Pregnant by the Greek Tycoon Read online

  The thought of him breaking his beautiful neck made her unthinkingly blurt out, ‘You should be careful.’

  ‘At the moment I’m under strict instructions to relax.’ A slow smile that made her tummy flip spread across his lean features. ‘And suddenly,’ he confided in a husky drawl that made Georgie’s skin prickle, ‘that doesn’t seem such a bad idea.’

  Was he flirting with her…? Georgie dismissed the thought even before it was fully formed.

  ‘I was actually wondering about the night-life…?’ he went on.

  ‘Night-life?’ she parroted. The distracting shadow of dark body hair visible through the fine fabric of his shirt was making it hard for her to concentrate on what he was saying.

  ‘As in nightclubs.’

  ‘Nightclubs?’ she echoed as though he were talking a foreign language. ‘Here?’

  His beautifully moulded lips quirked. ‘No nightclubs.’ She shook her head. ‘Restaurants…?’

  Georgie’s eyes had got even wider. ‘I think you might have got the wrong place. There’s the teashop next to the post office—they do a great cream tea—and the fish and chip shop, but… Are you laughing at me?’

  ‘You’re delightful.’

  Even though she realised he probably meant delightful in a cutesie, cuddly, clumsy puppy sort of way, she couldn’t stop smiling.

  ‘And this feels like the first time I’ve laughed in a very long time.’

  Georgie was pondering this enigmatic statement when a football landed in her lap, spraying sand all over her. There was the sound of laughter as she sprawled inelegantly backwards onto the sand.

  ‘Jack Kemp!’ she yelled, spitting out a mouthful of sand as her stepbrother approached. She struggled into an upright position and glared at the guilty figure.

  ‘What’s got into you?’ asked the freckle-faced twelve-year-old. ‘It wasn’t hard,’ he added scornfully.

  Clicking her tongue, she threw the ball back, with an admonition to be careful. ‘And five minutes only,’ she cautioned, glancing at her watch. ‘I promised I’d get dinner tonight,’ she reminded him.

  ‘Sure…sure, Georgie,’ Jack called back before loping off down the sand.

  ‘Georgie…?’

  ‘Georgette,’ she said with a grimace. ‘My family call me Georgie. That’s my stepbrother,’ she explained, nodding to the skinny running figure.

  She turned as she spoke and found he wasn’t looking at the distant figure of the fair-headed boy, but at her. There was a sensual quality in his dark-eyed scrutiny that sent a secret shiver through her body; the condition of her nipples was less a secret as they pressed against the stretchy fabric of her bikini top.

  She looked around red-cheeked and mortified for the shirt she had discarded. She found it in a crumpled heap under the sun cream; hastily she fought her way into it.

  ‘I will call you Georgette,’ he pronounced.

  She was never going to see him again, but as far as Georgie was concerned this man could call her anything.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘HOW old are you, Georgette?’

  Georgie flirted briefly with the notion of coming back with a cool, Old enough, but she knew she’d never carry it off. Besides, how mortifying would it be if he laughed?

  ‘Twenty-one,’ she responded more conventionally.

  ‘Will you come to dinner with me?’ he asked without skipping a beat.

  Her eyes, round with astonishment, flew to his. ‘Me…you…?’

  ‘That was the general idea.’

  Georgie swallowed before running her tongue over her dry lips—they tasted salty—and she looked at him suspiciously. ‘You’re not serious.’ She tried to laugh but her vocal muscles didn’t co-operate.

  ‘Why would I not be?’ She shook her head, flushing as his gaze became ironic. ‘You are the most attractive woman on the beach.’

  ‘I’m the only one under sixty without a husband and children,’ she rebutted huskily, ‘so I’ll try not to get carried away with the compliment.’

  Who was she kidding? Her entire life she had thought of herself as an average sort of girl—hidden depths, sure, but was anybody ever going to bother looking? Now totally out of left field there came this incredible man who was looking at her as though she were a desirable woman.

