Natalie Anderson - Claiming His Hidden Heir

‘Yes, well, you wouldn’t have got that had you stayed.’ He put his hands behind his head and watched her pulling out a couple of casual shirts and adding them to the case.

‘Will you be swimming when you’re there?’ she asked.

‘What do you think, Cece?’ he said.

It really had been a stupid question, given where he was headed, but it had been more to change the subject than to find out the answer.

‘I think you should call me by my proper name,’ she added, ignoring his question. Of course he would be swimming.

‘It’s not a holiday camp.’ He grinned from the bed. ‘The villas all have their own private pools,’ Luka said as she headed into his en suite bathroom, then he let out a fond laugh of recall. ‘Though there used to be just one main one. I used to work it.’

‘Work it?’ Cecelia laughed and called out from the en suite where she was collecting his cologne and things. ‘Were you a cabana boy?’

‘Yes.’

‘Really?’ She came to the door smiling, her hands full of toiletries. ‘I was actually joking.’

‘It’s true, though. I used to head down there after school or during the holidays. It wasn’t as luxurious then as it is now. There was a different owner then—Geo.’

‘What was he like?’

‘Lazy and a gambler,’ Luka said, and he looked at her standing in the doorway and thought of all she had told him last night.

And all she had not.

There was a lot he hadn’t told her either. He thought of her little jab yesterday about not everything being about money. She thought he’d had it all handed to him on a plate.

Everyone did.

He would have two weeks solid of it now; his father swanning around as if he had rebuilt the stunning complex from scratch, and—one thing that really annoyed Luka—complaining about the food when he feasted at the restaurant. Theo would sit there loudly stating that he made it better himself, when in truth Theo Kargas could not make his own coffee, let alone run a high-end kitchen.

Luka rather guessed that the uptight Cecelia might not be a forgiving audience for the story of his beginnings, and not the first person he would choose to share it with.

Luka wasn’t used to sharing anything.

In business and in private he chose to take rather than to give.

Yet she had told him so much last night and the guilt of his past gnawed at his gut like a cancer—not that he would ever admit it.

‘I would pick up the towels and get drinks and things. Then, when I finished school I got a job in Reception.’

Cecelia zipped up his toiletry bag and put it in his case and was just about to ask him about footwear when he said something that made her frown.

‘Of course, I still worked the pool but it was in my own time and it wasn’t towels that I was picking up.’

She looked up and met his eyes. ‘Meaning?’

‘Because I worked in Reception, I knew who the richest women were because they had private access to the beach and the ocean view.’

‘I’m not with you...’

‘I think you are, Cece.’

She added a belt to his case and did not look at him but he could see two pink spots on her cheek.

In fact, she was embarrassed, wondering if it was because of the fact that sex was constantly on her mind around Luka that she was misinterpreting things.

‘I made a lot of money, and I saved all of it. I made enough that when Geo lost a small fortune and was desperate for cash, I put in an offer for the restaurant and it was accepted.’

‘You bought the restaurant?’

‘Yes,’ Luka said. ‘I bought it and gave my father a share, so he might finally work in his own restaurant, as he had always said he wanted to do. Growing up, we had no money and he said there were no jobs but there were jobs. Pot - washing jobs but, still, it was work. He got really angry...’ Luka didn’t add that he’d got the worst beating of his life that night. ‘My mother said he was a chef and that washing pots was beneath him. So, when I had the money, I bought him a share in a restaurant, one with the Kargas name on the door.’

‘But how on earth did a pool boy get the money to buy a restaurant?’

‘It wasn’t the establishment it is now,’ Luka pointed out.

‘But even so! Are you saying you were a gigolo?’

‘If you choose to call it that then, yes, I was,’ Luka said, expecting her to snap his case closed and walk away.

Yet she didn’t.

‘But how?’ Cecelia asked. ‘I mean, how does it work?’

Luka shrugged. ‘A smile, a nod. Often they would buy me a drink.’

‘I thought it would be the other way around.’

‘No.’

‘And did you name a price?’

‘Of course not,’ Luka said. ‘That would be in poor taste.’

‘But how?’ she asked, intensely curious. ‘I mean, I just can’t imagine...’

‘What?’ he said. ‘You can’t imagine naming your wants?’

‘No!’ Cecelia admitted. ‘I can’t.’

‘Perhaps you should try it before you knock it!’

‘No, thank you,’ she said primly. ‘And I can’t imagine giving the cabana boy a wink and a nod.’

Luka smiled. ‘The first time it happened was a surprise. I got chatting to one of the guests. She was a widow. I didn’t really know her but she asked me to join her for dinner. I said no, Geo would not like me dining with the guests. She said we would dine in her suite then. And so I went up and we ate and then we...’ He smiled. ‘I’m sure you can guess the rest.’

‘But I can’t,’ Cecelia said, for she wanted to know more, and in her curiosity she found herself sitting down on the bed. ‘How old was she?’

‘A good bit older than I was then. In her thirties, I think,’ Luka said. ‘She was my first.’ He looked at her. ‘Who was yours?’

‘I don’t have to answer that.’

‘If you want to know more you do.’

‘Gordon.’

He wrinkled his nose and Luka was surprised as something that felt like it should be called jealousy surged in his chest.

Which was ridiculous when he was telling her about his own depraved past.

‘Well, my first was actually stunning—a divorcée. She was there with friends but had her own villa. I was there every night until morning and I thought I had found the keys to heaven. The morning she left she came into Reception and when Geo wasn’t looking she gave me an envelope. I thought it was a letter. When I opened it there was a whole load of cash. Until that point I had thought it was a romance.’

‘Were you hurt when she paid you?’

‘Hell no,’ he said. ‘To tell the truth I was already starting to get restless.’

Cecelia suppressed an eye-roll and refrained from saying that perhaps it was an indicator of things to come, as Luka spoke on.

‘I was trying to work out how to break it off but had decided to do so after her holiday. I was the naïve one back then.’

Cecelia gave a wry smile at that. ‘I doubt you were ever naïve. And after she’d gone there was another?’

‘Of course, although it wasn’t always cash. Sometimes they would take me shopping for a watch or such like. Once a car...’

‘A car?’

She started to laugh. An embarrassed laugh, but she was also very curious. ‘Luka!’

‘What?’ He shrugged. ‘I was always careful and it wasn’t all sex.’

‘What else?’

‘Romance. Dinner. Shopping. But mainly talking.’

‘You mean, saying what they wanted to hear?’

‘Yep.’

‘Did you care for them?’

‘Some I did,’ Luka said. ‘Mostly it was work.’ He met her eyes. ‘They didn’t all care for me, Cece. They paid for the full Luka Kargas treatment.’

For a few years the pool had been his playground and the pickings had always been rich.