The Greek Billionaire's Love-Child (3 page)

‘It’s the hot weather.’ Helen looked out of the window at the blue sky. ‘The tourists will already be on the beach, hitting themselves with cricket bats and being stung by wasps.’ She bit her lip and turned back to her friend. ‘I’m sorry, El.’

‘Forget it. It’s done.’ Numb with shock, her mind in a spin, Ella stared sightlessly out of the window. ‘You go. I’ll lock up here.’

Helen hesitated, clearly torn between going and staying. ‘Ella…’

‘Just go.’

He wouldn’t come
, Ella tried to reassured herself as she listened to the soothing lap of the water against the sides of the wooden boat and tried to stay calm. He was married. He probably already had children. She’d been a convenient distraction while he’d been in London, nothing more.

Greek or not, he wasn’t going to care that she was pregnant.

It was over.

His emotions threatening to overwhelm him, Nikos glanced around the waiting room of the paediatric emergency department, aware that some sort of response was expected from him. Never before had it been this difficult to concentrate on work. His stress levels mounting with every second that passed, he dutifully scanned the neat rows of small red seats, the colourful play area and the bright murals that livened the walls. ‘You have a separate entrance for the children?’

‘Yes. From the moment they come through the main door, they’re separated from the adults. What do you think?’ Rose, the senior nurse in charge of the main emergency department, looked at him nervously. ‘We’ve had builders working non-stop for the past four months.’

Trying to show an interest, Nikos strode through the cheerful reception area and paused in the doorway of one of the cubicles. As well as state-of-the art equipment, there were neat boxes of toys, piles of children’s books and DVDs. ‘Resuscitation room?’

‘Next door on your left.’ Rose hurried along next to
him, struggling to match her stride to his. ‘Can I ask you something, Professor?’ They were in the resuscitation room now and Nikos was mentally itemising each piece of equipment in an attempt to distract himself from the issue that had dominated his brain for the past week.

‘Call me Nikos, and, yes. Ask.’

‘We’re thrilled you’re here, obviously but—why did you take this job?’ Rose gave an apologetic shrug. ‘You’re in demand all over the world. I heard you lecture two years ago. The auditorium was completely packed out—there wasn’t even breathing room.’

‘Perhaps it was raining outside,’ Nikos drawled lightly, and Rose gave a lopsided smile.

‘I think we both know that wasn’t the case. You could be working anywhere. Why us?’

‘Sick children are sick children. It doesn’t matter what the setting is.’ Nikos cast his eye over the intubation tray, refusing to reveal his real reason for being there, even though he knew it would become apparent soon enough. ‘Tell me about the staff.’ He kept his tone neutral. ‘They are paediatric trained?’

‘We have a core of staff who are paediatric trained and we also rotate staff from the main emergency department according to need. This afternoon the paediatric nurse in charge will be Ella. She’s wonderful.’

Ella.

A hard knot of tension settled in his stomach and his brain was filled with a distracting image of perfectly smooth blonde hair, a sweet, seductive smile and curves designed to fuse a man’s brain. ‘I know Ella.’ Not by a flicker of an eyelid to Nikos reveal just how well he knew her. ‘We worked together in London.’

And now she was pregnant with his child.

A fact she’d concealed from him.

Sharp claws of anger dug into him like talons and he breathed deeply, searching for control, shocked by the raw intensity of his rage. Well aware that people called him the ice doctor, he wondered what they’d say if they knew that at the moment he was close to meltdown.

What was that phrase that people threw out so carelessly?
Everyone has their limit.

Was this his?

Had he reached his limit?

With a supreme effort of will Nikos reminded himself that anger achieved nothing. Losing his temper was
not
going to help.

Emotion didn’t solve problems. What was needed was rational discussion.

She was going to have her say. He was going to have his say.

It was all going to be calm and reasonable.

They were going to be civilised.

‘You know Ella?’ Rose was looking at him, surprised. ‘That’s wonderful.’

Nikos gave a cool smile, well aware that Ella was going to find the situation a great deal short of wonderful.
She’d kept the news of her pregnancy from him.
‘I’m looking forward to renewing our acquaintance.’

