Shouldn’t he be relieved that she considered them over, the same way he did?
When he’d faked his death it had been with the full knowledge that the fake termination of his life was the real termination of his relationship. His gallows humour had made him wryly acknowledge that at least he wouldn’t have to deal with the histrionics that always came with ending a relationship, even those that had lasted only a fraction of the time spent with Marisa.
When Rosaria left the room and they were left alone with their son, Marisa’s eyes narrowed. ‘Did you understand that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Since when do you speak my language?’
‘Boredom’s a killer when you’re dead,’ he quipped to counteract the needles prickling over his skin to remember the endless, lonely evenings spent listening to online Spanish tutorials. He’d figured that seeing as he had hours of time on his hands, he might as well use it productively. He would listen to it in bed too, drifting into sleep with the rhythm of the Spanish language playing like music into his ears.
‘You taught yourself?’ If she was impressed, she was doing an excellent job of hiding it.
‘I now understand it perfectly. It’s speaking it I need practice with.’
‘Then you’ll soon get plenty of practice—the majority of our staff speak only a little English and I doubt any of them speak Greek.’
His pulse quickened and he leaned forward. ‘Does that mean you accept my proposal?’
She studied him in the same impervious manner her mother had done only minutes before. ‘With conditions.’
He was the one doing her a favour. His offer was more than generous. And she had the nerve to impose conditions on him?
He’d forgotten how magnificent she could be.
‘Name them.’
* * *
Marisa peered closely into the mirror to check her make-up hadn’t smudged, then added more lip gloss. She’d always taken pride in her appearance—her deliberate attempt to sabotage her own engagement notwithstanding—but there were occasions when it mattered more than others and seeing Nikos came into that category. Her pride wouldn’t let him see her at anything less than her best. She needed all the confidence she could muster to handle being in the same room as him.
In the two weeks since his return from the dead, she’d had to dress and present herself at her best every single day because Nikos was always around, visiting Niki every evening and dining with them as a family. Then there had been the numerous visits to the business headquarters and the docks and the many meetings with their respective lawyers to thrash out their business agreement. She literally couldn’t get rid of him. He gave every impression of someone planning to hang around Valencia for the rest of his life.
But he wasn’t hanging around Valencia for her. He was hanging around for their son. If not for Niki, she still might not yet know that Nikos was alive. He wouldn’t have cared if she’d learned about his resurrection by social media or through her social circle’s grapevine.
He wasn’t worth an ounce of the pain he’d put her through.
She never dropped her guard around him and worked religiously to maintain a serene if aloof front. She made sure to always keep her tone amiable and whenever their hands brushed when passing their son between them, she gave no reaction at all. Most importantly, she made sure not to stare at him. The times their eyes locked she would deliberately un-focus hers, so as not to feel the effect of his.
When they’d been together she’d seen what she’d wanted to see. Now she only let him see what she wanted him to see because if he could see the truth, he’d see she was holding on by her fingertips.
This was the man she’d been besotted with, the man whose death had come close to breaking her. To get through the days of her grief without him, she’d had to nestle her love and pain deep in her heart. Now, to get through the days with him, she had to bury those old feelings and never, ever let them out. Let emptiness swathe her and replace the fear and pain.
It was the hardest fight of her life.
There was a light knock on her bedroom door before her mother appeared. ‘Are you ready?’
Marisa took a deep breath and nodded.
Rosaria stood behind her and together they stared at their reflections.
‘I’m proud of you, darling.’ Her mother captured one of Marisa’s curls in her fingers. ‘Your father would be too.’
She closed her eyes and willed back the burn of tears. It was because of her father that she’d agreed to Nikos’s business proposition. The contracts cementing the deal would be signed in an hour.
How badly she’d wanted to throw his offer back in his face, but that would have been her pride talking and acting for her.
Her father had inherited the shipping business from his own father and had taken such pride in running it to the same high standards that Marisa had always wanted to do the same for him. He’d worked his backside off to give his family a good life and his daughters the best education money could buy and had still managed to be a wonderful, present father and taken their dead housekeeper’s orphaned son under his wing and mentored him from a screwed-up rebellious teenager into a billionaire businessman.
Nikos’s deal meant her family’s legacy would live on and all the pressure she’d been under would be lifted. The structures they were putting in place for the business meant she could take a back seat for as long as she wanted and devote her time and attention solely to her son.
Best of all, her son had a father. Not just a father but his father, and Nikos was proving himself an attentive and loving one. Everything she’d wanted her son to have.
She would just have to learn to live her life with the man she’d once imagined her future with, as a part of her future. But not for her sake. Loving her son but not loving her.
‘Come on,’ she said, taking her mother’s hand and squeezing it. ‘Let’s get this done.’
* * *
‘Have you decided what you’re having?’ Nikos asked. Marisa’s face had been hidden behind the leather-bound lunch menu ever since they’d been shown to their table, dropping it only to thank the waiter for her glass of wine.
