The Maid's Best Kept Secret (The Marchetti Dynasty 1)

Which was about as much as she’d expected. He hadn’t said anything about taking responsibility—which was also what she’d expected. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been brutally honest.

She just couldn’t help feeling sorry for Daniel, who was destined to suffer the same fate she had. No father on the scene.

The fact that he’d never got the note she’d left him had taken some of the fuel out of the anger she’d nurtured over the past few months, and without the anger there was just a sense of disappointment. Which was as dangerous as it was unwelcome.

Once he had confirmation that Daniel was his, and inevitably left them to get on with their lives as he would his, she would pick up the piec

es and tell herself that it was enough that he knew.

In many ways she could handle this—she knew how to deal with an absent and uninterested father. She wouldn’t know how to handle Nikos if he actually wanted to be involved. The man came within ten feet of her and she couldn’t think straight, so this really was for the best.

Nikos threw back another measure of whiskey, poured from his decanter into a tumbler in his living room at Kildare House. The fact that he was even using a tumbler and not drinking straight from the decanter didn’t say much about his level of control, which felt very frayed.

Twenty-four hours ago he’d been blissfully ignorant. Blissfully ignorant of the fact that the woman who had been haunting his X-rated dreams for a year had become a mother in the interim. The mother of his child. Potentially.

It was disconcerting to think of his father’s very dominant dark Italian genes appearing in this baby. The only hint Nikos held of his mother was in his hazel-green eyes. Those strong Italian genes had wiped his Greek mother out in more ways than one.

His father had been dark physically and morally, thinking nothing of stripping Nikos’s mother of her fortune to further his own ambitions.

When she’d realised that Domenico Marchetti—handsome, charming, ruthless—had only married her to get his hands on the vast Constantinos inheritance she’d killed herself. Nikos had been two, and from that day to this he’d depended solely on himself.

Hence the reason why he’d always vowed not to have children. No way did he want to be responsible for the welfare of an innocent child.

And yet already Nikos could feel a resistance in him to the idea that Daniel might not be his son. Which was as shocking as it was unnerving. This was not a scenario he’d ever expected to face. He was the least likely among the three half-brothers to settle down...have a family. And yet if Maggie was to be believed he was well on the way to that situation.

If Maggie was to be believed.

Nikos had seen too much and experienced too much of human nature to trust for a second in a woman he’d spent only one night with, no matter what kind of persona she’d projected. Sweet. Innocent.

He felt a prickling sense of exposure. Had he been played? Spectacularly? A year ago and now? By a woman looking to feather her nest?

Nikos drew out his phone from his pocket and made a couple of calls.

Within a few minutes his phone pinged and he looked at the link that had been sent to him by his security company. He saw grainy CCTV images of Maggie, taken in early February. She could be seen entering his office building, wearing jeans and a coat, her pregnant belly evident. Her hair fell down over her shoulders in wild waves.

Nikos’s gut clenched on seeing this evidence of her visit, of her attempt to tell him about her pregnancy. And he felt a pang of regret that he hadn’t witnessed her body growing and ripening with his child. Something he had never in a million years expected to experience.

He put away his phone and poured himself another whiskey. But this time it left an acrid taste in his mouth. The truth was, all the whiskey in the world couldn’t prepare him for what was coming.

His son would be a Marchetti, with all the baggage that entailed. And, as much as Nikos didn’t welcome the thought of a child—had never planned to have a child—he knew one thing: no child of his would ever suffer the abandonment he’d suffered. Or the persistent feeling of standing on the periphery of his own family.

He and his half-brothers had always been kept apart from each other. His older half-brother, Sharif, had grown up mainly in his Arabian mother’s country—but as eldest son he’d been groomed by their father to take over from a young age. Nikos’s younger brother, Maks, had grown up in Rome, with his Russian mother and younger sister, and as Rome was their paternal ancestral home Nikos had always felt envious of him for having that link to their shared past.

Maks’s younger sister had since been proved not to be their father’s daughter—not that Nikos had ever had a chance to get to know her anyway...

But that was enough about his brothers and a sister who was not even his sister. If this baby was his it would have a claim on the Marchetti legacy through Nikos. And for the first time in his life he felt a sense of destiny and a tangible sense of family that he’d never really had before.

The next day Maggie drove up the drive to Kildare House. She hadn’t expected to be back here again and her heart lurched when it was revealed at the top of the drive. She’d always liked this house over any of the other houses her mother had worked in, where they’d inevitably lived either in a gate lodge or in cramped staff quarters.

The first time Maggie had seen it she’d loved it. It was the kind of house she’d always dreamed of living in one day, and living there so long without its owner in residence she’d developed a false sense of ownership.

But then Nikos had arrived. Asserting his ownership of the house. And her.

A shiver of memory went through her when she thought of what had happened.

For a while, in the aftermath of that night a year ago, Maggie had blamed grief for the reason why she’d acted so uncharacteristically—jumping into bed with Nikos Marchetti after little more than a brief conversation and some whiskey.

But if she was honest with herself she knew it hadn’t been grief at all. Or the alcohol. It had been the man and the seismic effect he’d had on her the moment she’d opened the front door to him for the first time.