Where her home had defined rooms with doors leading from one to the other, this had defined spaces reached through open arches, and she followed Nikos through one into a huge living space with four separate sofa areas. Through another arch in the far distance she could see the sea...
No longer waiting for Nikos to guide her, she shifted Niki in her arms and headed for the arch. Stepping through it, she found herself in a vast living space that extended seamlessly to an equally vast terrace. Open-mouthed, she slowly craned her neck from left to right, taking in the long infinity pool that lapped inside and then seemed to stretch out to the Aegean itself.
The hairs on the nape of her neck rose before Nikos’s voice rumbled in her ear. ‘What do you think?’
‘It’s stunning.’
He grinned and stepped onto the terrace, beckoning for her to follow. ‘Let me show you the grounds.’
Marisa tried her best to pay attention to the tour itself rather than her tour guide, but her attention grew increasingly fractured. Not only did she have to concentrate on holding a bored baby in her arms but Nikos kept close enough to her that her senses threatened to go into overdrive. At one point he even rested a hand on her back when showing her the playground he’d had installed for their son and then, when he took Niki from her, his eyes held hers with the gleam in them that never failed to make her belly melt.
She could only manage appreciative murmurs at the spa and business centre situated in two of the smaller villas, the open-air cinema, the soft play room for Niki near the shallow end of another swimming pool so large a holiday resort would be proud to have it.
When they returned to the villa, a matronly figure stood with the butler waiting for them with a small suitcase at her side.
Nikos shook her hand, spoke to her in Greek then made the introductions. ‘Marisa, this is Seema. I’ve employed her as Niki’s nanny for your stay here.’
Nikos watched Marisa’s dark brown eyes widen before her gaze darted from him to Seema then back again.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ she murmured, extending a hand.
‘Pleasure to meet you too,’ Seema replied shaking the offered hand. Then she spoke to their son. ‘You must be Niki.’
To his surprise, Niki shied away from her and buried his face in Nikos’s shoulder. No amount of coaxing would get him to look at her.
‘This isn’t like him,’ he said to Marisa. ‘Usually he’s so sociable.’
She shook her head tightly. ‘He always needs time to get used to new people.’
‘He took to me straight away,’ he pointed out.
She shrugged. ‘You’re the only one. Maybe it’s because on some weird baby level he recognised you as his father.’ Then, as Nikos was puffing up with pride at her observation, she addressed the nanny. ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be comfortable with you very soon but he’s in a new country in a home that is strange to him. I’ll take care of him tonight and then tomorrow we’ll introduce the two of you again.’
Seema looked to Nikos for approval. His orders to her had been clear—she would be responsible for his son’s routine that week, especially with regard to evenings and nights. As he could also feel Marisa’s laser stare piercing through him, he nodded. ‘Angelos will show you to your room and make you familiar with everything. If we need you this evening we’ll page you.’
She bowed her head and disappeared with his butler.
There was a moment of silence before Marisa said, ‘You’ve employed a nanny?’ Her low tone did not disguise the underlying menace in it.
He met her flinty stare. ‘Obviously.’
Her eyes narrowed and glinted. ‘You had no right.’
He bristled. ‘I had every right. I’m his father.’
‘And I’m his mother and I’m only here because I’m his mother.’
‘Seema has impeccable references. She was nanny to the King of Agon’s children.’
‘I wouldn’t care if she came gold-plated! You had no right to go over my head like that, no right at all, and don’t quote the “I’m his father” line at me again; you don’t know Niki well enough yet to know what’s in his best interests.’
‘Whose best interests?’ he disputed coolly. Nikos had been prepared for Marisa’s annoyance about the nanny but her line of attack on the matter was out of order. ‘His or yours?’
Angry colour stained her cheeks. ‘How dare—’
‘You hardly let him out of your sight. Even when we were organising the business partnership you brought him along to all the meetings. You do everything for him. When it comes to our son, you’re a control freak.’
The dark circles under her eyes proved how much she needed a break but a break would never happen if she had to get up at the crack of dawn each day to care for their son. He’d spent enough time with Mother Marisa to know she wouldn’t trust him to care for Niki on his own. Not yet. She’d get up and hover between them.
That employing a nanny to care for their son left more time and opportunity for seduction was only secondary...
The baring of her teeth made him quite sure that she would have slapped him if he didn’t have Niki in his arms.
‘Caring for Niki is my job,’ she snarled.
‘You never relax or take time for yourself.’
‘I’m a mother. It comes with the territory.’
His chest tightened as the image of his own mother floated in his mind and before he could stop himself he said, ‘Not for all mothers.’
Not all mothers were tigers who roared to keep their cubs safe, like Marisa and her mother. Not all mothers had a primal urge to protect. Some mothers looked at their children and felt nothing.
Marisa’s angry stare tempered, became contemplative. The piercing of the laser burn lessened as the composure he’d had so much fun cracking since her arrival visibly reset itself.
In a much calmer tone, she said, ‘In future, please consult me before making any decision about our son’s care.’
