The Greek Tycoon's Defiant Bride
An extremely timid Irish wolfhound, Mouse was hiding under the table as usual. He would not emerge until he was reassured that it was only Maribel and Elias coming home. Struggling out from below the table because he was a very large dog, Mouse then welcomed his family with boisterous enthusiasm. Boy and dog rolled on the floor in a tumbling heap. Elias scrambled up. ‘Mouse…up!’ he instructed, to the manner born.
For a split-second, a flash of memory froze Maribel to the spot: Leonidas seven years earlier, asking when she planned on picking up the shirts lying on the floor. There had been that same note of imperious command and expectation, but not the same successful result because, intimidating though Leonidas was, Maribel had never been as eager to please as Mouse. Another image swiftly followed: Leonidas so domestically challenged and so outraged by the suggestion that he was helpless without servants that he had put an electric kettle on the hob.
Her son’s yelp of pain jerked Maribel out of her abstraction. Elias had stumbled and bumped his head on the fridge. Tiredness made him clumsy. Maribel lifted him and rubbed his head in sympathy. Tear-drenched, furious brown eyes met hers, for the reverse side of his warmth and energy was a strong will and a temper of volcanic strength and durability. ‘I know, I know,’ she whispered gently, rocking him until his annoyance ebbed and his impossibly long black lashes began to droop.
She took him upstairs to the bright and cheerful nursery she had decorated with painstaking care and enjoyment. Removing his shoes and jacket, she settled him down in his cot with soothing murmurs. He went out like a light, yet she knew he wouldn’t stay horizontal for very long. In sleep, he looked angelic and peaceful, but awake he could lay claim to neither trait. She watched him for a couple of minutes, involuntarily drawn into tracing the physical likeness that could only strike her with powerful effect on the same day that she had seen his father again. She wondered if her son was the only decent thing that Leonidas Pallis had ever created. It was a fight to get a grip on her thoughts again.
Accompanied by Mouse, Maribel went into the small sunlit room she used as a study and got straight down to marking the pile of essays awaiting her attention. Some time later, Mouse barked and nudged at her arm with an anxious whine. Ten seconds after that warning, she heard the approach of a car and she pushed back her chair. She was walking into the hall when she registered that other vehicles appeared to be arriving at the same time. Her brow furrowed in bewilderment, for she received few visitors and never in car loads.
Glancing out of the window, she stilled in consternation, for a long gleaming limousine now obscured her view of the garden and the field beyond it. Who else could it be but Leonidas Pallis? Her paralysis lasted for only a moment before she raced into the lounge, gathered up the toys lying on the rug and threw them into the toy box, which she thrust at frantic speed behind the sofa. The bell went even before she straightened from that task. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror: her blue eyes were wide with fear, and her face was pale as death. She rubbed her cheeks to restore some natural colour while apprehension made her mind race. What the heck was Leonidas doing here? How could he possibly have found out where she lived? And why should he have even wanted to know? The bell rang again in a shrill, menacing burst. She recalled the Pallis impatience all too well.
A dark sense of foreboding nudging at her, Maribel opened the door.
‘Surprise…surprise,’ Leonidas drawled softly.
Unnerved by the sheer smoothness of that greeting, Maribel froze and Leonidas took immediate advantage by stepping over the threshold. Her hand fell from the door as she turned to face him. After what had been a mere stolen glimpse in church, she got her first good look at him. His suit and coat were exquisitely tailored, designer-cut and worn with supreme élan. His height and breadth alone were intimidating, but for a woman his lean sculpted bone structure and utterly gorgeous dark, deep-set eyes had the biggest impact. Nor was that effect the least diminished by the fact that those ebony eyes were as dangerously direct and cutting as a laser beam. A tiny pulse began beating horribly fast at the foot of her throat, interfering with her ability to breathe.
‘So what ever did happen to breakfast?’ Leonidas murmured with honeyed derision.
A crimson tide of colour washed away Maribel’s pallor in a contrast as strong as blood on snow. Shock reverberated through her as he punched an unapologetic hole through the mind-block she had imposed on her memories of that night after Imogen’s funeral, just over two years earlier. Flinching, she tore her gaze from his, hot with shame and taut with disbelief that he should have dared to throw that crack at her in virtually the first sentence he spoke. But then what did Leonidas not dare? The last time she had met his gaze, they had been a good deal closer and he had shaken her awake to murmur with quite shattering cool and command, ‘Make me breakfast while I’m in the shower.’
