Twice she’d agreed to marry the wrong man. Twice she’d let her kind, good heart lead her down the garden path.
Would third time be the charm for her? She was mesmerisingly beautiful, kind, funny, intelligent. She deserved someone who loved her. And their daughter?
Pain gripped his chest, because of course their daughter would be a part of that package. If Hannah met and married someone else, his daughter would have a stepfather. The idea filled him with sawdust, but even that wasn’t enough. He couldn’t go after her simply because he didn’t want anyone else to have her.
He wasn’t a spoiled three-year-old.
She’d fallen in love with him even though he didn’t deserve that love, even though he could never give it back. She’d fallen in love with him and the kindest, fairest thing Leonidas could do for Hannah was accept her decision to leave.
He had to let her go.
* * *
‘Christós, don’t go easy on him, will you?’ Thanos asked Leonidas.
Leonidas, sitting at the head of the table in one of the boardrooms of their London offices, threw his brother a quizzical expression.
‘Did you see his hands shaking? He turned violet from rage.’
Leonidas shrugged. ‘He wants to do business with us? Then he needs to lower his rate.’
Thanos laughed. ‘I’ve never seen you quite like this.’
Leonidas compressed his lips. His personal life was a mess but that didn’t mean his business life had to be. He’d become some kind of monster since Hannah had left the island—working eighteen-hour days seemed like the best way to put her out of his mind.
Every morning he’d woken to the security briefings, reporting on her whereabouts. Their only communication had been through his lawyers—him transferring a town house in London to her name, her not wishing to accept. He’d wanted to text her. To call her.
Hell, he’d wanted to see her. He’d wanted to see her so badly he’d felt as if he were running a marathon uphill, every single day that passed in which he didn’t give into his impulses and get on a flight and go to London, knock on her door and demand she marry him after all.
He was a tyrannical CEO, so why not make it impossible for her to refuse marriage? Threaten harder, demand more.
But every time he imagined doing exactly that, he saw her as she’d been that last morning, her heartbreak evident in every line on her face, her softly spoken words when she’d told him he was a good person, that he would never hurt her.
And she was right about that—he couldn’t hurt her. So he’d let her go, as he’d known he should. And every month that passed had filled him with an increasing ache, a desperation that was tearing him apart.
He needed her, but it was a selfish need, just as it had been all along.
He’d taken what he wanted from her, using Hannah to fill in the gaps of his soul without realising he was only adding to her own pains. He was becoming yet another thing she would need to get over.
He wanted to speak to her, but how could he? He took his cues from her and she was refusing to so much as acknowledge his gifts.
This week, however, had been by far the hardest. Three months after she’d left the island, a whole season later, he’d come to London. And he’d gone to bed every night looking out on this ancient city, knowing that she was only miles away. Imagining her, and the roundedness of her belly, the sweetness of her face in repose, the sound of her husky breathing.
He had tormented himself with her nearness—and the knowledge he had no right to see her. That he was here in London and not at her side.
‘Leonidas.’ He looked up as his brother’s assistant entered the room. Belinda, somewhere in her fifties with pale hair and a permanently disapproving scowl, had worked for Thanos for almost a decade and it showed. She was tired and almost on the brink of a nervous breakdown—keeping Thanos’s life on the rails could not be an easy occupation. At least they compensated her well for such a chore. ‘Greg Hassan’s on the phone for you.’ She nodded sternly towards the receiver on a bench in the corner of the room.
‘Thank you.’
Leonidas moved quickly across the room, telling himself not to panic even as the taste of adrenalin filled his mouth.
‘What is it?’ He had no time for pleasantries.
‘Hannah’s been rushed to hospital. Her waters broke.’
‘What hospital?’
Hassan gave the name. Leonidas slammed the phone down and grabbed his coat without saying a word.
‘Leo?’ Thanos was right behind him. ‘What’s up?’
‘The baby’s coming.’
Thanos’s smile was huge but Leonidas shook his head. ‘It’s too early. There’s still a month to go.’
Panic wrapped around him. ‘Stay here. I’ll let you know.’
‘Screw that.’ Thanos’s voice was firm. ‘No way.’
Leonidas didn’t want company, but he knew better than to argue with Thanos. Besides, he didn’t have the energy and he didn’t much care. He just needed to get to Hannah, to know everything was okay.
It was peak hour and the hospital was across London. ‘Helicopter,’ he muttered, shouldering out of the office with an impatience that was overtaking his soul.
Thanos didn’t say a thing, simply nodded and took out his phone, giving orders for the helicopter to be readied. On the roof, they climbed into the sleek black chopper and it fired to life.
‘Which hospital?’ their pilot asked.
Leonidas repeated the name and the pilot lifted off. Thanos turned to Leonidas, his own features taut. ‘Try not to worry, Leo. You’ll be there soon.’
It didn’t feel like soon enough to Leonidas. Despite the fact the helicopter cut through the sky like butter, he couldn’t believe he’d ever let her leave him, leave the island. He couldn’t believe she’d gone into labour on her own—that he hadn’t been there to help her.
