by Kim Lawrence
“Anyone would think you didn’t want me to move in with you, yineka mou,” Angolos drawled.
Anyone would be right. Her body grew rigid as the full import of his comment penetrated. “Move in?” Georgette echoed sharply.
“I think we should start as we mean to go on. We did agree that this is to be a marriage in every sense of the word.”
“That would be sensible…the starting as you mean to go on bit, I mean,” she agreed cautiously. “But unfortunately my flat is tiny—one bedroom.”
“Cosy,” he replied. “I’ll see you in the bedroom….”
Harlequin Presents®
They’re the men who have everything—except brides…
Wealth, power, charm—what else could a handsome tycoon need? In the GREEK TYCOONS miniseries readers have already met some gorgeous Greek multimillionaires who are in need of wives.
Now meet the wealthy, attractive and very arrogant Angolos Constantine in Kim Lawrence’s Pregnant by the Greek Tycoon
This tycoon thought he could never be a father, now he must swallow his pride and try to win back the mother of his child!
Coming in October:
The Greek’s Ultimate Revenge
by Julia James
#2497
Kim Lawrence
PREGNANT BY THE GREEK TYCOON
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
‘OF COURSE I knew it would never last.’
The words brought Georgie to an abrupt halt as she was dragged back four years in time without warning.
For most people it had been the summer of the heatwave, when cold, damp Britain had basked in tropical temperatures. For Georgie it had been the summer her life had changed.
She had been just twenty-one then, a fairly typical student enjoying the summer break before returning to college for her final year. Her only plans had revolved around the teaching career she’d wanted and the car she’d been saving up to buy.
The previous term she had been stopped in the street by a clipboard-wielding woman doing a survey for a television programme.
‘Do you believe in marriage?’
‘I don’t disbelieve in it.’
‘So you would get married?’ the interviewer pressed.
‘Me…? Oh, I’m far too young to be even thinking about it.’ Georgie laughed. ‘I want to have some fun before I settle down.’
Barely three months later she had been exchanging vows with a man she had known less than a month.
And yes, her grandmother had told her it would never last, but this had hardly put her in an exclusive category! It would have been hard to find someone who had thought the marriage was a good idea!
Georgie, floating several feet off the ground, had smiled serenely through the lectures and totally ignored the predictions of disaster. If anything the opposition had stiffened her resolve, made it seem somehow more romantic to her.
Her lips twisted in a self-derisive grimace as she recalled the idyllic future she had seen stretching ahead of her.
‘Mummy…!’
Georgie pushed aside the memories crowding in on her and turned to the little boy who was holding up some treasure in his chubby hand for her to admire. Long, curling lashes as black as the glossy curls that covered his head lifted from his rosy cheeks as he raised his cherubic, smiling face to hers.
Not everything that had come from her ill-judged marriage had been negative. She had Nicky; she had her baby. Not that he was such a baby any longer, she thought ruefully as she made the appropriate admiring noises.
As Nicky went back to his game—he really was an extraordinarily contented, sunny child—Georgie banged the sandals she was carrying loudly against the wrought-iron table set on the patio.
It didn’t have the desired effect. Too engrossed in their conversation, the women inside remained oblivious to her presence.
This is just what I need! A front-row seat to the dissection of the marriage from hell. Georgie could have saved them the bother; bad idea about summed it up.
‘Were they together long?’ Georgie recognised the distinctive Yorkshire accent of Ruth Simmons, a retired headmistress and keen bird-watcher who had rented the cottage next door to theirs for the summer.
‘Six months.’
The way her grandmother said it made it sound like a jail sentence.
‘Do you think there’s any possibility of reconciliation?’ the other woman probed. ‘Perhaps if they had given it more time…tried a little harder…?’
‘Tried harder…what would be the point?’
Georgie leaned her forehead against the frame of the door and absently rubbed a flake of peeling paint with her thumb. She was rarely in tune with her grandmother, but on this occasion she agreed totally with the older woman’s reading of the situation. She could have spent half her life trying to be what Angolos wanted and she wouldn’t have succeeded.
In the end, however, the choice to call it quits had not been hers.
Angolos had ended it. He had done so with brutal efficiency, but then, she reflected, Angolos didn’t like to leave loose ends, and he was not sentimental.
‘They could,’ she heard her grandmother, Ann, reveal authoritatively, ‘have tried until doomsday and the result would have been the same.’
‘But six months…poor Georgie…’
The genuine sadness in the other woman’s voice brought a lump of emotion to Georgie’s throat. There hadn’t been much sympathy going begging when she had swallowed her pride and turned up on her dad’s doorstep. Plenty of, ‘I told you so,’ and a truck-load of, ‘You’ve made your own bed,’ but sympathy had been thin on the ground.
‘With those two, it was never a matter of if, just when they would split up. When he got bored or when she woke up to the fact they came from different worlds. Far better that they cut their losses. He was only ever playing.’
