Wed for His Secret Heir

by Chantelle Shaw

  ‘How are we going to do that?’ Ava’s tone dripped ice.

  ‘I will make a formal announcement of our engagement and ensure that our relationship receives as much media coverage as possible. Stefanos has invited all the bidders who are interested in buying his company to meet him on his private Greek island in one month’s time. With you by my side, an engagement ring on your finger, I am confident that he will sell Markou Shipping to me. The deal is as good as done,’ he said with satisfaction.

  She frowned. ‘Are you saying that—supposing I was mad enough to agree to the pretence—I would have to be your fake fiancée for a whole month and go to Greece with you?’

  ‘One month is less than the prison sentence your brother would be likely to receive,’ Giannis reminded her. ‘It will be necessary for you to live at my home in Greece because Stefanos is not stupid and he will only believe our relationship is genuine if we are seen together regularly. From now on, every time we are out in public we must act as if we are madly in love.’

  ‘It would require better acting skills than I possess,’ Ava muttered.

  ‘On the contrary, I thought you were very convincing when you kissed me outside the hotel.’

  She made a choked sound as if she had swallowed a wasp. ‘I was in a state of shock after hearing you tell the photographers that I was your fiancée.’ After a tense pause, she said, ‘What will happen if Stefanos sells his company to you and then we end our fake engagement and you go back to your bachelor lifestyle that he disapproves of? Won’t he be angry when he realises he was duped?’

  Giannis shrugged. ‘There will be nothing he can do once the sale is finalised.’

  ‘Isn’t that rather unfair?’

  ‘Life is not always fair.’ Irritation made his voice curt. He really did not need a lecture on morals from Ava. ‘It was not fair that your brother wrecked my boat, but I am offering you a way to help Sam stay out of prison. Face it, angel-face, we both need each other.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ she muttered. ‘But I can’t give up a month of my life. What am I supposed to do about my job, for instance?’

  ‘You told me you are between jobs since you moved from Scotland to London. What do you do, anyway? I noticed you avoided talking about your career.’

  She grimaced. ‘I am a victim care officer, and I try to help people who have been the victims of crime. I worked for a victim support charity in Glasgow and I have been offered a similar role with an organisation in London.’

  ‘When will you start the new job?’

  Ava seemed reluctant to answer him. ‘The post starts in November.’

  ‘So there is nothing to stop you posing as my fiancée now.’

  ‘You are so arrogant. Do you always expect people to jump at your command? How do you know that I don’t have a boyfriend?’

  ‘If you do, I suggest you dump him because he clearly doesn’t satisfy you in bed.’ Giannis’s lips twitched when Ava muttered something uncomplimentary. She was prickly and defensive and he had no idea why she fascinated him. Well, he had some idea, he acknowledged derisively as he pictured her sprawled on black silk sheets wearing only a pair of sheer stockings. He glanced at her and she quickly turned her head away, but not before he’d seen a flash of awareness in her eyes.

  Last night they had been dynamite in bed and sex with her had been the best he’d had in a long, long time. Was that why he had come up with the fake engagement plan? Giannis dismissed the idea. He’d been forced to take drastic action when the paparazzi had snapped him and Ava leaving the hotel, having clearly spent the night together. He could not risk that his playboy reputation might lose him the deal with Stefanos Markou.

  His inconvenient desire for Ava would no doubt fade once he had secured Markou’s fleet of ships. The only thing he cared about was fulfilling the promise he had made over his father’s coffin, to provide for his mother and sister. Money and the trappings of wealth were all that he could give them to try to make up for what he had stolen from them. Yet sometimes his single-minded pursuit of success felt soulless, and sometimes he wondered what would happen if he ever opened the Pandora’s Box of his emotions. It was safer to keep the lid closed.

  ‘Did you choose to work with crime victims because your brother got into trouble with the police?’ Giannis succumbed to his curiosity about Ava. She had made an unusual career choice for someone who had learned etiquette and social graces at a Swiss finishing school. At dinner last night he had noted how comfortable she was with the other wealthy guests, and he was confident she would act the role of his fiancée with grace and charm that would delight Stefanos Markou.

  She shook her head. ‘Sam was still in primary school when I went to university to study criminology.’

  ‘Why criminology?’

  For some reason she stiffened, but her voice was non-committal. ‘I found it an interesting subject. But moving away to study and work in Scotland meant I wasn’t around to spot the signs that Sam was having problems, or that my mother didn’t know how to cope with him when he fell in with a rough crowd.’ She sighed. ‘I blame myself.’

  ‘Why do you blame yourself for your brother’s behaviour? Each of us has to take responsibility for our actions.’

  Every day of the past fifteen years, Giannis had regretted that he’d drunk a glass of wine when he and his father had dined together at a taverna. Later, on the journey back to the family home, he had driven too fast along the coastal road from Athens and misjudged a sharp bend. Nothing could excuse his fatal error of judgement. If there was any justice in the world then he would have died that night instead of his father.