‘Does that work for me too?’ he challenged. ‘Only it seems that you’re the one who gets to make all the decisions for him.’
‘That’s because I’m the one who raised him without his father for eleven months. I earned that right.’ Then she looked at their son and her features softened. ‘But I take your point. If you disagree with my judgements then we should discuss it.’
‘Who gets the final say?’
‘Logic does. Failing that, me.’
Nikos had to control every muscle in his mouth to stop it from opening and biting back some home truths to her. He was acutely aware that, though their son couldn’t understand what they were saying, he would undoubtedly be picking up on the tense atmosphere between them. He would not allow Niki to witness any kind of war between his parents.
Swallowing back the rancid taste on his tongue, he indicated the winding staircase. ‘I’ll show you to your rooms.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
MARISA HELD NIKI close as she stepped over the threshold of the door Nikos opened for her in the wide corridor, using his solid little body as a shield to protect herself from the emotions thrashing and crashing inside her.
She’d known it would happen one day soon, that Nikos would assert his authority as a father, but she’d surprised herself at the strength of her feelings about it. Until that moment, every single decision about Niki had been made by her and her alone. Nikos had been dead! The times when she’d been uncertain about something she’d sought her mother’s advice but the ultimate decision had always been hers. His sudden assertion of parental authority while she was fighting the effect his nearness was having on her had made her angrier about it than she should have been... And his reasons for it.
Why would he employ a nanny for her benefit? Why would he care if she took time for herself? She knew he didn’t care a jot for her...
But he still wanted her. Had
n’t she known that since their meal together? And hadn’t she sensed it before that?
His desire was there in every gleam of his eyes, a sensual promise that lived as a hum in her veins.
He didn’t care for her but he still desired her as a woman, and, as she gazed around the room that would be hers for the week, she caught a glimpse of her reflection in a full-length mirror. For a moment she stared at the woman with the child in her arms.
A mother. A daughter. A sister.
A woman.
And then she caught Nikos’s eye in the reflection. The icy steel she’d seen during their brief, heated argument had melted. What she saw in his light brown gaze now...
Her abdomen turned to liquid.
Marisa quickly looked away and forced her attention back to the room. It was as vast and white as the rest of the place but there were colourful feminine touches in the soft furnishings. The splashes of colour were the reds and oranges she adored, colours she hadn’t seen in any other part of his home. Had these colourful touches been added for her...?
She couldn’t stop her eyes darting back to Nikos. He stood by the glass door in the centre of the far wall, which had floor-to-ceiling windows, watching her.
‘What do you think?’ he asked.
She had to swallow hard to get her throat moving. ‘It’s perfect, thank you.’
The returning gleam had her tightening her hold around their son, who, oblivious to the undercurrents happening around him, was merrily babbling away as he took in the newness of his surroundings.
Suddenly desperate to escape the intimate confines, she backed to the door. ‘Where’s Niki sleeping?’
He stepped away from the wall, a knowing half-smile playing on his lips. ‘The room opposite. It’s been turned into a nursery for him. I’ll show you.’
If she didn’t have Niki in her arms, she’d have run out of the room.
The nursery was a big hit with Niki, who immediately went crawling to the building blocks set out on the floor for him. The adjoining dressing room had been filled with brand new clothing and all the toys a baby on the cusp of his first birthday could wish for. As dinner would soon be ready, Marisa decided a change of clothes for him was needed. All the travelling had made their son grubby. It might have proved a great distraction from Nikos if he hadn’t stood next to her at the baby changing table so he could make funny faces at their son while she put a new outfit on him.
He stood so close—deliberately, she was sure of it—that her lungs contracted. She could feel the heat of his skin vibrating against hers and a job that should have taken two minutes doubled because her brain forgot how to work her fingers and thumbs.
As she fumbled to get socks onto her son’s plump feet, Nikos’s phone vibrated and he stepped away from her.
She met her son’s bright happy eyes and blew out all the air she’d been holding in one long puff, trying to make it into a joke for fear that if she didn’t, she would burst into tears. They wouldn’t be sad tears. They would be frustrated tears. Frustration at herself for still hungering and responding so desperately to the man who’d treated her so abominably.
‘My grandfather’s back,’ Nikos announced. ‘Is Niki ready?’
She pasted a smile to her lips, nodded and stepped aside to let Nikos pick him up.
Following them out of the room, she vowed to get a grip on herself. With this firmly in mind, she said, ‘When you say he’s back, does your grandfather live here?’
‘He lives in the villa next to the spa. He could have had a wing in here but he likes privacy to entertain his lady friends.’
‘I didn’t realise,’ she said evenly, descending the stairs in step with him. He’d never mentioned his grandfather living with him.
‘What, that my grandfather still has an active sex life? It’s something I try not to think about.’
A welcome kernel of laughter tickled her throat at his deadpan comment. ‘No, that he lives with you. Is that a recent thing?’
‘He moved in when I finished the renovations eight years ago.’
‘What made you buy it? Was it the views?’
