WHEN GIANNIS ARRIVED at the terrace he found the table set as he’d instructed but no Tabitha.
Pouring himself a large glass of white wine, he took a seat and waited.
She appeared ten minutes later in the same rolled-up jeans and black vest she’d answered her bedroom door in, her hair brushed, her face clean but her cheeks flushed. ‘Sorry. I got lost.’
Awareness stabbed through him so hard that all he could do was raise a brow.
Her nerves came out in her voice. ‘I thought you meant the terrace at the back with the swimming pool. I didn’t know there was one overlooking the beach too. It’s very well hidden.’
‘It’s secluded,’ he agreed. ‘Please, sit. Would you like a drink?’
‘Just water, please.’ Tabitha took the seat she assumed had been set for her—judging by the cutlery setting, they were having a three-course meal—and looked out at the magnificent view so as to avoid meeting his eye again until her heart had slowed to a more manageable beat.
Trying desperately to distract herself, she inhaled the fragrant floral air mingled with the scent of the sea that glimmered before her. This terrace had to be right below her bedroom.
The more she explored Giannis’s home, the more there was to discover, including that the vast majority of it was carved into the cliff itself.
He poured water for her from a jug and indicated the pitta bread and dips already laid on the table.
Being alone with him had killed her appetite quicker than the gory pictures her stepsisters had liked to show her to scare her when she was a child but this was a much different appetite suppressant. This suppressant was because large butterflies had suddenly formed in her stomach, their wings fluttering hard all the way up to her throat.
Although she knew she wouldn’t be able to manage more than a small amount, Tabitha dipped some of the bread into the pink taramasalata and took a tiny bite.
Giannis was the one to break the silence. ‘Forgive me for not asking this sooner, but how are you finding the pregnancy?’
She swallowed her bite-sized morsel and forced herself to look at him. ‘Exciting and frightening.’
‘That is understandable. What about physically? Have you noticed any changes?’
‘I suffer with afternoon morning sickness.’ She managed a small smile to see the furrow in his brow. ‘Every afternoon, without fail, I get nauseous. I’ve learned to only eat plain food for lunch then it’s less severe but, either way, it doesn’t last long—an hour or so. I also get tired easily but that’s it. So far, so good.’
She crossed her legs to stop the jitters.
Why were they pretending? Why was she pretending? Pretending that sharing a meal with Giannis was normal, that she wasn’t suspicious at this change in attitude towards her? She wanted to be thankful for it but she couldn’t. When he’d dropped her back at his home earlier he’d hardly been able to look her in the eye. Now he was pouring her drinks on the terrace of his home, sharing a meal in a setting that could only be considered as romantic.
‘Maybe the sea air here will help with the sickness,’ he observed.
‘Maybe. I was nauseous earlier but I wasn’t sick.’
‘That’s encouraging.’ He dipped a large chunk of pitta into the humus and popped it whole into his mouth.
Unable to take this stilted, fake politeness a moment longer, she wiped her fingers on the cotton napkin and raised her chin. ‘Why are you being nice to me?’
He didn’t pretend not to know what she was talking about. He took hold of his glass but, instead of drinking from it, he swirled the wine within it. ‘I have been harsh with you. For that I apologise. The news about your pregnancy came as a shock but now we have to move forward...’
Before Giannis could finish and tell her he thought they should marry, there came the sound of clacking footsteps followed by his sister Niki bursting through the French doors.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked in Greek, rising from his chair.
‘To tell you off. You left me in Vienna without a word of explanation and have been avoiding all my calls since.’ She cast a beady stare at Tabitha. ‘Is she the reason for...?’
But then Niki cut herself off and stared even harder at her with widening eyes. ‘Tabitha?’
Giannis watched as recognition flickered in the cornflower eyes. ‘Niki?’
‘You two know each other?’ His mind raced. His sister had not spent a great deal of time at his palace hotel but she was a gregarious soul who made friends easily. It would be just like her to befriend a chambermaid.
An enormous smile spread over Niki’s face and, in English, she said, ‘It is you! What are you doing here? How do you know my brother?’
The shock on Tabitha’s face told its own story. ‘Giannis is your brother?’
Niki beamed and nodded, then pulled out a chair to sit, uninvited.
‘How do you two know each other?’ Giannis asked again, his curiosity outweighing his frustration at this rude interruption.
Grabbing Tabitha’s unused wine glass, Niki poured herself a glass. ‘Tabitha was at Beddingdales with Simone, Melina’s cousin. We used to meet up at weekends if we had the same leave.’
Melina was Niki’s best friend. Melina had been the reason Niki had refused to go to Beddingdales herself, begging their parents to send her to the same English boarding school that Melina was being sent to. As Niki could wrap her parents around her little finger, they’d agreed.
