by Penny Jordan
It was a vision of the American dream and he was exactly like that invasive rabbit, feeding on what wasn’t his.
His conscience had already been torturing him before Adara had turned up pregnant. Now all he could think was that he’d be lying about who he was to his son or daughter along with his wife.
But he couldn’t go back and undo all the things he’d done to get here. He’d barely scratched the surface of his past when he’d told Adara he’d started working young. Child labor was what it had been, but as a stowaway discovered while the ship was out to sea, he could as easily have been thrown overboard.
Kristor had put him to work doing what a boy of six or seven could manage. He’d swabbed decks and scrubbed out the head. He’d learned to gut a fish and peel potatoes. Burly men had shouted and kicked him around like a dog at times, but he’d survived it all and had grown into a young man very much out for his own gain.
By the time he was tall enough to make a proper deckhand, Kristor was taking jobs on dodgy ships, determined to build his retirement nest egg. Gideon went along with him, asking no questions and taking the generous pay the shady captains offered. He wished he could say he had been naive and only following Kristor’s lead, but his soul had been black as obsidian. He’d seen dollar signs, not moral boundaries.
The ugly end to Kristor’s life had been a vision into his own future if he continued as a smuggler, though. Gideon had had much higher ambitions than that. He’d been stowing his pay, same as Kristor, but it wasn’t enough for a clean break.
Posing as Kristor’s son, however, and claiming the man’s modest savings as an “inheritance” had put him on the solid ground he’d needed. Kristor hadn’t had any family entitled to it. Yes, Gideon had broken several laws in claiming that money, even going to the extent of paying a large chunk to a back-alley dealer in the Philippines for American identification. It had been necessary in order to leave that life and begin a legitimate one.
Or so he’d convinced himself at the time. His viewpoint had been skewed to basic survival, not unlike Adara’s obdurate attitude when he’d first caught up to her in Greece. He’d been cutting himself off from the pain of losing Kristor in exactly the way he’d fled onto Kristor’s ship in the first place, running from the grief and horror of losing his mother.
He couldn’t say he completely regretted becoming Gideon Vozaras. At sixteen—nineteen according to the fresh ink on his ID—he’d sunk every penny he had into a rusting sieve of a tugboat. He repaired it, ran it, licensed it out to another boatman and bought another. Seven years later, he leveraged his fleet of thirty to buy an ailing shipyard. When that started to show a profit, he established his first shipping route. He barely slept or ate, but people started to call him, rather than the other way around.
Fully accepted as an established business by then, he’d still possessed some of his less than stellar morals. When he was ready to expand and needed an injection of capital, he started with a man known to let his ego rule his investment decisions. Gideon had walked into the Makricosta headquarters wearing his best suit and had his salesman’s patter ready. He’d been willing to say whatever he needed to get to the next level.
He’d been pulled up by an hourglass figure in a sweater set and pencil skirt, her heels modest yet fashionable, her black hair gathered in a clasp so the straight dark tresses fell like a plumb line down her spine. She turned around as he announced himself to the receptionist.
He was used to prompting a bit of eye-widening and a flush of awareness in a woman. If the receptionist gave him the flirty head tilt and smooth of a tendril of hair, he missed it. His mouth had dried and his skin had felt too tight.
Adara’s serene expression had given nothing away, but even though her demeanor had been cool, his internal temperature had climbed. She had escorted him down the hall to her father’s office, her polish and grace utterly fascinating and so completely out of his league he might as well still have had dirt under his nails and the stink of diesel on his skin.
Three lengthy meetings later, he had been shut down. Her father had refused and Gideon had mentally said goodbye to any excuse to see her again. No use asking her to dinner. By then he had her full background. Adara didn’t date and was reputed to be holding on to her virginity until she married.
When she had unexpectedly asked to see him a few weeks later, he’d been surprised, curious and unaccountably hopeful. She’d shown up in a jade dress with an ivory jacket that had been sleek and cool and infuriatingly modest, not the sort of thing a woman wore if she was encouraging an afternoon tryst.
“I didn’t expect to see you again,” he’d said with an edge of frustration.
“I...” She’d seemed very briefly discomfited, then said with grave sincerity, “I have a proposal for you, which may persuade my father to change his mind, if you’re still interested in having him as a backer. May I have ten minutes of your time?”
Behind the closed doors of his office, she had laid out what was, indeed, a proposal. She had done her homework. She had information on his financials and future projects that weren’t public knowledge.
“I apologize for that. I don’t intend to make a habit of it.”
“Of what?” he’d asked. “Snooping into my business or running background checks on prospective grooms?”
“Well, both,” she’d said with a guileless look. “If you say yes.”
He’d been self-serving enough to go along with the plan. The upside had been too good, offering access to her business and social circles along with a leap in his standing on the financial pages. And Adara had made it so easy. She had not only scripted their engagement and wedding, she’d known her lines. Their marriage had been perfect.
To the untrained eye.