In remembrance, a wave of dizziness washed over her and her tummy flipped as though she had gone down too fast in a lift. She would have done just about anything to avoid the recollection of his cruel amusement that morning. She had been gone by the time he’d emerged from that shower. She had buried her mistake as deep as she could, confiding in nobody, indeed resolving to take that particular secret to the grave with her. She was ashamed of the events of that night and all too well aware that Leonidas had not even a passing acquaintance with sensations like shame or discomfiture. She was dismayed by the discovery that, even after two years, her defences were still laughably thin. So thin that he could still hurt her, she registered in dismay.
‘I would sooner not discuss that,’ Maribel enunciated with a wooden lack of expression.
Exasperated by that prissy response, Leonidas snapped the front door shut with an authoritative hand and strolled into the front room. Her taste had not changed, he noted. Had he been presented with pictures of house interiors he could easily have picked out hers. The room was full of plants, towering piles of books and faded floral fabrics. Nothing seemed to match and yet there was a surprising stylishness and comfort to the effect she had achieved.
‘Or why you bolted from the church today?’ Leonidas queried, his rich, dark, accented drawl smooth as silk, but infinitely more disturbing.
Feeling trapped but determined not to overreact, Maribel studied his elegant grey silk tie. ‘I wasn’t bolting—I was simply in a hurry.’
‘But how unlike you to disregard the social rituals of the occasion,’ Leonidas censured softly. ‘Yet another unusual experience for me. You are the only woman who runs away from me.’
‘Maybe I know you better than the others do.’ Maribel could have clapped her hand to her mouth in horror after that verbal reprisal simply tripped off her tongue without her even being aware that it was there. She was furious with herself, for in one foolish little sentence she had betrayed the fear, the anger, the bitterness and the loathing that she would have very much preferred to keep hidden from him.
CHAPTER TWO
LEONIDAS was not amused by that retaliation. The devil that lurked never far below his polished granite surface leapt out. While women of all ages fawned on him and hung on his every word, Maribel, it seemed, still favoured the acerbic response. He had never forgotten the one surprisingly sweet night when Maribel had used honey rather than vinegar in her approach. He had liked that; he had hugely preferred that different attitude, since he had neither taste nor tolerance for censure.
His brilliant eyes gleamed in liquid-gold warning below his luxuriant black lashes. ‘Maybe you do,’ Leonidas acknowledged without any inflection at all.
For a long, wordless moment, Leonidas took his fill while he looked at her, his gaze roaming over her with a boldness that came as naturally to him as aggression. His attention lingered on her strained violet-blue eyes, dropped to the luscious fullness of her mouth as it pouted against her peach-soft skin, and finally wandered lower to scan the full glory of her hourglass curves. It was a novelty to know that, this time around, she would most probably slap him if he touched her. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time. He almost smiled at the memory: his very first and still quite unique experience of female rejection.
Madly aware of that unashamedly sexual appraisal and unable to bear it any longer, Maribel flushed to her hairline and breathed curtly, ‘Stop it!’
‘Stop what? ‘Leonidas growled, strong arousal now tugging at him, in spite of the powerful sense of intuition that warned him that there was something wrong. Even as he glanced back at her face, he picked up on her fear and wondered why she was scared. She had never been scared around him before, or so reluctant to meet his gaze. A faint sense of disappointment touched him, even while he wondered what was wrong with her.
‘Looking at me like that!’ For the first time in two long years, Maribel was hugely conscious of her body and she was furious that she could still be so easily affected by him.
Leonidas loosed an earthy masculine laugh. ‘It’s natural for me to look.’
Her slim hands coiled into fists of restraint. ‘I don’t like it.’
‘Tough. Aren’t you going to offer me coffee? Ask me to take off my coat and sit down?’ Leonidas chided.
Maribel felt like a bird being played with by a cat and she snatched in a fractured breath. ‘No.’
‘What has happened to your manners?’ Unasked, Leonidas peeled off his coat in a slow graceful movement that was curiously sexy and attracted her unwilling attention.
