by Jennie Lucas
Turning off the slender road, Leonidas pulled up to a gate and typed in a code. The gate swung open, and he drove through.
Daisy gasped when she saw a lavish white villa, spread out across the edge of the beach, overlooking the sea.
“This was your childhood home?” she breathed, turning to him. “You were the luckiest kid alive.”
His eyes seemed guarded as he gave a tight smile. “It is very beautiful. Yes.”
Parking in the separate ten-car garage, which was almost empty of cars, he turned off the engine. After taking their luggage from the trunk, he led Daisy inside the villa.
They were greeted by a tiny white-haired woman who exclaimed over Leonidas in Greek and cried and hugged him. After a few moments of this, he turned to Daisy.
“This is Maria, my old nanny. She’s housekeeper here now.”
“Hello,” Daisy said warmly, holding out her hand. Maria looked confused, looking from Daisy’s face to her belly. Then Leonidas spoke a few words in Greek that made the white-haired woman gasp. Ignoring Daisy’s outstretched hand, the housekeeper hugged her, speaking rapidly in the same language.
“She’s thrilled to meet my wife. She says it’s about time I was wed,” he said, smiling.
“Maria helped raise you?”
His expression sobered. “I don’t know how I would have survived without her.”
“Your parents weren’t around?”
“That’s one way to put it.” He turned to Maria and said something in Greek.
The white-haired woman nodded, then called out, bringing two men into the room. They spoke to Leo and then took their suitcases down the hall.
Leonidas turned to Daisy. “You must be hungry.”
“Well—yes,” she admitted, rubbing her belly. “Always, these days.” She bit her lip. “And I didn’t eat much at the reception last night...”
“We can have lunch on the terrace. The best part of the house.”
He led her through the spacious villa, which was elegant and well maintained, but oddly old-fashioned, almost desolate, like a museum. She asked, “How long has it been since you’ve visited?”
He glanced around the music room, with its high ceilings and grand piano, its wide windows and French doors overlooking the sea. He scratched his head. “A few years. Five?”
“You haven’t been home for five years?”
“I was born here. I never said it was home.” He looked away. “I don’t have many good memories of the place. I was away at school from when I was nine, remember. I’ve hardly come back since my parents died.”
She knew he was an orphan. “I’m so sorry...how old were you?”
“Fourteen.” His voice was flat. No wonder. It was heartbreaking to lose your parents. Daisy knew all about it.
Her voice was gentle as she said, “Why did you choose this place for our honeymoon?”
“Because...” He took a deep breath. “Because it was time. Besides.” He gave a smile that didn’t meet his eyes. “Doesn’t every bride dream of a honeymoon on a Greek island?”
“It’s more than I ever dreamed of.” She nestled her hand in his. “I’m sorry about your parents. My own mom died when I was just seven. Cancer. And then my...”
She stopped herself, but too late. Their eyes locked. Would the memory of her father always stand between them?
He pulled his hand away. “This way.”
Leonidas led her outside through the French doors. Daisy stopped, gasping at the beauty.
The wide terrace clung to the edge of the bright blue sea, with a white balustrade hovering between sea and sky. On the walls of the villa behind them, bougainvillea climbed, gloriously pink, between the white and blue.
“It’s beautiful,” she whispered, choking up. “I never imagined anything could be so beautiful.”
“I can,” Leonidas said huskily, looking down at her. He roughly pulled her into his arms.
As he kissed her, Daisy felt the sun on her bare shoulders, the warm wind blowing against her dress and hair, and she breathed in the sweet scent of flowers and the salt of the sea. She felt her husband’s strength and power and heat. He wanted her. He adored her.
Could he ever love her?
He’d told her once that he couldn’t. But then, hadn’t Daisy said the same after learning his true identity—telling him she could never, ever love him again?
And she’d been wrong. Because in this moment, as Leonidas held her passionately in this paradise, she felt her love for him more strongly than ever.
A voice chirped words in Greek behind them, and they both fell guiltily apart. Maria, the housekeeper, was smiling, holding a lunch tray. With an answering smile, Leonidas went to take the tray from her.
“We’ll have lunch at the table,” he murmured to Daisy.
The two of them spent a pleasurable hour, eating fish and Greek salad and freshly baked flatbreads, along with briny olives and cheeses. It was all so impossibly delicious that when Daisy finally could eat no more, she leaned back in her chair, looking out at the sea, feeling impossibly happy.
She looked at her husband. As he gazed out at the blue water, his darkly handsome face looked relaxed. Younger. He seemed...different.
“Do you have any drawing paper?” Daisy asked suddenly. He turned to her with a laugh.
“Why?”
“I want to draw you.”
“Right now?”
“Yes, now.”
He went inside the villa, and a moment later, came back with a small pad of paper and a regular pencil. “It’s the best I could find. It’s not exactly an art studio in there.”
“It’s perfect,” she said absentmindedly, taking it in hand. She looked at him as he sat back at the small table on the terrace. “Don’t move.”
He shifted uneasily. “Why are you drawing me?”