He could look back now and see what a performance it had been on both their parts. From the reception to country clubs to rubbing shoulders with international bankers, they had set each other up like improv specialists, him feeding Adara lines and her staying on message.
And she’d conformed to brand like a pro, elevating her modest style to a timeless sophistication that had put both the hotels and his shipyard in a new class. She’d delivered exactly what she’d promised in terms of networking, opportunities and sheer hard work, putting in the late hours to attain the goals he’d laid out.
She had probably thought that’s all he’d wanted from her, he realized, heart clenching. It had been, initially, but somewhere along the line he’d begun to care—about a lot of things. She was an excellent cook and she bought him shirts he liked. Whenever they were about to leave for work or an evening event, she invariably smoothed his hair or straightened his tie and said, “You look nice.”
Part of him had stood back and called her actions patronizing, but a needier part had soaked up her approval. It was all the more powerful because he had admired her so much.
Adara set a very high standard for herself. Once he’d fully absorbed that, he’d begun taking it as a challenge to meet and exceed her expectations. Finally comfortable financially, he’d followed her lead and started helping others, selecting charities with thought for who he really wanted to help, creating foundations that benefited young mothers, street kids, and sailors unable to work due to disabilities.
Meanwhile, pride of possession had evolved into something so deep, Adara’s seeming to cheat on him earlier this summer had shaken him to the bone.
It wasn’t comfortable to be this invested. Sure he was a risk-taker, but not with his emotions. The way his heart had grown inordinately soft, especially in the last weeks, unnerved him, but he couldn’t help the way his chest swelled with feeling and pride every time he so much as thought about his wife.
A screen door creaked, drawing his glance. Pressure filled his chest as Adara appeared on the veranda and lifted a somber hand.
He didn’t deserve her or any of this,
but he’d do anything to keep it.
* * *
Adara’s emotions were all over the place and that look of intense determination on Gideon’s face as he looked up at her gave her a chill near her heart. He seemed so ruthless in that second, exactly as her mother had just accused him of being. She could clearly see the man who’d said, Whatever it took, I had to amass some wealth and take control over my destiny.
But maybe her vision was colored by everything she was dealing with. When she started down the stairs, he met her at the bottom, his scowl deepening as he took in her red, puffy eyes. His arm was tender as he crooked it around her and drew her into his solid presence.
“Pretty rough, huh?”
She began to shake. Until the last few weeks, she’d had to keep her sorrows or worries inside her where they ate like acid. Now she had Gideon. Her mother was so wrong about him. He wasn’t cold and heartless like her father. Not at all.
“Can we stay out here a few minutes? I feel like I haven’t had air in weeks.” Not that the summer heat held much oxygen, but he obliged, ambling beside her as she took a turn around the pond. “This would have been a great place to grow up if my father had bought this earlier. And things had been different,” she mused, imagining a swing set and a sandbox.
“If Nic had been your father’s, you mean?”
Adara choked on a harsh laugh, voice breaking as she said, “Mom asked me if this baby was yours.” Her hand moved to protectively cover their unborn child’s ears. “What prospective grandmother has that as a first reaction?”
“I don’t have any doubt he or she is mine,” Gideon said with quiet resolution. “But even if you told me right now that it wasn’t, I’d stay right here and work through it with you.”
Adara checked her step, startled, thinking again, whatever it took... “You wouldn’t be angry?”
“I’d be angry as hell, but I wouldn’t take it out on you and the baby the way your father tortured you and your mother. I wouldn’t push you out of my life to fend for yourself, either.”
The way his mother had had to make her own way. Adara’s surprise and apprehension softened to understanding. He might have a streak of single-mindedness, but there was a marshmallow center under his hard shell.
“You’re a bigger person than me. Maybe it’s the miscarriages and fear of infidelity talking, but I don’t know if I could stay married if you had a baby with someone else.”
“You’re not sure you want to stay married, as it is, and the only woman having my baby is you.”
Adara pivoted away from that and continued walking, startled by the shaft of fear his light challenge pierced into her. It would seem her ability to dissemble around him was completely gone. He knew every thought in her head, every hesitation in her heart.
“My mother said she’d understand if it wasn’t yours,” Adara said with a sheared edge on her tone, recalling how that conversation had spun into directions she hadn’t anticipated any better than this one. Holding on to her composure had been nearly impossible as her mother had tried to find parallels in their two lives. “My parents had had a fight and the engagement was off. That’s why she slept with Nic’s dad. Olief was a journalist flying back to Europe. She had a layover. It was just a rebound thing. The sort of affair all her flight attendant friends were having. Then my father called and the wedding was back on.”
“Even though she knew she was pregnant?”
“I guess paternity could have gone either way. She loved my father so she married him and deluded herself into believing Nic was his.”
At least you’re not in love with your husband. I’ve always been proud of you for having that much sense, but children are a mistake, Adara. You have no idea how much power a man has over you once babies enter the picture.
Adara had recoiled from her mother’s words, finding it distasteful to be accused of having no feelings for Gideon even though that had been her goal for most of her marriage.