  Ava insisted that her brother regretted taking a gang of thugs aboard Nerissa and damaging the boat. She clearly loved her brother, and Giannis felt a begrudging admiration for her determination to help Sam. He remembered how scared he had felt at nineteen when he had stood in a courtroom and heard the judge sentence him to a year in prison.

  He had deserved his punishment and prison had been nothing compared to the lifetime of self-recrimination and contempt he had sentenced himself to. The car accident had been a terrible mistake, yet not one of his relatives had supported him. His sister had been too young to understand, but his mother would never stop blaming him, Giannis thought heavily.

  He looked at Ava and she blushed and quickly turned her head to the front as if she was embarrassed that he had caught her staring at him.

  ‘What about your father?’ he asked her as he slipped the car into gear and pulled away from the traffic lights. At least the traffic was flowing better as they headed towards Camden. ‘Did he try to give guidance to your brother?’

  ‘Dad...left when Sam was eight years old.’

  ‘Did you and your brother have any contact with him after that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It is my belief that children, especially boys, benefit from having a good relationship with their father. Although I realise my views might be regarded as old-fashioned by feminists,’ Giannis said drily.

  * * *

  ‘I suppose it would depend on how good the father was,’ Ava muttered.

  She glanced at Giannis’s hard profile and wondered what he would say if she told him that it had been difficult for her and Sam to have a relationship with their father after he had been sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Her mother had refused to allow Sam to visit Terry McKay at the maximum-security jail which housed some of the UK’s most dangerous criminals. Ava had visited her father once, but she had found the experience traumatic. It had been bad enough having to suffer the indignity of being searched by a warden to make sure she was not smuggling drugs or weapons into the jail.

  Seeing her father in prison had been like looking at a stranger. She had found it impossible to accept that the man she had trusted and adored had, unbeknown to his family, been a violent criminal and ruthless gangland boss. The name Terry
McKay was still feared by some people in the East End of London. Perhaps if Sam had seen the grim reality of life behind bars he might not hero-worship his father as a modern-day Robin Hood character, Ava thought heavily. She was prepared to do everything in her power to prevent her brother from turning to a life of crime, and keeping him out of a young offender institution was vital. Giannis had offered her a way to give Sam another chance, but could she really be his fake fiancée?

  She had assumed after they had spent the night together that she would never see him again. Memories of her wildly passionate response to his lovemaking made her want to squirm with embarrassment, but she remembered too how he had groaned when he had climaxed inside her. Did he intend that they would be lovers for the duration of their fake engagement? The little shiver of anticipation that ran through her made her despair of herself. If she had an ounce of common sense she would refuse to have anything more to do with him.

  But there was Sam to consider.

  Desperate to stop her thoughts from going round in circles, she searched for something to say to Giannis. ‘Do you have a good relationship with your father?’ If she could build up a picture of him—his family and friends, his values, she might have a better understanding of him.

  He was silent for so long that she thought he was not going to answer. ‘I did,’ he said at last in a curt voice. ‘My father is dead.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Evidently she had touched a raw nerve, and his forbidding expression warned her to back off. She sighed. ‘This isn’t going to work. We are two strangers who know nothing about each other. We’ll never convince anyone that we are madly in love and planning to get married.’

  To her surprise, Giannis nodded. ‘We will have to spend some time getting to know each other. I can’t afford any slip-ups when we meet Stefanos. Let’s start with some basics. Why do you and your brother have different surnames? Have you ever been married?’

  ‘No.’ Her voice was sharper than she had intended, and she flushed when he threw her a speculative look before he turned his eyes back to the road. For some reason she found herself explaining. ‘There was someone who I was sure...’ She bit her lip. ‘But I was wrong. He didn’t love me the way I’d hoped.’

  ‘Did you love him?’

  ‘I thought I did.’ She did not want to talk about Craig. ‘After my parents divorced I took my mother’s maiden name.’

  Ava breathed a sigh of relief when he did not pursue the subject of her brother’s surname. Giannis was Greek and it was possible that he did not associate the name McKay with an East End gangster. If he knew of the crimes her father had committed she was sure he wouldn’t want her to pose as his fake fiancée and he was likely to refuse to drop the charges against Sam.

  Giannis slowed the car to allow a bus to pull out. ‘Where did you learn Greek? I did not think the language is routinely taught in English schools.’

  ‘My family lived in Cyprus when I was a child, although I went to boarding school in France and then spent ten months at a finishing school in Switzerland.’

  ‘Why did your parents choose not to live in England?’

  ‘Um...my mother hated the English weather.’ It was partly the truth, but years later Ava had learned that the real reason her father had taken his family to live abroad had been the lack of an extradition agreement between the UK and Cyprus, which had meant that Terry could not be arrested and sent back to England.

  Her thoughts were distracted when a cyclist suddenly swerved in front of the car. Only Giannis’s lightning reaction as he slammed on the brakes saved the cyclist from being knocked off his bike.

  ‘That was a close call.’ She looked over at Giannis and was shocked to see that he was grey beneath his tan. His skin was drawn so tight across his face that his sharp cheekbones were prominent. Beads of sweat glistened on his brow and she noticed that his hand shook when he raked his fingers through his hair.