Finally, the chopper touched down on a neighbouring roof to the hospital. The engine wasn’t even cut before Leonidas was jumping down, keeping bent low as he ran across the roof.
Thanos caught up to him as the elevator doors opened and neither spoke as the lift careened to the floor. Thanos ran the rest of the way, his heart pounding with every step he took.
‘Hannah May,’ he said as he arrived, the reception desk mercifully quiet.
‘What ward?’
‘I don’t know.’ Leonidas raked a hand through his hair.
‘Obstetrics.’ Thanos, right behind him, spoke more calmly.
‘Let me see.’ The nurse moved slowly, pressing her finger to a clipboard, a frown on her face. ‘I don’t see her.’
‘She was brought in earlier. She must be here,’ Leonidas demanded.
‘Could you check again?’ Thanos suggested, putting a hand on Leonidas’s chest and pushing him a little away from the counter. His eyes held a warning—a suggestion: I’ll handle this.
Leonidas paced from one side of the reception to the other, cursing in his head, adrenalin coursing through his veins.
‘This way,’ Thanos interrupted him, nodding towards the lifts. They went as fast as they could but everything in this old building was slow. When they reached the obstetrics ward and found the corridor they needed to walk down was closed because of mopping, Leonidas almost shouted the hospital down.
‘Calm down,’ Thanos insisted.
Yeah, right. When they arrived at the desk for the obstetrics ward, Thanos joined the back of a long queue to find out where Hannah was but Leonidas moved through the doors, and he stood stock-still. Because he heard her. He heard her cries and his heart jerked out of his chest.
A scream, pain; he was running down the corridor towards her voice, so close, his hand reaching for the door.
‘You can’t go in there, sir.’ A man was running behind him, an older man, frail. Despite his se
curity guard uniform, Leonidas didn’t think he’d have much chance of stopping a terrified six-and-a-half-foot man in the prime of physical fitness.
‘Try and stop me.’
‘Sir, stop.’ A woman now—a nurse. ‘This corridor is off limits to visitors.’
‘I’m not a damned visitor. My...’ Christós, what could he call her? Not his wife. Not his fiancée. She was nothing to him now, just as she’d wanted. His chest rolled. ‘My daughter is being born in here.’ He hiked his thumb towards the door.
Thanos appeared behind the frail security guard.
‘And if you wait in the reception, we’ll let you know as soon as your baby arrives.’
He swore angrily. ‘No. I want to be in there. Hannah needs me.’
For a moment, the nurse’s face flashed with sympathy, but then she was all business again. ‘Miss May was very clear on this point. There was no one she wanted called, no one she wanted notified. She told me she is alone.’
Leonidas couldn’t meet his brother’s eyes. Pain and raw disbelief filled him as he digested this, feeling the rejection of that statement, the line she’d drawn in the sand excluding him from this moment—knowing he deserved no better.
‘Tell her I’m here. Please.’ The words were hoarse, his stomach rolling, his expression full of desperation.
The nurse relented. ‘I will. Please go and wait in reception for now.’
‘But I—’
‘This is not your call,’ the nurse insisted with a quiet firmness in her voice. ‘If she wants to do this on her own, you have to accept it.’
Leonidas stared at the nurse, then at the doors, then back at the nurse. Hannah’s scream tore through the air and Leonidas felt an agonising need to go to her, to hold her, to do something...anything to help her.
‘Please.’
‘It’s not my call.’ She lifted a hand to his chest. ‘I’ll tell her you’re here. Go and wait for me out there.’
Every bone in his body railed against this; every fibre of his being demanded he stay, that he fight her, that he fight to be with Hannah. But she didn’t want him. She was doing exactly what she’d said she would—making her own life.
Despair swallowed him up. He stalked out of the corridor and into the reception room, which was full of happy, waiting family members. Leonidas was the only one who looked as if he could murder someone with his bare hands.
Thanos sat on one of the chairs, his calmness infuriating to Leonidas.
Leonidas was not calm.
Every time he heard her cry out his body was a tangle of pain, of outrage and impotence. How could he let her go through this—without him?
What could he do to help?
Nothing.
But that didn’t change the fact that he was living a moment of sheer terror, that he’d spent the last three months in a state of agony and now it had come to this. Her pain filled him and worry—irrational, desperate anger at his own stupidity—drove through him like a blade.
He’d wasted time. He’d gambled. And now he could lose everything.
When a team of two nurses ran through the waiting room and disappeared into the corridor, he followed. When they pushed into Hannah’s room, his heart dropped. A doctor followed.
Leonidas couldn’t bear it.
He pushed into the room, and almost wished he hadn’t when he saw the pain on Hannah’s face, the look of sheer terror.
‘Sir, I told you, you can’t be here.’ The nurse who was at Hannah’s legs shot him a fierce look but Leonidas ignored her.
He strode to Hannah’s side and took her hand in his, his eyes burning into Hannah’s.
‘I belong here.’
She looked up at him, her expression showing him only pain, only hurt, and he swallowed, fear tearing through him. ‘I belong here.’
