Harlequin Presents: Once Upon A Temptation June 2020--Box Set 1 of 2

by Dani Collins

  Not that he was stung other than in his ego by her rejection. Their proposed marriage had been an effort to rescue his pride. He saw that now and it only made his foul, obdurate mood worse. What a pathetic fool he was.

  Grim malevolence was his companion now. It had become as entrenched in him as the deep grooves carved into his face and body. It clouded around him like a cologne gone off. It had sunk into his bones with the insidiousness of a virus or a spell, making his joints stiff and his heart a lump of concrete.

  Staring with one eye down at the streets of Athens, a city and country he had sworn never to set foot in again, he dreamed only of burning this whole place down.

  Your family stands to inherit a significant portion of the estate, his father’s lawyer had said. All parties must be present at the reading of the will for dispersal to move forward.

  Javiero didn’t want any of his father’s money. He didn’t want to be here in his father’s office tower and couldn’t stand the idea of listening to yet another version of his father’s idea of what was fair.

  For his mother’s sake, and what she stood to gain, he had relented. She had been treated horribly by Nikolai Mylonas and deserved compensation. If Javiero’s presence could help her finally gain what should have rightfully been hers, so be it. Here he was.

  He didn’t have it in him to muster pretty manners, though. His already thin patience was tested by the prospect of listening to his mother chase principles his father had never possessed. She would argue one more time that her son was Niko’s legitimate heir and Javiero was legally entitled to everything.

  Then he would have to listen to his father’s onetime and always scheming mistress, Evelina, arguing that his half brother, Val, was two days older than Javiero, and therefore all the money should go to them.

  Mine, mine, mine.

  The sickening refrain continued despite the instrument being dead.

  Javiero wished the damned jaguar had finished him off. He really did.

  As for Scarlett…? His grim mood skipped in and out of its channel, sparking and grinding at the mere thought of her.

  She had called once while Javiero was in hospital. Once. On behalf of his dying father. His mother had informed her that Javiero would survive, and that had been all Scarlett had needed to hear. Not another word, no card or flowers. Nothing.

  Why did that bother him? Until the last time he’d seen her, she had always been a very businesslike and unflappable PA. Almost pathological in her devotion to his father. She would turn up in one of her pencil skirts, blond hair gathered at her nape, delicate features flawlessly accented with natural tones, and she would irritate the hell out of him with her one-track agenda.

  Your father wants me to inform you that he’s aware you’re behind the hostile takeover in Germany. He is willing to give you control of his entire operation if you come back to Athens and run it.

  No.

  Or, Evelina has made a specific request for funds. Niko has granted it. This is your mother’s equivalent amount. If you would like to speak to him about—

  No.

  And then that final meeting. Your father has run out of treatment options. He is unlikely to survive the year. Now would be the time to come see him.

  No.

  She had finally cracked and it had been fascinating.

  She hadn’t understood how he couldn’t care one single rat’s behind about his father or his father’s money.

  You don’t want what is rightfully yours? What if it all goes to Val?

  That had caught his attention. If it was up to Javiero, Val could have every last cursed euro, but his mother would be devastated. Was Niko planning to leave it all to Val?

  No, Scarlett had assured him, but that hadn’t been the whole truth. Come and see him, she had insisted, looking ready to take him by the ear to accomplish it. He hadn’t understood what had driven her so vehemently. It wasn’t love for his father. She had never said a harsh word about Niko, but she’d never said a kind one, either.

  There had been a mystery there—Javiero had felt it—but he had refused all the same, annoyed that she was instilling a genuine temptation in him to solve it. He wanted to go with her when he had sworn nothing would ever induce him to see his father or visit that island again for any reason.

  He’d sensed a finality to her visit, though. There’d been a futility in her that told him he wouldn’t see her again after this. It had added a layer of desperation to their power struggle. The tension had become sexual and had burst into a passionate encounter that had left him reeling.

  But only him, it seemed. He had continued to think about her months later. She had left before the dinner hour, choosing to go back to work for a man Javiero hated with every fiber of his being rather than remain with her new lover.

  That had been before he looked like hell. Would she be repulsed by his injuries when she saw him? Indifferent?

  Why should he care what she thought?

  He didn’t. But he entertained a small, malicious fantasy where he pointed out his disfigurement was only physical. Scarlett had character flaws.

  “Javiero.” His mother’s voice behind him held such heightened emotion that the hair lifted on the back of his neck. Shock and urgency and something bordering on triumph?

  He swung from the window in the small sitting area and almost had to reach for the back of a sofa to catch his balance. He was still getting used to his lack of depth perception.

  His mother had insisted on rechecking her impeccable appearance. Her black hair was still rolled into its customary bun, but she was pale beneath her makeup. Agitation seemed to grip her while there was a glow of avaricious excitement in her blue-green eyes.

  “Go in there.” She nodded toward the door to the ladies’ room.

  Javiero lifted his brows and felt the pull under his eye patch against scar tissue that hadn’t fully healed.