  Ahead there was an empty space by the side of the road and Ava waited until he had parked the car and switched off the engine before she murmured, ‘You didn’t hit the cyclist. He was riding like an idiot and it was fortunate for him that you are a good driver.’

  Giannis gave an odd laugh that almost sounded as though he was in pain. ‘You don’t know anything about me, angel-face.’

  ‘That’s the point I’ve been making,’ she said quietly. ‘We are not going to be able to carry off a fake engagement.’

  ‘For your brother’s sake you had better hope that we do.’ The stark warning in Giannis’s voice increased Ava’s tension, and when he got out of the car and walked round to open her door she froze when she recognised an area of London that was painfully familiar to her.

  ‘Why have we come here? I thought you were taking me home.’ It occurred to her that he had not asked where she lived, and she had been so stunned after he’d told the photographers she was his fiancée that she had let him drive her away from the hotel without asking where they were going.

  ‘Hatton Garden is the best place to buy jewellery.’

  ‘That doesn’t explain why you have brought me here.’ She was aware that Hatton Garden was known worldwide as London’s jewellery quarter and the centre of the UK’s diamond trade. It was also the place where her father had masterminded and carried out his most audacious robbery.

  Ava remembered when she was a little girl, before the family had moved to Cyprus, her father had often taken her for walks to Covent Garden and St Paul’s Cathedral. They had always ended up in Hatton Garden and strolled past the many jewellery shops with their windows full of sparkling precious gems. She had loved those trips with her father, unware that Terry McKay had been assessing which shops would be the easiest to break into.

  ‘For our engagement to be believable you will need to wear an engagement ring. Preferably a diamond the size of a rock that you can flash in front of the photographers,’ Giannis drawled. He glanced at his watch. ‘Try not to take too long choosing one.’ He took his phone out of his jacket pocket. ‘I need to tell my pilot to have the jet ready for us to leave earlier than I’d originally planned.’

  Ava stared at him. ‘You own a jet?’

  ‘It’s the quickest way to get around. We should be in Paris by lunchtime. I’m going to be busy this afternoon but I’ll arrange for a personal shopper to help you choose some suitable clothes. This evening we will be attending a high-profile function at the Louvre that is bound to attract a lot of media interest. By tomorrow morning half the world will believe that we are in love.’

  ‘Wait...’ She stiffened when he slid his hand beneath her elbow and tried to lead her towards a jewellery store. Her heart plummeted when she saw the name above the shop front.

  Ten years ago her father had carried out an armed robbery at the prestigious Engerfield’s jewellers and stolen jewellery with a value of several million pounds. But Terry McKay’s luck had finally run out and he had been caught trying to flee back to Cyprus on his boat. In court, CCTV footage had shown him threatening a young female shop assistant with a shotgun.

  Ava had been devastated to discover that her father was a ruthless gangster. Even worse, several national newspapers had published a photo of her and her mother with the suggestion that they must have been aware of Terry’s criminal activities. If Julie McKay had harboured suspicions about her husband, she had not told her daughter. But Ava knew that her mother had worshipped Terry and been blind to his faults.

  She stared at the jewellery shop. ‘I can’t go in there.’

  Giannis frowned. ‘Why not? Engerfield’s is arguably the best jewellers in London.’

  ‘What I mean is that I can’t wear an engagement ring or go to Paris with you until I’ve seen my brother and explained that our relationship is fake.’

  ‘You cannot tell anyone the truth in case someone leaks information to the press. I mean it,’ Giannis said harshly as Ava opened her mouth to argue. �
�No one must have any idea that our engagement is not real.’

  ‘But what am I going to say to Sam?’

  He shrugged. ‘You’ll have to invent a story that we met a few weeks ago, and after a whirlwind romance I asked you to marry me. That will explain why I dropped the charges against Sam because I did not want to prosecute my future brother-in-law.’

  ‘I don’t want to lie to my brother,’ she choked. ‘I hate deception.’

  ‘Do you really want to have to admit to him that you slept with me the night we met? That is the truth, Ava, and I will have no qualms about telling Sam how we got into this situation.’

  ‘You told the paparazzi that I am your fiancée. The situation is all your fault.’ She winced when Giannis tightened his grip on her arm and escorted her through the door of the jewellers.

  ‘Smile,’ he instructed her in a low tone when a silver-haired man walked over to meet them.

  Somehow Ava managed to force her lips to curve upwards, but inside she was quaking as she recognised Nigel Engerfield. Ten years ago he had been commended for his bravery after he had tried to protect his staff from the gang of armed thieves led by her father. At the time of her father’s trial Ava remembered seeing the shop manager’s photograph in the newspapers. Would he remember her from the photo of Terry McKay’s family that had appeared in the press a decade ago? She was sure she did not imagine that the manager gave her a close look, but to her relief he turned his gaze from her and smiled at Giannis.

  ‘Mr Gekas, what a pleasure to see you again. How can I help you?’

  ‘We would like to choose an engagement ring. Wouldn’t we, darling?’ Giannis slid his arm around Ava’s waist and his dark eyes glittered as he met her startled glance. ‘This is my fiancée...’