But none of this was what Giannis was thinking of.
He stared at Tabitha, met her expressionless gaze and felt the ground shift beneath him.
Then Niki burst into a peel of laughter. ‘I’ve just realised—you’re the woman who took Giannis’s attention for the whole of the masquerade ball! I was sure you were familiar but with your mask on I couldn’t place where I knew you from!’
He whipped his head round to look at his sister.
She’d mentioned his ‘mystery woman’ a couple of times in the days after the ball but not once had she said the woman in question was familiar to her. After he had shut her up about the subject, she had stopped mentioning it.
If he had known Tabitha had rung a bell with Niki he would have made her think hard about who she could be.
He looked again at the woman carrying his child.
How the hell did a girl from one of the world’s most exclusive and expensive all-girls boarding schools grow into a woman so impoverished she’d become a live-in chambermaid?
* * *
The next hour passed with Tabitha in a daze.
Niki was Giannis’s sister? She’d never known her well but had always remembered her, mostly because she was one of the most fun people she’d ever met. A few years older than Tabitha, she’d exuded a glamour Tabitha would have killed to achieve for herself. Whenever she’d come with Melina to visit Simone in the town near their school, Tabitha had been thrilled to be included in the group.
Whether she was oblivious to the tension in the air or whether she just chose to ignore it, only Niki knew, but she stayed, happily helping herself to Tabitha’s leftovers, of which there were many, from all the delicious courses they were served. There were many instances of, ‘Do you remember?’ to which Tabitha would nod and smile but chatterbox Niki didn’t require input from either of them. From the way her merry eyes darted between them, she obviously thought they’d got together at the ball and had been seeing each other in secret since.
When she finally took one of the enormous hints Giannis kept dropping and said her goodbyes—and Giannis insisted on seeing her out, most likely to ensure she actually left—Tabitha got to her feet and stood at the thick white wall that acted as a barrier between the terrace and sheer drop beneath them.
She breathed in deeply, inhaling the wonderful night scents, trying hard to compose herself.
Something was about to happen. She could feel it in her bones: an anticipation.
But whether it was an anticipation of dread she couldn’t tell. Whatever it was, she needed to keep herself together. She needed to be strong.
His footsteps were heavy when he joined her back on the terrace.
He poured himself another glass of wine from the second bottle to be opened after Niki had demolished most of the first one and drank half of it before putting the glass on the table and coming over to stand beside her.
The night sky and the romantic lights illuminating the terrace cast his handsome face in shadows that gave him a gothic, piratical look. It made her heart ache, reminding her strongly of how he had looked the night of the ball when she had fallen under his spell.
The heady awareness that lived in her blood for him flickered to life with all the ease of a switch. Without the barrier of the table between them he was close enough to touch.
For a long time he stared at her with a hard curiosity. ‘Who are you?’
She forced herself to maintain eye contact. ‘Are you asking because you saw me as a dirt-poor chambermaid and assumed that’s all I ever was?’
His eyes narrowed. ‘I never thought that.’
‘Didn’t you?’ she challenged. ‘I saw the shock in your eyes when Niki said how she knew me. You assumed I lied about Beddingdales, didn’t you? You were so confident it was a lie, you never bothered to ask. You didn’t think a privately educated woman could possibly get her hands dirty working in domestic service. It was easier to assume I was a liar than give me the benefit of the doubt.’
‘If I thought you a liar, it’s because you lied about your identity to get into the ball. You lied about who you were,’ he ground out.
‘The only lie was the name on the invitation I entered the ball with. I told you my real name. I told you I worked in hospitality, which was stretching the truth, I admit, but it was the closest I could get without telling a lie. Everything else was the truth. I was an imposter that night but I’m not a liar, Giannis, whatever you may think of me.’
His lips thinned, a pulse throbbing on his jawline. ‘You made assumptions too. You ran out on me without giving me a chance. You didn’t even attempt to tell me the truth. You assumed that I would be furious that you worked for me and sack you.’
‘With good reason.’ Tabitha held her ground and tried to hold on to her train of thought which was threatening to slip away. His spicy scent had slowly mingled with the fragrant bougainvillea and was seeping through her airwaves with every inhalation. If she stretched out her hand, she would reach his chest. Her hand was begging her to do just that. ‘And you proved it when you tried to sack me the moment you realised I worked for you.’
‘I’d spent...’ He cut himself off and ran his fingers roughly through his hair. ‘I was angry. You say you didn’t tell me one lie, but you let me believe you were someone you were not. Or are you the person you pretended to be?’
‘I was that person once, but that was a long time ago, and I would say you were more than angry when I came to you and you realised I was nothing but a chambermaid. You were disgusted and don’t you dare deny it—it was written all over your face.’
