by Abby Green
Maggie wished she felt calmer after the shock of seeing Nikos again...kissing him, him seeing the baby...but she didn’t. She still felt jittery. It had taken her ages to settle Daniel, because he’d obviously sensed her tension.
Nikos walked in. He looked grim. Maggie directed him to another door which led into a small sitting room. She closed the adjoining door to the bedroom and watched as Nikos prowled around the room like a magnificent caged animal. A panther.
He stopped at the bookshelves, his back to her, hair curling over the back of his jacket. He said, ‘You took your books with you.’
She hadn’t expected him to notice. Her gut clenched as she remembered that moment last year. ‘Yes. They come everywhere with me.’
He turned around. ‘Did you leave Kildare House because you were pregnant?’
Maggie shook her head. ‘I told you—it was never a long-term plan.’
Nikos gritted his jaw, making it pop. ‘How did you end up here, then?’
She swallowed. ‘I got to know Nessa Barbier from living in the area. When she heard I was leaving Kildare House she offered me a job here to tide me over...and shortly after I arrived I found out about...about the baby. She insisted I stay. They have a créche here, for the children of their staff. Nessa herself has two children. I worked in the kitchen under the head chef until a few weeks before I gave birth. Then she offered me a deal so I could keep doing some part-time work after the baby was born—they have staff here to mind him. Like this evening...’
Amidst the tension Maggie felt emotional, thinking of how supportive both Nessa and her husband had been. Unlike the man in front of her, who had never contacted her even though—
‘You’re saying the baby is mine?’
‘His name is Daniel, and, yes, he’s yours.’ The insulting assumption that he might be another man’s—that she would have so quickly jumped into bed with another man—hit Maggie anew.
‘I never planned on having children.’ Nikos said.
Why? Maggie pushed the question aside for now. ‘Well, you do have a child.’
‘If you’re so sure he’s my son then why didn’t you tell me before now? The moment you fell pregnant?’
The affront made Maggie’s spine rigid. She had agonised over whether or not to tell him—especially in light of her experiences with her own father—but ultimately she’d decided that she didn’t have the right not to tell him, even if that came with the risk of not knowing how he would respond.
‘I went to your offices in London—I even checked to see if you’d be there. You didn’t leave me a personal number to contact you.’
Nikos frowned. ‘I didn’t see you.’
‘No,’ Maggie said, feeling bitter and humiliated all over again. ‘Because I didn’t get further than your secretary on the top floor.’
‘When was this?’
‘When I was about six months pregnant. Last February.’
Nikos looked as if he was trying to figure something out. ‘What was the secretary’s name?’
‘Chantelle.’
Maggie would never forget her fake smile and patronising tone. She’d looked pointedly at Maggie’s distended belly and told her, ‘Oh, no, Mr Marchetti is far too busy to meet with you today, but I’ll be sure to pass on your note to him.’
Maggie said, ‘I wrote you a note.’ Like you left me a note. ‘She said she’d pass it on.’
‘Well, she didn’t.’
Maggie frowned. ‘But I saw you with her—I waited for a while outside your offices, hoping I might catch you leaving—’
She stopped there, recalling how it had felt to see Nikos emerge with the tall, blonde woman who had been everything Maggie hadn’t in that moment: slim, elegant, beautiful. Coiffed. They’d disappeared into the back of a sleek car before Maggie had been able to move towards them.
Nikos was shaking his head. ‘She didn’t give it to me.’
‘But...’ Maggie absorbed this. She sat down on the small two-seater couch behind her. ‘She told me she’d pass it on.’
Nikos unfolded his arms and paced back and forth. He stopped, funnelled a hand through his hair, clearly agitated. ‘I fired her around that time.’
‘Why?’
‘Inappropriate behaviour. She was sending me naked pictures of herself. It doesn’t surprise me that she might have suspected we’d had a relationship and gone out of her way to disrupt it.’
‘If you can call one night a “relationship,”’ Maggie muttered.
Nikos either didn’t hear her or chose to ignore her comment. ‘What did your note say?’
‘It said that I was pregnant with your baby and we needed to talk.’
Nikos paced back and forth again. He muttered something that sounded suspiciously rude. Then he stopped and faced her again. ‘I used protection that night.’
Maggie’s face grew hot. ‘I know. It must have failed.’
Nikos was struggling to contain the sheer magnitude of this news and what it potentially meant. ‘You could have tried again...once the baby was born.’
‘It’s all been a bit of a blur since the birth, to be honest.’
Nikos hated to admit it but he could see the faintly purple shadows under her eyes now. And when he thought of how she’d felt in his arms just now... In spite of those curves he could tell she’d lost weight.
But if anything she was more beautiful. It was as if she’d grown into herself in order to embody something earthy and impossibly sensual.
Everything in him resisted her pull on him in the midst of this bombshell. Rejected this news. He did not want a child. Not now—not ever.
Maggie continued, oblivious to Nikos’s inner turmoil.
‘I didn’t try again because I believed that you’d got my note and weren’t interested. But I don’t regret what happened. I don’t regret having Daniel for a second, even though I know it’s not what you want.’
