  She hardened her tone, despising him even more for what he was forcing her to say. “I, clearly, needed sex and you...you provided it.”

  Arctic frost would have nothing on the coldness of his blue eyes. “So all you needed was a stud? Any man would have done?”

  “Maybe, I don’t know.” She brazened it out past the hard lump in her throat. “What I know is you... You’re the most gorgeous, the most compelling man I’ve ever met. You taught me more about my body than I ever knew... But you’re not marriage material, Nikandros.

  “A mere two weeks after your accident at your latest stunt—scaling that mountain peak—you went back to that crazy lifestyle again.

  “When you were in Drakon, I waited and watched, like the entire world did, to see what you’d do. If you’d settle down. If you’d own up to your duty...

  “Not once did you tell the media that you’d stand by your brother now.

  “You walk away from responsibility in your life. You risk your life again and again. And you want me to trust that you’re interested in being a husband all of a sudden, that this child is not a novelty?

  “I won’t be locked in another marriage, with a man even worse than Brian.”

  “And the child? Have you decided that it doesn’t need a father, either?”

  “It definitely doesn’t need a father who chases death-defying thrills as if it were an addiction. It does not need a father who’s only going to break his or her heart in the end.

  “Let’s face it, Nikandros, you’re no more equipped to be a father and a husband than you are to become the Prince that Drakon needs.”

  Tall and proud, his eyes flinty with a hardness she’d never seen in him, Nikandros stared at her. The seconds ticking by made the hair stand on her nape.

  “I never planned to marry either. I never envisaged a marriage to a wife who’ll remind me every day that she drove my friend to near madness, a wife who’ll treat the father of her unborn child with little respect, as if he were nothing but a sperm donor.

  “Not in a hundred years would I have chosen that life—filled with mistrust and contempt. Christos, I walked away from that life and made something of myself. But
see, there is one thing where you went wrong in your estimation of my character, Mia.

  “I have never walked away from the consequences of my actions. Neither will I now.”

  Fear rippled down Mia’s spine. “You can’t force me to go with you.”

  He opened the door and beckoned someone inside.

  It was the short, squat man Mia had seen hovering around Nikandros’s penthouse. The man looked at Mia and Nikandros, back and forth, as if he could sense the chill in the room despite the sweat beading on his bald head.

  “Your Highness, the Crown Prince has—”

  Nikandros interrupted the man without even looking at him. “On my signal, Stavros here will tell the press that the child you carry is mine. One word that you hooked up with your late husband’s best friend and the press will hound you. Every wrong Brian committed against you will be forgotten when they learn that you shacked up with me and are now carrying my child.”

  “You’re bluffing,” Mia croaked, despite the icy chill in Nikandros’s words. He looked like he was carved from the very mountains his country seemed to be full of. No cocky smile lingered around his mouth. No twinkle softened the coldness of his eyes. “You aren’t that ruthless, to serve me up to them. That’s not the Nikandros I know.”

  “Oh, agapita, but we’ve already established that you do not know me.

  “I’ve been that ruthless once before. And even then, I surprised myself with how cruel I could be. Much as I delude myself that it’s not in me, it seems that vein of cruelty is in my blood.” A wary resignation entered his eyes as he reached the door. “I’m a member of the House of Drakos—bloodthirsty warriors who’d tamed a dragon and made its riches their own. We’re a covetous, cunning lot and we like to keep our dirty secrets within our family.

  “You either face the jackals for the biggest mistake we made in our lives, or you fly to Drakon with me in the lap of luxury. My limo will wait for five minutes.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SNOWCAPPED MOUNTAINS AND turquoise-blue oceans—Mia’s first sight of Drakon had been as exhilarating as it had been terrifying. Her fury with Nikandros for railroading her into coming to Drakon with him began to dissolve slowly as her mind churned.

  A thrill-seeker and adventurer by nature and profession, he seemed to have, relatively easily, accepted the change in direction of his life. If she hadn’t had her own hang-ups about him, if their history wasn’t all twisted with Brian in between them, would she have fought so dirty?

  Dear God, she’d pretty much told him he was good for sex and nothing else.

  Every time she’d tried to talk to him on the long flight, he’d frozen her out.

  Regret that she’d been too harsh circled her insidiously.

  Welcome to your new home, he’d declared in that arrogant voice of his, his eyes shaded by the wraparounds, before seeing her into a dark-tinted limo and walking away.

  He’d washed his hands of her that easily.

  It was exactly the kind of relationship she’d never wanted again—full of mistrust and anger. If Nikandros thought a child would be happy growing up in such an environment, he was utterly wrong.

  From the private airfield, she’d been driven to the King’s Palace in the tinted limo, showed into the Grand Apartments by staff that wouldn’t even meet her eyes. And left there to stew in her own anger and confusion.

  That was five days ago and she hadn’t heard a word from Nikandros again.

  Sick of sitting on her hands waiting for Nik to show up, she’d taken to swimming in the pool in the inner courtyard, complete with a gazebo and high walls, and then walking through the gallery featuring frescoes painted as far back as the sixteenth century.

  This was temporary, she kept reminding herself. Nikandros would realize what a crimp she and a baby would put in his lifestyle and let her go.

  By the time the invite had arrived for lunch with the Prince, she’d lost all the guilt and the anger was back.