‘Well, you won’t have to wait long. She’s on a late shift this afternoon. She’ll be here any minute.’

As if on cue Nikos heard her laughter from somewhere behind him and the sound released his temper. How could she laugh?

What was funny about intentionally depriving a man of his child?

Emotion thickened until he could taste it, until he was ready to put his fist through something.

Rational discussion was no longer on his wish list.

He forgot calm and reasonable.

He forgot civilised.

As she walked through the door, his anger erupted with volcanic force.

Her arms were raised, her hands occupied scooping her shiny blonde hair into a ponytail, a pose that seemed to emphasise the air of vulnerability that surrounded her. And suddenly Nikos found himself thinking about all the times he’d kissed his way down her slender, creamy throat while she’d writhed and moaned his name in a desperate plea for satisfaction. He remembered how shy she’d been the first time, how hard he’d found it to believe that a woman of twenty-four had so little experience.

Looking at her now, it was like taking a punch full in the gut.

She was wearing a scrub suit covered in pictures of jungle animals and for a moment Nikos was distracted. With her cheerful smile and sense of fun, she’d always had a gift for turning the emergency department into somewhere a child was almost pleased to visit.

‘Hello, Ella.’

She stopped instantly, the smile dying on her lips as she saw him standing there.

Her arms dropped to her sides and she turned so pale that Nikos took an involuntary step forwards, preparing to catch her if she crumpled to the floor. Her breathing was audible and she stepped back, as if his approach represented a physical threat. For a moment she just stood there, her chest rising and falling as she sucked in air and stared at him.

Guilt
, he thought grimly, as he watched her face. What she’d done was unforgivable and she knew it. But even as the anger took him by the throat once again, his hands were ready to catch her if she fell. There was no way he was going to let her land on the floor in a heap, pregnant with his child.

His lips burned with the need to speak his mind, but it wasn’t the time or the place so instead Nikos communicated the full force of his anger in a single, hotly charged glance.

Apparently unaware of the dangerous shift in the atmosphere, Rose was cheerful. ‘Ella—good timing. I had no idea that you and Professor Mariakos know each other. I’m delighted. It will make things so much easier. Now I have an experienced team running the paediatric emergency unit. It’s going to be a happy summer.’

Anticipating anything but a happy summer, Nikos kept his simmering, accusing gaze fixed on Ella’s pale, shocked face. ‘It will be like old times.’

Something flickered in her slanting green eyes and he knew that she was thinking what he was thinking—that it was going to be
nothing
like old times.

This time when they worked there would be no intimate glances, no delicious thrill of excitement as they anticipated the time when they could be alone. No soft whispers, no swift smiles and absolutely no explosive sexual chemistry.

Only anger, blame and recrimination.

She’d hidden the fact that she was pregnant, and no woman was doing that to him again.

This time he wanted the right to be a father to his child.

Pain thumped through his gut and suddenly he wanted to tower over her and demand an explanation right here, right now. He wanted to know why the hell she hadn’t contacted him herself.

The depth of his disillusionment surprised him because he’d always considered himself to be realistic about women.

Rose glanced between them. ‘I’ve scheduled the two of you to work together on every shift right through the summer. I don’t need to tell you that the hospital management are scrutinising this department very closely. I know it’s going to be a fantastic success.’

Nikos dragged his gaze from Ella’s but somehow his eyes simply shifted to a different part of her, this time her abdomen. To the untrained eye her pregnancy wasn’t visible under the loose fabric of her scrub suit and yet he knew her so intimately that he could see the changes in her. Her glorious breasts were even fuller than usual, her hips more generously curved.

Cradling his child.

What would she have to say for herself?

What excuse would she give?

Was she one of these modern feminist women who wanted a baby but not a man?

His mouth tightened into a grim line as he pondered that possibility. If that was the case then she’d picked the wrong guy for a stunt like that. He was Greek. And she was about to discover exactly what that meant.

‘Just breathe normally, sweetheart,’ Ella soothed, her hand gently stroking the little girl’s head as she tried to relax the terrified child. ‘This mask is going to help you breathe.’

