Everything was going in the right direction. Now it was time to live her life again.
She just wished she didn’t feel so lonely.
She wished she didn’t still miss Giannis so much.
She still hadn’t found the courage to call him. They’d exchanged a few polite messages about her health and the baby but nothing more than that.
She feared hearing his voice. But she heard it in her dreams, every single night. She would reach out for him in her sleep, the tears spilling before she could stop them.
She never cried when she was awake.
Three days after taking possession of the manor and hiring a cleaning firm to come in and blitz the place—she might be a master cleaner but this was a job much too big for her—she decided to get out of the cleaning crew’s way and take a look in the attic. Maybe Emmaline had forgotten about the Brigstock stuff that had been stored up there for generations and had left it unharmed.
Checking her watch first—a specialist decorating firm was coming over later to give her a quote on redecorating the manor back to its original glory—she climbed the creaky narrow stairs that led to it and opened the hatch.
The attic covered the entire ceiling space. Tabitha remembered poking her head in it as a child and being frightened of the shadows.
What a scared little girl she had been to be frightened of shadows. No wonder her stepsisters had found her such an easy target to terrorise.
Judging from the dust that swirled in the air as she walked through it, no one had been in the attic in years, but she was cheered to find old furniture in there: a chesterfield sofa and armchair, a dressing table and wardrobe that would have been fashionable in the nineteenth century, a variety of ottomans amongst other smaller items and dozens and dozens of boxes.
A short while later, she opened the lid of another ottoman and found a nest of white lace. Her mother’s wedding dress and Tabitha’s christening outfit.
Hands shaking, she hugged the wedding dress to her chest and carried it to the full-length mirror carelessly left against one of the walls.
This was the dress her mother had worn the day she’d married her father, the day her father had once whispered had been the second-happiest of his life. The happiest had followed three years later when Tabitha had been born.
Suddenly she found her legs could hold her up no more and she sank onto the floor, tears flowing down her cheeks as if a dam had burst.
She would trade everything to have them back for just one day. One hour. One minute.
If they’d been there she would have had their comforting arms around her easing the pain of her broken heart.
Oh, she missed him. That so-called great healer called Time hadn’t healed anything. She missed Giannis’s smile, his laughter, his sardonic wit, his love-making, his tenderness. Everything. She missed everything. Her arms ached to hold him and touch him. She longed to see him—had to resist searching his name on her phone just as she had to resist speaking to him. She had never known pain like it and it tore at her then, in a way she’d fought letting it tear at her before, shredding her already broken heart.
Only when there was a loud bang on the attic hatch did she drag herself off the floor.
‘Miss Brigstock?’ came the voice of one of the cleaners. ‘You have a visitor.’
‘Tell him I’ll be down in a minute,’ she called back, hurriedly wiping her face. It must be the decorator.
She winced to see her reflection. Her face was puffy, her eyes red from crying.
So much for crying being cathartic. The first time she’d cried in over a fortnight and she felt worse than ever.
Neatly folding the dress back into the ottoman, she re-tied her loose ponytail, wiped the dust from her clothes and headed back down the narrow stairs.
Moving through to the drawing room where he would be waiting for her, she almost had a heart attack when she walked in and found Giannis sitting there stiffly on the window ledge.
Struck mute, she could only stare at him, heart thumping into immediate overdrive.
Their eyes connected and in that moment a wave of emotion so strong pulsed through her that she pressed her back to the wall to keep herself upright.
‘Hello, Tabitha.’
Just to hear her name fall from his lips was enough to make her veins dance and she crossed her arms tightly across her chest, grinding her feet to the floor, doing everything in her power to stop her treacherous body from flying over to fling herself at him.
She cleared her tight throat and forced herself to speak. ‘This is an unexpected surprise.’
But not a welcome one, Giannis suspected ruefully.
He stared at the beautiful face that had haunted his every waking moment for what felt like for ever and felt his heart rip.
She looked like she’d been crying.
‘What brings you here?’ She spoke politely but he heard the rawness in her voice.
‘I wanted to see you...see the home you grew up in. Is something the matter, matia mou?’
Her shoulders rose and, though she pulled a rueful face, she blinked numerous times, as if trying to hold back more tears. ‘I just found my mother’s wedding dress in the attic.’
She’d been in the attic? That explained the dust clinging to the slender frame that had thickened a touch in the seventeen days since he’d last seen her.
Chin wobbling, she pulled at her ponytail. ‘Can I get you a drink? I don’t have any alcohol but I’ve got tea and coffee.’
