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

She pressed her fingers to her temples and shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Evidently I was wrong.’

‘But it’s silly—you couldn’t…’ Angolos was so rampantly male he couldn’t be…She shook her head positively and without thinking her eyes dropped down his body. ‘You’re—’

‘I am functional,’ he cut in. ‘You’re confusing sterility with impotence.’

Flushing to the roots of her hair at his sardonic intervention, she jerked her eyes back to his face.

‘I just didn’t think I was capable of fathering a child.’

‘But we’d only been together a few weeks. You couldn’t know that unless—’ Unless he had already tried to have ababy. With someone else. With Sonia. The colour suddenly leached dramatically from her lightly tanned skin. ‘Oh,’ she said swallowing. ‘I see.’

So now she had the answer to the question that had puzzled many people at the time. Namely, why should a couple so supremely well suited as Sonia and Angolos get divorced? This new revelation provided the answer, and Georgie could see how it could have happened. They had desperately wanted a family, and Sonia hadn’t got pregnant.

It wouldn’t be the first time the strain of that sort of situation had split up a marriage.

She could see it all: Sonia had thrown herself into a mad social whirl, and Angolos had buried himself in his work. They wouldn’t have talked, of course…as she knew to her cost Angolos didn’t talk.

You had only to witness Sonia and Angolos together to see that they still had feelings for one another. And Georgie had witnessed them together. She hadn’t had much choice when the woman had been their house guest barely weeks after they had married.

‘So when I said I was pregnant…some men might have thought it was a miracle, but you thought that I…’

Some men hadn’t had a letter written by their wife’s lover in their possession. Even after all these years the humiliation of that discovery was still with him. ‘I suppose some men might, but that is all in the past, now I know…’

‘And now you know you can have children.’

Right result, wrong mother.

Was that what he had thought when he realised…? Had he wondered why this couldn’t have happened while he was with Sonia?

Georgie pressed the heel of one hand to the centre of her chest where misery had lodged like a solid object behind her breastbone. Would the pain ever go away…?

‘Yes, now I know I have a child. I have Nicky, and I want to be his father.’

A furrow appeared in her smooth brow. ‘No.’ She wouldn’t deprive Nicky of his father, but how could she survive with Angolos as part of her life? If she had ever kidded herself she weren’t as madly in love with him as ever, she recognised now that this convenient self-delusion was no longer an option.

He slid her a burning look of impatience. ‘What do you mean, no?’

‘I mean…I don’t know what I mean.’ She shook her head. ‘No, this can’t be right. We talked about having a family…we planned…’ She stopped and realised that they hadn’t talked; she had talked. Her stomach lurched sickly as the implications of his confession hit her. ‘You knew about this when we got married?’

‘I did.’

‘And you didn’t tell me—you let me think…’

Angolos watched the colour drain from her face; the sprinkling of freckles across her nose stood out against the marble pallor. ‘You can’t love them,’ she had always said when he had told her he loved those freckles.

‘You let me talk about babies when all along…’ A shudder ran through her body as she turned her tearful, accusing eyes to his face. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? You let me carry on thinking…’

‘It was an omission, and I was wrong.’ A man with an ounce of integrity would have given her the opportunity to make an informed decision.

In his own defence he had fully planned to tell her before the wedding. He had lost count of the number of times that he had started to tell her only to pull back at the last moment.

He had rationalised it, of course, told himself that she was marrying him…After all, her inability to give him a child wouldn’t have altered his feelings.

Feelings were the core of the problem…

She had lit up when he’d walked into a room; she had shaken when he’d touched her. Angolos had known full well that she had been infatuated with him. Young and infatuated, but love…? Had he dared put it to the test?

‘I’m sorry, Angolos.’

His startled eyes flew to her face.

Georgie was pale but composed. As he watched she pushed the hair back from her face with her forearm. It was an intensely weary gesture. The urge to reach out and take her in his arms was so strong that for a moment he couldn’t drag air into his lungs.

‘What are you sorry for, yineka mou?’

‘Well, it must have been incredibly hard for someone like you to be told that you couldn’t father children.’

‘Someone like me…?’

She nodded and as she lifted her eyes to his she caught the strangest expression crossing his face. ‘Well, any man, then,’ she moderated, tactfully not touching on his overdeveloped male pride. ‘When they told you…’ Her voice faded as she imagined him sitting in a clinical white office having the shattering news broken to him by an unsympathetic doctor. ‘You must have felt like someone had kicked you in…’ Her glance dropped and dark, fiery colour rose up her neck until her face was glowing. ‘Sorry, that wasn’t—’

‘You’re right, that’s exactly how I felt,’ Angolos cut in, taking pity on her.

‘And I don’t expect you discussed it with anyone.’

His smile faded. ‘It is not the sort of thing a man discusses.’

His stiff pronouncement was exactly what she had been talking about. ‘Point proven. You’re really into all this macho stuff in a big way. There’s no good denying it,’ she added. ‘And I know you can’t help it. I’m just sorry,’ she admitted with sigh, ‘that you didn’t feel able to confide in me, but then that was always the problem, wasn’t it?

‘You never treated me like an adult capable of making my own decisions. You always kept me out of the loop. Ours was never an equal relationship,’ she reflected, contemplating her neatly trimmed, unpolished nails with a wistful expression that unknown to her had a more dramatic impact on Angolos than the kick she had previously so accurately described.

His expression had grown increasingly shocked as he listened to her matter-of-fact analysis of their relationship. By the time she finished he had the stunned aspect of someone who had just been hit by a runaway truck.

‘I never expected you to take it this way.’

‘Well, I’m not saying I would have been happy about it. I desperately wanted to have your baby.’ She looked up and surprised a stricken expression on his lean face that cut her to the core. ‘But it wouldn’t have changed anything, not essentially,’ she added firmly.

‘You think not?’

His scepticism annoyed her. ‘Yes, I do. We could have adopted…’ Her face brightened. ‘There are a lot of babies out there who need a home,’ she told him earnestly.

‘It would seem,’ he said slowly, ‘that I underestimated you.’

‘When were you going to tell me?’

‘I honestly don’t know,’ he admitted.