The Pregnant Mistress

by Sandra Marton

His voice was soft. She had come to know that softness. It hid a rock-hard determination but she was determined, too. It was time to decide how to progress, if to progress, whether to stay with Demetrios until the inevitable end or walk away now.

  She didn’t know which way would be the best, even after spending most of the day thinking about it. Pain now, or pain later? It was an impossible decision. She’d always found relationships so easy to handle. Amanda had talked a little about how tortured she’d been, trying to figure out what she felt for Nick; Carin had sworn how much she despised Rafe to anyone who’d listen, and Sam had just taken it all in and wondered how a woman could possibly become so confused in her dealings with a man.

  She owed her sisters an apology.

  “You wonder if we went into what too quickly?” Demetrios said, and she looked at him.

  If sleeping with your boss was a mistake, falling in love with him was sheer disaster. Of course, she wouldn’t tell him that. She’d say that she’d decided she realized she couldn’t give up the loss of independence that would go with being intimately involved with him, that it had been a mistake to let the relationship become personal.

  “Into this—this—”

  “We are lovers.” He spoke curtly. “Is that so difficult to acknowledge?”

  “No. It’s not. What I mean is…Don’t look at me like that!”

  “Like what?” he said, and told himself that if he’d been required to pay a drachma for every time he’d wanted to shake this woman since he’d met her, he’d be well on his way to the poorhouse by now.

  Sam shoved back her chair and got to her feet. “Don’t!” she said, as he sprang up, too. “I am perfectly capable of moving around on my own. I sprained my ankle, Demetrios, I didn’t break it.”

  “Ah.”

  “Ah, what? Must you always sound so smug?”

  “I was right,” he said calmly. He could be calm, now that he knew the problem. For a few seconds, he’d thought she was about to tell him she’d decided against their affair. Their relationship. Whatever in hell you called it when a man fell in love with a woman who didn’t love him, a woman he didn’t want to be in love with.

  But that was ridiculous. Samantha enjoyed being with him. She enjoyed what happened in bed. All she needed was a little reassurance that he would respect her independence. Well, he could manage that. He just had to back off a little, convince her that all he wanted from her was what they already had.

  It wasn’t even a lie.

  Try as he might, he had no idea exactly what he did want. Marriage? Children? From what he knew of such things, he wasn’t exactly desirous of them. He would tell her that, let her see that she risked nothing by continuing their affair.

  And, over the weeks and months that came next, if he changed his mind, well, then he would set out to change hers. If he didn’t…if he didn’t, that would be that.

  It was a logical solution. He felt better for having reached it, and he smiled as he walked towards her.

  “Sam, kalóz mou…” To his surprise, she slapped at his hands when he tried to clasp her shoulders.

  “I just don’t…” Her throat tightened. What was wrong with her? Was she going to cry because he called her his beloved without meaning it? “I want to say what I need to say, all right? Without you stopping me.”

  “But it isn’t necessary.”

  “God give me strength! You’re impossible, Demetrios! You always think you know what’s necessary. Well, I have news for you. You don’t. ”

  “Sweetheart,” he said with total sincerity, “I understand what’s troubling you.”

  Sam folded her arms. “In that case, tell me. Go ahead. Read my mind.”

  “You are concerned that I’m taking over your life.”

  “It’s a lot more complicated than that.”

  “Mostly, you are afraid I may want too much from you.”

  How could a man be so wrong? “Really,” she said dryly.

  “But I don’t. I won’t.” He put his arm around her. She didn’t melt into him, as she would have last night, even this afternoon, but she let him do it. He took that as a good omen. “I understand how difficult it is for a woman like you to have an affair with a man like me.”

  “Of course you do. You know everything.”

  He decided to let that pass. “My mother was American. Did you know that?”

  “Maybe. Amanda might have said…” Sam puffed out a breath. “You’re not going to divert me by talking about your mother.”

  “She was a singer. A coloratura. Do you know what…?”

  “Yes,” she said impatiently, “of course I do. It’s a soprano with an exceptionally light, clear voice.”

  “That’s right.” He tugged her down beside him on a wicker love seat. “She was a good woman, but she and my father should never have gotten married.”

  Sam stared at him. “What?”

  “She was like you,” he said, bringing her hand to his lips. “Beautiful. Fiercely independent. Argumentative. Difficult.”

  “I am neither argumentative nor difficult.”

  He smiled. “And my father…well, I suppose I am very much like him.”

  “Conceited. Impossible. Authoritative.”

  “I am Greek,” he said, as if that explained everything. “Well, half-Greek, but it is the same thing. He was the one who raised me.”

  Sam had promised herself she wouldn’t let him drag her down this detour but not asking the inevitable question was impossible.

  “Why? What happened to your mother?”

  His smile dimmed. “She’d become restless. She missed her country, her friends, her career…” He caught himself in midsentence. This was not what he’d wanted to tell her. His father had explained what had driven his parents apart, but that was not the point. “They quarreled often. She would leave, fly to New York. He would go after her and bring her back. And then, one day, he didn’t go after her. She stayed in America and he stayed here.”

