The Greek Tycoon's Defiant Bride

‘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.’