Greek Bachelors: The Ultimate Seduction: The Petrakos Bride / One Night...Nine-Month Scandal / One Night to Risk it All

‘No…’ But her mind, she discovered, was a total blank. The doctor had said it was hormones, but sometimes she felt as if her brain had been hijacked.

She had no objection, therefore, to Giannis stepping straight into the breach with the immediate assurance that she would be met at the station and brought to a hotel where they could dine.

‘It’ll be very relaxed.’ Giannis was determined to do and say whatever it took to draw her out of hiding, though he was using persuasive tactics that were utterly new to him.

Maddie wondered dully how hungry he would feel after she had broken her news. Since she could hardly take care of that in a public restaurant, she felt she had to say in warning, ‘I sort of need to talk to you in private.’

Whatever, Giannis thought, energised by a wave of satisfaction and impatience. She had missed him. Of course she had. He had picked up on a hint of tears in her voice, but even so she had stayed away for over three bloody months! Strange how a woman who could be so gentle could also be as stubborn as a mule and as hard as granite. He realised that he was as angry with her as he was pleased, and it was a volatile combination. But stronger than either prompting ran a deep, atavistic need to stamp her as his again, with the raw, physical intimacy that would ensure she never ran in the wrong direction again. This enthralling imagery in mind, Giannis cancelled all his afternoon appointments with a casualness that shocked his personal assistants.

Even though it was a hot day, Maddie wore a long jacket which, amazingly, did a good job of concealing her changing shape. Nemos greeted her with a warm, welcoming smile and shepherded her through the busy station. She alighted in a quiet side street. The lavish hotel foyer was wrapped in the intimidating silence of an exclusive establishment. Her nervous tension increased, her palms dampening.

‘Mr Petrakos is in here…’A door was spread back and she saw him for herself: tall, vibrantly dark and devastatingly handsome, he wore a silver-grey business suit with the classy sheen of madly expensive silk. He was all she saw—the only element in the room that she could focus on. A tiny pulse was beating too fast in the hollow of her collarbone.

His first thought was that she looked incredibly lovely, like a painting brought to life. She looked tiny and fragile in a voluminous black jacket which acted as a vivid foil for her Titian mane of curls and pure white skin.

‘Would you like a drink?’ he murmured softly.

‘Oh, no—I mean…’

Giannis strode forward and offered to take her coat. He didn’t like the way she was hovering, or the evasiveness of her green eyes. He had never been so tense. He was trying not to think of what he would do if she decided to walk away again.

‘No…no, it’s okay.’ Maddie backed away, and then thought how ridiculous she must look—how pointless it was for her to try and delay the announcement that she had to make. ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’

‘You’re very jumpy? I can see that for myself.’

Maddie breathed in deep. ‘About three months ago I told you a lie.’

‘You’re forgiven,’ Giannis asserted huskily, feasting his appreciative and somewhat amused gaze on her, because he was convinced that what she termed a lie would only qualify as the most minor fib. After all, nobody knew better than he did that she had sterling principles set in stone.

‘But you don’t know what I lied about yet.’

His gilded bronze eyes narrowed and raked over her, lingering on the soft pink fullness of her mouth. ‘You look amazing. You’d have to be a guy to understand. Promise to come home with me tonight and I won’t even ask what the lie was, pedhi mou.’

Maddie could not initially credit his response, and then intimate and deeply embarrassing memories stirred and surfaced. He exuded hot, sexual energy, and he had taught her the meaning of exquisite pleasure. A heavy flush heated her entire skin surface. She could not deny that in Morocco she had been with him every step of the way. Furthermore, the extent of the passion he’d awakened had shocked her. She had not even known that it was possible for her to want a man to the extent that he could make her want him. So was it any wonder that he did not take her very seriously?

‘Do you ever think of anything other than the bedroom stuff?’ she asked in a stifled tone of discomfiture.

‘Not around you…it colours everything,’ Giannis confided in a driven undertone, opting for the honesty that she had insisted she wanted from him. ‘It even gets in the way of business. Perhaps if I had you all to myself for an unspecified length of time, and I could live out my every erotic desire, I could think of other things…occasionally.’

‘Like…as in having a serious conversation?’ Maddie prompted tightly, as she unbuttoned her jacket with trembling hands.

‘Don’t hold your breath, glikia mou.’ His lean, strong face taut, his brilliant dark eyes flashed languorous gold above his bronzed cheekbones. ‘I’m not into those.’

Maddie yanked off her jacket in a decidedly challenging fashion and pitched it at a chair, fearful that at any moment she would lose her nerve. She also hated herself for the fact that she really didn’t want to show him her pregnant body. He had found her unpregnant body deeply attractive and sensual.

