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

‘So what happened to those fine principles of yours?’ he derided. ‘You were so proud of your ethics. Where were they when you walked away from me without telling me that you had become the mother of my child?’

Maddie shifted uncomfortably. ‘I really did think I was doing the best thing—’

‘But I listened when you talked about your principles and I trusted you.’ Giannis directed a chilling look of censure at her. ‘Yet you lied to me—’

‘It was an emotional time for me. I was feeling very guilty,’ Maddie muttered unhappily. ‘But I do see now that if I was involved in the break-up of your engagement then I shouldn’t have gone away after I discovered that I was pregnant.’

Giannis stiffened, and his brilliant dark eyes screened to a very wary glitter below his dense black lashes. That particular association of ideas disturbed him. She was moving way too far and too fast for him. ‘There was no connection. You played no part in the break-up,’ he emphasized, smooth as polished steel. ‘I hope that eases your conscience.’

‘Yes.’

But Maddie was quite unaware of her conscience at that moment. His sardonic response had struck like a dagger in the heart, and she felt so wounded by his blunt rejection that she did not dare to look at him. From that hurt came a deeper self-knowledge and a horrid sense of humiliation. The instant she had learnt that Giannis and Krista had split up she had grasped the first excuse to contact him and rush back to his side. How revealing was that? How full of herself she must have sounded when she made the assumption that their affair might have led to his change of heart about marrying Krista! She wanted to cringe.

‘Don’t tell me any more lies. I expect more from you, pedhi mou,’ Giannis concluded, keenly appraising her small figure again. Even as he looked, his anger at the way she had kept him in the dark steadily receded. Though pregnant, she was gorgeous. He was beginning to adjust to the shock of her new body shape. In fact he was finding her burgeoning figure distinctly pleasing. After all he, he acknowledged, was responsible for that change.

Maddie, on the other hand, was feeling more than a little fragile. He had knocked the emotional stuffing out of her. She was just a woman he had slept with who had got in the family way. As she brushed her curls back from her brow, her tummy gave a warning lurch of nausea. She was nothing special to him. Her forehead dampened with perspiration. But he had somehow become so very special to her. Terrified of being sick in his vicinity, she struggled to block that painful passage of thought. She snatched in a discreet gulp of oxygen in an effort to combat the wave of dizziness consuming her and backed blindly down into a seat.

‘Giannis, I…’ As the giddy attack of nausea worsened, Maddie leapt up again in a sudden movement, intending to leave the room. But darkness folded in on her like a suffocating blanket and she keeled over in a dead faint.

For a split second Giannis just surveyed her in horror. But then he reacted quickly. He hit the alarm on his watch to call his security team, and crouched down beside her to put her in the recovery position.

Maddie swam back to consciousness and loosed a startled moan as a camera flash almost blinded her. ‘What…what on earth?’

Mounting the steps to doors already flung wide for their entrance, Giannis tightened his arms round her slight frame. ‘Paparazzi,’ he growled. ‘They were waiting outside the hotel and they followed us here. Blood-sucking vultures!’

‘Where are we?’

‘A private clinic. I want you checked out.’

‘But I saw a doctor this morning,’ Maddie argued.

‘He didn’t do you much good,’ Giannis told her forcefully.

‘I haven’t eaten since breakfast, which was stupid of me,’ she groaned. ‘Put me down, for goodness’ sake. I can walk perfectly well!’

Striking ebony brows accentuating his frown, Giannis lowered her with great care to the floor. But when she tried to stand upright her head started swimming again, and she had to grab at his sleeve to correct her balance.

‘All talk and no action,’ Giannis censured, scooping her off her feet again. ‘Let me do what I do best.’

Maddie was belatedly conscious that other people were around: Nemos and his men, and medical staff. Just about everybody seemed to be staring at them. ‘Like bossing people around?’ she quipped.

The forbidding tension in his lean bronzed features eased, and he laughed in appreciation. He bent his arrogant dark head and whispered with husky mockery, ‘I do a lot of things better than other people, glikia mou.’

‘Showing off?’ Regardless of their audience, she was insanely tempted to wrap her arms round him and hug him tight. She wanted to trap the moment and the memory, so that she could take it out some time in the future, when he was no longer around.

He had taught her how vulnerable she could be. In leaving London she had done what she’d believed was best in a bad situation. But there had not been a day in the intervening weeks when she had not thought of him, missed him, and longed for even just five minutes back in his energising company.

Giannis settled Maddie down on an examination couch in a plush office, and turned to address the consultant gynaecologist who had evidently been awaiting their arrival.

Having banished Giannis, Maddie answered loads of questions. While she was being examined she confided that she thought there was nothing wrong with her aside of tiredness and hunger.

‘I can hear two heartbeats,’ the consultant told her quietly. ‘I’m almost certain you’re carrying twins.’

Maddie sucked in a startled breath and then, thinking of her lost twin, Suzy, she slowly began to smile.

Giannis was pacing outside the room when she reappeared, seated in a wheelchair. ‘They won’t let me walk either. I’ll be finished as soon as I have a scan,’ she told him apologetically. ‘You know…I’m fine.’

‘No, I don’t know it. That’s for the medics to say. I’d like to be present for the scan.’

Maddie acquiesced, because she was feeling a little intimidated by the level of attention she was receiving, not to mention her swanky surroundings. From the minute the doctor urged her to watch the monitor, however, she was entranced by the astonishingly clear images in 3D, delivered by the state-of-the-art ultrasound equipment.

‘That’s a baby…’ Giannis whispered in stark amazement. He had expected to see very little that was recognizable, and certainly not a tiny face.

‘Oh, he’s so…so beautiful,’ Maddie framed chokily.

Giannis closed a hand over hers. ‘Are we having a boy?’

‘Do you want to know?’

‘Yes, I think I’d like to,’ Maddie confessed.

‘This one is a boy…’

‘You can tell even at this stage?’ Giannis was studying the monitor in awe. ‘So we are to have a boy. But what did you mean when you said “this one”?’

‘I’m having twins,’ Maddie told him, suddenly appreciating that she had yet to share that information with him, and feeling sad that she had imposed that division between them.

‘It’s a little difficult to be sure with the babies in this position, but I’m almost certain the other is a girl,’ the consultant added.

‘Theos mou…twins.’ Giannis was stunned, and his lean, shapely hand tightened on hers, his thumb and forefinger gently massaging her wrist. As spellbound as she was, his attention was held by the brilliant clarity of the images.

‘Are they healthy?’ Maddie pressed anxiously.

The reassurance she received eased her instinctive concern. She was urged to stop worrying, eat more, and get plenty of sleep.

Giannis tucked her back into the wheelchair with great care. He was in a daze. Two children—his son and daughter—his blood. He was astonished by his sense of satisfaction and his even stronger sense of anticipation. He had always believed that he did not care whether he had children or not. But the instant those tiny faces had appeared on the screen something very fundamental had changed in him. Out of his wondering pride had grown a fierce feeling of protectiveness towards Maddie and the babies she carried.