Pregnant by the Greek Tycoon (8 page)

CHAPTER NINE

THE only sound to disturb the silence that followed Angolos’s driven declaration was the cracking noise as he clenched his long fingers and the audible hiss of his laboured breathing.

‘Not have children…?’ Georgie shot a sideways look at his taut profile. ‘You’re not making any sense.’

‘I was told that I couldn’t have children.’

She just stared at him, hearing, but not able to digest what he had said.

‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’

She pressed her fingers to her temples and shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Evidently I was wrong.’

‘But it’s silly—you couldn’t…’ Angolos was so rampantly male he couldn’t be… She shook her head positively and without thinking her eyes dropped down his body. ‘You’re—’

‘I am functional,’ he cut in. ‘You’re confusing sterility with impotence.’

Flushing to the roots of her hair at his sardonic intervention, she jerked her eyes back to his face.

‘I just didn’t think I was capable of fathering a child.’

‘But we’d only been together a few weeks. You couldn’t know that unless—’
Unless he had already tried to have a baby.
With someone else. With Sonia. The colour suddenly leached dramatically from her lightly tanned skin. ‘Oh,’ she said swallowing. ‘I see.’

So now she had the answer to the question that had puzzled many people at the time. Namely, why should a couple so supremely well suited as Sonia and Angolos get divorced? This new revelation provided the answer, and Georgie could see how it could have happened. They had desperately wanted a family, and Sonia hadn’t got pregnant.

It wouldn’t be the first time the strain of that sort of situation had split up a marriage.

She could see it all: Sonia had thrown herself into a mad social whirl, and Angolos had buried himself in his work. They wouldn’t have talked, of course…as she knew to her cost Angolos didn’t talk.

You had only to witness Sonia and Angolos together to see that they still had feelings for one another. And Georgie had witnessed them together. She hadn’t had much choice when the woman had been their house guest barely weeks after they had married.

‘So when I said I was pregnant…some men might have thought it was a miracle, but you thought that I…’

Some men hadn’t had a letter written by their wife’s lover in their possession. Even after all these years the humiliation of that discovery was still with him. ‘I suppose some men might, but that is all in the past, now I know…’

‘And now you know you can have children.’

Right result, wrong mother.

Was that what he had thought when he realised…? Had he wondered why this couldn’t have happened while he was with Sonia?

Georgie pressed the heel of one hand to the centre of her chest where misery had lodged like a solid object behind her breastbone. Would the pain ever go away…?

‘Yes, now I know I have a child. I have Nicky, and I want to be his father.’

A furrow appeared in her smooth brow. ‘No.’ She wouldn’t deprive Nicky of his father, but how could she survive with Angolos as part of her life? If she had ever kidded herself she weren’t as madly in love with him as ever, she recognised now that this convenient self-delusion was no longer an option.

He slid her a burning look of impatience. ‘What do you mean, no?’

‘I mean…I don’t know what I mean.’ She shook her head. ‘No, this can’t be right. We talked about having a family…we planned…’ She stopped and realised that they hadn’t talked;
she
had talked. Her stomach lurched sickly as the implications of his confession hit her. ‘You knew about this when we got married?’

‘I did.’

‘And you didn’t tell me—you let me think…’

Angolos watched the colour drain from her face; the sprinkling of freckles across her nose stood out against the marble pallor. ‘You
can’t
love them,’ she had always said when he had told her he loved those freckles.

‘You let me talk about babies when all along…’ A shudder ran through her body as she turned her tearful, accusing eyes to his face. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? You let me carry on thinking…’

‘It was an omission, and I was wrong.’ A man with an ounce of integrity would have given her the opportunity to make an informed decision.

In his own defence he had fully planned to tell her before the wedding. He had lost count of the number of times that he had started to tell her only to pull back at the last moment.

He had rationalised it, of course, told himself that she was marrying
him
… After all, her inability to give him a child wouldn’t have altered his feelings.

Feelings were the core of the problem…

She had lit up when he’d walked into a room; she had shaken when he’d touched her. Angolos had known full well that she had been infatuated with him. Young and infatuated, but
love
…? Had he dared put it to the test?