How could she explain this strange glow of happiness, this need to understand, to hold on to the moment—and to him? “Because...just because.”
With a sigh, he nodded, and sat back at the table. As Daisy drew, she focused completely on line and shadow and light and form. Silence fell. He sat very still, lost in his own thoughts. As Leonidas stared at the villa, his relaxed expression became wooden, even haunted. To draw him back out, she prodded gently, “So you grew up here?”
“Yes.” If anything, he looked more closed off. She tried again.
“You must have at least a few good memories of this place.”
“I have good memories of Maria. And the hours I spent on this terrace. As a boy, I used to look out at the water and dream about jumping in the sea and swimming far, far away. Not stopping until I reached North America.” The light slowly came back into his eyes. “The village is nice. The food. The people. I was free to walk around the island, to disappear for hours.”
“Hours?” She lifted her eyebrows, even as she focused on the page. “Your parents didn’t worry?”
“They were happy I was gone.”
Moving the pencil across the white page, Daisy gave a snort. “I’m sure that’s not true...” Finishing the sketch, she held it up to him with quiet pride. “Here.”
Reaching out, Leonidas looked at the drawing. Daisy smiled. It was the best thing she’d done in ages, she thought. Maybe ever. He looked younger in the drawing, happy.
He touched the page gently, then whispered, “That’s how you see me?”
“Yes.” She’d drawn him the way she saw him. With her heart.
Silence fell, a silence so long that it became heavy, like a dark cloud covering the sun. Then Leo roughly pushed the drawing back to her.
“You’ve got me all wrong,” he said in a low voice. “It’s time you knew.” He lifted his black eyes. “Who I really am.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
THIS WAS A MISTAKE. A huge mistake.
Behind him, Leonidas could hear the roar of the sea—or maybe it was his heart. He looked at Daisy, sitting across from him at the table.
His wife’s eyes were big and green, fringed with dark lashes, and her full pink lips were parted. Her honey-brown hair fell in waves against her bare shoulders, over the thin straps of her white sundress. Behind her the magnificent white villa reached up into the blue sky, with brilliant pink flowers and green leaves along the white wall.
For the last few days, he’d tried to convince himself he was going to tell her everything, as he’d promised. She was his wife now. She was having his baby. If he couldn’t finally let down his guard with her, then who?
Then he remembered how he’d felt when that gray-haired artist—Franck Bain—had burst in on their wedding and tried to take Daisy from him.
Don’t marry him. He’s a liar who killed your father—an innocent man.
If the security guards hadn’t rushed the man out, Leonidas might have throttled Bain himself. Since the wedding yesterday, the man had been politely warned to leave New York. Politely might be an exaggeration. But he had left for Los Angeles and with any luck, they’d never see him again.
But Bain had been right about one thing. Leonidas was a liar. Not about Daisy’s father, who hadn’t been innocent in the forgery scheme.
But about himself.
For Leonidas’s whole life, he’d lied about who he was.
He was tired of pretending. He wanted one person on earth to know him, really know him. And who could be more trustworthy than Daisy?
He wanted to tell his wife the truth. But the idea was terrifying. Even as he’d held his new bride, snuggled up against him, on the overnight flight from New York, tension had built inside him.
So he’d promised himself that he’d tell her at the end of their honeymoon, after a week of lovemaking, eating fresh seafood and watching the sun set over the Aegean.
Appearance is what matters. How many times had his parents drilled that into him as a child—not just by words, but by example? At twenty-one, he’d thrown himself into the luxury business, determined to do even better than Giannis and Eleni Niarxos had in projecting an aura of perfection. Leonidas had become his brand—global, wealthy, sophisticated, cold.
Except there was this quiet voice inside him, growing steadily harder to repress, that he was more than his brand, so much more. He wasn’t the monster his parents had called him; he could be warm and alive. Like her.
Daisy licked her delicious pink lips. “What do you mean?” she said haltingly, her voice like music. “I don’t know who you are?”
In her arms, pressed against her breasts and belly, she cradled her sketch of him.
It was the sketch which had made him blurt out the words. The man in her drawing looked strong and warm and kind and sure, with humor gleaming from his eyes. Nothing like Leonidas had ever been. Not even as a boy.
But perhaps he could still become that man if—
“Leo?”
“I was never meant to be born,” he said. “My very existence is a lie.” He gave a grim smile. “You might say I’m a forgery.”
“What are you talking about?”
Leonidas took a deep breath. “You think I’m Leonidas Gianakos Niarxos, the son of Giannis Niarxos.”
Her lovely face looked bewildered. “Aren’t you?”
This was harder than he’d thought. He could not force the words from his lips. His whole body was screaming Danger! and telling him to be quiet before it was too late, before he risked everything.
Rising from the chair, he paced the wide terrace. He felt her eyes follow him. He probably looked crazy. Because he was. Keeping this story buried inside him for so long had made him crazy.
Turning, Leonidas gripped the railing of the balustrade, looking out at the sea beneath the hot Greek sun. “My parents married for love.” He paused. “That was unusual for wealthy Greek families at the time. And they were young. My father was heir to the Niarxos company, which made luxury leather goods. My mother was the heiress to a shipping fortune. She brought money as her dowry—and a Picasso.”