  Carried away…? She was quite frankly blown away!

  She tried to adopt an amused expression and failed miserably as the screen of ebony lashes swept up from his cheekbones. Combustible best described his smoky-eyed stare.

  ‘I don’t even know your name,’ she protested weakly.

  His smile had been confident, tinged with the arrogance that came naturally to someone like him. And why shouldn’t it be? she mused, four years down the line. Angolos Constantine was used to getting what he wanted; a little bit of complacence was understandable when women had been falling at his feet since the day he’d hit puberty!

  ‘Not an insuperable barrier and I already know yours, Georgette.’ The way he said her name had a tactile quality. It made the hairs on her nape stand on end and intensified the unspecified ache low in her belly.

  She stared back at him dreamily.

  It was just dinner.

  ‘It’s just dinner,’ he said as if he could read her thoughts.

  What was she doing, hesitating? All the girls she knew wouldn’t have needed coaxing. They saw what they wanted and went for it. Georgie applauded them, but privately wondered if in secret they weren’t just as insecure as she was.

  When she opened her mouth she intended to say yes, but her dad hadn’t raised a reckless child. Caution had been drilled into her from her infancy, and at the last second her conditioning kicked in.

  ‘Thank you, but I couldn’t.’ He was a total, a total stranger who could, for all she knew, be a psycho or even a married psycho. She shook her head; she was out of her depth and she knew it. ‘Thank you, but I’m afraid I can’t. My boyfriend wouldn’t like it.’

  Under other circumstances the look of baffled frustration on his lean face would have been laughable.

  Georgie didn’t feel like laughing; she didn’t even feel like smiling. She was actually pretty ambivalent about the entire ‘done the right thing’ situation.

  His dark brows lifted. ‘Are you saying no?’

  She could hear the astonishment in his voice and she realised that being knocked back had never crossed his mind. No was obviously not a word this man was used to hearing.

  She nodded.

  This time there was a hint of annoyance in his appraisal. ‘As you wish.’

  His irritation made her feel slightly better. Her normal nature, the one she had when she wasn’t turned into a brainless bimbo by the sexual aura this man radiated, briefly reasserted itself. Why should he assume she was a sure thing? She might have been a bit obvious, but a girl could look without necessarily wanting to touch…

  She flashed a quick semi-apologetic smile in his general direction. She wasn’t trying to strike a blow for female equality here—better and braver women had already done that—she just wanted to get the hell out of there without making herself look any more a fool than she already had!

  Aware that his disturbing eyes were following her actions as she crammed her possessions in her canvas bag made her clumsy.

  ‘Jack!’ she bellowed, zipping up the bag with a sigh of relief.

  ‘You forgot this.’

  She half turned and saw he was holding out a tube of sun-block.

  She extended her hand. ‘Thank you.’ The fingertip contact lasted barely a heartbeat but it was enough to send an electrical tingle through her body. Her wide, startled eyes lifted momentarily to his and she knew without him saying a word that he knew exactly what she was feeling.

  Well, at least someone did!

  Without waiting to see if her aggravating stepbrother was following her, Georgie stumbled and ran across the sand to the pebbly foreshore, all the time fighting an insane impulse to turn back.

  A childi
sh shout jolted Georgie back to the present. She made admiring noises as her son proudly showed her a small pile of stones he had placed on the patio.

  She could remember doing the same thing as a child herself; continuity was important. Her own childhood had been a long way from deprived, but there was a gap—questions that remained unanswered because her mother hadn’t been there to answer them. Now Nicky had an absent father… Continuity strikes again!

  Her jaw firmed. Rejection wasn’t hereditary, it was bad luck, and if she had anything to do with it Nicky was going to be a better judge of character than his mother.

  It was strange—she had changed beyond recognition from that girl running away that day on the beach, but the beach house and the town hadn’t. It was as if the place were in some sort of time warp.