‘I was disgusted with myself for falling for a woman who wasn’t who she claimed to be. I’ve been there before. My wife... You know I was married?’ It was a question framed as a statement.
The picture she’d seen of Giannis and his stunning wife on their wedding day flashed immediately into her mind, the way they had stared into each other’s eyes... It felt like a hand had grabbed hold of her heart and twisted it.
Since she’d arrived in Santorini, Tabitha had tried hard not to think of the woman who had shared his life here before tragedy had struck, because every time she did she had the sick feeling of stepping on another woman’s toes and something else, something much deeper and stomach-twisting, which she dared not think about in any depth.
But hearing him acknowledge his wife for the first time...
‘Yes.’ The clenching in her heart softened to imagine the hell he must have gone through losing the love of his life as he’d done. ‘I’m sorry for what happened to her.’
Giannis shrugged and raised his chin.
By the time of Anastasia’s death he’d grown to hate her but not as much as he’d despised himself for believing her lies.
That he felt guilt and a responsibility for her death were things he could not fathom. He hadn’t been driving that car. She had.
She’d been driving it to her lover.
‘I’d learned she was a gold-digger who was cheating on me.’
He watched Tabitha stiffen before he cast his eyes away from her to the dark sea before them.
Too many emotions curled through him when he looked at her. The spell she’d bewitched him with the night they’d conceived their child breathed powerfully in his blood stream, his desire for her threatening again to cloud his thoughts. How easy it would be to cup her beautiful face in his hands, plunder that enticing mouth and lose himself in the pleasure they had created together all over again.
Always he’d been the master of his desire, even during his short, ill-fated marriage.
With Tabitha he felt a breath away from losing control without even touching her.
A yacht sailed past them in the distance. He focused his attention on it, using it much like the anchor the yacht would use when it reached harbour, wherever that would be.
‘Anastasia tried to pass her lover’s child off as mine,’ he said in as emotionless a tone as he could manage. He heard a sharp intake of breath but ignored it. ‘She fell pregnant three months after we married. I should have been delighted but my gut told me something did not feel right. She had the scan done without me, only telling me about it after the fact, so I visited the obstetrician privately. I asked if the date of conception could be determined from the scan and learned that it could to a good degree of accuracy.
‘The child Anastasia claimed was mine had been conceived during the ten days I was in Brazil. It was not possible I was the father. I set a private investigative team onto her and learned our entire marriage was a sham. All she wanted was my money and the lifestyle. She never wanted me.’
He could not bring himself to tell Tabitha about his confrontation with Anastasia’s lover and his admission that she’d planned to leave him after the birth. Giannis would have been the legal father and liable to pay maintenance. Anastasia would also have been entitled to a good chunk of his money in her own right.
He’d just shared more with Tabitha than he had with anyone else. Not even his family knew Anastasia’s child had not been his. A man had his pride.
Anastasia’s actions had humiliated him. The bruises to his pride still lived in him.
But Tabitha’s child was his and, whatever virulent, dangerous emotions his child’s mother evoked in him, all that mattered was securing his child to his side.
‘It’s no secret that one of the reasons for me hosting the masquerade ball was to find a new wife,’ he said into the stunned silence. ‘The time was right. I’m thirty-five and I want to be a father before I’m too old to play football with my children. I wanted my next wife to be a woman who was independently wealthy. I do not want love in my next marriage—I’ve done love and it tastes bitter—but I wanted security in my wife’s motives for marrying me. You are carrying my child. It would be wrong of me not to give our child the same opportunities it would have had with the mother of my choice. As you won’t countenance me having custody of our child, the next best thing is for us to marry.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Tabitha must have misheard him, too dazed at his unexpected revelation about his marriage to have been listening properly.
She didn’t want to feel sorry for him but she did. What a blow it must have been to a man as proud as Giannis to learn he’d been cuckolded, and what a blow to his heart too. He must have been devastated.
No wonder he’d doubted Tabitha about the pregnancy. If she’d been in his shoes she might have demanded proof too.
‘I want us to marry,’ he repeated.
She twisted her face to look at him but all she found was his profile gazing into the distance, his jaw clenched, hands gripping the wall tightly.
Marriage?
That feeling of having slipped through the looking glass hit her strongly again, the pebbled ground beneath her feet starting to spin. ‘Marriage? You and me?’
‘If you marry me, our baby will not want for anything.’
‘That applies even if we don’t marry,’ she managed to croak. ‘You would still have to pay child support.’
Of all the things she had expected him to suggest about a way forward for them as parents, not once had it crossed her mind he would suggest this.