The fact that she was echoing his thoughts wasn’t welcome. ‘First I need to confirm that he is my son—then I will decide how to proceed.’
Maggie looked hunted. For the first time in his cynical life Nikos had to acknowledge that he suspected Maggie was telling the truth. Not that he should trust her word alone, of course.
And in spite of all of this he was still burningly aware of her. This bombshell hadn’t diminished his desire for her one iota. He was afraid he might give in to the impulse to haul her into his arms and kiss her into relaxing the rigid line of her spine...kiss her into apologising for turning his life upside down in the space of a couple of hours.
He needed to leave now. His emotions were too volatile, mixed with an even more volatile desire. He needed to leave before he could do something he would regret.
He said, ‘I’ll arrange to have a DNA test done as soon as possible. You’ll be hearing from me.’
CHAPTER FIVE
NIKOS WAS GONE before Maggie could say another word. She let out a shuddery breath. The sounds of the party were a faint hum in the distance. She wondered if he had gone back to the party. Why wouldn’t he? He was a playboy after all. But he hadn’t looked like a playboy just now—he’d looked shell-shocked.
Which was about as much as she’d expected. He hadn’t said anything about taking responsibility—which was also what she’d expected. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been brutally honest.
She just couldn’t help feeling sorry for Daniel, who was destined to suffer the same fate she had. No father on the scene.
The fact that he’d never got the note she’d left him had taken some of the fuel out of the anger she’d nurtured over the past few months, and without the anger there was just a sense of disappointment. Which was as dangerous as it was unwelcome.
Once he had confirmation that Daniel was his, and inevitably left them to get on with their lives as he would his, she would pick up the piec
es and tell herself that it was enough that he knew.
In many ways she could handle this—she knew how to deal with an absent and uninterested father. She wouldn’t know how to handle Nikos if he actually wanted to be involved. The man came within ten feet of her and she couldn’t think straight, so this really was for the best.
Nikos threw back another measure of whiskey, poured from his decanter into a tumbler in his living room at Kildare House. The fact that he was even using a tumbler and not drinking straight from the decanter didn’t say much about his level of control, which felt very frayed.
Twenty-four hours ago he’d been blissfully ignorant. Blissfully ignorant of the fact that the woman who had been haunting his X-rated dreams for a year had become a mother in the interim. The mother of his child. Potentially.
It was disconcerting to think of his father’s very dominant dark Italian genes appearing in this baby. The only hint Nikos held of his mother was in his hazel-green eyes. Those strong Italian genes had wiped his Greek mother out in more ways than one.
His father had been dark physically and morally, thinking nothing of stripping Nikos’s mother of her fortune to further his own ambitions.
When she’d realised that Domenico Marchetti—handsome, charming, ruthless—had only married her to get his hands on the vast Constantinos inheritance she’d killed herself. Nikos had been two, and from that day to this he’d depended solely on himself.
Hence the reason why he’d always vowed not to have children. No way did he want to be responsible for the welfare of an innocent child.
And yet already Nikos could feel a resistance in him to the idea that Daniel might not be his son. Which was as shocking as it was unnerving. This was not a scenario he’d ever expected to face. He was the least likely among the three half-brothers to settle down...have a family. And yet if Maggie was to be believed he was well on the way to that situation.
If Maggie was to be believed.
Nikos had seen too much and experienced too much of human nature to trust for a second in a woman he’d spent only one night with, no matter what kind of persona she’d projected. Sweet. Innocent.
He felt a prickling sense of exposure. Had he been played? Spectacularly? A year ago and now? By a woman looking to feather her nest?
Nikos drew out his phone from his pocket and made a couple of calls.
Within a few minutes his phone pinged and he looked at the link that had been sent to him by his security company. He saw grainy CCTV images of Maggie, taken in early February. She could be seen entering his office building, wearing jeans and a coat, her pregnant belly evident. Her hair fell down over her shoulders in wild waves.
Nikos’s gut clenched on seeing this evidence of her visit, of her attempt to tell him about her pregnancy. And he felt a pang of regret that he hadn’t witnessed her body growing and ripening with his child. Something he had never in a million years expected to experience.
He put away his phone and poured himself another whiskey. But this time it left an acrid taste in his mouth. The truth was, all the whiskey in the world couldn’t prepare him for what was coming.
His son would be a Marchetti, with all the baggage that entailed. And, as much as Nikos didn’t welcome the thought of a child—had never planned to have a child—he knew one thing: no child of his would ever suffer the abandonment he’d suffered. Or the persistent feeling of standing on the periphery of his own family.
He and his half-brothers had always been kept apart from each other. His older half-brother, Sharif, had grown up mainly in his Arabian mother’s country—but as eldest son he’d been groomed by their father to take over from a young age. Nikos’s younger brother, Maks, had grown up in Rome, with his Russian mother and younger sister, and as Rome was their paternal ancestral home Nikos had always felt envious of him for having that link to their shared past.
Maks’s younger sister had since been proved not to be their father’s daughter—not that Nikos had ever had a chance to get to know her anyway...
