Maisey Yates - One Night to Risk it All

“Follow the path to the garden. You’ll find that refreshments are already being served, Mr. Kyriakis.”

Nice alias. Seeing as he’d lived his entire adult life with one, he knew a good one when he heard it.

“Thank you.”

He followed her instructions, and the neatly groomed path, to the back of the house. It was expansive, with rows of chairs set up facing an altar and the sea. Everything was white. Crisp and pure.

Again, very like the Rachel the media was so fond of. Nothing like the woman he’d experienced.

The woman he’d experienced hadn’t seemed so pure when she’d been with him. Legs wrapped around his hips, her breath hot on his ear as she’d moaned her pleasure.

Heat washed over his skin. Prickles of sensation that bloomed from his neck and down his arms. He flexed his fingers, tried to shake off the sensation. It wasn’t as though Rachel was the first woman he’d had.

There were any number of options available to a young man who found himself out on the streets and unsupervised from the age of fourteen. If nothing else, hooking up had often given him a bed to crash in, and he’d had no complaints about that.

So why on God’s depraved earth was he so fascinated by a night of sex with a virgin? He couldn’t fathom it.

Perhaps it was extra satisfying because he had taken her from Ajax. Because he’d robbed him of what he had been surely saving as a wedding night prize. Why else would he have left her untouched?

Just thinking about the man, being this close to him, made his stomach burn. If he hadn’t decided years ago that assassination was a bad plan, he would have been considering it now.

Well, he was imagining it, but he wouldn’t really do it.

He was a bastard—life had made him that way. But he wasn’t entirely cold-blooded. Unlike Ajax.

Unlike their father.

No matter his position now, Ajax had been there, just as Alex had been. A young teenager who had taken advantage of the excess on offer.

The women, like Alex’s mother, who would have done anything for their next fix. Who were slaves in every way. Victims. Living in poverty while surrounded by opulence. Kept on a leash of addiction, and in his mother’s case, a strange attachment to the master of the manor.

A twisted thing she’d called love. The kind of love that, when severed, had left her to bleed out onto the floor. A crimson stain in Alex’s memory that he could never wipe away.

Years and success wouldn’t change that. Wouldn’t bring her back. And yet Ajax stood at the top now, unaffected. With a family. A woman who had always appeared, to Alex, at least, to love him.

He looked unscathed, unspoiled. Ajax could pretend at respectability all he wanted but Alex knew the truth.

Because the truth was in him, too. But at least he never played as if he was anything other than a bastard. Ajax played as though he’d walked through it all and come out clean.

Alex knew he would never be clean.

He curled his fingers into fists and looked up at the house. There was a small group of people headed inside, led by a woman wearing black, which was clearly the uniform of the event staff.

He started in their direction, melting into the back of the group. Everyone was rapt, paying close attention to what the woman was saying about a fresco on the exterior wall that had been moved from an old church. Blah blah. He didn’t care.

Greece was old. Like that was news.

He’d spent nights in more crumbling ruins than he could count. He was a fan of mod cons. As long as they didn’t come at the price of living under the roof of a violent, sexually deviant psychopath.

Yeah, he’d preferred the ruins to that. He preferred the street to that. Starvation and cold and everything else that came with it.

He had run from that life. From all that it represented. He would not become a part of it.

He followed them into the house and as soon as they rounded the first corner, he separated from them and headed up the stairs. No one stopped him. Because he looked like he belonged. A right he’d earned, if only recently.

This was his world now. He was no longer someone who could be stepped on by the rich and powerful.

He was the rich and powerful. He went where he liked, he did what he liked.

“I have something to give the bride,” he said to a passing servant. “Where might I find her?”

“Miss Rachel is in her suite. Down the hall and just to your left,” the woman answered without blinking.

Because he looked the part. He spoke with confidence. And as a result, no one questioned whether or not he belonged.

He nodded once and continued on down where the woman had indicated.

He hadn’t been going to come. But he was glad he had.

* * *

She’d never prayed so hard for her period to come in all her life. She’d never prayed for it to come. She’d taken it for granted. The cramps, the teariness. It had started when she was fifteen and it had gone on, regularly, for all the time since. Just a little signifier that it was the middle of the month. Nothing more.

Well, not right now.

Now the absence of it was about to send her into a panic attack. She’d been walking around her bedroom in her bra and panties for the past twenty minutes, a tampon on the nightstand, right next to an unopened pregnancy test.

Neither had been used at this point. One month since her night with Alex. One month of alternating between cursing his name and lying in a dark room just staring at the ceiling, unable to cry because tears were a release she wouldn’t allow herself. A rush of emotion, too uncontrolled for the likes of her.

And then her period hadn’t come. Even after it had passed fashionably late, she’d still been praying the floodgates might open and forth would come the crimson tide, and that the pregnancy test could remain unopened. But no such luck.

Tampon or test. She was going to be opening one of them in the next few minutes.

And it was rapidly becoming clear which.

She was already six days late. This little song and dance between her and those two items had been going on since the first morning.

She finally reached down and grabbed the pregnancy test.

And suddenly the world just sort of tipped to the side and she saw herself clearly, standing there, almost ready to marry another man while she was potentially pregnant with Alex’s baby.

And she knew there was no way she could get married today.

Her hands started shaking, her throat going dry. Oh...Jax, please forgive me.

So now she was just going to have to...tell him. Right before the wedding. But there was something she had to do first.

“Okay,” she said to the little white-and-pink box. “Let’s do this.”

Her bedroom door swung open and she whirled around, clutching the box to her breasts in an instinctive attempt at modesty. Until she realized she was advertising that she was holding a pregnancy test and whipped it behind her back, her thigh crossing over the front of her other thigh in an attempt to hide that she was in very brief panties.

Then she froze, because she realized who her intruder was. For almost a full second, she was frozen, caught by those arresting blue eyes. Again.

It was almost like all that thinking about him had just...conjured him here. But at the worst possible moment.

His hair was shorter. His body wrapped in a custom-made suit and not in those thin, faded work clothes she’d first seen him in.

How strange to think it was the other Alex that had been a disguise, while this was the real him. It hardly seemed possible.

Then suddenly, she was hit by the bright, clear smack of reality. She hated Alex. Hated him. It was her wedding day. He was here. And she was afraid she was pregnant with his baby.