‘No, thank you.’
‘A tour of the house?’ She didn’t wait for a response, springing away from the door and heading straight out of the room.
Without ceremony she guided him quickly through the many rooms of the sprawling manor house. He didn’t need to close his eyes to imagine Tabitha as a small child running happily through the spacious rooms, her happiness coming to a crashing end when her father had married the stepmother from hell.
He didn’t make any comment until she opened a door on the first floor and muttered, ‘This was Fiona’s room.’ Then she muttered something under her breath and stepped inside it to snatch something from under the bed.
She held the photograph up with a frown. ‘I can add this to the bonfire.’
He looked at the three faces staring into the camera’s lens and shuddered. All three were pretty—beautiful, even—and immaculately made up but their eyes were empty.
‘Your stepfamily make the witches of Macbeth look like angels,’ he quipped, trying to break the tension radiating from her. He hadn’t come here to distress her.
She gave a bark of laughter and wiped a stray tear from her cheek as she walked out of the room. ‘The witches of Macbeth would have been easier to live with,’ she said over her shoulder but before she could walk away he put his hand on her shoulder.
It was an instinctive action that came from a hand that had yearned to touch her from the moment she had stepped into the drawing room.
‘I’m proud of you,’ he said in a low voice, dropping his hand to hang uselessly by his side. ‘You defeated the witches. I hope you can be happy now.’
Her rigid torso didn’t move. ‘I couldn’t have done it without your help.’
‘You would have. Everything my investigators discovered, you would have found out for yourself in your own time.’
He could hear her breathing.
Long moments passed before she rolled her shoulders and turned to face him.
‘You should go,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ve got decorators coming over to give me a quote and a hundred other things I need to be getting on with.’
She gave him no time to answer, walking away from him to the end of the corridor and disappearing from his view down the ancient cantilevered stairs.
Throat closed, he followed her until he stood at the top of the stairs and s
he was taking the final step at the bottom.
‘I fell in love with you when I saw you walking the stairs of my palace hotel,’ he called to her.
Her foot hovered mid-air, hand tightening on the banister.
‘You enchanted me from that first glance. When I found you gone the next morning... I spent weeks trying to find you.’
Slowly she turned to look up at him, her expression disbelieving.
Putting one foot before the other, Giannis reached into his pocket and pulled out the one reminder she’d left of their night together until she’d walked back into his life.
When he reached her at the bottom of the stairs he held it out to her in his open hand without speaking.
Slowly she plucked the earring from him and stared at it.
Then shining cornflower eyes stared at him.
‘I have carried that with me every day since that night,’ he told her. ‘I could not forget you. I tried. God knows I tried, but you were with me all the time, in my head, in my heart... I could not forget you. It’s been the same since you left me but so much worse. You’re in my head, matia mou, under my skin and in my heart. I have missed you more than I thought it was possible to miss another.’
To Tabitha’s utter bewilderment, he sank down onto his knees before her and took her hand in his.
‘Since you left me I can’t breathe properly and I am here to ask you—to beg you—to please give me another chance.’
His words were like nectar to a starving, exhausted bee but Tabitha had been through too much, had wrung her heart out too much over him, to believe that the dream she had for them could come true.
She pulled her hand from his hold and stepped back. ‘I’m sorry, Giannis, I want to believe you...’
He closed his eyes. His throat moved a number of times. ‘You were right that I kept you at a distance. When I’m with you my feelings overwhelm me. I needed to keep control. I never lost control of my feelings with Anastasia but her infidelity still shattered me. What I felt for her... I won’t insult you by downplaying it but my feelings for her were nothing compared with what I feel for you. I’m not going to lie—they terrified me. I never called you when we were apart, not because I didn’t want to, but because I was trying to prove to myself that I didn’t need you. The truth is, every minute spent apart from you was spent missing you and needing you.’
Tabitha covered her mouth. She wanted to cover her ears too but the nectar coming from his mouth was too sweet to resist.
Her aching, broken heart yearned to believe him.
He rose back to his feet and closed the space she had created between them.
‘I spent our marriage trying to free myself from the spell you’d put me under, but I was a fool, because I couldn’t see that it wasn’t a spell of your creation but a spell binding us both.’ Giannis took both her rigid hands in his and pulled them to his chest so she could feel the aching thuds of his heart. ‘You felt it too, didn’t you?’
The shining eyes finally spilled into tears and she gave an almost imperceptible nod that gave him the strength to continue.