She lowered it an inch for her eyes to peer over. ‘I think so.’
He nodded at the hovering waiter, who was at their table in a flash, and gave his order.
Marisa’s face appeared in its entirety and she followed suit.
‘See,’ he teased when they were alone again and she didn’t have a menu to hide behind any more. ‘That wasn’t so hard.’
‘I was trying to decide what to eat.’ She sipped at her wine, eyes flickering from him to the artwork on the restaurant’s walls. It was something she often did, a subtle refusal to engage with him unless it was about their son or the business. Infuriatingly, her behaviour only made him want to engage with her more, to provoke a reaction, to feel the weight of those large brown eyes on him as she hung on his every word.
He knew this was contrary to everything he’d told her and himself because, doubly infuriating, he was constantly having to clamp down on the thickening of his blood and loins whenever she was within fifty feet of him and having to stop himself goading her into arguments just for the pleasure of seeing her cheeks saturate with colour and her eyes blaze with the passion that always roused him.
He wanted to goad her now, tear her attention from the abstract painting she was studying and force her attention on him. He supposed it was like when a child was denied something—it only made them want it more.
Other than that first night when she’d fallen apart and couldn’t tear her eyes from his face, Marisa acted not only as if the previous eighteen months hadn’t happened but as if their time together had never happened either. She accepted him as part of their son’s life while carefully keeping herself at arm’s length. It had become obvious that though she’d behaved rashly
in her proposal to Raul, she really had moved on with her life without Nikos. Whatever pain his ‘death’ had caused her had been fleeting. Her reaction to his return had been nothing more than a large dose of shock, and he’d come to the conclusion Rosaria’s warning about not hurting Marisa were the words of an overprotective mother.
In the two weeks he’d spent in Valencia, he’d learned Marisa was as overprotective of their son as Rosaria was of her. Marisa rarely let Nikos out of her sight, her home office more of a crèche than a place of work.
She was still studying that damned painting. How could it hold her interest so thoroughly? It looked like something a child would paint.
‘Can we talk business?’ he asked, and instantly regretted his rough tone. Not only was he thinking like a child denied attention but now he was acting like one.
Strangely, as a child, he’d never acted in such a way. He’d learned at too young an age that begging for attention only provoked greater indifference. Only when he’d been taken into his grandfather’s custody and given a window into how other families lived had he started to understand their neglect and to ask questions.
The biggest question had been what was so damn wrong with him that his parents couldn’t love him and had willingly given him up?
Marisa’s large brown eyes locked on his, her expression open, almost serene. ‘What’s on your mind?’
How infuriating that he should be frustrated by her indifference.
It just proved he’d been right all along that whatever feelings she’d once had for him had been fleeting. Unsustainable.
But her love for their son was neither fleeting nor unsustainable. She would never give Niki up like Nikos’s parents had given him up.
A chill ran up his spine.
What if one day she were to look at Nikos and see what his parents had seen? What if she saw in him whatever it was they’d seen and decided Niki was better kept from him?
He took a sharp breath to counter the disquiet racing through him and curved his mouth into a cool smile.
That scenario would never happen. He would never allow it.
‘I brought you here to celebrate so let’s celebrate.’ He raised his wine glass. ‘To a successful business collaboration.’
She clinked hers to it. ‘I’ll drink to that.’
He drank and raised his glass again. ‘And to the successful end of your engagement.’
Her eyes narrowed but she clinked her glass to his. ‘Let’s hope there aren’t any consequences.’
‘If there are, he’ll pay for them. I’ll see to it personally. The business will be protected.’
‘I’m counting on it. It’s the only reason I agreed to your buy-in. Salud.’ She tilted half her wine into her mouth. The act was neither salacious nor provocative but the awareness that always thrummed under his skin when he was with her intensified.
Marisa looked at the giant langoustines placed before her and laughed. It sounded natural, she was sure of it.
This celebratory meal was the first time they’d been alone together since Nikos’s return and she found herself working twice as hard to maintain a cool front and fight her eyes desire to fall onto his gorgeous face. She had to avoid too much eye contact with him. She’d become lost in his light brown gaze too many times before.
‘If the main course is as big as the starters, I’ll have to tell Santi not to cook too much for us tonight,’ she said lightly.
‘You’re going to your sister’s?’
‘She wants to show off Santi’s cooking. I meant to tell you earlier. Don’t worry, you’re invited.’
‘That’s good of them to include me but I’m flying to Ibiza later.’
At this, her heart juddered and her composure cracked. Her hand spasmed against her wine glass, sending the pale liquid flying.
Cheeks flaming instantly, she was saved from the weight of Nikos’s suddenly piercing stare by a passing waiter hurrying to clean it up and refill her glass.
Nikos was leaving? That should be something to celebrate, not something that made her chest feel like icy shards were penetrating it.
‘It’s not like you to be clumsy,’ he commented when they were left alone again, thoughtful eyes fixed on hers, forehead indented with the contemplative lines she recognised.
