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

‘You’re right—this isn’t the time or place.’

His voice came out harsh and he saw how she winced. His conscience pricked but he turned around and did up his own clothes. This was not him. He was usually in control. Almost detached from proceedings. He never lost it so much that he seduced housekeepers and got them pregnant—

He cursed again.

He turned around when he had done up his shirt and tucked it in. He battled to cool his libido, but it was next to impossible while Maggie stood only a few feet away, clothed again but no less sexy for it.

The urge to throw caution to the wind and haul her back into his arms and finish what they’d started was overwhelming.

He resisted it.

‘I hadn’t intended that. I did intend just to talk.’

Eventually she said, ‘I... Okay.’

He was more sophisticated than this. What was it about this woman that short-circuited his brain and sent it straight to his pants?

He raised his gaze to her flushed face and her wild hair—tumbling around her shoulders now. Her eyes were bright blue and full of things that still made his skin prickle uncomfortably. It was those eyes and the emotion that he’d seen in them that had made him want to turn it into something else.

Passion. Not emotion. He could handle passion.

She was looking at him warily now. He reacted against her silent accusation.

‘What just happened was mutual, Maggie.’

Maggie was struggling to regain a sense of composure but it was hard. Those last few cataclysmic minutes in Nikos’s arms had flayed a layer of skin off her body. The knowledge that he still wanted her thrummed through her body like a drug, giving her an illicit high.

But that wasn’t why she was here.

‘We need to talk about what happens next,’ she said.

Nikos folded his arms across his chest. ‘Yes, we do need to talk. Now I know that Daniel is mine we can move forward.’

‘What does that mean?’

The dark gold and green lights in his eyes glinted. ‘Marriage, Maggie. It means we need to marry.’

CHAPTER SIX

OF ALL THE things Maggie had been expecting, she’d never—

She stared at Nikos, wondering if she’d heard right. ‘Did you really just say marry?’

Nikos nodded, watching her carefully.

Maggie’s legs felt suspiciously rubbery, but she locked them in order to stay standing. ‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. We barely know each other.’

Nikos’s mouth firmed. ‘And yet we’ve shared an intimacy that has resulted in a child. Some would say that constitutes knowing one another just fine. People in other cultures marry for a lot less.’

Maggie felt shaky. Panicky.

Seizing desperately onto anything to try and make him see sense, she asked, ‘Is this what you want? Really? When you’ve told me what happened to you?’

There was a long moment of silence, and then Nikos said tightly, ‘It’s because of what happened to me that I’m determined to be there for my son. My father failed my mother and me—I won’t do that to you or my son.’

Shock reverberated through Maggie as she absorbed this. She wasn’t sure what was worse: a father who didn’t want anything to do with them or a father who would take responsibility out of a sense of duty and nothing more?

‘Do we need to get married, though? Can’t we just come to some agreement?’