  “Is there a problem? I’ll call maintenance.” That came from Nigel, the assistant who had met them at the south entrance. He had taken one aghast look at Javiero’s face and had kept his attention on Paloma ever since.

  “No,” his mother said firmly. She stepped aside and waved at the door, prompting. “Javiero.”

  With a snarl of impatience, he strode past his mother and shoved into the women’s toilet, halting abruptly at the sight of Scarlett turning from the sink.

  Distantly he heard the door drift closed behind him while he took in her appearance. Her blond hair was gathered at her nape, her face was rounder, her blouse untucked and her tailored jacket open to allow for—

  He cocked his head, widening his one eye, not sure he was seeing this correctly.

  He yanked his gaze back to her face. Her expression was frozen in horror as she took in his shaggy hair and eye patch and gashed face poorly hidden by an untrimmed beard.

  The word pregnant landed in a pool of comprehension deep in his brain, sending a tidal wave of shock through his entire psyche.

  * * *

  Scarlett dropped her phone with a clatter.

  She had been trying to call Kiara. Now she was taking in the livid claw marks across Javiero’s face, each pocked on either side with the pinpricks of recently removed stitches. His dark brown hair was longer than she’d ever seen it, perhaps gelled back from the widow’s peak at some point this morning, but it was mussed and held a jagged part. He wore a black eye patch like a pirate, its narrow band cutting a thin stripe across his temple and into his hair.

  Maybe that’s why his features looked as though they had been set askew? His mouth was…not right. His upper lip was uneven and the claw marks drew lines through his unkempt stubble all the way down into his neck.

  That was dangerously close to his jugular! Dear God, he had nearly been killed.

  She grasped at the edge of the sink, trying to stay on her feet while she grew so light-
headed at the thought of him dying that she feared she would faint.

  The ravages of his attack weren’t what made him look so forbidding and grim, though, she computed through her haze of panic and anguish. No. The contemptuous glare in his one eye was for her. For this.

  He flicked another outraged glance at her middle.

  “I thought we were meeting in the boardroom.” His voice sounded gravelly. Damaged as well? Or was that simply his true feelings toward her now? Deadly and completely devoid of any of the sensual admiration she’d sometimes heard in his tone.

  Not that he’d ever been particularly warm toward her. He’d been aloof, indifferent, irritated, impatient, explosively passionate. Generous in the giving of pleasure. Of compliments. Then cold as she left. Disapproving. Malevolent.

  Damningly silent.

  And now he was…what? Ignoring that she was as big as a barn?

  Her arteries were on fire with straight adrenaline, her heart pounding and her brain spinning with the way she was having to switch gears so fast. Her eyes were hot and her throat tight. Everything in her wanted to scream Help me, but she’d been in enough tight spots to know this was all on her. Everything was always on her. She fought to keep her head and get through the next few minutes before she moved on to the next challenge.

  Which was just a tiny trial called childbirth, but she would worry about that when she got to the hospital.

  As the tingle of a fresh contraction began to pang in her lower back, she tightened her grip on the edge of the sink and gritted her teeth, trying to ignore the coming pain and hang on to what dregs of dignity she had left.

  “I’m in labor,” she said tightly. “It’s yours.”

  Fresh shock flickered over his scarred face, and his gaze dropped to her middle again. “I’m supposed to believe that?”

  “My water broke. It’s a textbook sign.”

  “You know what I mean.” His aggressive stance didn’t soften, but a tiny shadow flickered in his eye as he watched her draw in a long breath.

  She was trying to bear the growing intensity of her contractions without a grimace, but it wasn’t working.

  “Is it my father’s?”

  “No!” She should have expected that, she supposed. Pretty much everyone believed she was more than Niko’s long-suffering PA. She closed her eyes, wincing in both physical and emotional anguish as the pain peaked. “I don’t have time for a lot of explanations.” She tried for calm when her voice was still tight from the fading contraction. “Whether you believe this baby is yours by my word or after a DNA test doesn’t matter.” It mattered. She hated that he was so skeptical of her. It ground what little self-esteem she possessed well into the dust. “I have to go to the hospital, but I wanted to be the one to tell you that this is your baby. That’s what you would have learned in today’s meeting, along with the fact that…”

  He would never forgive her. She had known it even as she was staring at the positive test. Even as she was telling Niko and watching his eyes narrow with calculation. Even as she had sat in meetings that secured her baby’s future and her own.

  Even before she told Javiero what Niko had done with his will, she could see stiff resistance taking hold in Javiero’s expression. He would never forgive her for any of this, including abiding by Niko’s wish that she hide her entire pregnancy from him. She hadn’t wanted to, but Niko had been dying at the time. She had agreed to delay telling Javiero because revealing her pregnancy would have caused the sort of war that Niko wouldn’t have been able to handle in his weakened condition. She had known that everything would come out now, after his death, anyway.

  So what was one more secret kept for nearly three years?

  It was one more. When it came to Niko’s relationship with his two sons and the two women who had birthed them, every misdeed was a blow against someone. Getting between them meant getting knocked around herself.

