Sarah Morgan - Greek Bachelors - The Ultimate Seduction - The Petrakos Bride / One Night...Nine-Month Scandal / One Night to Risk it All

‘Like…as in having a serious conversation?’ Maddie prompted tightly, as she unbuttoned her jacket with trembling hands.

‘Don’t hold your breath, glikia mou.’ His lean, strong face taut, his brilliant dark eyes flashed languorous gold above his bronzed cheekbones. ‘I’m not into those.’

Maddie yanked off her jacket in a decidedly challenging fashion and pitched it at a chair, fearful that at any moment she would lose her nerve. She also hated herself for the fact that she really didn’t want to show him her pregnant body. He had found her unpregnant body deeply attractive and sensual.

‘And possibly you aren’t either,’ Giannis added thickly, hoping very much that she was going to continue with the strip.

He didn’t care how many serious conversations he had to be subjected to afterwards. Indeed, he dimly accepted that that might well be the price. She was a little conscience on legs, heavily prone to feeling bad about his natural human flaws. He just wished she could see how simple everything would be if she could only think as he did. She was back. They were together. He wanted her to come home with him. What was wrong with a celebration? There was no need to discuss the fact that she now had her own discreet surveillance team of three, who would ensure that she never got lost again. No, he didn’t make the same mistake twice.

‘G-Giannis…?’ Maddie stammered, the tip of her tongue sliding out to moisten her lower lip in the heavy silence. She had assumed that he would immediately notice that her trim waist had vanished.

Instead his smouldering gaze was locked to the sinfully ripe contours of her moist pink lips. ‘I love your mouth…’

Maddie realised that her black T-shirt and stretchy skirt were doing a better job of concealment than she had expected. Sucking in her breath, in the pathetic hope that some of her tummy would go in with it, she muttered unevenly, ‘Don’t you notice anything?’

On an erotic high of anticipation, Giannis was taking his time about inspecting her wonderfully rounded shape. The voluptuous curve of her bosom left him spellbound, and his scrutiny lingered there with the purist’s attention to detail. He was picturing her on his bed, in his office, in his apartment, on his private jet. Always there for him, always available. ‘Your breasts are amazing…’

Maddie went scarlet with rage and stress and disbelief and turned sideways. ‘What about my stomach?’

Sleek ebony brows pleating, Giannis stared. Black lashes lowering, he blinked, too taken aback to instantly grasp why she should look from that angle as if she had swallowed a cushion. ‘Enormous…’

Her eyes smarted; her face tightened and paled. Well, he had shot straight from the hip—and she had always known that he would find her rotund proportions deeply unappealing, hadn’t she?

‘Pregnant,’ Giannis almost whispered in Greek. And then he said it again for good measure in English. ‘But you can’t be pregnant because you said you were not.’

A silence full of dangerous sparks began to simmer in the tense atmosphere.

‘Isn’t that so?’ Giannis murmured lethally.

MADDIE winced at that direct hit. ‘Yes, but—’

Giannis focused on her with a fierce intensity that made her feel horribly like a condemned prisoner in the dock. ‘Is this the lie you mentioned?’

Maddie nodded reluctant confirmation.

Giannis lifted a strong hand and brought it down again in a compelling motion. A warning flare of gold was glimmering in his gaze. ‘You are not forgiven.’

‘I realise that this is a shock for you…’

Outrage was roaring through Giannis, who prided himself on his control of his temper. It was bad enough that she had disappeared, but that she should have done so when she carried his child incensed him. All those wasted months when they might have been together. ‘It is a great deal more than a shock—’

Coppery red curls streamed back from her oval face as her chin came up. ‘A disaster? That is how you labelled the possibility of me conceiving.’

‘That is unjust. You’re rewinding right back to the first day we met to quote a casual comment?’ Giannis shot back at her, fast as the speed of light.

‘What was casual about it? It wasn’t casual for me,’ Maddie protested painfully. ‘I may not have known it that day, but you were engaged. Yes, I accept that it was casual for you, and of course you didn’t want me to have your child. Why can’t you just admit that me falling pregnant is the worst situation you can imagine?’

His lean, darkly handsome face hardened. ‘Do not tell me how I think or how I feel,’ he intoned in sizzling disdain. ‘Don’t make excuses for yourself either!’

Maddie dealt him a defensive glance. ‘I’m not—’

‘You are—and it makes what you have done even more unacceptable. So I didn’t think you would conceive?’ Giannis flung up his hands and contrived to shrug his indifference to that angle of argument. His Greek heritage had never been more apparent to her. ‘But you did conceive and the instant that occurred everything changed for both of us.’

‘How?’ Maddie realised that she had very much underestimated the depth of his anger.

Stunning eyes fiercely intent, Giannis studied her. He moved away a little to get a better view. The lush mound of her once flat stomach was fast becoming a source of fascination to him. He could not recall ever looking at a pregnant woman before. He had not had the slightest interest. But this was different—she was different in that starring role. Somewhere deep within his male psyche a primitive glow of satisfaction burned with his every fresh appraisal of her altered figure. He was fertile. She was carrying his seed in her belly.

‘The child is mine,’ he pointed out. ‘From the first moment I had a right to be involved in every decision you made.’

Maddie was squirming, wishing he would stop glancing at her tummy as if he expected her to expand in girth before his very eyes, like Jack’s beanstalk. ‘That’s not how I see it.’

‘Then you had better learn to see it my way. Look at what a hash you have already made of things!’ Giannis launched in sudden fierce accusation. ‘How dare you go away without telling me you were expecting my child? What am I? Such a tyrant that you exclude me from what I should have known from the outset?’

‘I have not made a hash of things!’ Green eyes bright emerald with defiance, Maddie screwed her hands into fists. ‘I thought I was doing you and your fiancée a favour.’

‘Nonsense!’ Giannis raked back at her with lethal derision. ‘You took off without telling me because I was engaged. That was my punishment and your revenge—’

‘That’s an awful thing to accuse me of…As if I’d be so petty and selfish and downright spiteful!’

‘The first thing you can do is tell me where you have been all these weeks,’ Giannis informed her grimly.

Her brow was tight with tension and she rubbed it with her fingers. ‘I moved to Southend, but I had trouble with the landlord so I had to move on again—’

‘What sort of trouble?’

Her soft mouth compressed. ‘He kept on calling in to see me and it gave me the creeps.’

‘I would soon have dealt with him,’ Giannis growled, inflamed by that admission. ‘Why did you not phone me then?’

‘It wasn’t any big deal. But…’ Maddie worried at her lower lip and sighed unhappily, feeling ashamed that she had not managed the business of surviving more efficiently. ‘That second move left me broke, and it was hard to get work. With me in this condition, not every job was suitable either.’

Dragging his smouldering gaze from her, Giannis stood by the window, his tall well-built frame rigid, his broad shoulders straight as an axe handle. He was deeply aggrieved by her failure to approach him for support. Every word she spoke increased his displeasure. No woman had ever denied him his proper place in her life. No woman had ever behaved as though he could not be trusted.