There was a tightness to his smile. ‘I inherited it from my mother.’
She was instantly confused. ‘I thought you grew up in Chora?’ Chora was Mykonos’s capital and she distinctly remembered him saying it was the part of the island he was from.
‘This was my home until I was six.’
‘That must have been quite a change for you.’ Nikos’s beachside villa was incredibly remote. ‘Did you move for school?’
‘No. My grandfather took custody of me,’ Nikos replied shortly. ‘He took care of me as a child and now I take care of him.’
Shock had her tightening her grip on the bannister. Custody?
But there was no time to ask what he meant by this for he increased his pace to greet the elderly gentleman waiting for them.
* * *
Nikos’s grandfather, Stratos, was a man of, Marisa guessed, around eighty. He had a shock of white hair, a weather-beaten face, twinkling blue eyes and, from the way he bounded to them, the energy of a man half his age.
When Nikos made the introductions, she was taken aback to see the blue eyes turn to ice as they landed on her. His kiss to her cheek came with a definite coolness that immediately put her on edge. She was old enough to know that everyone couldn’t like each other but this was the first time since her school days she’d detected such an instant and noticeable dislike of her.
What on earth had she done to cause it? Could it be something as simple as Stratos being prejudiced against the Spanish or redheads?
If it was prejudice causing his frostiness to her, she was relieved to find his attitude didn’t extend to her son.
Stratos couldn’t speak Spanish or English. Marisa understood Greek far better than she spoke it—teaching herself Nikos’s language so she could teach it to her son had been her greatest joy during her pregnancy—so that meant any ice-breaking conversation was out, but he didn’t need verbal conversation to communicate with his great-grandson.
At first, Niki was as shy with him as he’d been with the nanny Nikos had hired. Stratos was undeterred, parking himself on the hard floor where he waited patiently for Niki’s confidence around him to grow and was soon rewarded by his great-grandson using him as a human climbing frame.
Not once during this did he look at or attempt to communicate with Marisa.
Nikos did, though. Though she kept her stare on the two generations playing on the floor, she could feel his gaze burning into her. She wished the burn didn’t feel like buzzing velvet in her veins. Wished her skin didn’t shiver with awareness of his presence. She’d been wishing these things since he’d come back into her life.
Her mind kept going over his throwaway comment about his grandfather having custody of him. How had she spent six months of her life loving someone without knowing something so fundamental about them? The few things he’d revealed about his past had been delivered matter-of-factly before he’d turned the conversations around to her. It had been done in such a subtle way that at the time she’d preened under the weight of his thirst for knowledge about every aspect of her life. Now she realised it had been a deflection to stop her asking questions about him.
But these were thoughts that had to be put on the backburner when dinner was served and they all headed out to the table on the terrace to sit beneath the warm night sky.
Stratos took the seat next to the highchair and insisted on feeding Niki the specially prepared mush. The utter disgust on her son’s face as the concoction hit his taste-buds was photo-worthy. He spat it out, globules of green goo landing on Stratos’s white shirt.
For the first time since their introduction, the elderly man met her eye. He burst into loud, gravelly laughter that set her off too.
‘Has that got courgette in it?’
she asked when they’d all stopped laughing and Niki had been pacified with a bread roll and a banana and Stratos had gone back to ignoring her.
Nikos grinned. This was his first shared meal with his son in his own home. He would never have imagined a month ago that something so simple and ordinary could provoke such huge enjoyment.
He’d shared plenty of meals in Valencia with his son but they’d all been with Marisa and her family. As outwardly welcoming and obliging as her mother and sister—on the occasions she’d joined them—had been to him, he’d known perfectly well that both of them would have cheerfully stabbed him with their forks if they’d thought they could get away with it. Strangely, he’d never had that vibe from Marisa, but then he remembered that in those first weeks she’d worn her indifference like armour.
He wondered if she was aware how greatly that armour had been stripped away. Or if she realised that every time she spoke to him, her fingers captured one of the ringlets splayed over her shoulders?
Seated diagonally from her, the pleasure of the evening was intensified by the enjoyment of her lovely face as his vista throughout the meal. Marisa was a beautiful woman but under the rising moonlight, her beauty turned into something other-worldly.
‘I’ve no idea what the chef made him,’ he answered after a drink of his wine. ‘I should have warned him not to put courgette in his food.’
‘You can add peppers and aubergine to the list,’ she said without looking at him, fingers tugging on a ringlet. ‘I made a batch of baby-friendly ratatouille a few days ago and you’d have thought I was trying to poison him.’
‘I’m still amazed you can cook.’
‘Only baby food,’ she hastened to remind him, eyes darting to his before quickly looking away again.
Yet another example of her devotion to their son.
His own mother had never, to Nikos’s recollection, cooked him a meal. She’d generally been too busy cooking her drugs to worry about feeding her son, and it rolled like poison in his guts to imagine his own son, belly cramping with hunger, teetering on a kitchen stool to reach a cupboard for food.
The Secret Behind the Greek's Return Page 8