  It was going to hurt no matter what, so she waded in.

  “You won’t inherit anything,” she said bluntly. “Exactly as you wished. Instead, Niko has split his fortune equally between his grandchildren.”

  “Grandchildren.” It was strange to see his brows rise unevenly, one broken by the claw mark, the other still perfect and endearingly familiar. “Plural.”

  “Yes. He has a granddaughter. Aurelia.” Who was adorable, not that Scarlett could say so. “She’s Val’s.”

  Javiero’s gaze turned icy at the mention of his half-brother. “Since when does Val have a daughter?”

  “Since her mother, Kiara, gave birth to her two years ago. They’ve been living on the island with us since the middle of her pregnancy.”

  “That’s not possible.” Javiero spoke with the cynical confidence of a lifetime of dealing with his father’s other family. “Evelina would have used a baby to influence Dad. You haven’t shown up with any equal opportunity checks for Mother.”

  “Evelina doesn’t know about Aurelia.” Scarlett didn’t bother explaining how Evelina had dropped the rattle and Niko had picked it up. “Val doesn’t know, either. Niko didn’t want any of you to know. It would have caused fresh battles and he was too sick to weather them. Evelina and Paloma will each receive one million euros and the rest goes to Aurelia and…” She set her hand on her belly, willing the tingle in her back not to manifest into a fresh contraction.

  “Well, isn’t that darling,” Javiero bit out. “He continues to treat us so fairly that he kept our own children from us and burdens them equally with his damnable fortune. No wonder Mother looked so thrilled when she walked out of here. Did you tell her Val’s kid is getting half and she’s only getting one million?”

  “No.” She struggled to hold his venomous glare.

  “Coward,” he pronounced, but laughed harshly and shook his head. “More of his stupid, stupid games, right to the bitter end! And you’re still helping him.” He pointed in accusation. “You knew all of this when you came to Madrid that day. That day.”

  He pointed at her middle. His contempt was a knife to her heart, and despair threatened to encase her. She shoved it away.

  “I don’t have time to justify his actions or mine.” She teared up as she said it though, doubting he would ever see her side. He hated her. She could taste it on the air. “I have to go to the hospital.”

  She glanced at her phone on the floor, face down and possibly cracked, definitely a million miles away when she could hardly breathe let alone touch her toes.

  “Kiara is my birth coach. Will you get her for me? She’s not answering my texts.”

  “The mother of Val’s baby is your birth coach?”

  His derisive tone got her back up. She might not have much moral high ground to stand on, but she would die on this particular mound.

  “Don’t disparage either of them. Aurelia is an innocent child and Kiara is the best friend I’ve ever had.” Her only friend, really. Better than a sister because they’d chosen each other. “Hate Niko and Val if you want to, but don’t you dare attack my friend and her child.”

  Javiero’s hand smacked on to the marble that surrounded the sink, making her jump. He leaned into her space, looming like a terrifying raptor as he thrust his marred face up close to hers.

  “Look me in the eye, Scarlett.” His breath was dragon fire against her cheek. “Is that my baby?”

  His eyes had always been so fascinating to her, sea green with flecks of blue. Shifting and moody. So beautiful.

  Now there was only one. She’d been in agony since she’d learned the extent of his injuries, desperate to go to him. If he hadn’t survived…

  She pushed back desolation and bit her trembling lips, huskily saying, “It’s yours.”

  He snorted with skepticism and shoved to straighten away from her, his retreat so full of contempt it felt as though he took a layer of her skin with him.

  “I’ll give you
the benefit of the doubt, but the DNA test had better prove that baby is mine. And if that is my child, there is no way it will start its life defiled by that misbegotten half brother of mine. I’ll take you to the hospital. Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “I’M SORRY I didn’t come to the hospital after the attack,” Scarlett said in a low voice when they were in the back of his car.

  Mentally, Javiero was in the pen, her pregnancy having struck him as unpredictably as that big cat, leaving him wrestling under the bite of words like his, trying to evade the claws of The money goes to…

  As her apology penetrated, he bristled and sat straighter, refusing to let her see how much her indifference had stung. He shouldn’t have cared either way.

  “Why would you?” he asked distantly. He had asked her to stay and she’d made her choice, turning their torrid encounter into a one-afternoon stand. He knew how those worked.

  And he hadn’t been fit company in hospital any more than he was today. That hadn’t stopped his mother from showing up every day, but as her only child—and her only link to his father’s fortune—Javiero had no illusions about the breadth of her maternal concern. Paloma was no Evelina Casale when it came to unadulterated greed; nor was she willing to let go of something she believed wholeheartedly belonged to her.

  Paloma had gone to her hotel in a huff after they emerged from the ladies’ room and told her the terms of the will. She’d been very unimpressed by her entitlement to one million euros. It was nothing after all these years, but Javiero supported her financially. She wouldn’t go without. Any incidental funds she received from Niko were hers to throw away on an impulse trip to the Riviera or a vanity purchase in Paris. She could do the same with today’s top-up.