‘It is better for a child to have two parents together.’ Suddenly he turned his face to her. His eyes bored into hers with an intensity she could feel right in her core. ‘Marry me and our child will have a mother and father living under the same roof. Two parents available at all times. No being shunted from one home to another. No insecurities about which home is their home, no wondering which parent they are spending the weekend or school holidays with. And you would have greater security too—the law would give you that.’
‘Why offer this now? Only this morning you wanted to buy our child from me and cut me from its life.’ But, before he could respond, the answer came to her and all the sympathy she’d felt for him vanished. ‘Coincidence, is it, that you suggest marriage within hours of learning I was privately educated? Does it make me more acceptable to your standing in your world?’
His features darkened, becoming taut. ‘You insult me.’
‘You insult me.’ All the emotions she’d been trying to supress for so long, all her fears and insecurities, merged with the anger she hadn’t felt creeping up on her at his cruel words, colliding to crash through her in a wave. ‘You tell me you want us to marry in the same breath as telling me I’m not the woman of choice to be mother of your child. You say I don’t disgust you, that my job isn’t an issue...’
‘It has never been an issue.’
‘But half the time you won’t even look at me!’
She’d hardly finished uttering the last word when two huge hands lunged at her and gripped her shoulders, pulling her to him. His piratical features only inches from hers, he snarled, ‘Look at you? You have turned my world on its head! I am trying to navigate my way through everything, trying to do what’s right and best for my child, but just sharing the same air as you distracts my thoughts. Yes, matia mou, I have an issue with looking at you but it’s not because I’m the snob you think I am. I look at you and all I want is to throw you over my shoulder, carry you to the nearest bed and rip the clothes from your body with my teeth.’
Heart thumping, Tabitha stared into the clear blue eyes that were filled with the same anger and desire that coiled in her and felt something low inside her melt.
And then Giannis’s mouth caught hers with a savage possessiveness that sent everything else inside her melting too.
Sticky warmth flooded her. The ache she’d carried inside her since the night they’d conceived their child bloomed as her senses filled with his spicy scent and dark, wine-laced taste. Wrapping her arms around him, she sank into the hungry urgency of his mouth.
One touch from Giannis was like the spark of a match on kindling: immediate and utterly combustible. And yet there was so much more than the flames licking her skin. There was a sense of rightness. Where she turned his world upside down, he righted hers. Being held in his arms...it felt as if this was where she was meant to be.
Their tongues wound together in a heady, sensuous exploration while his fingers threaded down through her long hair until he reached the base of her spine, evoking sensation that made her stomach contract and blood move relentlessly through her veins. Splaying his hand, he moulded her closer to him so the hard contours of his body were flush against hers.
She hardly noticed when his hands gripped her waist and lifted her from the ground to carry her effortlessly to the far wall covered in a tumbling display of flowers, not until her feet were placed back on the ground and she had to tighten her hold around him to stop her watery legs giving way beneath her.
His hard mouth wrenched from her lips to graze over her cheek and burrow into her neck, his hands pushing up her vest and bra, fingers brushing over her ribcage to her breasts to capture and knead the tender tips before capturing her breasts whole. A rich wave of sensation darted heavily through her sensitive flesh.
Capable fingers dragged down her belly to the button of her jeans and wrenched them open. His mouth crashed back onto hers at the same moment his fingers dipped beneath the band of her knickers and her gasp was smothered by the weight of his heady kisses.
Her body had become a playground of tingling nerves and her hips arched towards him of their own volition. When his fingers edged down through the soft curls of her pubis to the slick heat at the core of her womanhood, she writhed, helpless against the exquisite pleasure engulfing her.
The pleasure grew in intensity, a yearning growing with it, stronger, needier, reaching, searching, all of it centred on Giannis and his magical manipulations, until she reached the tipping point and she pressed her cheek to his throat and held him tightly as an explosion of rippling pleasure roared through her.
She was still awash with the waves of bliss flooding through her loins when he disentangled himself and stepped back, visibly fighting for air.
Pressing herself against the cold wall for support, she stared at him, dazed, fighting for her own breath.
His throat moved then he rubbed his head angrily.
‘You see what you do to me?’ he said roughly. ‘How can I hate you when you make me feel like this? What you do to me...’
What she did to him?
Had he not just seen—felt—what he’d done to her?
Hands shaking, she straightened her clothes and fumbled the buttons of her jeans back up.
She couldn’t speak, could only watch mutely as he strode heavily to the table and downed what was left of his wine.
He rolled his shoulders and breathed deeply before looking back at her. ‘I am serious about us marrying, matia mou, and I want you to think seriously about it too. Sleep on it. I don’t wish to fight you but be under no illusions—I will not accept anything less than being a permanent part of my child’s life. All a custody battle will do is give the press a meal to feed on and line our lawyers’ pockets.’
And then he left the terrace without looking back.