The Greek Tycoon's Defiant Bride

‘I won’t allow it,’ she whispered apologetically while she stood as straight and stiff as a statue, struggling not to feel intimidated.

But Leonidas was already striding past her to snatch up the photo frame on a corner table. ‘Is this him?’ he breathed in a thickened undertone, staring down with a strong air of bemusement at the snap of the smiling toddler clutching a toy lorry.

It was natural human curiosity, she told herself, fighting to control the sense of panic clawing at her. ‘Yes,’ she conceded in reluctant confirmation.

Leonidas scanned the photo with an intensity that would have stripped paint. He studied the little boy’s olive skin and black curly hair and his dark-as-jet eyes. Although he could never recall looking at any other child with the slightest interest and had absolutely no basis for comparison, he thought that Elias was, without a shade of doubt, the most handsome baby he had ever seen. From his level eyebrows to his determined little chin, he just oozed strong Pallis genes.

‘Please go, Leonidas,’ Maribel urged tautly. ‘Don’t make this a battle between us. Elias is a happy child.’

‘He is also self-evidently a Pallis,’ Leonidas pronounced in a bemused tone, his Greek accent more marked than usual.

‘No, he’s a Greenaway.’

Lush black lashes swept up on sizzling dark golden eyes. ‘Maribel…he is a Pallis. You cannot call a dog a cat just because you want to, and why should you want to?’

‘I can think of many reasons. Now that you’ve forced me to satisfy your curiosity, will you leave?’ Maribel was trembling. She was tempted to snatch that precious picture of her son from his lean brown hand. All her protective antenna were operating on high alert.

‘Acquit me of a motive as superficial as that of mere curiosity,’ Leonidas censured. ‘You owe me an explanation—’

‘I owe you nothing and I want you to go.’ Swallowing back the thick taste of panic in her throat, Maribel moved forward and snatched up the phone. ‘If you don’t leave right now, I’ll call the police.’

Leonidas gave her a disconcerted glance and then threw back his handsome dark head and laughed out loud. ‘Why would you do something so mad?’

‘This is my home. I want you to leave.’

‘In the same hour that I find out that you may be the mother of my only child?’ Innate caution and shrewdness were already exercising restraint on Leonidas. He knew it would be most unwise to acknowledge Elias as his before stringent DNA testing had been carried out and the blood bond fully proven by scientific means. Yet he knew in his bones that Elias was his child. He did not know how he knew but he did, and he was already reaching the conclusion that the situation could have been a great deal worse. At least he had Maribel to deal with, and not some mercenary, calculating harpy without morals.

‘I will call the police,’ Maribel threatened unsteadily, terrified that Elias would waken and make some sound upstairs, and that Leonidas would immediately insist on going up to see him.

Leonidas slung her a confounded look and flung his arms wide in a gesture that was expansively Greek and impressive. ‘What is the matter with you? Is this hysteria? Are you at risk of robbery or assault? Is that why you need to talk garbage about calling the police?’

Her eyes were as bright a purple-blue as wild violets, an impression heightened by her pallor and tension. ‘I want you to forget you came here and forget what you think you may have found out. For all our sakes.’

‘Is there some other guy hanging around who thinks that Elias is his child?’ Leonidas enquired grimly, seizing on the only motive he could think of that might explain why she was so eager for him to stage a vanishing act.

A band of tension was starting to pound behind Maribel’s smooth brow and tighten there like a painful vice. Standing up to Leonidas Pallis in such a mood was like being battered by a fierce storm. ‘Of course not.’ Distaste showed openly in her oval face. ‘That’s a really sleazy suggestion.’

‘Women do stuff like that all the time,’ Leonidas told her cynically, and he was not wholly convinced by her denial. Having watched Imogen manipulate Maribel, he had soon appreciated that, while Maribel might be exceptionally brainy, she could also be very gullible when her emotions were engaged. ‘If that isn’t the problem, spare me the theatrical speeches about forgetting I came here. How likely is that?’

