‘Take it however you want.’ She smiled at a passing woman they’d spoken to earlier, the wife of a diplomat. She couldn’t help but notice the woman’s gaze linger a touch too long on Christian.
Did she think he was charismatic?
Christian had more charisma than anyone she’d known. People were drawn to him. Women especially were drawn to him and it wasn’t the sole result of his good looks. She doubted the size of his bank account had much affect either—the magnetism he carried came from him.
‘Then I will take it as a compliment.’
‘Why finance?’ she asked, her interest piqued. ‘Of all the jobs and careers out there, why go that route?’
The bemusement dropped, the warmth in his eyes cooling. For a moment she thought he was going to ignore her innocent question.
Instead, he held her gaze. ‘When I was a small child, every night before she slept my mother would get the few drachmas she had to her name, place them in front of her and count them.’ He spoke slowly and concisely, as if he were thinking carefully about his answer. ‘I think she hoped that if she counted them enough times they would magically double. The only time I was ever able to make her happy was if I found a stray coin and brought it home to her.’
He shook his head, distaste pouring off him. ‘She worked so hard but we were so poor she couldn’t afford to pay for my school books. We had food in our belly from Mikolaj—whatever was left over from the day before—but there was no money for anything—not birthdays, not Christmas, not anything.’
Alessandra swallowed, the familiar ache forming in her belly that always came when she thought of his childhood. She hated imagining what he’d lived through.
His gaze bore into her. ‘I was obsessed with people like you.’
‘Me?’ she queried faintly.
‘I would see men and women like you, people who were clean and wore beautiful clothes, and wonder why we were so different, why the clothes my mother and I wore were falling into rags. Then I realised what the difference was: money. They had it and we didn’t. So that became my obsession. Money. I was determined to learn everything about it: how to earn it, how to make it grow and how to keep it so that my mother and I too could be clean and wear beautiful clothes.’
‘You certainly realised your dreams,’ she said quietly. ‘Did you have to study hard for it or did it come naturally to you?’
She thought back to her own single-sex education and how she had resented the strictness, rebelling by refusing to pay attention or do homework until it had become likely she would fail all her exams. If she’d applied herself a bit more, her grandfather would never have felt the need to employ a private tutor to help her catch up. Javier would never have entered her life. Who knew how different her life would have been if she’d never met him?
Would she have stayed a virgin until the age of twenty-five?
She hadn’t been ready for sex with Javier but with hindsight it was because she’d known, even without being aware of his wife and children, that a sexual affair between them was wrong. The balance of power had been too one-sided, in his favour.
But Javier was her reality. She didn’t know if she would have stayed a virgin until the age of twenty-five if she hadn’t met him because that would have been a different Alessandra, not the Alessandra she was today.
‘I studied every hour I could,’ Christian said, adopting the same quiet tone as she. ‘I must have been ten when I realised education was the only way either I or my mother could escape.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said softly after a long silence had formed between them.
‘For what?’
‘I don’t know.’ She raised her shoulders, wishing she could articulate the shame churning within her. She recalled the little rant she’d had in Mikolaj’s taverna when she’d put Christian in his place about him not having a monopoly on childhood pain and abandonment.
At least she’d always had clean clothes and fresh food. Materially she’d had everything she could have wished for; the things she’d been denied were to stop her being spoiled and not due to a lack of finances.
After the mess that had been her relationship with Javier, her grandfather had used money—her allowance—as another means to control her. No allowance meant no money; no money meant she stayed prisoner in the villa without the means to bring any more shame to the good Mondelli name.
A prisoner?
What a self-absorbed brat she had been.
Christian’s whole life came into sharp focus. No more potted snapshots of her Adonis, the hard working but poor scholarship student, the small child sharing a mattress in a cramped attic room with his harridan of a mother...
Now the snapshots formed a whole picture. Formed the man before her; everything it must have taken for him to drag himself out of the slum. Two decades of suffering before he’d had the opportunity to shower daily.
What must he think of her, the spoiled little rich kid? She knew she’d never been spoiled but in comparison to Christian she might as well have been Imelda Marcos. So her grandfather had been a workaholic and happy to pass the actual raising of his granddaughter to the female staff of his household? At least she’d never doubted his love. So he’d cut off her allowance? Oh, boo hoo. Her grandfather had been teaching her a lesson. Without it she would never have felt compelled to get herself a job, would never have answered the advertisement to be a photographer’s assistant and taken the first steps on the career she loved.
She’d been self-sufficient ever since.
She might not have had a mother or a father but she’d had her grandfather, strict as he was, and her brother, as protective as he was. Things might be tense at the moment but Rocco would always be there for her.
Christian hadn’t had any of that. Mikolaj had been there as best he could but with a business to run and seven kids of his own to raise it hadn’t been enough. Christian had basically been alone until he’d established the strong friendship group with her brother, Stefan and Zayed. A friendship that had been destroyed because of her.
