“So what was your scenario? That I was here to extort you and once you gave me a mind-blowing send-off, I’d walk away?”
“What else could I think? You can’t be considering taking Dora for real,” Naomi cried. “For God’s sake, Andreas, you know you don’t want a baby and won’t be able to give her the home and family life she needs and deserves.”
He shrugged. “Probably. That’s why I don’t intend to take Dorothea from you.”
Her heart detonated with brutal hope. “Y-you don’t?”
Leaning one knee down, he dipped the mattress, tumbling her toward him, and murmured, “I don’t.”
Before she collapsed back with relief, his hand dove beneath the sheets and cupped her breast, giving it a delicious squeeze. “I do intend to take you, though.”
* * *
The Sarantos Baby Bargain is part of the No.1 bestselling series from Mills & Boon® Desire™—Billionaires & Babies: Powerful men … wrapped around their babies’ little fingers.
The Sarantos
Baby Bargain
Olivia Gates
OLIVIA GATES has always pursued creative passions such as singing and handicrafts. She still does, but only one of her passions grew gratifying enough, consuming enough, to become an ongoing career—writing.
She is most fulfilled when she is creating worlds and conflicts for her characters, then exploring and untangling them bit by bit, sharing her protagonists’ every heart-wrenching heartache and hope, their every heart-pounding doubt and trial, until she leads them to an indisputably earned and gloriously satisfying happy ending.
When she’s not writing, she is a doctor, a wife to her own alpha male and a mother to one brilliant girl and one demanding Angora cat. Visit Olivia at www.oliviagates.com.
To all my readers. Thanks so much for all your support and enthusiasm. It’s for you that I keep writing.
Contents
One
Naomi Sinclair stared at the face filling the TV screen in her partner’s office, an avalanche of memories swamping her. Memories of a time when she’d known exactly how the Titanic had felt.
She’d crashed into her own iceberg, after all. A colossal one by the name of Andreas Sarantos. The one whose ice now reached out from the screen to freeze her marrow...and simultaneously spill lava into her bloodstream.
Despite all the cautionary tales of what befell those who approached him, she’d steamed ahead on an intercept course. When she’d collided with him, it hadn’t been for a catastrophic but brief encounter. Oh, no. She’d smashed herself against his frozen annihilation for two tumultuous years. Total wreckage had been the only possible outcome.
Now her whole being quivered at seeing Andreas again, after four long years. With the sound off, and with him looking right at her so fiercely, she could imagine him saying what he’d said that first day she’d pursued him.
You don’t want to get mixed up with me, Ms. Sinclair. Walk away. While you still can.
She could still hear his voice, dark and pulsing with sensual menace, that slight Greek accent making it more compelling. Could still feel his eyes burning her with their inimitable brand of aloof yet searing lust.
She hadn’t heeded his warning. Not before she’d had a protracted demonstration of how right he’d been. His words had not been a cautioning, but a promise. Of destruction. One he’d carried out. And she’d had no one to blame but herself.
“What do you know! He’s back in town.”
The comment, laced with surprise and not a little excitement, pulled Naomi back to reality with a thud.
Tearing her gaze from the gorgeous yet forbidding face still filling the screen, she blinked at her partner.
Malcolm Ulrich’s comment made her realize where Andreas was. In front of his Fifth Avenue headquarters. He was “back in town.” Where he hadn’t been for four years.
Though she knew he could be in the next room and make no effort to see her, her heart hammered at the realization.
Malcolm turned his gaze to her, his green eyes eager. “I’d just about given up on doing business with him, since he deals only in person, and only when he’s here.” Her partner looked at the TV again. “But here he is.”
She unwillingly followed suit, found Andreas’s eyes drilling into hers as he glowered at the camera with all the tolerance of a wolf regarding a rabbit.
Malcolm sighed. “I still can’t believe I didn’t manage to pin him down to something when he pulled our fat out of the fire back in Crete, then came here personally to discuss how he resolved our problem with Stephanides. But it’s never too late, and that guy is bigger than ever. This time I’ll do whatever it takes to nail down his elusive hide long enough for him to give our expansion plans serious consideration.”
A scoff almost escaped her. She hadn’t gotten “serious consideration” from Andreas when she’d been in his bed every night. Not even mind-blowing sex had swayed him to get involved in something he hadn’t considered “financially feasible.” He’d said their sustainable development methods posed too many logistical problems and promised too little profit for him to bother with. That had been the sum total of the business talk they’d had during their...liaison.
But she doubted telling Malcolm that would dissuade him from continuing his pursuit of Andreas. And it might make him suspect there’d been more between her and Andreas than he, and the world, knew. Only Nadine, her only sister, and Petros, his only friend, had known the truth. To the world, she and Andreas had been two professionals who’d crossed paths sporadically, he as the Greek multibillionaire venture capitalist whose magic touch every business in the world craved, and she as a partner in a real estate development company struggling to make its mark in an increasingly competitive field.
When