Maribel dragged her guilty eyes off him again, gritting her teeth, literally praying for self-discipline. He came between her and her wits. He brought sex into everything. He made her think and feel things that were not her choice. No matter how hard she fought it, there was a shameful hum of physical awareness travelling through her resisting body. He had always had that effect on her, always. Leonidas had provoked a sense of guilt in Maribel almost from the first moment of their meeting.
In a fluid stride, Leonidas closed the distance between them and lifted a hand to push up her chin and enforce the eye contact she was so keen to avoid. ‘Was it the service? Did it upset you?’
He was now so close that Maribel trembled. She was taken aback by the ease with which he had touched her. She did not want to recall the fleeting intimacy that had broken down all normal barriers. She did not want to be reminded of the taste of his mouth or the evocative scent of his skin. ‘No…it was good to remember her,’ she said gruffly.
‘Then what’s the problem?’ Mesmeric dark golden eyes assailed hers, powered by a larger-than-life personality that few could have withstood.
Her throat ached with her tension. ‘There isn’t one,’ she told him unevenly. ‘I just wasn’t expecting you to call.’
‘I’m usually a welcome visitor,’ Leonidas murmured lazily, his relaxed rejoinder quite out of step with the keen penetration of his gaze.
As Maribel strove to keep a calm expression on her oval face her teeth chattered together behind her sealed lips for a split-second before she overcame that urge. ‘Naturally I’m surprised to see you here. It’s been a long time and I’ve moved house,’ she pointed out, struggling to behave normally and say normal things. ‘Did my aunt give you my address?’
‘No. I had you followed.’
Maribel turned pale at that unnervingly casual admission. ‘My goodness, why did you do that?’
‘Curiosity? A dislike of relying on strangers for information?’ Leonidas shrugged with languid cool. An infinitesimal movement out of the corner of his eye turned his attention below the table where a shaggy grey dog was endeavouring to curl its enormous body into the smallest possible space in the farthest corner. ‘Theos…I did not even realise there was an animal here. What is the matter with it?’
Maribel seized on the distraction of Mouse’s odd behaviour with enthusiasm. ‘He’s terrified of strangers and when he hides his head like that he seems to think he’s invisible, so don’t let on otherwise. Friendly overtures frighten him.’
‘Still collecting lame ducks?’ Leonidas quipped and, as he turned his head away, he caught a glimpse through the window of a hen pecking in the flower bed at the front of the house. ‘You keep poultry here?’
His intonation was that of a jet-setter aghast at her deeply rural lifestyle. Maribel was willing to bet that Leonidas had never before been so close to domestic fowl, and in another mood she would have laughed at his expression and rattled on the window to chase the hen away from her plants. Unable to relax, she resolved to treat him as she would have treated any other unexpected visitor. ‘Look, I’ll make some coffee,’ she proffered, thrusting open the kitchen door.
‘I’m not thirsty. Tell me what you’ve been doing over the past couple of years,’ he invited softly.
A chill ran down her taut spinal cord before she turned back to him. He couldn’t know about Elias, she reasoned inwardly. Why should he even suspect? Unless someone had said something at the service? But why the heck should anyone have mentioned her or her child? As far as her relatives were concerned she was a geek who led a deeply boring life. Scolding herself for the unfamiliar paranoia that was ready to pounce and take hold of her, Maribel tilted her chin. ‘I’ve been turning this place into a habitable home. It needed a lot of work. That kept me busy.’
Leonidas watched her hands lace together in a restive motion and untangle again. She folded her arms and shifted position in a revealing display of anxiety that any skilled observer would have recognised. ‘I believe you have a child now,’ he delivered smooth as glass, and all the time as his own tension rose he was telling himself that he had to be wrong, his suspicions ridiculously fanciful.
‘Yes—yes, I have. I didn’t think you’d be too interested in that piece of news,’ Maribel countered in a determined recovery, forcing a wry smile onto her taut lips, while wondering how on earth he had found out that she had become a mother. ‘As I recall it, you used to give friends with kids the go-by.’
Leonidas would have been the first to admit that that was true: he had never had any interest in children and found the doting fondness of parents for their offspring a bore and an irritation. Nobody acquainted with him would have dreamt of wheeling out their progeny for him to admire.
‘Who told you I’d had a child?’ Maribel enquired a shade tightly.
