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

Nikos couldn’t breathe. He pulled at his tie, opened a couple of buttons. But that tight fist was around his chest, squeezing tighter and tighter.

He rested his hands heavily on the desk, breathed as deeply as he could, exactly as his friend had told him—an ex-French Foreign Legionnaire who had looked at him one day and said, ‘How long have you been having panic attacks?’

That friend had known because he’d recognised the signs.

To Nikos’s surprise, the symptoms started to fade—far more quickly than they usually did. He straightened up and went over to the window that looked out over London.

The shock and horror of seeing that cake, lit with candles, and then Maggie and Marianne singing... It was quite literally his worst nightmare. But for a tiny, treacherous moment he’d been transported back in time to before the day had become tainted for ever.

He never mentioned his birthday. He never acknowledged it. Why the hell had Maks told her?

Because his brother didn’t know.

There was a soft knock on his study door. He tensed.

The door opened. ‘Nikos? Are you okay?’

Nikos felt conflicting things. He wanted to snarl at Maggie to leave him alone and yet he wanted her to come in, so that he could pull her close and lose himself in her scent and silky body.

He bit out, ‘I’m fine,’ and went over to his drinks cabinet to pour himself a measure of whisky.

He was aware of her coming in. Wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Hair down. She could wear a sack and he’d want her. The desire wasn’t burning out. It was burning up.

‘Nikos...?’

Even her voice was enough to distract him, make him clench down low to try and control his body’s response.

He said curtly, ‘I’m sorry. You weren’t to know.’

‘Know what?’

He turned around. ‘That I despise my birthday and any mention of it.’

She sat back against his desk as if winded. ‘Why?’

Why, indeed?

Nikos walked over to the window, his back towards Maggie. His own face was reflected to him. Distorted.

He said, ‘I never even knew it was my birthday until I

was about five and my father turned up in Athens to take me out to a restaurant. There was more cake and sweets than I’d ever seen in my life—my grandparents didn’t allow sweet things. My father encouraged me to eat my fill. I thought he had come to take me home with him. I was so happy.

‘But I’d eaten too much cake, and I started to be sick. My father was naturally disgusted and sent me home with my nanny. I was sick for a week and I thought that was why he hadn’t taken me home with him... Then, every year on my birthday he would show up and take me to a restaurant and order cake—even though I’d developed an aversion to it after my first experience.

‘I came to dread the annual event, even as I lived in hope that he would take me away with him. But he never did. He would just put me back in the car and send me back to my grandparents’ villa, to be sick for a week. That cake came to symbolise his disregard...the perpetual disappointment.

‘And then one year he took me out and told me that he was taking me away. I thought he was finally taking me home with him. I knew he had a new wife and a son and a daughter—Maks and Sasha—and I was ecstatic at the thought of siblings. I was so lonely at my grandparents’ house... But he didn’t take me to tmeet hem. He took me to boarding school. One of the most remote schools in England.

‘I never saw my grandparents again. They couldn’t have cared less. And my father didn’t visit me on my birthday any more. I discovered that my birthday is also the date of my mother’s death. She killed herself on my second birthday.’

He turned around then, to face Maggie. Her face was pale, blue eyes huge.

‘So that’s why I have an aversion to birthdays, and anything sweet.’

Maggie stood up. ‘Nikos, your father was some kind of sadist—and as for your grandparents...they didn’t deserve the title. They rejected their own daughter and then you.’ She came closer. ‘I’m sorry. If I’d known—’

‘How could you?’ His voice was harsh. He modulated it. ‘You couldn’t have known. No one knows. Not even my brothers.’