‘And possibly you aren’t either,’ Giannis added thickly, hoping very much that she was going to continue with the strip.

He didn’t care how many serious conversations he had to be subjected to afterwards. Indeed, he dimly accepted that that might well be the price. She was a little conscience on legs, heavily prone to feeling bad about his natural human flaws. He just wished she could see how simple everything would be if she could only think as he did. She was back. They were together. He wanted her to come home with him. What was wrong with a celebration? There was no need to discuss the fact that she now had her own discreet surveillance team of three, who would ensure that she never got lost again. No, he didn’t make the same mistake twice.

‘G-Giannis…?’ Maddie stammered, the tip of her tongue sliding out to moisten her lower lip in the heavy silence. She had assumed that he would immediately notice that her trim waist had vanished.

Instead his smouldering gaze was locked to the sinfully ripe contours of her moist pink lips. ‘I love your mouth…’

Maddie realised that her black T-shirt and stretchy skirt were doing a better job of concealment than she had expected. Sucking in her breath, in the pathetic hope that some of her tummy would go in with it, she muttered unevenly, ‘Don’t you notice anything?’

On an erotic high of anticipation, Giannis was taking his time about inspecting her wonderfully rounded shape. The voluptuous curve of her bosom left him spellbound, and his scrutiny lingered there with the purist’s attention to detail. He was picturing her on his bed, in his office, in his apartment, on his private jet. Always there for him, always available. ‘Your breasts are amazing…’

Maddie went scarlet with rage and stress and disbelief and turned sideways. ‘What about my stomach?’

Sleek ebony brows pleating, Giannis stared. Black lashes lowering, he blinked, too taken aback to instantly grasp why she should look from that angle as if she had swallowed a cushion. ‘Enormous…’

Her eyes smarted; her face tightened and paled. Well, he had shot straight from the hip—and she had always known that he would find her rotund proportions deeply unappealing, hadn’t she?

‘Pregnant,’ Giannis almost whispered in Greek. And then he said it again for good measure in English. ‘But you can’t be pregnant because you said you were not.’

A silence full of dangerous sparks began to simmer in the tense atmosphere.

‘Isn’t that so?’ Giannis murmured lethally.

CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_7e9db5cf-9162-568d-a1a4-51006e007a2f)

MADDIE winced at that direct hit. ‘Yes, but—’

Giannis focused on her with a fierce intensity that made her feel horribly like a condemned prisoner in the dock. ‘Is this the lie you mentioned?’

Maddie nodded reluctant confirmation.

Giannis lifted a strong hand and brought it down again in a compelling motion. A warning flare of gold was glimmering in his gaze. ‘You are not forgiven.’

‘I realise that this is a shock for you…’

Outrage was roaring through Giannis, who prided himself on his control of his temper. It was bad enough that she had disappeared, but that she should have done so when she carried his child incensed him. All those wasted months when they might have been together. ‘It is a great deal more than a shock—’

Coppery red curls streamed back from her oval face as her chin came up. ‘A disaster? That is how you labelled the possibility of me conceiving.’

‘That is unjust. You’re rewinding right back to the first day we met to quote a casual comment?’ Giannis shot back at her, fast as the speed of light.

‘What was casual about it? It wasn’t casual for me,’ Maddie protested painfully. ‘I may not have known it that day, but you were engaged. Yes, I accept that it was casual for you, and of course you didn’t want me to have your child. Why can’t you just admit that me falling pregnant is the worst situation you can imagine?’

His lean, darkly handsome face hardened. ‘Do not tell me how I think or how I feel,’ he intoned in sizzling disdain. ‘Don’t make excuses for yourself either!’

Maddie dealt him a defensive glance. ‘I’m not—’

‘You are—and it makes what you have done even more unacceptable. So I didn’t think you would conceive?’ Giannis flung up his hands and contrived to shrug his indifference to that angle of argument. His Greek heritage had never been more apparent to her. ‘But you did conceive and the instant that occurred everything changed for both of us.’

‘How?’ Maddie realised that she had very much underestimated the depth of his anger.

Stunning eyes fiercely intent, Giannis studied her. He moved away a little to get a better view. The lush mound of her once flat stomach was fast becoming a source of fascination to him. He could not recall ever looking at a pregnant woman before. He had not had the slightest interest. But this was different—she was different in that starring role. Somewhere deep within his male psyche a primitive glow of satisfaction burned with his every fresh appraisal of her altered figure. He was fertile. She was carrying his seed in her belly.