He reached for her, his eyes piercing her with their vehemence. “This is all I can offer. This is what I am, Caliope. And I can’t change.”
She stared up into his fierce gaze, knowing one thing. That the sane thing to do was to refuse his offer. The self-preserving thing was to cut him off from her life now, not later.
But she couldn’t even contemplate doing that. Whatever damage it caused in the future, she couldn’t sacrifice what she could have of him in the present to avoid it.
And she succumbed to his new terms.
But as the weeks passed, she kept bating her breath wondering if she’d been wrong to succumb. And right in believing the pregnancy would shatter their perfection.
She did sense his withdrawal in everything he said and did. But he confused her even more when he always came back hungrier than ever.
Then just as she entered her seventh month, and was more confused than ever about where they stood, her world stopped turning completely when Maksim just...disappeared.
One
Present
“And he never came back?”
Cali stared at Kassandra Stavros’s gorgeous face. It took several disconcerted moments before she reminded herself her new friend couldn’t possibly be talking about Maksim.
After all, Kassandra didn’t even know about him. No one did.
Cali had kept their...liaison a secret from her family and friends. Even when declaring her pregnancy had become unavoidable, with Maksim still in her life, she’d refused to tell anyone who the father was. Even when she’d clung to the hope that he’d remain part of her life after her baby was born, their situation had been too...irregular, and she’d had no wish to explain it to anyone. Certainly not to her traditional Greek family.
The only one she knew who wouldn’t have judged was Aristedes. Her, that was. He would have probably wanted to take Maksim apart. Literally. When he’d been in a similar situation, her brother had gone to extreme lengths to stake a claim on his lover, Selene, and their son, Alex. He’d consider any man doing anything less a criminal. His outrage would have been a thousand fold with her and his nephew on the other end of the equation. Aristedes would have probably exacted a drastic punishment on Maksim for shirking his responsibilities. Knowing Maksim, it would have developed into a war.
Not that she would have tolerated being considered Maksim’s “responsibility,” or would have let Aristedes fight her battle. Not when it hadn’t been one to start with. She’d told Maksim he’d owed her nothing. And she’d meant it. As for Aristedes and her family, she’d been independent far too long to want their blessings or need their support. She wouldn’t have let anyone have an opinion, let alone a say, in how she’d conducted her life, or the...arrangement she’d had with Maksim.
Then he’d disappeared, making the whole thing redundant. All they knew was that Leo’s father had been “nothing serious.”
Kassandra was now talking about another man in Cali’s life who’d been a living example of “nothing serious.” Someone who should also hold some record for Most Callous User.
Her father.
The only good thing he’d ever done, in her opinion, had been leaving her mother and his brood of kids before Cali had been born. Her other siblings, especially Aristedes and Andreas, had lifelong scars to account for their exposure to his negligence and exploitation. She’d at least escaped that.
She finally answered her friend, sighing, “No. He was gone one day and was never heard from again. We have no idea if he’s still alive. Though he must be long dead or he would have surfaced as soon as Aristedes made his first ten thousand dollars.”
Her friend’s mouth dropped open. “You think he would have come back asking for money? From the son he’d abandoned?”
“Can’t imagine that type of malignant nonparent, huh?”
Kassandra shrugged. “Guess I can’t. My father and uncles may be controlling Greek pains, but it’s because they’re really hopeless mother hens.”
Cali smiled, seeing how any male in the family of the incredibly beautiful Kassandra would be protective of her. “According to Selene, they believe you give them just cause for their Greek overprotectiveness to go into hyperdrive.”
A chuckle burst on Kassandra’s lips. “Selene told you about them, huh?”
Selene, Aristedes’s wife and Kassandra’s best friend, had told her the broad lines about Kassandra before introducing them to each other, confident they’d work spectacularly well together. Which they did. But they’d only started being more than business associates in the past two months, gradually becoming close personal friends. Which Cali welcomed very much. She did need a woman to talk to, one of her own age, temperament and interests, and Kassandra fulfilled all those criteria. Although Selene certainly fit the bill, too, ever since Cali had given birth to Leo, being around family, which Selene was now, had become too...uncomfortable.
So Kassandra had been heaven-sent. And though they’d been delving deeper in private waters every time they met, it was the first time they’d swerved into the familial zone.
Glad to steer the conversation away from herself, she grinned at her new confidante. “Selene only told me the basics, said she’d leave it up to you to supply the hilarious details.”
Kassandra slid lower on the couch, her incredible hair fanning out against the cushions in a glossy sun-streaked mass, her Mediterranean-green eyes twinkling in amusement. “Yeah, I flaunted their strict values, their conservative expectations and traditional hopes for me. I wasted one huge opportunity after another of acquiring a socially enviable, deep-pocketed ‘sponsor’ to procreate with, to provide them with more perfect, preferably male progenies to shove onto the path of greatness, following my brothers’ and cousins’ shiningly ruthless example, and to perpetuate the romantic, if misleading, stereotype of those almighty Greek tycoons.”
Cali chuckled, Kassandra’s dry wit tickling her almost atrophied sense of humor. “They must have had collective strokes when you left home at eighteen and worked your way through college in minimum-wage jobs and then added mortification to worry by becoming a model.”
Kassandra grinned. “They do attribute their blood-pressure and sugar-level abnormalities to my scandalous behavior. You’d think they would have settled down now that I’ve hit thirty and left my lingerie-modeling days behind to become a struggling designer.”
Kassandra was joking here since at thirty she was far more beautiful than she’d been at twenty. She’d just become so famous she preferred to model only for causes now. And she was well on her way to becoming just as famous as a designer. Cali felt privileged to be a major part of establishing her as a household name through an innovative series of online ad campaigns.
Kassandra’s generous lips twisted. “But no. They’re still recycling the same nightmares about the dangers I must be facing, fending off the perverts and predators they imagine populate my chosen profession. And they’re lamenting my single status louder by the day, and getting more frantic as they count down my fast-fading attractions and fertility. Thirty to Greeks seems to be the equivalent of fifty in other cultures.”
Cali snorted. “Next time they wail, point them my way. They’d thank you instead for not detonating their social standing completely by bearing an out-of-wedlock child.”
A wicked gleam deepened the emerald of Kassandra’s eyes. “Maybe I should. It doesn’t seem I’ll ever find a man who’ll mess with my mind enough that I’d actually be willing to put up with the calamity of the marriage institution either for real, or for the cause of perpetuating the Stavros species. Not to mention that your and Selene’s phenomenal tykes are making my biological clock clang.”
Cali’s