‘Just this once I’m asking you to think about someone other than yourself. If that’s theatrical, I’m sorry, but that’s how it is.’ With an unsteady hand, Maribel pushed the hair back from her cheekbone.

Leonidas gave her a quelling look of granite hardness. ‘I’m not listening to this claptrap. Where is Elias?’

Maribel stepped into the hall and yanked open the front door with a perspiring hand. ‘I’ll get the police, Leonidas. I mean it. I’ve got nothing to lose.’

‘My business card. Call me when you come to your senses.’ Leonidas settled a card down on the table.

‘I won’t be changing my mind any time soon,’ Maribel declared defiantly.

Leonidas came to a halt in front of her. Dangerous dark golden eyes slammed down into hers. ‘You want to start a war? You think you can handle that? You think you can handle me?’ he growled. ‘You could never handle me.’

‘But I have to, because I will not accept you in any part of my son’s life. I’ll do whatever it takes to protect him from you!’ Maribel swore in a feverish rush, determination etched into every rigid line of her small, shapely figure.

‘Protect him from me? What are you trying to say? You become offensive and without reason.’ Lean. dark features set with chilling intent, Leonidas shot her a forbidding appraisal. ‘Why? I expected better from you. Is this some sort of payback, Maribel? Are you angry that it took me two years to look you up?’

Maribel wanted to kill him and it was not the first time he had filled her with so much rage and pain that she barely knew what she was thinking any more. Nobody could be more provocative than Leonidas Pallis. Nobody knew better how to put the metaphorical boot in and hurt. Sensible people did not make an enemy of him. But then a sensible woman, she thought in an agony of bitter self-loathing, would never have gone to bed with him in the first place.

‘Why would I be?’ Maribel murmured helplessly. ‘I don’t even like you.’

Virtually nothing shocked Leonidas as, while he’d been growing up, he had seen all the worst facets of human nature as paraded by his dysfunctional mother, but that declaration from Maribel shocked him. He had always viewed her no-nonsense front as a defensive shell. He regarded her as a caring, sympathetic woman with a genuine soft centre, sadly condemned to have her good nature taken advantage of by the users and abusers of the world. But in the space of half an hour, Maribel had turned everything he believed he knew about her upside down and gone out of her way to attack and insult him.

Yet, from what he could work out, she appeared to be the mother of his child. He wondered if stress was making her hysterical, if she just couldn’t cope with the situation. He did not accept that she didn’t like him. He knew she loved him and he had known that almost as long as he had known her. She was not a changeable woman. That she had given birth to his child, rather than choose to have a termination, struck him as perfectly understandable.

Lean, darkly handsome face bleak, Leonidas climbed into his limousine. A Pallis and an alpha male personality to the core of his aggressive being, he wasted no time in making his next move. Lifting the phone, he called the executive head of his international legal team and asked for a copy of Elias Greenaway’s birth certificate to be obtained. He gave the details and ignored the staggered silence that fell at the other end of the line, because Leonidas Pallis never explained his actions to anyone, or laid out the full details of a situation unless he chose to do so.

‘In the morning, I also want a full briefing with regard to my rights as a father in this country.’

Furiously angry and in fighting mode, Leonidas marvelled afresh at Maribel’s offensive behaviour and unreasonable attitude. As he recalled her words his hostility grew ever stronger. To refuse him his natural desire to see the child! To suggest that the child should be protected from him and would be better off without him! His sense of honour was outraged by the shameful accusations she had dared to make.

And, all the while, he kept on seeing images of Maribel flashing him that defiant look, her luscious pink mouth taut with censure. His shimmering dark eyes scorched and hardened. How could she have had his baby without telling him? When the photo of the little boy came to mind, however, he tensed, for he preferred being angry with Maribel to thinking about the matter that lay at the heart of it all.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.