‘The Strattons.’
‘I’m surprised it was mentioned.’ While fighting to keep her voice light, Maribel was wondering frantically what she would say if he asked her what age her child was. Would she lie? Could she lie on such a subject? She was in a situation that she would have done almost anything to avoid. She did not believe that she could lie about such a serious matter and still live with her conscience. ‘Was it the “left-in-the-lurch” version?’ she asked.
A rare smile of amusement slashed the Greek tycoon’s beautifully shaped mouth. ‘Yes.’
‘That’s not how it was,’ Maribel declared, attempting not to stare, because when he smiled the chill factor vanished from his lean, hard-boned features and banished the forbidding dark reserve that put people so much on their guard.
Without warning, distaste that she had slept with another man assailed Leonidas and killed his momentary amusement on the subject. He marvelled at that stab of possessiveness that ran contrary to his nature. His affairs were always casual, hampered by neither emotion nor sentimentality. But then, he had known Maribel for a long time and he had become her first lover. Perhaps that had been inevitable, he reasoned, still in search of the precise trigger that had fired him into making that discovery, more than two years earlier. Once he had discovered how she felt about him, the awareness had lent a strangely enjoyable intimacy to their encounters.
‘How was it?’ he heard himself ask, and it was the sort of question he never asked, but he was determined to satisfy his curiosity.
Maribel was disconcerted by that enquiry and she spread her hands in a jerky motion. Her tension was climbing steadily. ‘It wasn’t complex. I found myself pregnant and I wanted the baby.’
Leonidas wondered at her wording. Why no reference to the father? Another one-night stand? Had he given her a taste for them? Had he ever really known her? He would have sworn that Maribel Greenaway was one of the last women alive likely to embrace either promiscuity or unmarried motherhood. Her outlook on life was conservative. She went to church; she volunteered for charity work. She wore unrevealing clothes. A frown line dividing his sleek ebony brows, his gaze skimmed over the view through the kitchen doorway. There, however, his attention screeched to an abrupt halt and doubled back to re-examine the brightly coloured, magnetised alphabet letters adorning the refrigerator door. Those letters spelled out a familiar name. A powerful sense of disbelief gripped him.
‘What do you call your child?’ Leonidas murmured thickly.
Maribel went rigid. ‘Why are you asking me that?’
‘And why are you avoiding answering me?’ Leonidas shot back at her.
A horrible cold knot twisted tight inside her stomach. It was not something she could hide, not something she could lie about, for her child’s name was a matter of public record. ‘Elias,’ she almost whispered, her voice dying on her at the worst possible moment.
It was the name of his grandfather and also one of his, and she pronounced it correctly in the Greek fashion, Ellee-us, not as someone English might have said it. Leonidas was so much shocked by that awareness that he was struck dumb, as he could not initially accept that what had only been the mildest of craziest suspicions might actually turn out to be true.
‘I always liked the name,’ Maribel told him in a last-ditch attempt at a cover-up.
‘Elias is a Pallis name. My grandfather had it and so also do I.’ Hard dark eyes rested on her with cold intensity. ‘Why did you choose to use it?’
Maribel felt as though an icy hand were closing round her vocal cords and chest and making it impossible for her to breathe properly. ‘Because I liked it,’ she said again, because she could think of nothing else to say.
Leonidas swung away from her, lean brown hands clenching into fists of frustration. He had no time for mysteries or games that were not of his own making. His chequered life had taught him many things, but patience was not one of them. He refused to believe what his brain was striving to tell him. He did not do unprotected sex. A risk-taker in business and sport and equally fearless in many other fields, he was cautious when it came to contraception, always choosing the safe approach. He did not want children. He had never wanted children. Even less had he ever wished to run the risk of giving some woman a literal gun to hold to his head and his wallet. For what else could an unplanned child be to a man of his extreme wealth? A serious liability and a complication he could do without. It was a mistake he had always thought he was too smart to make. But he was well aware that the night after Imogen’s funeral he had been in a very bizarre mood and he had abandoned his usual caution. More than once.
Maribel surveyed Leonidas with a surge of reluctant perception. Severe tension held his lean, powerful body taut. He was staggered and he was appalled, and she quite understood that. She did not blame him for his carelessness in getting her pregnant. It was true that she had felt rather differently when she had first discovered her condition, but the passage of time had altered her perspective. After all, Elias had enriched her life to an almost indescribable degree and she could hardly regret his conception.