‘It was an accident.’ She tried to speak dismissively but there was a tremor in her voice. Her bones felt like they’d become jellified again.
His right eyebrow rose sardonically.
She had a large drink of her fresh wine and willed her heart to settle.
‘What are you going to Ibiza for?’ she asked, and was relieved that this time her voice had mostly returned to the casual tone she’d spent two weeks perfecting.
There was a slight narrowing of his light brown eyes before they glittered and a knowing smile played on his lips. ‘I need to check in with the club.’ A flash of white teeth. ‘Let them see in person that I’m not dead.’
‘Do your staff know?’
Nikos put a scallop in his mouth and nodded slowly, not taking his eyes from her beautiful face.
Marisa’s reaction to the news about him leaving had his heart pumping hard with triumph.
In one beat of a moment, the self-possessed, collected woman who’d treated him with an almost brittle cordiality had lost control. Just one brief second, enough to be a clumsy insignificance were it not for the effects of it still showing, there in the flush of her cheeks, in the quiver in her voice, in the unsteadiness of her hands.
When he’d swallowed the scallop, he said, ‘Everyone who needs to be notified has been but it’s time for me to show my face again and see for myself that everything’s running as it should be in all the various clubs and businesses. It’s something I’d planned to do before but learning about our son and sorting out everything with your business changed that.’
A host of emotions played on the face he could see straining not to give anything else away. ‘I imagine it will take you a while to get through them.’
He added more food to his fork. ‘My PA has arranged for me to visit them and sit down with each management team over a week.’
‘Sounds like you’re going to be busy.’
‘It will be non-stop. It should have been spread over two weeks but I wanted it condensed to get it done as quickly as possible.’ Limiting the time he had to spend apart from his son.
‘Will we see you in that time?’ she asked with a casualness that would have been convincing if her cheeks weren’t still flaming and her eyes darting everywhere but at him.
‘I hope to make a couple of visits back to Valencia when time allows... If that’s agreeable to you?’
‘Of course,’ she said brightly. ‘Niki’s become very attached to you.’
What about his mother? he wondered idly. ‘And I’ve become very attached to him too.’
‘I had noticed,’ she said with a dry nonchalance that might have passed as natural if he wasn’t watching her so closely.
‘And it’s with that attachment in mind that I have a request to make of you.’
Having just popped some more langoustine into her mouth, she arched an eyebrow in query.
He leaned forward. ‘When I have finished checking in with all my management teams, I want to take Niki home.’
The colour drained from her face and the fork in her hand dropped onto her plate. Her eyes widened and her shoulders hunched as she placed a hand to her chest. She cleared her throat. ‘You want to take him to Mykonos?’
‘And you,’ he clarified.
‘Me?’ The sudden dread that had clutched Marisa vanished under the surge of her racing pulse and she found herself arching towards him. ‘You want me to come too?’
His speculative stare held hers. ‘He’s still getting to know me and he’s too young to leave you yet.’
The brief rush of adrenaline flatlined. She didn’t even know why she’d experienced it. This was the man who’d faked his own death with no thought or concern about her and, even if she could forgive that—not his reasons for faking his death which she understood, but his complete dismissal of her in his planning and execution of it—she couldn’t forgive or forget his failure to let her know he was alive once it was all over. If he hadn’t spotted Niki, he’d have been happy never seeing her again. She meant nothing to him. He didn’t want her. She was welcome in his home only as the mother of his son.
Well, she didn’t want him either. He was welcome in her home only as the father of her son. If he got down on his knees and begged for them to start over, she would laugh in his face.
She just wished she didn’t wake every morning with panic in her heart that she’d dreamt his resurrection and that every minute spent with him didn’t make her feel so jittery and flushed inside. It was there now, the heat that had lived in her the entire time they’d been together, the cells of her body straining towards him, her pulse never settling into a steady rhythm.
‘Let our son visit my home, agapi mou,’ he said, light brown eyes boring into her. ‘My heritage is his heritage. He deserves to know about it, do you not agree? And one day, everything I have will be his.’
Her cheeks flamed at the endearment that had slipped off his tongue so smoothly she was sure he hadn’t noticed. ‘When you put it like that, how can I say no?’
She couldn’t. She knew that. Not unless she wanted to be actively cruel.
It astounded her how quickly the bond between father and son had formed but it was there and it was real and it was a good thing. All children deserved to have the best relationship possible with both their parents and she would never deny her son that, no matter the personal cost to herself.
And it was costing her a lot.
‘So you’ll come?’
She strained every muscle in her face to form a smile. She’d spent weekends with Nikos at his homes in Ibiza, Barcelona, Rome and London, while work commitments had forced her to turn down invitations for weekends at his homes in Mallorca and Athens, but the one home she’d longed for an invite to had never come. His real home. The island where he’d been born and raised. The island his family lived on. Mykonos.
The Secret Behind the Greek's Return Page 6