‘I’m sorry, Angolos.’

His startled eyes flew to her face.

Georgie was pale but composed. As he watched she pushed the hair back from her face with her forearm. It was an intensely weary gesture. The urge to reach out and take her in his arms was so strong that for a moment he couldn’t drag air into his lungs.

‘What are you sorry for,
yineka mou
?’

‘Well, it must have been incredibly hard for someone like you to be told that you couldn’t father children.’

‘Someone like me…?’

She nodded and as she lifted her eyes to his she caught the strangest expression crossing his face. ‘Well, any man, then,’ she moderated, tactfully not touching on his overdeveloped male pride. ‘When they told you…’ Her voice faded as she imagined him sitting in a clinical white office having the shattering news broken to him by an unsympathetic doctor. ‘You must have felt like someone had kicked you in…’ Her glance dropped and dark, fiery colour rose up her neck until her face was glowing. ‘Sorry, that wasn’t—’

‘You’re right, that’s exactly how I felt,’ Angolos cut in, taking pity on her.

‘And I don’t expect you discussed it with anyone.’

His smile faded. ‘It is not the sort of thing a man discusses.’

His stiff pronouncement was exactly what she had been talking about. ‘Point proven. You’re really into all this macho stuff in a big way. There’s no good denying it,’ she added. ‘And I know you can’t help it. I’m just sorry,’ she admitted with sigh, ‘that you didn’t feel able to confide in me, but then that was always the problem, wasn’t it?

‘You never treated me like an adult capable of making my own decisions. You always kept me out of the loop. Ours was never an equal relationship,’ she reflected, contemplating her neatly trimmed, unpolished nails with a wistful expression that unknown to her had a more dramatic impact on Angolos than the kick she had previously so accurately described.

His expression had grown increasingly shocked as he listened to her matter-of-fact analysis of their relationship. By the time she finished he had the stunned aspect of someone who had just been hit by a runaway truck.

‘I never expected you to take it this way.’

‘Well, I’m not saying I would have been happy about it. I desperately wanted to have your baby.’ She looked up and surprised a stricken expression on his lean face that cut her to the core. ‘But it wouldn’t have changed anything, not essentially,’ she added firmly.

‘You think not?’

His scepticism annoyed her. ‘Yes, I do. We could have adopted…’ Her face brightened. ‘There are a lot of babies out there who need a home,’ she told him earnestly.

‘It would seem,’ he said slowly, ‘that I underestimated you.’

‘When were you going to tell me?’

‘I honestly don’t know,’ he admitted.

Truth be told, he had been willing to ignore every precept of decency that had been instilled in him all his life in order to marry a woman he hadn’t even believed loved him, and now it seemed that woman’s feelings had been deeper and less selfish than his own.

And he had blown it big time.

‘At the moment our feelings for each other are not important,’ he began in a voice totally devoid of emotion.

She pulled herself onto her knees and brushed the sand from her skirt with slow, deliberate strokes. ‘Neither are they any mystery,’ she said dully. To her way of thinking, if he had ever felt a shred of true feeling for her, he would never have sent her away.

She experienced a sudden swell of emotion. After everything he had done she still loved him and would continue to love him to her dying breath. The injustice of it all hit her. Why should he not know what he had done to her? Why should she spare him?

‘Do you want to know how I feel about you?’

A muscle along Angolos’s taut jaw clenched. ‘We will discuss your feelings for me at a more appropriate moment, when you are less emotional.’

‘Which, roughly translated, means when you say so—no change there, then.’

The muscle clenching in his lean cheek reminded her of a ticking time bomb. Georgie supposed she
ought
to be grateful that his response had spared her from making a total fool of herself. All the same she couldn’t help but think that it would be an enormous relief to get it all out into the open.

‘Our son’s future is what we must decide.’

‘Nothing to decide.’ Externally at least she maintained the appearance of control.

Actually his comment had terrified her. If there was one thing she had learnt from her short time with the Constantine clan, it was not to underestimate the power of money! Angolos might never get custody of Nicky—access was another story—but he could tear her life to shreds while he was trying.

