‘I thought she was an actress?’
‘No, that was the other one.’
‘I tell you who knocks spots off all these women,’ Zayed said. ‘Alessandra.’
Christian snapped his head round to stare at him. ‘Don’t even think about it.’
Zayed raised his hands. ‘I’m just making an observation.’
‘Well, don’t.’
‘Man, you know I wouldn’t go there. I’d never do that to Rocco— Where are you going?’ he added when Christian got up from his stool and made to leave.
‘To get some air.’
‘You not feeling well?’ Stefan was looking at him closely.
‘It’s been a busy time. I’m probably jet-lagged. Get another round in—I’ll be back in a few minutes.’
Instead of going outside, Christian went to the restroom and splashed cold water on his face.
He’d been a paper thickness away from punching Zayed.
Theos, he needed to get a grip on himself.
This was his guilt and his problem. No one else’s.
Back in the ballroom his eyes automatically sought Alessandra out. As he found her, she turned her head in his direction, as if some sixth sense told her he was there. Quickly she turned away.
He thought he was doing a good job of hiding his guilt-ridden inner turmoil. After that one close call of almost punching one of his oldest and closest friends for an innocuous remark, he joined in with the celebration they were there for, drinking, laughing and horsing about, being the same old Christian he always was when with them.
Except, every time he looked, he found Alessandra’s gaze upon him. Their eyes would meet for a fraction of a second before jerking away. She certainly seemed to be enjoying herself, though, dancing with anyone who cared to ask, at one point stealing Olivia from Rocco and waltzing her around the floor to screams of delight.
Only when the bride and groom, their hands clenched tightly together, left to head off to their secret honeymoon destination did Christian determine his duty to have been done.
Exchanging bear hugs with Zayed and Stefan, who called him every laughably demeaning name under the sun for retiring to bed so early, he strode out of the ballroom, unable to resist one last glance at Alessandra. For once, she wasn’t looking at him.
He was about to climb the stairs to the sleeping quarters when he heard his name called.
Stefan approached him and pulled him into another embrace. ‘You are playing with fire, my friend,’ he said into his ear.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Sure you do.’ He pulled back a little and brought his hands up to Christian’s face, slapping both his cheeks lightly. ‘You have to end it. Now.’
Christian’s chest compressed. He couldn’t lie to his friend. ‘It was over before it started.’
‘Good. Keep it that way. For all our sakes.’
* * *
Alessandra took a deep breath and knocked on the door. The party was still going strong, a DJ having replaced the band, music pounding through the walls. There were revellers all over the villa but thankfully this wing was quiet and devoid of people.
She waited a few moments before knocking again, louder.
Unless Christian had left without telling anyone, he was in there. The dim light seeping under the door testified to this. She’d casually asked Stefan and Zayed where their fellow musketeer had escaped to. She could only hope she’d imagined the suspicious but pitying look in Stefan’s eyes when he’d told her Christian had gone to bed.
Please, God, let him be alone in there.
What were the chances?
She’d been nothing special, just another notch on a bedpost crammed with notches.
Christian Markos travelled with a trail of broken hearts attached to him ranging from Hong Kong to London. Some sold their stories to the tabloids, tales of short-lived lust before being discarded. Some spoke with bitterness. Most spoke with longing. Most wanted him to break their hearts all over again.
It took an age before the handle turned and the door opened.
Christian stood clad in a pair of jeans. And nothing else.
He blinked narrowing eyes. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I need to talk to you. Can I come in?’
His bronzed throat rose. ‘That’s not a good idea.’
‘It’s important.’
His firm lips, usually quirked in an easy smile, clamped together. He shifted past her, looking both directions down the wide corridor before ushering her in and swiftly closing the door.
His room was tidy, his tuxedo hanging neatly on the door of the wardrobe. The bed was rumpled; a tablet was on the bedside table next to a half-full bottle of bourbon and an empty glass.
‘Are you drunk?’ she challenged. This was a conversation she needed to have when he was sober.
‘No.’ He strode to the window and closed the heavy curtains. ‘Believe me, I’ve been trying to reach that state.’
If only she were in a position to reach that state herself.
‘Today went well,’ she said, sitting gingerly on the corner chair. She could really do with a shot of that bourbon. It would make what was coming next easier to cope with, of that she was certain. ‘Rocco and Liv looked really happy.’
Their obvious happiness had had the dual effect of making her heart lighten for her brother’s sake and sink at the knowledge it was something she could never have for herself.
Christian propped himself against the wall by the window and crossed his arms over his broad chest. She hadn’t really had the opportunity to study his torso in her apartment, and now she could look at it properly she felt the heat she’d experienced that night bloom anew.
Years of rowing and track had honed his physique, his form strong and athletic, his shoulders broad. Fine hair dusted across his bronzed chest and she felt an almost unbearable compulsion to hurtle herself into his arms and take solace in his strength.