“I wanted her to be happy for us and she just took off on a bitter rant about my father.” Hearing her mother refer to her grandchild as a “mistake” had been the greatest blow of all. Her entire childhood, void as it had been of parental pride and joy, had crawled out from under the bed, grim and dark and ready to swallow her.
“She’s sick,” Gideon reminded her.
“I know, but—” But you lied to him, she had wanted to say. Maybe her father wouldn’t have twisted into such a cruel man if his wife had been honest from the start.
There was no use trying to change her mother at this point though. Challenging her, arguing and judging, were incredibly misplaced. Her mother wasn’t just sick, she was dying.
“We’ll do better by our child,” Gideon vowed, pausing to turn her into him. He lifted her hand to graze his lips across the backs of her fingers. The ring he’d given her yesterday winked at her.
At the same time, his eyes held a somber rebuke. Gideon was a patient man, but this time he wasn’t going to let her avoid his silent question. Even as she absorbed his earnest statement, her mother’s voice whispered again, You have no idea how much power a man has over you once babies enter the picture.
But she wasn’t her mother. There weren’t any lies between her and Gideon. The secrets and recriminations that had surrounded her growing up, forcing her to close off her heart out of self-protection, were old news. Their child, unpolluted by any of that, gave her a chance to love cleanly and openly.
This fresh start with this man, who already stirred her so deeply, was a chance to build a truly happy life. If she dared believe she was entitled to it and opened herself to letting it happen. It was a huge leap of faith, but she’d taken one in marrying him at all. Maybe she was putting her heart at deep risk, but again and again he’d proven himself to be a man she could trust.
“We will, won’t we?” she said in quiet promise.
Relief and a flicker of deeper emotion was quickly transformed into his predominant mask of arrogant confidence. For a second, he’d seemed moved, which made her heart trip, but now he was his typical conqueror self, nearly smug with triumph—which was familiar and oddly endearing, making her want to laugh and ignore her old self trying to warn her that she might be giving up too much too quickly.
But if she had a soupy, awed look on her face, he wore one of fierce tenderness.
“You’re so beautiful.” The kiss he bent to steal was as reverent and sweet as it was hard and possessive.
Her lips clung to his as he drew away.
“Don’t get ideas,” he chided, breaking contact from her look of invitation. “We’re cut off until you deliver.”
“That’s you being overcautious. Karen didn’t say we couldn’t.” She was still aggravated that they’d shared a bed last night but hadn’t made love. She was nervous about doing anything to jeopardize her pregnancy, but they’d been making love without consequence until now.
“Karen doesn’t know how insatiable we are once we get started. Just do me a favor and don’t make this harder than it is.”
“Pun intended?” She drifted her gaze down his front to the bulge behind his fly.
“This is going to be a very long pregnancy.” He gritted his teeth, making her laugh as he guided her inside for an early dinner before driving home.
CHAPTER TEN
AFTER YEARS OF being the one who micromanaged to ensure everything met her father’s impossible standards, Adara was forced to let go and trust others to pull off top-notch work with minimal input. It wasn’t easy, but she eased up and was pleasantly surprised by her very efficient teams. Despite her working from home for months, only checking in electronically, they were managing great things without her.
Staying away from the office had a drawback, however. Moving through the ballroom decorated in fall colors of gold, crimson and burnt umber, she couldn’t h
elp congratulating people on putting together a brilliant event to celebrate the Makricosta chain’s thirty-fifth anniversary. They all reacted with great surprise and when Adara met up with Connie, a woman she’d worked closely with for years, she realized why.
Connie rocked back on her four-inch heels. “Wow, I’ve never seen a woman as pregnant as you act so happy and outgoing. When I got that big, I was a complete cow.”
“Oh, I...” Adara didn’t know what to say. Had her personality been frozen for so many years that a bit of friendly warmth was remarkable? Or was she really as big as she felt?
“That’s meant as a compliment,” Connie rushed to say, glancing with horror at Adara’s guardian angel, Gideon.
They’d learned to give each other space in the confines of the penthouse as they worked from home, but tonight he was right beside her, his ripped masculinity nearly bursting out of his tuxedo. He didn’t complain about their abstinence nearly as much as she did, but he spent a lot of time expending sexual energy in the weight room. It showed, making his presence all the more electric, while Adara’s insecurity ballooned to match her figure.
“It’s true,” he said with a disturbing slide of his hand beneath the fall of her hair. His touch settled in a light, caressing clasp on the back of her neck, making her follicles tighten. “The pregnancy glow isn’t a myth. You’re gorgeous.”
“I look like the Queen Mary,” Adara sputtered. Her reports from Karen continued to be good, and weight gain was to be expected, but playing dress-up for this evening hadn’t been as fun as it used to be. Her hair had developed kinks, she was too puffy for her rings and wearing heels was out of the question. Growing shorter and pudgier while her husband grew hotter and sleeker was demoralizing. All her excitement in having a date night deflated.