‘Let’s not discuss this,’ she murmured gently.
That suggestion outraged Leonidas. How could a woman with her extraordinary intellect say something so foolish? But was it possible that she could have given birth to his child without even letting him know that she was pregnant? Surely it had to be impossible? His logic refused to accept her in such a role—she was a very conventional woman. Yet why else had she named her child Elias? Why was she so nervous? Why was she irrationally trying to evade even discussing the matter?
‘Is the child mine?’ Leonidas demanded harshly.
Her natural colour had ebbed and with it the strength of her voice. ‘He’s mine. I see no reason to add anything else to that statement.’
‘Don’t be stupid. I asked a straight question and I will have a straight answer. What age is he?’
‘I’m not prepared to discuss Elias with you.’ Dry-mouthed, her heart beating so fast she felt nauseous, Maribel straightened her spine. ‘We have nothing to talk about. I’m sorry, but I would like you to leave.’
Leonidas could not give credence to what he was hearing. In all his life he had never been addressed in such a fashion. ‘Are you out of your mind?’ he breathed in a raw undertone. ‘You think you can throw this bombshell at me and then tell me to go away?’
‘I didn’t throw anything at you. You reached your own conclusions without any assistance from me. I don’t want to argue with you.’ Her blue eyes were violet with a curious mix of defiance and entreaty.
‘But if I hadn’t reached the correct conclusion, you would surely have contradicted me,’ Leonidas reasoned with harsh bite. ‘As you did not, I can only assume that you believe Elias to be my child.’
‘He is mine.’ Maribel linked her hands tightly together to prevent them from trembling. ‘I’m quite sure you don’t want my advice, but I’ll give it all the same. Please consider this issue in a calm and logical way first.’
‘Calm? Logical?’ Leonidas growled, affronted by that particular choice of words.
‘Elias is healthy, happy and secure. He lacks nothing. There is no reason for you to be concerned or involved in any way in our lives,’ Maribel told him tautly, willing him to listen, understand and accept those facts.
Rage was rising in Leonidas with a ferocity he had not experienced since his sister had died when he was sixteen. How dared she seek to exclude him from his child’s life? Elias had to be his child, his son. Had it been otherwise, Maribel would have said so. But bewilderment held him back from the much more aggressive response ready to blast from him. Why was she trying to get rid of him if Elias was his child? What kind of sense did that make?
‘Did you assume I wouldn’t want to know? Is that what lies at the foot of this nonsense?’ Dark eyes shimmering gold, Leonidas studied her in wrathful challenge. ‘Are you presuming to believe that you know how I would feel if I had a child? You do not know. Even I do not know when such news comes at me out of nowhere!’
The atmosphere was so hot and tense Maribel would not have been surprised to hear it sizzle and see it smoke.
‘When was he born?’ Leonidas demanded.
Her neck and her shoulders ached with the tension of her rigid stance. All the legendary force of the Pallis will was trained on her in the onslaught of his fierce dark gaze. Never had she been more conscious of his strength of character and it occurred to her that parting with a few harmless facts might actually dampen down his animosity. She gave the date.
The silence seemed to last for ever. In the circumstances and with such a date, Leonidas knew immediately that there was virtually no chance that anyone else could have fathered her child. ‘I want to see him.’
Maribel went white and shook her head in urgent negative, chestnut brown hair flying round her cheeks in a glossy fall. ‘No. I won’t allow that.’
‘You won’t…allow…that?’ Leonidas breathed in rampant disbelief.
Maribel wished that there had been a more diplomatic way of telling him that. Unhappily, she had no precedent to follow because people didn’t say no to Leonidas Pallis. ‘No’ was not a word he was accustomed to hearing. ‘No’ was not a word he knew how to accept. From birth he had had every material thing he had ever wanted or asked for, while being starved of the much more important childhood needs. But he had survived by tuning out the emotional stuff, getting by without it. Now when he desired something, he simply went all out to take it and sensible people didn’t get in his way. He was as ruthless as only a very powerful personality could be when he was crossed. She knew very well that her refusal struck him as a deeply offensive challenge and just how unfortunate that reality was.