The Greek Bachelors Collection. Rebecca Winters
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.
‘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,’