“Love with Birds,” Daisy whispered, then cut herself off.
“Yes.” He glanced back at her. “From everything I’ve heard, my parents were crazy about each other.” His hands tightened. “But years passed, and they could not have a baby. Society’s golden couple was not perfect after all. All of their friends, who’d been secretly jealous of their flaunted passion, taunted them with their smug pity. And when it turned out to be my father’s fault that they could not conceive, my mother started complaining about him to her friends. Their love evaporated into rage and blame.” He glanced back at her. “I only heard of this years later, you understand.”
Daisy’s face was pale. “Then you were born...”
“Right.” Leonidas gave a crooked smile. “Nine months later, I was born. Their marriage was saved. And that was the end of it.”
Setting down her sketchbook carefully on the table, she rose to her feet. Going to him on the edge of the terrace, she said quietly, “What really happened?”
His heart was pounding painfully beneath his ribs. “I’m the only one alive,” he whispered, “who knows the full story.”
Leonidas looked down at the pounding surf on the white sand beach below.
“From the time I was born, everything I did or said seemed to set my father on edge, making him yell that I was useless and stupid. My mother just avoided me. It was only at fourteen, after my father’s funeral, that I learned the reason why.”
Standing beside him, Daisy didn’t say a word.
“I always had the best clothes, the best education money could buy. Appearance was what mattered to them. No one must criticize how they treated their only child.” He paused. “If not for Maria, I’m not sure I would have survived.”
Reaching out, she put her hand over his on the railing. “Leo...”
Leonidas pulled his hand away. He couldn’t bear to be touched. Not now. Not even by her. “I knew something was wrong with me. I could not please them, no matter how I tried. Something about me was so awful that my own father and mother despised me. And though everyone in Greece seemed to think my parents still had this great love affair, at home, they ignored each other—or threw dishes and screamed. Because of me.”
“Why would you blame yourself for their marriage problems?”
For a moment, he fell silent. “I heard them sometimes, arguing at night, when I was home during school holidays.” He glanced back at the villa. “This is a big house. But sometimes they were loud. One of them always seemed to be threatening divorce. But neither was willing to give up the Picasso. That was the sticking point. Custody of the painting. Not me.”
Her stricken eyes met his.
Leonidas paused, then said in a low voice, “When I asked if I could stay at my boarding school year-round, they agreed. Because they could tell other people they’d only done it to make me happy. Appearance was all that mattered to them. My parents stayed together in their glamorous, beautiful lives, pretending to be happy.”
“How could they live like that?”
“My father quietly drank himself to death.” His lips twisted upward. “When I came home to attend his funeral, I was shocked when my mother hugged me, crying into my arms. I was fourteen, still young enough to be desperate for a mother’s love.” Leonidas still hated to remember that rainy afternoon, as he’d stared at his father’s grave, and his mother, dressed all in black, had embraced him. “I thought maybe she needed me at last. That she...loved me.” He gave a bitter smile. “But after the service was over, and her society friends were gone, my mother stopped pretending to be grief stricken. She calmly told me that she was leaving me in the care of trustees until I inherited my father’s estate. She was moving to Turkey to be with her lover. She said there was no reason for us to ever see
each other again.”
“What?” Daisy cried. “She said that? At your father’s funeral? How could she?”
He gave a low laugh. “I asked her. Why, Mamá? Why have you always hated me? What’s wrong with me?” His jaw tightened. “And she finally told me.”
Silence fell on the villa’s terrace. Leonidas heard the wind through nearby trees, ruffling the pages of his wife’s sketchbook on the table.
“My father had been enraged at my mother telling their friends that it was his fault they couldn’t conceive, that he wasn’t a real man. He wanted to shut her up—and go back to being the golden couple of society.” He narrowed his eyes. “He had a brother, Dimitris, his identical twin, a few minutes younger. My grandfather had cut off Dimitris without a dime for his scandals, leaving him nothing to buy drugs with. Until my father came to him with an offer—asking him to make love to my mother in the dark and cause her to conceive a child without realizing that the man impregnating her wasn’t my father.” He paused. “My uncle agreed. And he succeeded.”
“What are you saying?”
“My uncle was my real father.” Leonidas took a deep breath. “I never knew him. Before I was born, he burned himself out in a blaze of drugs. My father had believed that after I was born, he’d be able to forget he wasn’t my real father. After all, biologically I would be, or close enough. But he couldn’t forget that his brother had made love to his wife. And he couldn’t forgive her for not noticing the difference. Shortly after I was born, when my mother lashed out at him for ignoring their new baby, he exploded, and called her a whore.”
Daisy’s face was stricken. “Oh, Leo...”
“She forced him to explain. After that, she couldn’t forgive what he’d done to her, that she’d made love to her drug-addicted brother-in-law without knowing it. Her own husband had tricked her. Every time she looked at her newborn baby—me—she felt dirty and betrayed.”
