A flurry of panic rose up again. She hadn’t told anyone yet—not even her family. She couldn’t bear to see their reactions, knowing she’d let them down. Her sister knew of her brief romance with Nikos, but she hadn’t found the courage to tell her about the baby—not now, with all of Sally’s IVF problems.
‘Serena.’
She closed her eyes as she heard his voice behind her, deep and heavily accented. She couldn’t turn yet. The wretchedness she felt would surely be in her eyes. Either that or her love for him might still shine through, and that was something she just couldn’t let him see. Not after the way he’d cut her out of his life because of a mistake in the making, made by both of them.
A mistake. She hated that word. She’d lived with it hanging over her all her life. She was one of those—a mistake that had taken her parents by surprise. Forcing them to reconcile their differences and remain married.
‘Serena,’ he said again, and touched her arm.
She couldn’t avoid the moment any longer. Her breath caught in her throat and somersaulting butterflies took flight in her stomach.
She was more nervous than she’d ever been in her life as she turned to face him, desperate to keep her voice calm. ‘I had almost given up on you.’
Was that wobbly whisper really her voice? She must stay strong. Her unbalanced emotions couldn’t get the better of her—not now. But as she moved back from his touch she questioned if she could go through with this. Was she doing the right thing? Should she even have come here?
Nikos moved closer to her, forcing her to look up at him, and when she did she could hardly suppress a gasp of surprise. His blue eyes, so uncharacteristic for a Greek man, weren’t the colour of a summer sky, as she remembered them, but icy cold. He’d changed. This was a very different man from the one she’d fallen in love with. And it wasn’t only the smart clothes he now wore instead of the tatty work jeans she’d always seen him in.
He was still tall, dark haired, with angled features, but each angle looked harsher, and his lips were set in a don’t-mess-with-me line of rigidness.
‘Sorry I had business to attend to.’
‘You look...’ She paused as she struggled to find the right word, completely taken aback by his unyielding aura. His deceit, and the enormity of what she was about to announce made small talk almost impossible. The next few minutes would affect the rest of her life and she almost faltered, but bravely pushed on. ‘You look very smart—very much the businessman.’
His brows lifted in surprise and she thought she saw a hint of anger in the blue depths of his eyes. There was hardly a trace of the man she’d laughed and loved with for the duration of her holiday three months ago—the man she had given much more than just her heart to. This was the real Nikos.
‘I may have been brought up a simple fisherman, but that doesn’t mean I have to stay that way.’
The sharpness of his words made her blink, and again she took a step backwards, the sand shifting beneath her feet. She glanced around the now deserted beach in a desperate attempt to avoid that stern glare.
He wasn’t making it easy for her. It was obvious from his irritation that he knew why she was here—why she’d sought him out after he’d so cruelly ended their two weeks of romance. He was toying with her, forcing her to tell him.
‘Do you know why I’m here?’
She hated the way her words trembled, and resisted the urge to hug her arms about herself in an attempt to protect herself from his anger. Whatever else she did, she had to remain strong.
He didn’t take his gaze from her face. She stood firm, refusing to be intimidated as his cold words rose above the rush of the waves.
‘You should have done this about two months ago.’
Each matter-of-fact word lacerated her heart, almost annihilating the love for him she’d carried in her heart since she’d left the island. Each carefully spoken word proved she had been nothing more than a convenient amusement.
Whatever her dreams of Nikos had been, to him she’d only been a passing fancy—a brief encounter that didn’t require commitment, just soft words and passionate kisses. One he thought he could brush aside when it suited him. But things had changed and now he had to acknowledge the situation.
Enraged by his attitude, and all she’d learnt, she faced up to him, the fire of determination scorching through her. ‘For the past two and a half months I have been somewhat preoccupied with nausea.’
Each sharp word flew at him like a dagger. The injustice of his accusation was stinging, giving her the strength to stand her ground. After desperately keeping her pregnancy from her family, the strain was too much. He was pushing her almost to breaking point.
‘You could have called. I did, after all, ask to be told.’
His blue eyes had become so dark and forbidding they were like the hidden depths of the ocean. Unknown and uninviting.
‘Ask?’ The word rushed from her, wrapped tightly in disbelief. ‘You didn’t ask anything. You demanded.’
His eyes hardened, glinting like icicles as the full moon shone on them and fixed her to the spot. ‘I was doing the right thing. I asked that you tell me if you became pregnant. I did not demand anything of you. It would only have taken one call, Serena. Why wait so long? Why now?’
‘I needed time to think—to decide what I was going to do.’ She’d thought herself into circles. Total panic had made any kind of sensible thought impossible, but even then the answer had been the same.
Nikos had no intention of being a father. She would have to bring up her child alone. Such thoughts had driven her mad with fear and panic, as had the conviction that her mother would be devastated. Her daughter falling pregnant after little more than a one-night stand would be too much of a nightmare for her to deal with. And she wasn’t a naive teenager, which would only make her mother’s reaction worse. She always worried about what other people thought of her—that was why she’d hidden the sham of her marriage behind a facade of happiness.
At twenty-three Serena should have known better. But, having purposely kept any advances at arm’s length, she hadn’t.
The experience of making love with a man was something she’d planned to share with someone she loved. So when Nikos had sauntered into her life, sweeping her off her feet, she’d known almost from the moment they’d met where it would end. She’d given Nikos, the man she’d fallen instantly in love with, her most precious gift.
In doing so she’d let everyone down. But worse to bear was the pain she would cause her sister.
‘To decide what you were going to do?’
She saw his brows quirk together savagely as his gruff voice startled her out of her thoughts.
‘Yes—do.’ He was beginning to exasperate her. He was making her do all the work in this conversation, forcing every word from her when he didn’t even have the decency to admit his deceit. Was it a form of punishment?
‘And have you thought?’
The powerful aura radiating from him was something she hadn’t noticed before, even though they’d spent almost every evening of her time on the island together. Not only did he look different, he acted differently. This Nikos was totally in command, completely intimidating—and, worse than anything else, he was without care or kindness.
She met it head-on with a cold indifference