It had felt pretty real to her at the time, but maybe Gran was right. Were you playing, Angolos? Sometimes she just wished she could have him in the same room for five minutes so that she could make him tell her why. Why had he done what he did?
‘By all accounts his first wife led him quite a dance…beautiful, spirited, fiery…apparently she could have had a successful career as a concert pianist if she had dedicated as much energy to that as she did partying.
‘In my opinion after the divorce he was looking for a new wife who could give him a quiet life…unfortunately he picked Georgie. Inevitably the novelty wore off when he got bored with quiet and biddable.’
It was not an ego-enhancing experience to hear yourself described as what was basically a doormat. Sadly Georgie couldn’t dispute the analysis. She had been pathetically eager to please, and it was awfully hard to relax and be yourself around someone you worshipped, and she had worshipped Angolos.
‘I think you’re doing Georgie an injustice,’ Ruth protested. ‘She’s a bright, intelligent girl.’
Georgie leaned her shoulders against the wall, smiling to herself. Thank you, Ruth.
‘Of course she is, but…look, let me show you this.’
Georgie could hear the sound of rustling and knew immediately what her grandmother was doing.
‘This was in last week’s Sunday supplement. That is Angolos Constantine.’
&n
bsp; Georgie knew what the other woman was being shown; she had seen the magazine before her grandmother had hidden it under the cushions on the sofa. A double-page glossy picture showing Angolos stepping out of a chauffeur-driven car onto the red carpet of a film première. At his side was Sonia, his glamorous ex-wife. Were they back together…? Good luck to them, Georgie thought viciously. They deserved one another.
‘Oh, my…!’ she heard the older woman gasp. ‘He really is quite…yes, very…! They do say opposites attract…’ she tacked on weakly.
Nice try, Ruth, thought Georgie.
‘There are opposites, and then there is Angolos Constantine and my granddaughter.’
Georgie’s lips curved in a wry smile. You could always rely on her grandmother to introduce a touch of realism.
‘It was always an absurd idea. She was never going to fit into his world, and they had nothing in common whatsoever except possibly…’ Ann Kemp lowered her voice to a confidential whisper. It had a carrying quality that only someone who was a leading light of amateur dramatics could achieve.
‘Sex! Or love, as my granddaughter preferred to call it. Personally I blame it all on those romances she read in her teens,’ she confided.
‘I’m partial to a good romance myself,’ the other woman inserted mildly.
‘Yes, but you’re not a foolish, impressionable young girl who expects a knight in shining armour to come riding to the rescue.’
‘Young, no, but I haven’t totally given up hope.’
Georgie missed the dry retort.
A distracted expression stole over her soft features as she rubbed her bare upper arms, which, despite the heat, had broken out in a rash of goose bumps. Low in her pelvis the muscles tightened. She blinked hard to banish the image that had flashed into her head, but like the man it involved it didn’t respond to her wishes, or even, she thought, her soft mouth hardening, her entreaties.
In the end, bewildered and scared, she had lost all dignity and begged him to reconsider. He couldn’t want her to go away. They were happy; they were going to have a baby. ‘Tell me what’s wrong,’ she had pleaded.
Angolos had not said anything, he’d just looked down at her, his midnight eyes as hard as diamonds.
Strange how one decision could alter the course of your life.
In her case, if she hadn’t caved in to her stepbrother’s nagging and taken him down to the beach, when she had actually planned to curl up in an armchair and finish the last chapter in her book, she would never have met Angolos. Not that there was any point speculating about what might have been.
You just had to live with what was, and Georgie thought in all modesty that she wasn’t making such a bad job of it. She had good career, rented her own flat, a gorgeous son. A single friend had remarked recently that she didn’t know how Georgie managed to cope being a single parent with a young child and a full-time, demanding job.
‘I couldn’t imagine my life without Nicky; he’s the reason I do cope,’ Georgie explained. It was true—not that her friend had believed a word of it.
The fact there was no man in her life was a matter of choice. Not that she had ruled out the possibility of meeting someone; she just couldn’t imagine it.
Sometimes she tried to. She tried to imagine another man touching her the way Angolos had. She did now, and it was a mistake. Her nerve endings started to ache as she thought of his long, cool fingers on her skin.
Angolos had made her ache a lot.
When she wasn’t thinking about Angolos’s ability to make her ache, she occasionally wondered what sort of person she might have been if she had never met him. Would she still be as naïve and trusting as she had been that summer?
Such speculation was pointless, because she had met him, and every detail of that fateful occasion, the moment she had laid eyes on Angolos Constantine, the moment her life had changed for ever, was burnt into her brain.
She had been sitting on a blanket, one eye on the paperback she had been trying to finish and the other on her stepbrother, who had been playing with a group of boys farther down the beach. His shoes had been the first thing she had seen, shiny, hand-tooled leather, and then the exquisitely tailored legs of his dark trousers, expensive, tasteful, and wildly inappropriate for a beach.