She didn’t say anything, so he stayed; he kept her hand in his and she squeezed it so hard he wondered if circulation might completely stop, half hoping it would so he could feel something like the pain she was enduring.
He stroked her hair at times, and she said nothing to him—nothing to anyone—there were only the indiscernible, guttural sounds of her cries.
She dug her nails into his flesh and gave one last, agonising cry, the nurse lifting a pink and red baby with a shock of dark hair into the air, wiping her quickly with a towel and hitting her on the back until a robust cry emerged into the room.
Tears filled Leonidas’s eyes, emotions swirling through him. He looked down at Hannah and she was sobbing, but a smile was on her lips as she held her hands out for their daughter, pulling her to her chest. Leonidas had never seen anything more beautiful, more perfect.
They were his family—they were his.
* * *
‘You didn’t have to come.’ Hannah had recovered enough from the delivery to be trying to make sense of what Leonidas was doing at the hospital—and how he’d got there so quickly. Seeing Leonidas again was going to take a lot more recovery time. It had been three months. Twelve weeks. So many nights wondering if she’d done completely the wrong thing, wanting to crumble and beg him to take her back, needing him on every level, loving him enough to take whatever crumbs he would give her.
And in this moment, when her hormones were rioting and she was looking at their beautiful daughter, it took all her wherewithal to remember why she’d left him.
To remember that he didn’t love her, didn’t want her, that his heart belonged to someone else and always would.
He’d mercifully left the room again after the delivery under threat of the police being called, so Hannah could be cleaned up in privacy and transferred to a different room—one that was smaller and less medical in its design.
She was exhausted, but her heart was bursting—their daughter was asleep in a tiny crib across the room.
‘Did you think I wouldn’t?’
She shook her head.
‘Did you really want to keep me from this?’
She swallowed, looking at him and seeing him almost for the first time. He was so handsome but there was a torment in his face that robbed her of breath.
‘I was going to let you know once she was born.’
That her statement had hurt him was obvious, but when he spoke it was quietly, gently, and that somehow hurt even more.
‘No doubt.’
He paced across the room and Hannah’s eyes followed him hungrily before she realised what she was doing and looked away. A nurse had brought a tea in a few moments earlier, before Leonidas had returned. Hannah reached for it now, cupping the mug in her hands gratefully.
‘You were in so much pain,’ he said slowly, turning to face her, his eyes roaming over her in the same hungry way she’d been looking at him a moment earlier. ‘I thought you were dying.’
‘So did I, believe me,’ she quipped, but without humour. She sipped her tea then held it in her lap.
Leonidas moved to the crib, staring down at their daughter, and Hannah had to look away—so powerful was the image of the father of her daughter, the man she loved, the pride on his face, the love she saw there...it tore her apart.
Tears filled her eyes and she blinked, sipping her tea again, jerking her head away so she was looking at a shining white wall.
‘Three months.’ He said the words as though they were being dragged from deep within him. ‘You’ve been gone for three months.’
The tone of his voice had her pulling her face back to him, and she saw pain there, disbelief. Hurt.
‘Three months and it has felt like a decade.’ He swallowed, his Adam’s apple jerking in his throat.
Her own grief was washing over her. ‘I had to leave.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘Because you love me.’
She swept her eyes shut. ‘Yes.’ There was no sense denying it. True love didn’t disappear on a whim. It was
love. Simple, desperate, all-consuming love.
‘Theos, Hannah.’ He moved towards the bed and she stiffened, bracing for his nearness. She’d come on in leaps and bounds, was learning how to live without him, but she wasn’t ready to be touched by him. She couldn’t.
‘You don’t have to be here,’ she said urgently, arresting his progress across the room. ‘You really don’t.’
‘I want to be,’ he said simply, walking once more. He stood at her side, staring down at her, and her heart flipped in her chest, heavy with love, pain, rejection, fear, need.
‘No,’ she whispered. ‘You don’t understand. You can’t be here. It’s too hard. I don’t want you here.’
‘Hannah,’ he sighed, looking at her, perhaps innately understanding she couldn’t bear to be touched by him, not now, not after how he’d rejected her love. ‘I’ve spent the last three months telling myself I was doing the right thing. I knew you were safe, I made sure of that, and I told myself I had to give you what you wanted. I had to let you live your life away from me because I couldn’t return your love.’
Hannah made a small, strangled noise of panic.
‘And then Greg Hassan called and told me you were on your way to the hospital and—Theos, agape mou—I have never felt anything like this fear and panic.’
He pressed his hand to his chest, staring down at her. ‘I was so terrified that something had happened to you and all I could think was how I’d wasted all this time. Christós, Hannah.’ He dropped his head forward for a moment, catching his breath.
‘I’ve been so focussed on what I lost, so angry at what happened to Amy and Brax, at the fact it was my fault, because of who I am, that I didn’t stop to realise how lucky I am to have had that time with them. If I could do it all again, knowing how it would end, I would still choose this life.’
His eyes showed such strong emotions then, and her heart cracked. ‘I had a son.’ His voice was wrenched with grief. ‘A beautiful, perfect boy.’
The Greek's Billion-Dollar Baby Page 16
