‘I have no experience with babies. It’ll take me some time to adjust.’
Maggie couldn’t say anything to that. He was right. She’d had a year to adjust to being a mother. She’d had the experience of carrying Daniel inside her. Giving birth to him. Bonding with him instantly. Even though motherhood still terrified her, she’d found it an easier adjustment than she’d expected.
But what Nikos was suggesting was a quantum leap into a dimension she’d never considered.
‘If I did agree to marry you how would it work, exactly?’ she asked.
‘I think five years would be enough time to give a lasting impression of stability and create a secure base for our son. Then we can come to an arrangement about custody.’
Five years.
Maggie felt breathless. ‘And where would we go...where would we live? I don’t even know where you’re based.’
‘I’m mainly based in Paris, but I have apartments in New York, London and Athens. My apartment in Paris overlooks the Eiffel Tower.’
The perfect location for an international playboy.
Maggie felt a bubble of hysteria threatening to rise. Worse, she could still feel the imprint of Nikos’s mouth on hers. Hot and demanding. He might have implied that he hadn’t slept with anyone else since he’d slept with her, but she’d be naive in the extreme to believe that.
‘Can I think about this?’ she asked.
Maggie could see the struggle on Nikos’s face. Evidently he wasn’t used to not being given answers in the affirmative straight away. Well, tough.
‘You can—but we don’t have much time before the press sniff around and find out what’s going on. What I’d like is for you and Daniel to leave with me when I return to Paris tomorrow afternoon.’
Maggie felt winded. ‘Daniel doesn’t even have a passport.’
Nikos waved a hand. ‘I can arrange all the travel documents. We’ll be flying privately, which makes things easier. Things move fast in my world. The sooner we can contain and manage this situation, the better.’
So she and Daniel were a situation?
Any vaguely romantic notions Maggie had entertained about meeting a nice, kind, dependable man were truly incinerated by now.
Feeling a little shell-shocked, she said, ‘I need to get back to Daniel. And I need to think about all of this...’
To her relief, Nikos went to the suite door and opened it. She felt so raw after that kiss and the ensuing conversation that she knew if he touched her again she would have had no defences in place at all.
He said to her, on the threshold, ‘You know what’s best for our son.’
She looked at Nikos. She did—that was the problem. And the other problem was that she didn’t trust herself around Nikos, and agreeing to his plan would put them in close proximity, and close proximity spelled danger, because everything was turned on its head now and she was facing a scenario she had no idea how to navigate.
Marriage.
As if reading the turmoil in her head, Nikos said, ‘I have yours and Daniel’s best interests at heart. You’ll be a very wealthy woman for the rest of your life, and life with me won’t be boring—I can guarantee you that.’
Oh, she was sure it wouldn’t be boring. Every second with this man was a rollercoaster of emotions and sensations.
‘Maybe I want boring,’ she said.
That cynical look came into Nikos’s eyes. ‘Then I’d have to say it’s too late. You made a choice last year and you didn’t choose boring then, did you?’
No, she hadn’t chosen boring last year. She’d jumped into the fire and got burned in the process.
In the end Maggie knew she didn’t really have a choice. She’d expected Nikos to want to have nothing to do with them—in fact that would almost have been easier, in some perverse way.
Because he affects you.
And not just that, Maggie thought, feeling guilty, but because it was what she knew.