Making love to him had been an experience she would never forget. The single best experience of her life.
Try as she had to expel the memories from her head, they’d stayed with her, tantalising her, taunting her with the knowledge it was an experience that could never be repeated.
The simple remembrance of his smooth skin flush against her nakedness made her feel as if her insides were being liquidised.
‘What did you want to talk to me about?’ he asked, cutting the preamble and pulling her back to the present. While he wasn’t being unfriendly, there was none of the easy-going Christian she knew. She didn’t have to be psychic to know he wanted her gone from his room.
His regret and self-loathing were obvious.
Her heart hammered beneath her ribs, her stomach roiling with nerves that threatened to overwhelm her.
This was all her fault...
‘I’m pregnant.’
CHAPTER TWO
THE SILENCE THAT FOLLOWED Alessandra’s stark statement was total.
Christian seemed to deflate before her eyes, as if he’d suffered a body blow.
Which no doubt her news was, she thought miserably.
How she’d kept herself together throughout the day she would never know, her only thought having been that she mustn’t ruin Rocco and Olivia’s special day. She mustn’t.
She’d spent pretty much her entire life trying to keep herself together in public, the hardest before tonight being two months ago when they’d buried her grandfather. The paparazzi had been out in force. She’d worn dark glasses until they’d entered the church, refusing to give them the money shot they so desired. Even when Sandro, her alcoholic father, had turned up drunk and made that dreadful scene, she’d kept her composure. Christian and Zayed had been the ones who’d calm
ly approached him and dragged him away.
Christian staggered over to the bed and sat heavily on it, clutching his head.
‘Please. Say something,’ she beseeched. The back of her retinas burned and she blinked furiously. No matter what happened in the next few minutes, she would not cry. She’d done enough of that.
He fixed his blue eyes on her. ‘How long have you known?’
‘A while, I guess, but I only took the test a couple of days ago.’ She laughed, a hollow sound even to her own ears. ‘I took three of them, hoping they were wrong.’ At the third positive reading, she’d climbed onto her bed and sobbed.
‘Have you seen a doctor?’
‘Not yet.’ She bit into her lip. It had taken her almost a fortnight to entertain the possibility that her late period might actually mean something, another fortnight before she’d unburied her head from the sand and crossed the threshold into the pharmacy.
She’d never believed she would be a mother. Motherhood went hand in hand with relationships and she certainly didn’t believe in them.
‘But you’re certain?’
‘Yes.’ Once the reality of her condition had sunk into her shell-shocked brain, the tears had stopped.
Inside her, right in the heart of her womanhood, a tiny life grew.
Whatever the outcome of this conversation with Christian, nothing could change the fact that this life—her baby—was a part of her. Nothing could have prepared her for the host of emotions pregnancy would bring. It might be early days in pregnancy terms but already she loved it, this little alien developing within her; knew she would do anything to nurture and protect it. Anything.
Silence rang out, the only sound Christian’s heavy breathing. She’d never seen his features—all angles and straight lines forming what had been dubbed one of the most handsome faces in Europe—look so empty.
‘I’m so sorry.’
His brows drew together. ‘Sorry for what?’
‘I screwed up.’ She forced herself to look him straight in the eye. ‘I didn’t take my pill properly.’
He shook his head and expelled a breath through his mouth, running a hand through his cropped dirty-blond hair. ‘And you didn’t think to tell me that?’
‘I didn’t know the dangers, not properly.’
‘How could you not know? It’s basic biology.’ He swore under his breath.
‘I was put on the pill because my periods were painful, not for the purpose of contraception.’
‘You should have told me. Theos, if I’d known you didn’t take it at regular intervals I would have made certain to use a condom.’
‘I am sorry, truly sorry.’
The knuckles of his hands were white. She could see his temper hanging by a thread.
‘You can’t put this on yourself—I can’t put it on you,’ he eventually said. ‘We were both there. I should have had the sense to use a condom like I normally do.’
She closed her eyes, pushing away thoughts of him with other women. ‘Christian...I can’t do this on my own. I need your support—not financially but in other ways.’ Financially she could do it alone. She had her apartment, her career was thriving...
She opened her eyes and looked at his still-dazed face. ‘I know I’ve had a head start getting my head around all this, and that’s unfair on you, but I need your word—on your honour—that you’ll be there for me and our baby.’ Not that she could trust it. He was a man. Men always broke their promises.
All the same, she had to try and put a little faith in him. He was the father of her child. But then, her own father was the worst liar of all. He’d lied to her mother on her deathbed, promising to care for their children, never to leave them. That had been the biggest lie of all.
The only men she trusted were her brother and her grandfather. It had broken her grieving heart to learn recently that her grandfather had had his own dark secrets.
If it hadn’t been for his death, she would never have slept with Christian. She’d bumped into him in the House of Mondelli headquarters after she’d had a meeting with the fashion director about a campaign she’d been hired to shoot. Christian had turned up to take her brother out but Rocco had been in New York.