  “I don’t understand. Didn’t you grow up in Greece?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you just said your mother went back to the States.”

  “I didn’t go with her. My father would not permit it.”

  “He would not…?” Sam stared at him, at that imperious face that no longer bore a smile but had, instead, taken on the stoniness of marble. “She let him get away with that?”

  “Sam. You must try and understand. This is Greece. The rules are different here. A man is still the head of his household in my country.”

  “What you mean is, your father could keep you despite your mother’s wishes.”

  “Yes. No.” Demetrios frowned and got to his feet. The conversation was not going at all as he’d planned. “She didn’t mind. She loved me, in her way, but she was not a woman whose maternal instincts ran deep. Do you understand?”

  “No. I don’t. If I had a child, I could never let anything keep me from it.”

  “The law was on my father’s side. Would you expect a man to give up his own flesh and blood?”

  “There’s such a thing as joint custody. In America—”

  “I tell you again, this is Greece. Besides, why would anyone wish a child to be batted back and forth across the Atlantic, like a ball at a tennis match?” He hadn’t intended to say that, either. What did such things matter, after all these years? “This is all beside the point, Samantha. What you should understand is—”

  “What happened?” Sam asked softly. “To your parents’ marriage?”

  “They were divorced.”

  “And where is your mother now? I know your father died a few years ago but I don’t think I ever heard anything about your mother.”

  “She is still alive,” he said stiffly. “She lives in Argentina with a man who raises horses.”

  “She moved there after the divorce?”

  “She moved there,” he said coldly, “when I was thirteen. By then, she’d been living in New York for five years. And, before you as
k, until she left the States I saw her for two weeks each July, when my father permitted her—”

  “Permitted her?” Sam said, incredulously.

  “That’s right. He allowed her to come to Athens and stay in an apartment he owned, and spend whatever time she wished with me.”

  Sam stood up and put her hand on his arm. The muscles were taut beneath her fingers.

  “That’s terrible,” she said softly. “Demetrios, I’m so sorry…”

  “Don’t be.” He shook off her hand and looked at her, his eyes cold. “It was all she was entitled to. She was the wrong woman for my father, not the kind a man should take as a wife or wish to be the mother of his child.”

  Sam drew back. “You don’t know that. You don’t know the whole story. Maybe there’s more to it.”

  “People marry for the wrong reasons, Samantha. For passion. For sex. They call it love, but it isn’t.” He reached out for her, his hands cruel on her shoulders. Why had it seemed so confusing, just a little while ago? He knew what he wanted and it wasn’t love or marriage or fatherhood. “And that is why you have nothing to fear from me. I won’t demand anything but what you can give because it’s all I want.”

  Nothing to fear? She wanted to laugh. He thought he knew her. The worst of it was, she’d thought she knew herself but in the blink of an eye, she’d gone from wanting to go through life without leaving footprints to wanting to build a safe, warm nest where she could do all the mundane things other women did, like wake up in the morning in the arms of the man she loved and, some day, soothe the bruised knees of little boys who were tiny replicas of their father.

  How could she have fallen so hard, so fast?

  “Sam?” He slid his hands from her shoulders to her face, lifted it to his. “You mean more to me than a woman ever has. You’re beautiful. You’re exciting. You make me happy. And I please you. I know that I do.”

  She wanted to tear free and run. Her heart was pounding. But she stood still, even managed to choke out a laugh.

  “Such modesty, Demetrios.”

  “I’m being honest. You must do the same. We aren’t dreamers in need of fairy tale endings.”

  “No.” Her voice shook. “No, we’re not.”

  “I will give you everything, matyá mou. Not only honesty but respect. I will pledge you my fidelity for as long as we are together, but I won’t tell you lies—and I will not expect any from you. Do you understand?”

  He fell silent, hearing only the sound of his own hammering pulse. He had not planned to say any of this, had not even known it was inside him, but he was glad it had come out. It was all the truth and whatever he’d imagined about falling in love with Samantha had been sentimental self-deceit.

  He was his father’s son but he would not be the fool his father had been, and certainly she could understand that. He would not ask for what she could not give. He would never expect her to love him to the exclusion of anything else, or to take vows she would not keep, or to bear his child.

  He could see her mouth trembling. Had he hurt her? For a second, he almost pulled her into his arms to say it wasn’t true, that he loved her, would always love her, that she had only to say that she loved him…

  “I was going to tell you that I was leaving you,” she said in a low voice.

  “But now you won’t.”

  Sam stared up into the face of this man she loved, this man she’d been determined to leave, and saw not the man but the child he had once been, abandoned by a mother who had not loved him.

  “Sam.” He took her face in his hands. “Stay with me.”

  He kissed her, and she put her arms around him and kissed him back, trying not to weep, weeping anyway—and not knowing if the tears were for him or for herself. All she knew was that the anguish she felt now was nothing compared to what she would feel when he tired of her.

  Then she would pay for this night’s decision with a broken heart.

  CHAPTER TEN

  FOR the next few weeks, Sam was blissfully happy.

