by Penny Jordan
“Your money means nothing to me, Sander, nothing at all,” she told him truthfully, adding for good measure, “and neither do you. For me, the fact that you choose to think in terms of money simply underlines all the reasons why I am not prepared to allow my sons anywhere near you unless I am there.”
“That is how you feel, but what about how they might feel?” Sander pressed her. “A good mother would never behave so selfishly. She would put her children’s interests first.”
How speedily Sander had turned the tables on her, Ruby recognized. What had begun at least on her part as a challenge to him, which she had been confident would make him back down, had turned into a double-edged sword that right now he was wielding very skillfully against her, cutting what she had thought was secure ground away from under her feet.
“I am…they need their moth—” she started.
“They are my sons,” Sander interrupted her angrily. “And I mean to have them. If I have to marry you to facilitate that, then so be it. But make no mistake, Ruby. I intend to have my sons.”
Bestselling Harlequin Presents® author Penny Jordan brings you an exciting new trilogy
Three penniless sisters, pure and proud…but about to be purchased!
With bills that need to be paid, a house about to be repossessed and little twin boys to feed, sisters Lizzie, Charley and Ruby refuse to drown in their debts. They will hold their heads up high and fight to feed their family!
But three of the richest, most ruthless men in the world are about to enter their lives….
Pure, proud, but penniless, how far will the sisters go to save the ones they love?
Lizzie’s story—
THE WEALTHY GREEK’S CONTRACT WIFE
Ilios Manos is Greek and ruthless. A dangerous combination! Lizzie owes him thousands, but he’ll take her as his wife in payment.
Charley’s story—
THE ITALIAN DUKE’S VIRGIN MISTRESS
When project manager Charley is hired by demanding Raphael Della Striozzi, he’s adamant she must have a makeover! Now that the dowdy frump has been transformed, she’s sexy enough for another role: his mistress!
Ruby’s story—
MARRIAGE: TO CLAIM HIS TWINS
Out of the blue, Alexander Konstantinakos has turned up at Ruby’s house to take his twin sons back to Greece. Ruby will do anything to keep her boys by her side—even marry Sander!
Penny Jordan
MARRIAGE: TO CLAIM HIS TWINS
All about the author…
Penny Jordan
PENNY JORDAN has been writing for more than twenty-five years and has an outstanding record: over 165 novels published, including the phenomenally successful titles A Perfect Family, To Love, Honor and Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. She says she hopes to go on writing until she has passed the 200 mark, and maybe even the 250 mark.
Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire, U.K., where she spent her childhood, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and has continued to live there. Following the death of her husband she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her Crighton books.
She lives with a hairy Birman cat, Posh, who assists her with her writing. Posh sits on the newspapers and magazines that Penny reads to provide her with ideas she can adapt for her fictional books.
Penny is a member and supporter of both the Romantic Novelists’ Association and Romance Writers of America—two organizations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be-published authors.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE
ALEXANDER KONSTANTINAKOS, powerful, formidable, billionaire head of an internationally renowned container shipping line originally founded by his late grandfather, stood in the middle of the elegantly luxurious drawing room of his home on the Greek Ionian island of Theopolis, his gaze riveted on the faces of the twin boys in the photograph he was holding.
Two black-haired, olive-skinned and dark-eyed identical faces looked back at him, their mother kneeling down beside them. The three of them were shabbily dressed in cheap-looking clothes.
Tall, dark-haired, with the features of two thousand years of alpha-male warriors and victors sculpted into the bones of his handsome face the same way that their determination was sculpted into his psyche, he stood in the now silent room, the accusation his sister had just made was still echoing through his head.
‘They have to be your sons,’ she had accused Nikos, their younger brother. ‘They have our family features stamped on them, and you were at university in Manchester.’
Alexander—Sander to his family—didn’t need to keep gazing at the photograph Elena had taken with her mobile phone on her way through Manchester Airport after visiting her husband’s family to confirm her statement, or to memorise the boys’ faces. They were already carved into his memory for all time.
‘I don’t know anything about them,’ his younger brother Nikos denied, breaking the silence. ‘They aren’t mine, Sander, I promise you. Please believe me.’
‘Of course they’re yours,’ Elena corrected their younger brother. ‘Just look at those faces. Nikos is lying, Sander. Those children are of our blood.’
Sander looked at his younger sister and brother, on the verge of quarrelling just as they had always done as children. There were only two years between them, but he had been born five years before Elena and seven before Nikos, and after their grandfather’s death as the only adult family member left in their lives he had naturally taken on the responsibility of acting as a father figure to them. That had often meant arbitrating between them when they argued.
This time, though, it wasn’t arbitration that was called for.
