His Pregnant Bride: Pregnant by the Greek Tycoon / His Pregnant Princess / Pregnant: Father Needed

This wasn’t the sort of house where you nipped down to the kitchen to make yourself a sandwich in the middle of the night. She seriously doubted that Angolos knew where the kitchens were!

Within ten seconds she knew that she wasn’t going to acclimatise to her new life overnight. It was going to be a steep learning curve, but she reasoned if she had Angolos there to help her she would be all right. She didn’t know at the time that he wouldn’t be…that his work would occupy most of his waking moments.

She walked around the place making the right admiring noises, but she couldn’t imagine ever thinking of this place as home. And on top of that there was his family, who had been there in force when she’d arrived.

‘Sorry about tonight,’ Angolos said when they lay in bed later that night. ‘They wanted to inspect my new bride, and who,’ he suggested throatily, ‘can blame them?’

‘I don’t think they were very impressed.’

‘Don’t be silly. They’ll love you…why wouldn’t they?’ Angolos impatiently dismissed her concerns. ‘You just need to relax a little.’

‘You don’t think I was relaxed… Did I come over as—?’

He laid a finger against her lips. ‘Forget about my family; it doesn’t matter what they think. They’ll be gone tomorrow.’

She breathed a sigh of relief. Angolos seemed different in this environment, but she was sure that once they were alone everything would be all right. She couldn’t wait.

‘Good…that is, I’m sure they’re very nice, but there was an awful lot of them.’ There was no way she was going to remember the names of all those aunts and uncles and cousins. As Angolos was kissing his way up her neck she was hard-pressed to remember her own name.

‘I really don’t want to talk about relatives,’ he said, pausing halfway up.

‘Me neither,’ she admitted huskily as he peeled off her transparent nightgown to reveal glowing skin.

‘Theos, but you are beautiful.’

His words drove everything else from Georgie’s mind. She melted.

The sex was spectacular, but the problem was still there the next day in the shape of his mother and sister. They were still there at lunch-time.

Short of packing their bags for them, what could she do?

As she walked out to the helicopter pad with Angolos, who had explained he had to go into the office, she took the opportunity to casually enquire, ‘When are your mother and sister going home?’

Angolos threw some instruction to his assistant, a polite, nice-looking young man who was distantly related. As the younger man hurried ahead Angolos directed a puzzled frown at Georgie’s face.

‘Home…?’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t follow.’

‘I was wondering when your mother and Sacha were going back home.’

He threw back his head and laughed. ‘They are home, yineka mou, didn’t I say? They live here.’

Somehow the strained smile stayed glued to her face. ‘No, you didn’t say.’ The realisation that they would be sharing a home with his family made her spirits plummet. It had taken about five minutes for her to realise that she and her mother-in-law were never going to be pals, and that her sister-in-law, whom Georgie considered horribly indulged, looked down her aristocratic little nose at her.

‘Mother will be a big help while you’re settling in, and Sacha is your age—you’re bound to have a lot in common.’

Georgie, who seriously doubted either of these claims, responded to the kiss he planted on her lips with less enthusiasm than previously.

‘Are you all right?’

Georgie, a big fan of telling it as it was, heard herself lie. ‘Terrific…just a bit tired.’

That was the first time she concealed her feelings from him, but not the last time. She even got quite good at it though her acting talents were stretched to the limit when he dropped one particular bombshell on her.

Angolos went to Paris, this time on business and without her. ‘I’d love for you to come with me, of course I would, but this is business. You do understand…?’

On his return he casually mentioned, in a ‘you’ll never guess who I bumped into’ sort of way, that he had had dinner with his ex-wife while there.

Georgie, who had already been force-fed a daily dose of Sonia-worship by her in-laws, wanted to scream, but instead she smiled and said quietly, ‘How nice.’

The following month he announced he had invited Sonia up for the weekend. That his ex arrived late seemed to be taken for granted. Georgie could have accommodated her tardiness, but she could never forgive their guest for being poised, self-assured and, it went without saying, drop-dead gorgeous. In fact she had all the qualities necessary to be Angolos’s wife—heck, she even still had her ring; she’d just swapped fingers!

In other words she was everything Georgie longed to be and wasn’t.

She was also very tactile, always touching and stroking. Georgie was forced to watch as she stroked Angolos’s arm or ran her fingers over his lean cheek. It seemed to Georgie that every time she walked into a room they were there, laughing in a corner, sharing their jokes and their secrets. Feeling totally alienated, she retreated into her shell.

‘You never struck me as sentimental.’

She turned her head towards Angolos and smiled. Unexpectedly recalling the traumatic events made her realise just how much she had changed in the intervening years. It was quite an empowering experience to realise that if she found herself in that situation today she would not creep away to feel slighted and sorry for herself in the corner.

No, she would tell the other woman to lay off. She would confront Angolos—at best his behaviour was insensitive, at worst he still had feelings for his ex. She would demand he decided whom he wanted, because she wasn’t playing second fiddle to anyone!

‘I was being ironic. The watch—’ she glanced at her wrist ‘—is a good investment, much more likely to rise in value than money in the bank, or so I was told.’ By her dad when he’d returned the watch, having taken it to be valued without her knowledge.

‘You had it valued?’

She nodded; her father had been shocked that she’d been walking around wearing something that was, as he’d put it, ‘worth as much as a two-bedroomed house’, without any insurance.

‘My finances were tight.’

‘You seem to have a more practical attitude to money than you once did.’

‘Practical?’ She thought about the wild flowers, carefully pressed and preserved alongside other treasures in the velvet-lined box. Angolos had picked them for her the first time they’d walked through the sand dunes. ‘I’m working on it. But I don’t think I’ll ever care about money for its own sake and I don’t put a price on things the way you do.’

‘Not even your virginity?’

Heat flooded her face as her furious flashing eyes flew to his face. ‘Don’t you dare make out I held out to make you marry me!’ she snapped. ‘You always put a higher value on that than I did,’ she reminded him. ‘You could have had it for nothing, Angolos—you didn’t have to marry me.’

In the long simmering silence their eyes locked. His chest lifted as he expelled a long sibilant sigh.

‘I know.’ She would never know what it had cost him not to accept what she had been so anxious to give him.

‘Then why…?’

He pressed his fingers to the groove above his masterful nose and scanned the stretch of beach. It was empty but for a few people walking dogs.

‘Why did you marry me, Angolos?’

‘Do you want to walk?’