The little girl squirmed and clawed at the oxygen mask and Ella felt her heart contract as she tried to calm her. The poor child was terrified and her fear was making her condition worse.

Faced with a potentially life-threatening situation, Ella
pushed her own problems to the back of her mind and concentrated on the job she was trained to do.

Moments after Rose had given her the keys to the drug cupboard, the department had suddenly been swamped with patients. A dog bite, two asthma attacks and a child who had slipped while scrambling over the cliffs and sustained a nasty laceration to his lower leg.

Denied any opportunity to dwell on the implications of Nikos’s presence, Ella had taken the most serious of the cases, a three-year-old girl with an acute asthma attack.

Thank goodness for training
, she thought numbly as she adjusted the flow of oxygen and carefully observed the child’s breathing. It was only training that was allowing her to function as if nothing was wrong. Her hands were doing the right things and her mouth was saying the right things, but inside she was shocked and shaking.

After Helen’s confession, she’d cycled the brief distance along the canal to the hospital, her mind sifting through the various scenarios and how she’d handle them.

He’d come. Deep down, she’d known he’d come. And she’d decided that the most important thing was to stay calm and not allow emotion to play a part in their discussion. She’d be dignified and distant and keep the conversation focused on facts and nothing more. She’d find out what he wanted in terms of access and then go away and think about it. Nothing personal. She’d dismiss him as easily as he’d dismissed her.

At least, that had been the theory.

But how could any woman dismiss a man like Nikos Mariakos? How did you dismiss six feet two inches of strikingly good-looking, unwaveringly confident, muscle-packed male? Muscle-packed
angry
male.

Fortunately he’d gone with Rose to complete some paperwork, leaving Ella to work with Alan, a doctor with six months’ accident and emergency experience who was spending the next month in the paediatric department as part of his training. Alan was unfailingly polite and courteous and perfectly competent with the routine stuff that came through the doors of the main emergency department. Privately, Ella wasn’t sure he had the skill set to work with sick children, but she was hoping she’d be proved wrong.

So far three-year-old Tamsin had refused to allow him to listen to her chest, and nothing he tried could persuade her to co-operate. Flustered and out of his depth, the young doctor grew red in the face as he tried to reason with the child using a falsely bright voice.

Sensing his lack of confidence in a way that children always seemed able to do, Tamsin’s panic increased and she flailed her little arms, becoming more and more upset and making it harder for Ella to calm her.

‘Sweetheart, he’s not going to hurt you.’ Deciding that his presence was counter-productive, she discreetly waved a flustered Alan away from the trolley and picked up a doll from the toy box. ‘This is Angie, isn’t she beautiful? We’re going to put a dress on her and then give her some special air to breathe, just like you. Which dress do you think? You choose.’ She grabbed two dresses from the box and held them up. ‘Pink or purple?’

Tamsin was panting for breath but she stopped clawing at the mask and pointed to a dress.

‘Pink? Good choice. I love pink, too.’ Ella pulled the pink dress over the doll’s head and Tamsin reached out a hand for the doll.

‘Say please, Tams,’ the child’s mother muttered, but
Ella didn’t care about manners. She just wanted the child to keep the oxygen mask on.

‘Are you going to help me put a mask on Angie? Oops—it’s a bit big.’

Forgetting her own mask, Tamsin tried to help the doll.

‘Good girl. Aren’t you clever? She’ll soon be feeling all better.’ As Ella praised the child she glanced at the monitor again and felt a flash of unease. Worried about what she was seeing, she glanced at the child’s mother. ‘Amanda, has she had an attack like this before?’

‘Nothing this severe.’ The woman was cradling a young baby and trying to calm Tamsin at the same time. ‘Just breathe through the mask like the nurse is telling you, Tams.’

‘Has she had a cold? Any sort of infection you’re aware of?’

‘Nothing.’ The baby started to cry and Amanda shifted the tiny bundle onto her shoulder with an apologetic look. ‘Sorry. I wouldn’t have brought the baby but I didn’t have anyone to leave her with. Shh, Poppy—not now. Good girl, hush.’