‘I beg to differ.’

‘You never beg,’ she cut back bitterly. ‘You had your chance to be a father, Angolos, and you blew it. And look at it this way—there’s nothing to stop you going out there and making babies with someone else.’

Her comment brought a gleam of pure fury to his eyes. ‘You think I’m going to leave it like this?’

Her slender shoulders lifted. ‘Why not?’

‘I don’t want babies, I want…Nicky.’

She drew her knees up to her chest and rested her chin on them. ‘You don’t always get what you want, Angolos.’

‘Wake up, Georgette,’ he recommended harshly. ‘This is the real world.’

‘No, your world isn’t my reality. My world doesn’t have designer dresses and glitzy first nights, or people who judge you by how much money you have and who your parents are!’ she declared hotly. ‘My reality is making ends meet, a good day at work, a parking space in the high street, scraped knees, temper tantrums and doctor’s appointments.’ She stopped to catch her breath. The incoherent inventory of her life made it sound less attractive than it actually was.

‘All I’m asking for is a chance to be part of that world.’

It would seem Angolos hadn’t picked up on the unattractive part.

Taken aback by the intensity of his unexpected request, she stared at him warily. Perhaps I should have added sleepless nights and guilt. Guilt was a major part of parenting that all the literature skimmed over.

‘This isn’t a glamorous world we are talking here.’

‘Glamour!’
He dismissed it with a contemptuous click of his long fingers. ‘If anyone was seduced by the so-called glamour of my world, it was you,’ he contended.

Her eyes widened in protest. ‘That’s a stupid thing to say.’

‘Wasn’t the fact I came from a different world than you part of the attraction?’ he challenged. ‘You put me on a pedestal!’ he accused. ‘And I exploited it.’

‘I didn’t feel exploited.’ She didn’t like the idea his comment created that she’d been some sort of victim walking blindly to her fate.

‘The moments from our time together that remain clearly in my mind are not the lavish parties or dinners.’

‘What are they, then?’ She was probably going to regret asking, but if she didn’t the question would plague her for the rest of her life.

‘That picnic we had sitting cross-legged on the bedroom floor…’

Georgie’s eyes widened. It had been the one time when she had dared the wrath of the kitchen staff and made a personal request. When asked what sort of wine she’d wanted with her fish-paste sandwiches she had said any old thing would do…white and fizzy maybe…?

The horror etched on the face of the chef had been comical.

Of course the sandwiches had been smoked salmon, the wine had been champagne, and the cutlery Georgian silver, but she hadn’t quibbled. Instead she had pronounced herself delighted, and thanked the staff warmly.

‘You remember that?’ she asked, astonished.

‘Of course I damn well remember. I also remember what followed it—more so…’ He studied her unblinkingly through eyes that contained an explicitly sexual message.

It was a message that Georgie received. The pupils of her eyes dilated dramatically until they almost swallowed up the amber. Breathing fast and shallow, she traced the outline of her dry lips with the tip of her tongue and drew a long shuddering breath. Her hand came up in a fluttery gesture and then fell away again, leaving her fingers trailing in the sand.

‘Do you…?’

‘You know I do.’ She screwed up her eyes and tried to ignore the slick heat between her thighs. ‘We had some good times,’ she admitted huskily.

‘A bit better than
good
.’

He was right. Good was safe and comfortable; what they had enjoyed had been neither. ‘Think about it, Angolos,’ she appealed to him. The glint in his eyes suggested he wasn’t in the mood for thinking. ‘Nothing has changed, not essentially. You came here to get a divorce.’

This did get his attention.

‘I came here to find out the truth,’ he rebutted.

‘And I bet you wish you hadn’t found it.’

‘Wishes do not enter into it,’ he told her, his voice low and controlled. ‘I have a son…
Dios mio
!’ he gasped, no longer the least bit controlled. His blazing eyes locked with hers. ‘My life has changed profoundly. If you imagine even for one second that I would prefer to live in ignorance you are insane. I have a son. I may be slow but I do recognise a miracle when I see one.’