‘This heart beats only for you. You have my heart, my body and my soul. Without you I am nothing. I love you, matia mou, and if it takes me the rest of my life to make you believe that then that is how I will spend it. I am sorry for the pain I have caused you. I understand why you left me, and I swear on our child’s life that if you give me another chance I will be the husband you deserve, and the husband I should have been from the start if I’d only had the courage to believe what my heart was telling me.’
It felt as if the earth made a full rotation before her beautiful mouth parted.
‘I fell in love with you that night too,’ she whispered, a dreamy smile playing on her heart-shaped lips. ‘When I danced in your arms...it felt as if I’d been dropped into heaven. There were so many times when we were together when I felt that heaven again and being without you...’ She sighed and pressed herself closer to him. ‘I never wanted to leave you, Giannis. Being without you has been like living with a part of myself missing. You’re my life.’
Unable to hold himself back a moment longer, he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her trembling frame tightly to him. ‘I love you, Tabitha, with all that I am. Please come back to me.’
Her lips brushed against his throat then inched their way to his mouth. The kiss she bestowed on him was filled with such sweet tenderness that it spoke her answer for her.
Lifting her into his arms, Giannis carried his wife up the stairs to her bedroom where the passion that had always consumed them came alive once more. But this time it was for ever.
EPILOGUE
THERE WASN’T A cloud in the cobalt Santorini sky. The late-afternoon sun beamed down, its rays matching the rays bursting out of Tabitha’s heart.
Giannis’s sisters fussed with her hair and her dress. Helena, the fashion designer sister who’d made the alterations needed for the wedding dress to fit Tabitha’s post-baby frame, anxiously checked it every five seconds. Katarina, dressed in an identical bridesmaid’s dress to her sisters, rocked a fractious baby Elise in her arms, refusing to hand Elise back to Tabitha in case the three-month-old baby was sick on her dress. It was with much relief that Giannis’s mother, who was the designated babysitter for the day, returned from greeting the entire extended Basinas family, all squashed like sardines within the confines of the blue-topped church, snatched her newest grandchild into her arms and bustled back inside with her.
The only one of their small party stood on the steps of the church not nervous was Tabitha. She couldn’t wait to get in there.
A sharp elbow landed in her ribs. ‘Look,’ shouted Niki, laughing.
Tabitha followed her gaze and saw a small plane flying over them with her and Giannis’s names trailing behind it on a long banner.
She saw something else too that filled her heart with equal joy at this public declaration of her husband’s love. The moon had risen on this long summer’s day too, as if it had come out early to celebrate with them. She imagined her parents sat on it, watching her. She thought they would approve that this time, the time when the vows she was going to exchange meant everything, she was wearing the wedding dress that had belonged to Elise, her mother. And she thought they would approve of how she had given Brigstock Manor to the local authority to be turned into a children’s home.
She blew the moon a kiss, then stepped inside the church to renew her wedding vows to the man who had made her the happiest woman on earth.
* * *
If you enjoyed The Greek’s Pregnant Cinderella you’re sure to enjoy the first instalment in Michelle Smart’s Cinderella Seductions duet:
A Cinderella to Secure His Heir
available now!
And why not explore these other Michelle Smart stories?
Marriage Made in Blackmail
Billionaire’s Baby of Redemption
The Sicilian’s Bought Cinderella
Keep reading for an excerpt from His Two Royal Secrets by Caitlin Crews.
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His Two Royal Secrets
by Caitlin Crews
CHAPTER ONE
“THE ONLY THING that matters is the line,” Crown Prince Ares’s dark and intimidating father told him when he was little more than five.
At that age, Ares had no idea what his father meant. He didn’t know what line his father was referring to or what bearing it could possibly have on him anyway. At five, Ares had been primarily concerned with how many hours a day he could spend roaring about the palace grounds, out of sight of his nanny, who was forever trying to make him “act like a gentleman.”
But he had learned, already and painfully, never to question his father.
The king was always right. If the king was wrong, you were mistaken.
By the time he was ten, Prince Ares knew exactly what line his father was referring to, and was already sick to death of hearing about his own blood.
It was only blood. No one cared if he skinned his knee, but it was clearly very important that he listen to lectures about the purpose of that blood. Its dignity. Its import.
When it was still the same blood that welled up in any scrape Ares might get while doing things he shouldn’t around the palace. Things his old nanny liked to tell him were responsible for her gray hair.
“You do not matter,” his father would rant during Ares’s scheduled appointments with him. “You are merely a link in a noble chain, nothing more!”
The Greek's Pregnant Cinderella Page 17