But that was enough about his brothers and a sister who was not even his sister. If this baby was his it would have a claim on the Marchetti legacy through Nikos. And for the first time in his life he felt a sense of destiny and a tangible sense of family that he’d never really had before.
The next day Maggie drove up the drive to Kildare House. She hadn’t expected to be back here again and her heart lurched when it was revealed at the top of the drive. She’d always liked this house over any of the other houses her mother had worked in, where they’d inevitably lived either in a gate lodge or in cramped staff quarters.
The first time Maggie had seen it she’d loved it. It was the kind of house she’d always dreamed of living in one day, and living there so long without its owner in residence she’d developed a false sense of ownership.
But then Nikos had arrived. Asserting his ownership of the house. And her.
A shiver of memory went through her when she thought of what had happened.
For a while, in the aftermath of that night a year ago, Maggie had blamed grief for the reason why she’d acted so uncharacteristically—jumping into bed with Nikos Marchetti after little more than a brief conversation and some whiskey.
But if she was honest with herself she knew it hadn’t been grief at all. Or the alcohol. It had been the man and the seismic effect he’d had on her the moment she’d opened the front door to him for the first time.
Maggie parked the car. She was here to meet with the local doctor and Nikos. The doctor would be taking swabs for a DNA test.
She sucked in a deep breath and got out, extricated Daniel’s baby seat. Before she could knock on the front door, though, it opened, and Maggie was surprised to see a middle-aged smiling man, dressed in smart dark trousers and a white shirt.
He said, ‘Hello, you must be Miss Taggart. I’m Andrew Wilson, the new housekeeper. It’s lovely to meet you—and this must be Daniel?’
Daniel smiled gummily, oblivious to the circumstances.
Then Nikos appeared behind the new housekeeper, and Maggie wasn’t prepared to see him.
He said, ‘We’ll have some tea and coffee in the living room please, Mr Wilson.’ He held out a hand to her. ‘Here, let me take help you.’
Maggie was tempted to insist that she could manage, but that felt petty. As she handed over the baby seat she noticed how Nikos was careful not to look too closely at Daniel.
He led the way to the living room, turning around. ‘Where should I put him?’
Maggie came over and took the baby seat from him, placing it safely on top of a table so she could keep an eye on Daniel.
She looked around. For a moment the sense of déjà-vu was almost overwhelming. Even though it was bright outside and not dusky night, the scene was acutely familiar.
Nikos glanced at his watch. ‘The doctor will be arriving any minute. She’ll take swabs for the DNA tests.’
Maggie bit her lip. Anyone with eyes could see that Daniel was this man’s son. But of course he’d need proof.
‘What then?’ she asked.
‘Then we wait for the results. And then...depending on the outcome...we discuss what we do.’
‘He’s your son.’
‘I can’t afford to trust you on your word alone. Too much is at stake.’
Anger at herself for having succumbed to the charms of such a man—the kind who didn’t trust and who demanded DNA tests—made her say caustically, ‘Well, the feeling is mutual. I don’t trust you either.’
‘You trusted me enough to let me be your first lover,’ he supplied silkily.
Maggie flushed all over. ‘That was a moment of flawed judgement.’
He arched a brow. ‘That was chemistry, pure and simple. Don’t tell me you’re still holding out for your boring hero?’
Maggie squirmed. She’d told him so much. Too much.
/>
At that moment the doorbell chimed. Within a minute Mr Wilson was showing the doctor into the living room.
Maggie welcomed the distraction, getting Daniel out of his seat.
The procedure was done with the minimum of fuss and within minutes the doctor stood up. ‘It’ll take a couple of days for the results to come back. I’ll let you know as soon as I have them.’
Nikos saw the doctor out and Maggie patted Daniel’s back absently. Everything was about to change irrevocably. Nikos came back and she turned around to face him. She noticed that he was looking at Daniel. For the first time she had to appreciate what a shock this must be for him.
Impulsively she said, ‘I’m sorry that you found out like this. But I did try to tell you.’
He lifted his gaze to hers. ‘I know.’
‘You know? How?’
‘I got my security team to check the cameras and someone has been in touch with Chantelle. She confirmed it.’ Nikos shook his head. ‘She did a lot of damage.’
Maggie shrugged minutely. ‘It’s okay. You know now...or you will know soon.’
Nikos looked at his watch, suddenly businesslike. ‘I have to go to London for some meetings. I’ll come back when I have confirmation that he’s mine.’
The abruptness with which he was going to leave again made Maggie feel a little winded. She had no doubt that if Daniel should prove not to be his baby she wouldn’t see him again. Whatever passion had blazed between them was well and truly snuffed out. But Daniel was his, and she would have to see him again and accept the consequences of her actions.
Nikos followed her out to the car and Maggie noticed him looking at Daniel again for a long moment through the window. She couldn’t help asking, ‘Did you really never want to have children?’
He stood back and looked away from Daniel to her. ‘The short, brutal answer? No. But if he is mine I will accept him fully and things will be very different.’
He turned to walk back inside and Maggie said, ‘Wait just a second. What does that mean?’
He came and stood close. Hands on his hips. She sensed volatile emotions under the surface and to her mortification shivers of awareness ran through her blood, recalling his volatility a year ago.