  If this was his idea of playing happy family, she was going to give him a battle unlike anything he’d ever seen.

  She pulled a round brush through her still-damp hair and left it loose around her shoulders. Dressed in black trousers and a light pink sleeveless blouse that she wore under a white jacket—she had neither better clothes nor the inclination to dress up in deference to the damned royal who had, for all intents and purposes, kidnapped her—she walked into the huge dining room.

  Instantly, she felt underdressed, overwhelmed by the gold grandeur of the room.

  A large oval table that could seat at least twenty stretched the length of the vast room, covered in a cream tablecloth and gleaming silver cutlery. Stained glass on high windows left the room in bright swatches of colorful light. Pink Carrara marble gleamed at her feet while gold-framed portraits hung over the walls.

  Ostentatious and old-world, the room was aeons away from the adventurous, compelling man that had blown into her life like a hurricane. Nikandros no more belonged here than she, came the startling thought. In all the years, she’d never known him to be pretentious or...

  No! He’d made it undeniably clear that she knew him not at all.

  It took Mia a few seconds to corral her senses after the sheer magnificence of the room, and for her eyes to rest on the dark-haired figure standing near a side table gleaming with crystal decanters. Watching her silently.

  She’d seen him in the pictures of late, though she would have recognized the square-jawed, high cheekboned face dripping with the kind of arrogance and power that was bred into his blood itself.

  Crown Prince Andreas Drakos.

  As ruthlessly conventional and devoted to Drakon, they said, as his brother was wild and reckless. And he looked like he utterly belonged in the room.

  “Mrs. Morgan, thank you for accepting my invitation.”

  His address was to remind her who she’d been. She instantly disliked him. He seemed like the starchy, uptight kind of man she’d always imagined royalty to be. Puffed up with his own importance, even.

  Only the dawning realization that this palace and this family would be part of her child’s heritage kept her standing there. Damn it, where the hell was Nik?

  “Little choice when you purposely misled me, Your Highness,” she calmly replied.

  The Crown Prince didn’t blink at her retort. Without asking her, he poured her sparkling water. Which told Mia he knew.

  Taking a sip, she willed her nerves to calm down at his unblinking regard. Standing next to the powerful man in the lavishly ornate room, the surreality of her situation sank like a hard rock in her stomach.

  This would be her life if Nikandros had his way. She would sit here in a grandly lavish room like this one, somewhere in the palace, and wait for Nikandros to pull himself away from the thrills that filled his life, to remember that she existed.

  Powerless and waiting, her heart in her hands. For Nikandros made her weak unlike any other man she’d known.

  She needed to remember that he didn’t like her, either. That he believed she’d driven Brian away, that she was a woman who didn’t keep the vows she’d made.

  That he wanted this relationship even less than she did.

  The silence became stultifying as the Prince watched her. “I’m assuming the reason you invited me is not to just intimidate me with your presence, Your Highness.”

  Surprise glinted in the Prince’s eyes.

  Nikandros and his brother shared the same cut of features, and yet, there was the knowledge of having known deep joy, of happiness and anger and so many emotions lived, an uninhibited zest for life in Nik that was absent in this man’s face. As if he’d never quite learned how to live.

  “You have the grasp of the situation better than me, Mrs. Morgan,” he added, pulling her chair for her. “Talking would be mutually beneficial.”

  He settled at the head of the table and signaled.

  Her appetite was already growing and the food was simply delicious. Mia calmly finished everything she
was served, and only then did she lift her gaze.

  Her first instinct was to thank him for the lunch and walk away. To block out all this noise until she had it out with Nikandros. But that would be a coward’s way out, running away and hiding. And she’d done more than enough of that in the last few years.

  “Let’s cut the polite chitchat. Nikandros brought me here and promptly disappeared. I would like to know to where.”

  “I did not expect that when I told him.”

  “You? You told him I was pregnant? How the hell would you even know?”

  “A security team always keeps Nikandros under their watchful eye. Which means all of his...liaisons and their subsequent activities are also monitored for a while.”

  He’d called her one of many on purpose. In contrast to this hard-faced man, Nikandros appeared quite favorable. “One would think you’d be too busy with matters of state for dirty spying into your brother’s affairs, Your Highness.”

  “Insult and deference in the same statement. You’re something, Mrs. Morgan. Did Nik ask for a DNA test?”

  Her head jerked up. The placidness of his expression didn’t slip one bit.

  Mia shook her head, only now realizing how easily Nikandros had taken her word.

  “My brother has a personal fortune upward of hundreds of millions, an adventure empire he’s built over the last decade and he’s the scion of the illustrious House of Drakos.” Pride reverberated in his words, against all impressions Mia had of an uncaring, almost-indifferent picture of him. “Quite a lot hinges on your claim, Mrs. Morgan.”

  “The child is his,” she said with steel in her voice. “No wonder Nikandros hated the very thought of returning here. You’re full of cheap tricks, Your Highness.” Their gazes held—his penetrating, hers steady. “Why don’t we make it easy? What the hell do you want with me?”

  “To ask the same question of you. What do you want from my brother?”

  “A one-way flight ticket out of his life.”

  “You’d leave Drakon if I arranged for it?” he taunted, a dangerous glint in his eyes. “With no other demand?”