She’d just had to see who would be stupid enough to venture onto the beach in a get-up like that! Georgie had lifted a hand to shade her eyes, squinting against the sun as her glance had travelled upwards.
Oh, my goodness…!
The owner of the shoes had had long legs, very long legs; the rest of him had been a lot better than OK too. In fact, if you went for lean and hard—and what woman wouldn’t, given half the chance?—he was as close to perfect as damn it.
By the time she had reached his face the last shreds of amused mockery had vanished from her amber eyes—the eyes he had professed to love—and she had been smitten and had stayed that way until the day he had told her he wanted her to go away.
‘Go away…?’ Uneasy, but sure this was all a silly mistake, she had asked, ‘How long for?’
‘For ever,’ he had replied and walked away.
But on that first summer’s afternoon there had been no hint of the casual cruelty he was capable of. She had been totally overwhelmed and too inexperienced to hide it as she’d stared back into those dark eyes shaded by preposterously long lashes that had thrown a shadow across the prominent angle of his chiselled cheekbones.
Those seductive, velvety depths had held a cynical world-weariness that her impressionable self had found fascinating, but then she’d found everything about him fascinating, she reflected grimly, from his sable-smooth hair to the mobile curve of his sensual lips.
Tall and lean, darkly arresting, his olive-skinned face an arrangement of strong angles and fascinating bone structure, he was the essence of male beauty.
‘Hello,’ he said, flashing her a seriously gorgeous smile. Like his appearance his voice with its faint accent marked this most rampantly male of males out as fascinatingly different.
She was hot, her face was sticky, her skin was glossed with a film of sweat and the salty dampness had gathered in the valley between her breasts. The jacket casually slung over one shoulder was the only concession this stranger made to the heat, which appeared not to affect him.
She lifted a self-conscious hand to her hair and discovered it was full of salt from an earlier dip in the sea. She wanted desperately to be cool and say something intelligent but all she could manage was a breathless, ‘Hello.’ Her heart was beating so fast she could barely hear her own voice.
She knew she was staring, but she couldn’t help it. She simply couldn’t tear her eyes off this incredible man. Men like this did not walk down the beach of an old-fashioned family resort… She hadn’t actually believed they existed outside the pages of popular fiction!
Did wondering what a total stranger looked like naked make her depraved? This had never happened to her before; maybe it was the weather? Hadn’t she read somewhere that heat had an effect on the libido? But her libido had never given her any problems; in fact she had occasionally wondered if it wasn’t a little underdeveloped.
‘I’m not familiar with the area.’
‘I know…’
One darkly defined brow lifted and she rushed on in hot-faced explanation.
‘This is a small place and strangers…well, they stand out.’ In the most fashionable and glamorous watering holes on the planet he would have stood out! She couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to walk into a room and have heads turn and conversations stop. What would he feel like?
She lowered her gaze. Stop this, Georgie!
‘Then you live here?’
He’s talking to me. This incredible man is actually talking to me. What did he say…?
‘Sorry?’
‘Do you live locally?’
‘Yes…no.’
The creases around his stupendous eyes deepened. ‘Which?’
Oh, no, he w
as going to go back to whatever planet he came from—clearly he was too gorgeous to be earthbound—and laugh about the mentally challenged locals. She made a supreme effort to act as though her IQ reached double figures.
‘We spend the summer holidays here. My…’ Her eyelashes lowered, as she repressed the embarrassing impulse to give him her life story. Even if that life could be summed up in a paragraph, his stupendous eyes would have glazed over with boredom before she got to the end.
One noteworthy thing had happened in her life and she didn’t even remember it! She had been a baby when her mother had run away with a Greek waiter. Since then her deserted father had refused to travel abroad, hence the house here where she had spent every summer she could remember, firstly with just her father and grandmother, latterly with her stepmother and stepbrother.
‘But you know the area well? You know all the places to go?’
‘Places to go…?’ Her puzzled expression cleared. ‘I suppose I do.’ She was delighted to be able to be of use to this most amazing man. ‘Well, actually, it depends,’ she told him seriously.
‘On what?’
‘If you have a head for heights.’
‘I do.’
‘Not me,’ she admitted regretfully. ‘The headland walk along the nature reserve is apparently marvellous, but if you prefer something a little gentler the trail across the marsh is very well marked and there are hides where you can… Are you interested in birds?’ The area drew a lot of people who were; they arrived with their binoculars in their droves. ‘It’s not the breeding season, but there are still some—’
‘I am not a bird-watcher; I prefer more…active pursuits.’
Now that he said it she had no problem seeing him fitting into the mould of those tough, reckless individuals who indulged in extreme sports… Extreme as in those extremely likely to result in injury or worse!