Sander looked at the photograph again and then announced curtly, ‘Of our blood, but not of Nikos’s making. Nikos is speaking the truth. The children are not his.’
Elena stared at him.
‘How can you know that?’
Sander turned towards the windows and looked beyond them to where the horizon met the deep blue of the Aegean Sea. Outwardly he might appear calm, but inside his chest his heart was thudding with fury. Inside his head images were forming, memories he had thought well buried surfacing.
‘I know it because they are mine,’ he answered his sister, watching as her eyes widened with the shock of his disclosure.
She wasn’t the only one who was shocked, Sander acknowledged. He had been shocked himself when he had looked at her phone and immediately recognised the young woman kneeling beside the two young boys who so undeniably bore the stamp of their fathering—his fathering. Oddly, she looked if anything younger now than she had the night he had met her in a Manchester club favoured by young footballers, and thus the haunt of the girls who chased after them. He had been taken there by a business acquaintance, who had left him to his own devices having picked up a girl himself, urging Sander to do the same.
Sander’s mouth hardened. He had buried the memory of that night as deeply as he could. A one-night stand with an alcohol-fuelled girl dressed in overly tight and incredibly revealing clothes, wearing too much make-up, who had made such a deliberate play for him. At one point she had actually caught hold of his hand, as though about to drag him to bed with her. It wasn’t something any real man w
ith any pride or self-respect could ever be proud of—not even when there were the kind of extenuating circumstances there had been that night. She had been one of a clutch of such girls, openly seeking the favours of the well-paid young footballers who favoured the place. Greedy, amoral young women, whose one desire was to find themselves a rich lover or better still a rich husband. The club, he had been told, was well known for attracting such young women.
He had had sex with her out of anger and resentment—against her for pushing him, and against his grandfather for trying to control his life. He’d been refusing to allow him a greater say in the running of the business which, in his stubborn determination not to move with the times, he had been slowly destroying. And against his parents—his father for dying, even though that had been over a decade ago, leaving him without his support, and his mother, who had married his father out of duty whilst continuing to love another man. All those things, all that anger had welled up inside him, and the result was now here in front of him.
His sons.
His.
A feeling like nothing he had ever experienced before seized hold of him. A feeling that, until it had struck him, he would have flatly denied he would ever experience. He was a modern man—a man of logic, not emotion, and certainly not the kind of emotion he was feeling right now. Gut wrenching, instinctive, tearing at him—an emotion born of a cultural inheritance that said that a man’s children, especially his sons, belonged under his roof.
Those boys were his. Their place was here with him, not in England. Here they could learn what it meant to be his sons, a Konstantinakos of Theopolis, could grow into their heritage. He could father them and guide them as his sense of responsibility demanded that he should. How much damage had they already suffered through the woman who had borne them?
He had given them life without knowing it, but now that he did know he would stop at nothing to bring them home to Theopolis, where they belonged.
CHAPTER ONE
CURSING as she heard the doorbell ring, Ruby remained where she was, on her hands and knees, hoping that whoever it was would give up and go away, leaving her in peace to get on with her cleaning. However, the bell rang again, this time almost imperiously. Someone was pressing hard on the bell.
Cursing again under her breath, Ruby backed out of the downstairs cloakroom, feeling hot and sticky, and not in any mood to have her busy blitz on cleaning whilst her twin sons were at school interrupted. She got to her feet, pushing her soft blonde curls off her face as she did so, before marching towards the front door of the house she shared with two older sisters and her own twin sons. She yanked it open.
‘Look, I’m—’ Her sentence went unfinished, her voice suspended by shock as she stared at the man standing on the doorstep.
Shock, disbelief, fear, anger, panic, and a sharp spear of something else that she didn’t recognise exploded inside her like a fireball, with such powerful intensity that her body was drained of so much energy that she was left feeling shaky and weak, trembling inwardly beneath the onslaught of emotions.
Of course he would be dressed immaculately, in a dark business suit worn over a crisp blue shirt, whilst she was wearing her old jeans and a baggy tee shirt. Not that it really mattered how she looked. After all, she had no reason to want to impress him—had she? And she certainly had no reason to want him to think of her as a desirable woman, groomed and dressed for his approval. She had to clench her stomach muscles against the shudder of revulsion that threatened to betray her. The face that had haunted her dreams and then her nightmares hadn’t changed—or aged. If anything he looked even more devastatingly handsome and virile than she had remembered, the dark gold gaze that had mesmerised her so effectively every bit as compelling now as it had been then. Or was it because she was a woman now and not the girl she had been that she was so immediately and shockingly aware of what a very sexual man he was? Ruby didn’t know, and she didn’t want to know.