  The town remained defiantly unfashionable. There were no trendy seafood restaurants and no big waves to attract the surfing fraternity, but despite everything Georgie had a soft spot for this place. She rubbed her sandy palms on the seat of her shorts and accepted the seashell Nicky gravely handed her.

  This was the first time she’d been back here since that fateful summer. Partly she had come to lay the ghosts of the past and more practically there was no way she could afford a holiday for Nicky any other way.

  The jury was still out on whether she had succeeded on the former!

  She inhaled, enjoying the salty tang in the air. Memories sort of crept up on you, she reflected. The most unexpected things could trigger them: a smell…texture. As earlier, one second she had been trying to get the sand off her feet before putting on her sandals, the next—zap!

  It had been incredibly vivid.

  Her foot had been in Angolos’s lap, his dark head down-bent, gleaming blue-black in the sun as he’d brushed the sand from between her toes. The touch of his fingers had sent delicious little thrills of sensation through her body. He had felt her shiver and his head had lifted. Still holding her eyes, he’d lifted her foot to his mouth and sucked one toe.

  Her hand had pressed into the sand as her body had arched. ‘You can’t do that!’ she gasped. Snatching her foot from his grasp, she lifted her knees to her chin.

  Angolos’s expressive mouth quirked. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’re killing me,’ she confessed brokenly.

  The way he looked at her, the hungry, predatory gleam in his glittering eyes, made her insides melt. ‘You won’t have long to wait, yineka mou,’ he reminded her. ‘Tomorrow we will be man and wife.’

  Back in the present, Georgie opened her clenched fists. Her palms were damp and inscribed with small half-moons where her neatly trimmed fingernails had dug into the flesh. She sighed and rubbed her palms against the seat of her shorts. Would she ever be able to think about her husband without having a panic attack?

  ‘They could hardly keep their hands off one another.’

  The salacious details… This I can really do without.

  ‘I’m no prude,’ the older woman continued, ‘but really…she couldn’t keep her hands off him…’

  Mortifying though her grandmother’s comment was, Georgie, not a person given to self-delusion, had to admit that it was essentially true.

  Always a little scornful of her contemporaries’ messy and, it seemed to her, painful love affairs, she had been totally unprepared for the primal emotions Angolos had awoken in her. She had been totally mesmerised by him.

  ‘My son and I disagree on most things, but on that occasion we were of one mind. Robert said to her, “Sleep with the man if you must, live with him even, but marry him…! Insanity.”’

  ‘But one we have all experienced, Ann,’ came the rueful response.

  To imagine the two elderly women experiencing the insanity of blind lust that she had felt with Angolos made Georgie blink.

  ‘The girl has reaped the consequences of her stupidity.’

  The scorn in her grandmother’s voice brought a flush of mortified colour to Georgie’s sun-warmed cheeks. She had made a big mistake and she was willing to own up to it, but she sometimes thought that if her family had their way she would still be eating humble pie when she was eighty!

  ‘She was very young.’

  ‘Young and she thought she knew it all.’

  ‘The young always do. He…the man in the magazine…he looked older?’

  ‘Thirty-two or something like that, I believe, at the time. You have to understand that Georgie was very young for her age…very naïve in many ways, and he had been around the block several times. Oh, a handsome devil, of course. I’m not surprised she fell for him.’

  The admission amazed Georgie; to her face her grandmother had never offered any understanding.

  ‘You think he took advantage…?’

  ‘Well, what do you think? A man with one failed marriage to his credit already and Greek.’

  From her grandmother’s tone it was hard to tell which fault she found harder to forgive in the man: the fact he had been married or the fact he was Greek.

  ‘I knew the moment I saw him he couldn’t be trusted. I told her, we all told her, but would she listen? No, she loved him.’

  ‘Still, you must be proud of the way she has rebuilt her life, and she has a lovely child.’

  ‘A child who has never even seen his father.’

  ‘Never? Surely not…?’

  ‘Refused point-blank. Angolos Constantine made it clear that he wanted nothing whatever to do with the child. And neither he or any member of his precious family have ever been near…a blessing, if you ask me.’