  Demetrios was an incredible lover. She’d never known a man quite like him. He was fun, he was exciting, he was thoughtful and caring. Just when she thought she’d figured him out, he’d surprise her. He stopped the car to buy her a single rose from a street vendor; he spirited her to Florence for a weekend and bought her a tiny gold charm in the shape of a kitten with emerald eyes because, he said, it reminded him of her. Like her, he got as much pleasure out of spending the evening home as he did from going out.

  And when they were alone and in each other’s arms, he made her forget the world and everything in it.

  They never talked about the future.

  That should have been fine. Sam had always liked living that way. There was a kick in not knowing what you’d be doing a month from now, whether you’d be working in a thatched hut or in a suite at the Georges V. Life wasn’t supposed to be a road map you could read. Living from day to day was far more exciting than having a master plan.

  If you knew too much about the future, things would grow dull.

  That was what Sam had always thought. Now, she discovered that it wasn’t true.

  She loved knowing she’d go to sleep in Demetrios’s arms and wake to his kisses. She adored the sweet predictability of knowing they’d have their first cups of coffee while he shaved and she put on her makeup, that at night they’d talk over the day’s events, that curling up together to read or watch a movie on the VCR made her every bit as content as going out to a party. More content, maybe, because being alone with him was wonderful.

  The only danger was her fear that one of those nights she’d turn to him and blurt out the truth, that she loved him more each day.

  Sam knew she must never do anything so foolish.

  Demetrios had been brutally honest. He’d told her how he felt about love and what he expected of her, and those expectations surely didn’t include finding himself with a lovestruck woman on his hands. There was a world of difference between being a man’s lover and his beloved.

  Or in being his mistress.

  The funny thing was that she’d never thought of herself as his mistress until one night, when he took her to the opening of a new restaurant.

  “I don’t really want to go,” he said, as they drove along a narrow, twisting road on the rocky hillside overlooking Athens, “but an old friend owns the place. We won’t stay long, sweetheart.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Sam said. “We’ll stay as long as you like. It’ll be fun.”

  It was, until Demetrios stepped away for a moment and a stunning blonde wearing a dress that left nothing to the imagination wandered up to Sam.

  “How nice to finally get a look at you,” she’d said in a throaty purr.

  Sam had offered a puzzled smile. “Sorry?”

  “Some of us have been wondering what you look like,” the blonde said. “You are Demetrios’s new mistress, aren’t you?”

  Demetrios had come back just then, put his arm around Sam’s waist, introduced her to the blonde in a way that made it clear, at least, that there’d never been anything between them. The blonde wandered off and Sam got through the evening even though she felt as if everyone was watching her and talking about her. She’d never told Demetrios what had happened, but she couldn’t forget it—and yet, it was true. That was what she was, wasn’t she? His mistress?

  She lived with him. He paid for the roof over her head and the food she ate; he wanted to do more than that, to buy her clothes and jewels. She wouldn’t let him, but that didn’t change the facts. She was his mistress.

  The word itself had an old-fashioned feel to it, probably a certain sexy charm in the circles in which he moved. It had a less exalted meaning in Sam’s world. Well, so what? She’d never given a damn for convention. People could call her what they wished. What did words matter, when two people belonged together?

  A lot, or so it seemed.

  The answer she’d come up with, that all that counted was that she belonged with De
metrios and he belonged with her, began to seem more and more facile as the four months she’d agreed to work for him rushed towards their inevitable conclusion. Mistresses, by definition, lived uncertain lives. A mistress never knew where she’d be or what man she’d be with next year or even next month, and Sam knew exactly where she wanted to be. She’d found a man, the man, who was the other half of her.

  Sometimes, in the late hours of the night, she’d lie in his arms after they made love and think how amazing it was that she’d never even known she was searching for him…and wonder when she was going to lose him. The role of mistress came with a beginning and an end. You didn’t have to be a genius to understand that—and if she was foolish enough to harbor any doubts, she had only to recall how bluntly Demetrios had told her he’d had other mistresses before her.

  She might be the only one he’d ever asked to live with him, but that didn’t change the basics. There had been women before her; there would be women after her. It was a simple fact of life—and the more she tried not to dwell on it, the more she did.

  She began noticing a change in him, too. Was it her imagination, or was he treating her differently? Was he more formal? More removed? Did he spend more time in his study at night and less with her?

  As the days passed, she could hardly think about anything else. It didn’t help that she wasn’t feeling well. A nasty flu had gone around Piraeus and Athens; for weeks, people had coughed and sneezed and been nauseous. Everyone was over it—everyone but Sam.

  Her body felt heavy; she was tired all the time. Her stomach did a delicate dance, especially in the mornings. Or maybe it wasn’t flu. Maybe she was already reacting to what was going to happen in less than two weeks, when her term of employment ended.

  She was going to leave Greece, and Demetrios. Her job was ending, and so would their affair.

  By the last week of her contract, all the parties had agreed to the deal in principle. The lawyers would step in now and put things in language that would be binding. On Friday, Sam sat in the conference room at Karas Lines, listening to the buzz of conversation around her, trying to concentrate on her job—and failing miserably.