The disbelief that had frozen her into silence had turned like snow in the sun to a dangerous slush of fear and horror inside her head—and her heart? No! Whatever effect he had once had on her heart, Sander Konstantinakos had no power to touch it now.
But still the small betraying word, ‘You,’ slid from the fullness of the naturally warm-coloured lips that had caused her parents to name her Ruby, causing a look of mixed contempt and arrogance to flash from the intense gold of Sander’s eyes. Eyes the colour of the king of the jungle—as befitted a man who was in effect the ruler of the Mediterranean island that was his home.
Instinctively Ruby started to close the door on him, wanting to shut out not just Sander himself but everything he represented, but he was too quick for her, taking hold of the door and forcing it open so that he could step into the hall—and then close the door behind him, enclosing them both in the small domestic space, with its smell of cleaning fluid. Strong as it was, it still wasn’t strong enough to protect her from the scent of him. A rash of prickly sensation raised the hairs at the back of her neck and then ran down her spine. This was ridiculous. Sander meant nothing to her now, just as she had meant nothing to him that night… But she mustn’t think about that. She must concentrate instead on what she was now, not what she had been then, and she must remember the promise she had made to the twins when they had been born—she would put the past behind her.
What she had never expected was that that past would seek her out, and now it had…
‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded, determined to wrest control of the situation from Sander. ‘What do you want?’
His mouth might be aesthetically perfect, with that well-cut top lip balancing the promise of sensuality with his fuller bottom lip, but there was nothing sensual about the tight-lipped look he was giving her, and his words were as sharply cold as the air outside the Manchester hotel in which he had abandoned her that winter morning.
‘I think you know the answer to that,’ he said, his English as fluent and as accentless as she remembered. ‘What I want, what I have come for and what I mean to have, are my sons.’
‘Your sons?’ Fiercely proud of her twin sons, and equally fiercely maternally protective of them, there was nothing he could have said which would have been more guaranteed to arouse Ruby’s anger than his verbal claim on them. Angry colour burned in the smooth perfection of Ruby’s normally calm face, and her blue-green eyes were fiery with the fierce passion of her emotions.
It was over six years since this man had taken her, used her and then abandoned her as casually as though she was a…a nothing. A cheap, impulsively bought garment which in the light of day he had discarded for its cheapness. Oh, yes, she knew that she had only herself to blame for what had happened to her that fatal night. She had been the one to flirt with him, even if that flirtation had been alcohol-induced, and no matter how she tried to excuse her behaviour it still shamed her. But not its result—not her beautiful, adorable, much loved sons. They could never shame her, and from the moment they had been born she had been determined to be a mother of whom they could be proud—a mother with whom they could feel secure, and a mother who, no matter how much she regretted the manner in which they had been conceived, would not for one minute even want to go back in time and avoid their conception. Her sons were her life. Her sons.
‘My sons—’ she began, only to be interrupted.
‘My sons, you mean—since in my country it is the father who has the right to claim his children, not the mother.’
‘My sons were not fathered by you,’ Ruby continued firmly and of course untruthfully.
‘Liar,’ Sander countered, reaching inside his jacket to produce a photograph which he held up in front of her.
The blood left Ruby’s face. The photograph had been taken at Manchester Airport, when they had all gone to see her middle sister off on her recent flight to Italy, and the resemblance of the twins to the man who had fathered them was cruelly and undeniably revealed. The two boys were cast perfectly in their father’s
image, right down to the unintentionally arrogant masculine air they could adopt at times, as though deep down somewhere in their genes there was an awareness of the man who had fathered them.
Watching the colour come and go in Ruby’s face, Sander allowed himself to give her a triumphant look. Of course the boys were his. He had known it the first second he had looked at the image on his sister’s mobile phone. Their mirror image resemblance to him had sent a jolt of emotion through him unlike anything he had previously experienced.
It hadn’t taken the private agency he had contacted very long to trace Ruby—although Sander had frowned over comments in the report he had received from them that implied that Ruby was a devoted mother who dedicated herself to raising her sons and was unlikely to give them up willingly. But Sander had decided that Ruby’s very devotion to his sons might be the best tool he could use to ensure that she gave them up to him.
‘My sons’ place is with me, on the island that is their home and which ultimately will be their inheritance. Under our laws they belong to me.’
‘Belong? They are children, not possessions, and no court in this country would let you take them from me.’
She was beginning to panic, but she was determined not to let him see it.
‘You think not? You are living in a house that belongs to your sister, on which she has a mortgage she can no longer afford to repay, you have no money of your own, no job. No training—nothing! I, on the other hand, can provide my sons with everything that you cannot—a home, a good education, a future.’
Although she was shaken by the knowledge of how thoroughly he had done his homework, had had her investigated, Ruby was still determined to hold her ground and not allow him to overwhelm her.
