Bought To Carry His Heir

“I’m exhausted,” she said, rising. “I think I should return to my room.”

“You need to eat.”

“Then perhaps you’d be so kind as to send something to my room for me? I’m dying to eat and crawl back into bed.” She managed a small, tight smile. Seeing that he was about to protest, she added quickly, “I might as well sleep now, while I can. I understand it won’t be easy towards the end of this next trimester.”

His brow furrowed. He didn’t seem happy with her decision, but after a moment he rose. “I’ll walk you back.”

“No need.”

“You are a guest here, and you’ve only just arrived. I’ll see you to your room. It’ll give me a chance to check your door, make sure it has been repaired.”

She couldn’t argue with his logic, and if she was going to survive here, she’d need to acquiesce now and then. She might as well allow him to win small victories.

They went down a flight of stairs, passing through the gleaming white living room and then out into a whitewashed hall that reflected gold-and-red light from the row of windows overlooking the sea.

Rays of burnished gold fell on Nikos, highlighting the width of his shoulders and haloing his dark head with light. With the sunset illuminating his strong profile he looked like an oil painting come to life, or perhaps a page lifted from a book on the Greek gods. One of Zeus’s immortal sons here on earth...

“My room is just down there,” he said, nodding to a corridor. “Should you need anything later.”

“I won’t need anything,” she said.

“But if there’s an emergency.”

“There won’t be.”

He stopped outside her room. Her door was closed. He gave a twist to the door handle. It opened soundlessly. He closed it again. It closed smoothly. “It seems to be working properly.”

She stepped past him and checked the door herself. It opened and shut, but the paint was scraped clean in a spot. A bit of hardware was missing.

The lock had been removed.

Georgia turned to face him. “This is not all right.”

“The door shuts.”

“You had the lock taken off. I told you—”

“And I told you that I need to be able to reach you should there be an emergency,” he ground out, silencing her. “If you cannot sleep without a locked door due to anxiety or fear of being attacked, then I will sleep in your room with you—”

“No. That will not happen.”

“Then deal with an unlocked door, because those are your options.” He towered over her, features hard. “I will have a tray sent to you now, and I will see you in the morning for the tour of the house and gardens.”

CHAPTER FOUR (#u915b868b-043c-5560-89b6-a2fe8a6b2de1)

IT TOOK FOREVER for Georgia to fall asleep.

She’d only been in Greece a few hours and yet she was already wishing she’d never agreed to travel to Kamari. The money wasn’t worth it—

She stopped herself there.

The money would be worth it, if she calmed down and focused. Getting upset wasn’t going to help. She’d been through many difficult experiences in her life and she could handle this one.

With that said, it would have been better to have known more about Nikos Panos than she did. Mr. Laurent had told her a little bit about the Panos family when she’d been selected for the surrogacy. He’d explained that the Panos family’s fortune was fairly recent, only since the end of World War II, and that they’d made their money rebuilding war-torn Europe, then branched from construction into shipping and from shipping into retail.

She did a little more research on her own at that point. The Panos story wasn’t all sunshine and roses. The company had floundered during the past decade, poor investments and too much expansion in the wrong direction. Teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, son and heir Nikos Panos took the helm and turned the floundering company around.

Nikos’s success had reassured her. She’d assumed he was successful and stable. She needed to learn not to make assumptions.

Or perhaps she needed to stop thinking about Nikos. Maybe she needed to practice detachment. And not just about Nikos, but the pregnancy, too.

She’d lost so much when her parents and sister and grandparents died. And now she had to be careful she didn’t get her heart broken again. He wasn’t her baby. He wasn’t her son. Nor would he ever be.

Georgia finally fell asleep, but the morning came far too quickly. Waking, she frowned at the bright sunshine. She was not ready for the tour or more time with him.

Boundaries and distance, she told herself, showering and then dressing, choosing skinny jeans and an oversize gray cashmere sweater and gray ankle boots. The sky was clear, but her room was cold and outside the wind howled, buffeting the stone villa.

Boundaries and distance, she repeated when Nikos knocked at her bedroom door a few minutes later, coming to collect her personally for the morning tour.

It was a shock seeing him in the windowless hall, cloaked in shadows. He was wearing black trousers and a black shirt, and although she was tall, he towered over her, his broad shoulders filling the doorway, consuming space.

His dark gaze swept over her before focusing on her feet. “Please change the boots to something more practical.”

She choked on an uncomfortable laugh, thinking he was joking, but he didn’t laugh or smile. Her brows lifted, unable to believe they were starting a new day this way. “You’re serious?”

“That’s the third pair of boots. Heeled boots—”

“These are practically flats. The heel is maybe an inch tall.”

“They are two inches or more, and you’re not going to wear them and risk twisting an ankle or breaking your neck.”

“I don’t know what clumsy women you dated in the past—”

“We are not on a date. You are a surrogate. Change your shoes.”

She laughed. She couldn’t help it.

From the darkening of his expression, he hadn’t expected that response, which made another bubble of laughter rise. She struggled to smash this one, too, but the sound escaped, and she bit the inside of her lip, trying to muffle her amusement and failing miserably.

Did he really expect her to jump to his bidding? Was he accustomed to women bowing and scraping?

Clearly he had no idea who he was dealing with. The Nielsen sisters were not pushovers. Neither Savannah nor Georgia were known to be quiet, timid, pliable women. The daughters of Norwegian American missionaries, they’d grown up overseas, moving with their parents from mission to mission, before losing their family in a horrific assault four years ago. Georgia and her sister had battled through the grief together and had emerged stronger than ever.

And Nikos should know that.

He’d selected her from thousands of egg donors and potential surrogates. Mr. Laurent told her that Nikos had examined her profile in great depth as he was very specific about what he wanted—age, birth date, height, weight, blood type, eye color, natural hair color, education, IQ.

“You laugh,” Nikos said grimly.