She’d been in a bad place, she could see that now, trying to cope with her grief but not having a clue how to manage it. She’d never known pain like it. It still had the power to lance her.
Christian had presented the perfect opportunity for a night out where she could forget her pain for one evening, so she’d talked him into going out with her instead. Not for a minute had she imagined she would fall into bed with him.
But she had done just that and now she had to pay the consequences.
And so did Christian.
She might never be able to trust him but she’d had enough faith, whatever her state of mind, to lose her virginity to him. That had to account for something.
She wished he would say something. His frame was still but his eyes were alert. She couldn’t read them. Couldn’t read him.
‘When news of the pregnancy comes out the press are going to swarm all over it. I’ve lived through one scandal and I can’t go through that again on my own. I just can’t.’ Simply imagining going through it all again made her hands go clammy and her stomach churn. How clearly she remembered those awful days when the paparazzi had laid siege to Villa Mondelli, leaving her a prisoner in her own home. She’d never been so scared and alone in all her life. ‘If I know I can rely on you for support when I need it, and later on when our baby needs it, I might be able to sleep again.’
Christian’s throat rose before he twisted onto his side and grabbed his bourbon and glass. He poured a hefty measure and offered it to her.
She shook her head.
‘Of course not,’ he muttered, taking a large swallow of it. ‘You’re pregnant. Did you not drink today?’
‘I had a small champagne during the toasts but that’s all.’
He got to his feet and headed back to the window, peeking through the curtain.
‘Will you support me?’ she pressed. For her own peace of mind she needed to know. If he refused she didn’t know what she would do other than fall into a crumpled ball. Or maybe join a convent.
No. She wouldn’t do either. For the sake of the life inside her, she would endure.
‘Will you support our baby and be its father?’
* * *
The ringing that had echoed in Christian’s ears since Alessandra’s pronouncement that she was pregnant subsided.
He gazed at her belly, still flat under the lilac of her dress, not a hint that within it lay the tiny seed of life.
The life they had created together.
His baby.
He was going to be a father.
As this knowledge seeped through him, he thought of his own father, a man who’d left before Christian had been old enough to memorise his features. He had no memories of him, no possessions to place a tangible hold on him. Nothing. Not even a photograph. His mother had burned them all.
If there was one thing he knew with bone-deep certainty, it was that he didn’t want a child of his being raised without a father to look out for him or her.
From infancy it had been just him and his mother, a woman whose bitterness ran so deep it seemed to seep from her pores. His father had turned his back on them both and in turn had created the woman she’d become.
Christian would not be that man.
He raised his gaze from Alessandra’s belly to meet her eyes, a sharpness driving in his chest to see all the fear and uncertainty contained in them. Despite the braveness she strove to convey, her hands trembled, her teeth driving in and out of her plump lips as she awaited his response.
He knew what his response must be.
‘Yes,’ he said
, nodding slowly for emphasis. ‘I will support you and our child. But in return I want you to marry me.’
* * *
The comb holding Alessandra’s hair in place had been digging into her scalp all day, a minor irritation that suddenly felt magnified enough for her to yank it out. She got to her feet, swiping fallen hair off her face.
For a moment she couldn’t speak, her brain struggling to find the English she’d spoken like a native since early childhood. ‘I know this is a shock for you. I know, okay? But marriage?’
‘Yes, marriage.’
She shook her head, trying her hardest not to let panic set in. ‘Please, don’t say anything you’ll regret in the morning when you look at the situation with fresh eyes.’
‘The morning won’t change the situation. You’ll still be pregnant.’
‘And I still won’t be marrying you.’
‘Alessandra...’ He bit back his rising voice. ‘Alessandra, think about it. This is the obvious solution. Marriage will give legitimacy to our child.’
‘This isn’t the nineteenth century. There’s no stigma to children born outside of wedlock.’
His eyes swirled with an emotion she didn’t understand. ‘Children need and deserve two parents. You know that as well as I do.’
One parent would have been nice in her case, she thought bitterly. Yes, her father was still alive, but he’d never been a real father to her. He’d abandoned her almost from her first breath. By the time of her first birthday, he’d gambled and drunk away their home and had foisted Rocco and her into the care of his elderly father.
She felt as if she’d been blindsided. Marriage was the last thing she’d expected Christian to suggest. The most she’d hoped for was public support for her and their child, and even that had felt like a pipe dream considering she was dealing with the commitment-phobic Christian Markos. He made Casanova look like a monk.
She hadn’t allowed herself to hope for anything more substantial, had envisaged her and the baby’s future with Christian flitting in and out when it suited him. She’d even prepared her ‘please don’t introduce our child to a succession of aunties’ speech. In her head she’d prepared for just about every imaginable scenario. Apart from the scenario where he demanded marriage.
The Greek's Pregnant Bride Page 2