‘Your mother...’
‘What about her?’ he asked tersely.
‘However crazy she makes you feel, you must love her very much.’
He breathed deeply. ‘I respect what she did for me as a child. She could have abandoned me but she didn’t. I do my duty towards her and will never abandon her. But love? She poisoned any notion I ever had of love.’
As Alessandra digested this, a silver fox of a man came over to join them in the alcove, a German she recalled Christian telling her was head of one of Europe’s major private banks.
‘Have I introduced you to my daughter?’ he asked, indicating a woman of around the same age as Alessandra who was hovering behind him.
‘I don’t believe so,’ Christian answered.
Silver Fox pulled his daughter to him. ‘Kerstin, this is Christian Markos and his wife, Alessandra.’
Kerstin’s eyes gleamed as she leaned in to kiss Christian’s cheeks, lingering to whisper something in his ear. A tall, blonde, impossibly glamorous and beautiful woman, she reminded Alessandra of old Hollywood. Her kisses to Alessandra were quick and perfunctory, the first thing that caused the word bitch to float in Alessandra’s mind.
‘Kerstin graduated a few years ago from your Alma Mater,’ Silver Fox said when the introductions were complete.
‘You studied at Columbia?’ Christian asked with interest.
‘I did,’ she said with a knowing smile.
So she had brains as well as beauty?
‘I seem to recall your father saying something about it, but that was quite a few years ago,’ he mused. ‘Are you planning on following in his footsteps?’
‘Ja—when Papa retires the plan is for me to take over his role.’
‘That’s something I wanted to ta
lk to you about,’ Silver Fox said, addressing Christian. ‘Kerstin and I feel she needs to expand her horizons. We would like you to taking her under your wing for a year or two so she can learn directly from you different aspects of our business.’
Over my dead body.
‘That’s an interesting idea,’ Christian said, turning his attention directly to Kerstin. ‘What are you hoping to learn from me?’
‘Everything!’ Thus said, Kerstin proceeded to discuss in great detail what she hoped to achieve under his tutelage, most of which went straight over Alessandra’s head. This wasn’t through a lack of understanding on her part, more to do with the raging burn in her brain that glowed so brightly, nothing else could penetrate.
If she had claws she would scratch Kerstin’s eyes out without a second thought.
With a snap, she knew who Kerstin reminded her of and why she’d taken such an instant dislike to her.
She reminded her of all the women she’d ever seen photographed on Christian’s arm.
His interest in her—the way he leaned in closely to hear what she had to say, the obvious interest in his expression—was all so clear a highly polished window couldn’t have been more transparent.
Feeling everything inside her clench, she forced her ears to tune in to the conversation.
Now it really did fly over her head.
When it came to financial matters, the most Alessandra ever needed to know was the amount in her personal and business bank accounts and what income and outgoings she had. When she heard the word securities banded about in all earnestness, the only thing her brain conjured up were her bodyguards.
She wasn’t stupid; she knew that. But finance was its own separate language, one she didn’t know how to translate.
Kerstin did. Kerstin spoke fluent finance.
Alessandra placed a hand on her belly as if by covering it she could protect the tiny life within from the thoughts raging through its mother’s head.
By marrying her, Christian had deprived himself of a marriage that would be far better suited to him.
Kerstin would be perfect. She had the physical attributes he so desired—Alessandra doubted any man would get bored of making love to her—but, more importantly from her husband’s point of view, there would be no juggling of time, no compromise. Kerstin would flit into his life as if she’d been born there and then, when her father retired, she and Christian would take over the running of his bank together.
Dio, now her brain was running away from her. She couldn’t make it stop.
They’d been in the woman’s company for twenty minutes and already Alessandra had mapped her entire future out for her.
Christian had never wanted to marry. He’d given up his freedom for their baby. He was trying to accommodate the mother of his baby into his life as well as he could.
He might never have wanted to marry but he did want children.
If he’d met Kerstin tonight as a single man, would he too have grasped what an ideal wife she would have made for him?
They’d have been perfect together, could have made beautiful babies over a set of spreadsheets then whispered sweet nothings about the world of finance into each other’s ears until the early hours of every morning.
‘Are you okay?’ Christian asked quietly, breaking into her runaway thoughts.
She swallowed and jerked a nod. ‘I think I have indigestion,’ she said, uttering the first thing that came into her mind.
His blue eyes studied her, a question mark in them.
‘I must have eaten too many spanakopita,’ she expanded, referring to the mini filo-pastry pies stuffed with spinach and feta she’d taken a liking to. At her last count she’d eaten eight of them.
Her appetite had deserted her now. Her stomach felt so tight she doubted anything would go down.
‘Would you like to go home?’ Did he have to look so concerned when she was playing an imaginary game of marrying him off to someone else? A more suitable someone else.
‘No, I’ll be fine.’ She forced a smile. ‘Carry on with your conversation—I need to visit the bathroom.’