  It was foolish, but even after this time the truth still had the power to hurt. The knot of pain and anger in Georgie’s chest tightened as her glance turned towards the small figure who was crossing the patchy lawn towards her.

  His small, sweet face was a mask of concentration as he carried his bucket of pebbles. Her fond gaze followed him as he placed his burden carefully down on the ground and, falling to his chubby knees, began to dig in the soft ground.

  The love she felt for her child—the love she had felt for him from the first moment they had laid his warm, slippery little body in her arms—contracted in her chest. She had imagined that magic moment would be shared with Angolos.

  How wrong she had been!

  She had given birth alone. There had been no husband to hold her hand or breathe through the pain with her, and no one to share the magical moment of birth with.

  So Angolos had fallen out of love with her…or more likely he had never been in love with her at all…?

  Just why was the question mark attached to that thought, Georgie? A man could not treat anyone he had had any feelings for the way Angolos had treated her.

  She had accepted that.

  Sure you have!

  But how could he reject this child they had produced together? Nicky was perfect… How could anyone not want him? How could any parent not love their own child?

  ‘It’s just as well that her family were here to pick up the pieces.’

  Her grandmother’s observation was clearly audible, but Georgie had to strain to hear the other woman’s reply. That was the thing about eavesdropping—once you started it was hard to stop.

  ‘That’s so sad. How can a man not want to see his child?’

  ‘You tell me. All I know is he hasn’t given her a penny and Georgie is too stubborn to ask for what is hers by rights. I told her she should file for divorce and take him for every penny she can. There was no pre-nuptial agreement. I’m afraid Georgie is just like her mother that way—not a practical bone in her body.’

  What would Gran say, Georgie wondered, if she knew about the account that Angolos topped up with money every month? Whatever she said she’d say it loudly, especially if she knew that not a penny of the money had been touched!

  By now there was a lot of money in that account.

  ‘Mummy…’ The tired treble awakened Georgie to the danger of Nicky hearing the conversation taking place in the cottage.

  ‘
I’m thirsty.’ The small figure, bucket and spade in hand, tugged her shorts.

  With a smile, Georgie dropped down to child-level and swept a dark glossy curl from the flushed face of her son. She would never be able to forget what Angolos looked like; she saw his face, or a miniature, childish version of it, every day.

  ‘So am I, darling,’ she said, raising her voice to a level that the two elderly women inside could not fail to hear. ‘Let’s go and see if Granny would like a lemonade too, shall we?’

  CHAPTER THREE

  ROYALTY was attending the charity performance and the media were out in force to record the event. On the red carpet the star of a soap was denying for the benefit of the TV cameras rumours that she was about to marry her co-star.

  The foyer was thronged with other famous faces all wearing their best smiles and designer outfits. Despite the fact all the men present were for the most part similarly dressed in dark, formal suits, Paul had no problem locating the person he had come looking for.

  Angolos Constantine stood out in a crowd. It wasn’t just his height and looks; it was that rare commodity—presence.

  ‘Angolos…?’ he called out in relief.

  The tall figure, accompanied by an elegant brunette who was dripping with jewels, turned at the sound of his name. A smile spread across his lean face when he identified the speaker.

  ‘Paul!’ he exclaimed, detaching his partner from his arm and moving forward, his hand outstretched. ‘I didn’t know you were an opera buff…’

  ‘I’m not…and even if I was it wouldn’t have got me in here,’ the shorter man admitted frankly. ‘I only got this far by telling them I was your personal physician.’

  The groove above Angolos’s strong patrician nose deepened. ‘That was resourceful of you.’ His head whipped slowly from side to side as he searched the crowd. ‘And where is the lovely Miranda?’

  Paul Radcliff shook his head and scanned the olive-skinned face of the friend he had known since their university days. ‘Mirrie’s not here.’

  ‘I thought you two were joined at the hip.’