A few minutes later, after a sharp talking to herself in the privacy of a cubicle, she was washing her hands when Kerstin walked in.
The hot, burning feeling in Alessandra’s brain immediately started up again.
‘Is something the matter?’ Kerstin asked.
Dio, now Christian’s future imaginary wife was looking at her with concern.
‘Not at all.’ She forced another brittle smile.
A knowing expression came into Kerstin’s eyes. ‘My sister have a baby soon. You are the same, ja?’
‘How can you tell?’ Not only was she beautiful and intelligent but also psychic.
‘My sister has had many babies,’ Kerstin said with a laugh.
‘Please don’t tell anyone,’ Alessandra beseeched. ‘We’re not ready for the world to know.’
‘All those men chasing you with their cameras...is not nice.’
Beautiful, intelligent, psychic and empathetic?
Had a more perfect woman ever been born?
Kerstin looked openly at Alessandra’s belly. ‘I think you hide it for not much longer. Soon you will show.’
She stated the latter with such certainty that for a moment Alessandra was tempted to ask exactly how much later, right down to the hour.
Instead she fought back the sudden spring of hot tears welling in her eyes.
Kerstin saw them too and placed a comforting arm around her shoulder. ‘Your hormone will feel better soon.’
Alessandra gave a shaky laugh, accepting the tissue Kerstin magically produced.
At least she had one advantage over the beautiful German woman. Her own English was much better.
* * *
‘You’re very quiet,’ Christian said. They’d been in the car for ten minutes since leaving the embassy and Alessandra had spent the entire time gazing out of the window.
She’d become increasingly quiet since their wedding. It was only tonight, when she’d been her old, sociable self, that he’d realised quite how withdrawn she’d become.
Was he the cause? Had his mother’s prediction already started coming true?
He wanted to reach out to her and find out what troubled her but didn’t know how.
She raised a shoulder—the bare shoulder he’d spent the evening trying not to stare at. It had been an effort of epic proportions that had failed. That one naked limb had acted like a beacon to his eyes. The rest of her had acted as a beacon to his senses.
Holding her hand, feeling her warm, slender body brushing against him...
All the good work he’d done in recent weeks building a distance from her had crumbled.
Theos, he ached for her. Ached to possess her all over again with a burn so deep it was like fighting through treacle fog to remember why he had to keep his distance.
‘Are you going to take Kerstin on?’ she surprised him by asking.
‘I haven’t decided.’ On paper Kerstin was an ideal candidate for his ever-growing empire, having the perfect qualifications and aptitude. Her father was a long-standing, respected member of the finance community. Yes, on paper she was ideal.
But he hadn’t imagined the tension emanating from Alessandra when he’d been talking to her. He didn’t want to do anything that would make his wife uncomfortable.
‘I think you should.’
‘What? Take her on?’
Alessandra turned her head to look at him. Her features were still, sombre, even. ‘She’s perfect.’
It was too dark to read her eyes.
‘If I were to take her on in the capacity she and her father have requested, she will do a lot of travelling with us,’ he stated carefully.
&nb
sp; ‘She will do a lot of travelling with you,’ Alessandra clarified. ‘In another month or so, we can stop zigzagging the world together. Our schedules will thank us for it,’ she added drily.
‘Let us consider that in another month,’ he said, his mouth filling with an acrid taste at the thought of travelling without Alessandra by his side. The acridness turned sweet as he thought of how travelling made her sleep. How many hours had he spent these past few weeks on his jet, taking advantage of her oblivion to study her sleeping form, reminding himself over and over why he could only look at her? Theos, he wanted to touch her so badly.
She raised her shoulders in a sign of nonchalance, a smile playing on her lips. It was too dark to tell if her eyes smiled too. ‘I do think you should consider taking Kerstin on. Every billionaire should have a decent protégée.’
‘I thought our child would be a good candidate as my protégé.’
‘It will be a long time before our child is old enough for that. Consider Kerstin as practice.’
‘That’s not a bad idea,’ he mused. Taking Kerstin under his wing would certainly strengthen the ties between himself and her father, Gregor, a very powerful man in the European banking world. To take Kerstin under his wing would put Gregor in his debt. Debts of a personal nature were their own form of currency.
Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t hesitate. As Alessandra had pointed out, Kerstin was perfect. She was highly intelligent, multilingual and already had an excellent grasp of his business. His job would involve fine-tuning that grasp.
Moonlight seeped in the windows, the light bouncing off Alessandra’s bare arm, giving it a silver glow.
That naked arm. How could any man concentrate on anything for longer than a few seconds with that in his eyeline?
All it made him think of was the rest of her naked too.
Do not think of her naked.
It was hard enough sitting in an enclosed cabin in the back of a car with her without bringing memories of her beautiful naked form to his mind’s eye.
Self-enforced celibacy clearly did not agree with him.
How could any man cope with celibacy whilst living with such temptation?
The Greek's Pregnant Bride Page 14
