But it wasn’t. Instead, it was a handsome stranger, a coldhearted billionaire, the man who’d put her father in jail.
“I can see you’re tired,” Leonidas said gently, looking at her slumped shoulders and the way her hands cradled her belly. “Are you hungry? Perhaps I could take you to dinner?”
He sounded hesitant, as if he were expecting her to refuse. But after her early morning shift at the diner, followed by her checkup at the obstetrician’s office and then walking her energetic dog, Daisy was tired and hungry.
“Another fancy restaurant?” she said.
“Whatever kind of restaurant you want. Homey. Casual.” Leonidas smiled down at Sunny, who was by now licking his hand and flirtatiously holding up her paw. He added, “You can even bring your dog.” He straightened, giving her a slow-rising, sensual smile. “What do you say?”
It was really not fair to use her dog against her. Or that smile, which burned right through her. Daisy hated how her body reacted to Leonidas’s smile, causing electricity to course through her veins. She was no better than her pet, she thought in disgust.
But she was hungry. And more than anything, she wanted to get Leonidas out of this apartment, with all its sensual memories, before she did something she’d regret.
“Fine,” she bit out. “Dinner. Just dinner, mind. Someplace homey and casual. Where dogs are allowed.”
Leonidas’s smile became a grin. “I know just the place.”
* * *
Leonidas looked at Daisy, sitting next to him in the back seat of the Rolls-Royce. Daisy’s floppy yellow dog was in her lap, sticking her head excitedly out the window. The animal’s tongue lolled out of her mouth as they crossed over the East River, into Manhattan.
Sadly, the pet’s mistress didn’t seem nearly so pleased. Daisy’s lovely face was troubled as she stared fiercely out the window.
But it was enough. He’d convinced Daisy to come to dinner. He’d given quiet instructions to his chauffeur, Jenkins, and sent a text to his assistant. Everything was set.
Now he had Daisy, he never intended to let her go.
It was strange. Leonidas had never imagined wanting to get married, and certainly never imagined becoming a father. But now he was determined to do both and do them well. In spite of—or even perhaps because of—his own awful childhood.
For his whole life, he’d been driven to prove himself. His first memories involved desperately trying to please the man he thought was his father, who called him stupid and useless. Leonidas had tried to do better, to make his penmanship, his English conjugations, his skill with an épée all perfect. But no matter his efforts, Giannis had bullied him and sneered at him, while his mother ignored him completely—unless they were in company. Appearances were all that mattered, and as violently as his parents fought each other, they were united in wanting others to believe they had the perfect marriage, the perfect son, the perfect family.
But the truth was far from perfect. His parents had seemed to hate each other—but not as much as they hated Leonidas. From the age of five, when he’d first noticed that other children were hugged and loved and praised by their parents, Leonidas had known something was horribly wrong with him. There had to be, or why would his own parents despise him, no matter how hard he tried?
He’d never managed to impress them. When he was fourteen, they’d died, leaving him with no one but distant trustees, and boarding school in America.
At twenty-one, fresh out of Princeton, he’d seized the reins of Giannis’s failing leather goods business, near bankruptcy after seven years of being run into the ground by trustees. He decided he didn’t need a family. He didn’t need love. Success would be the thing to prove his worth to the world.
And he’d done what no one expected of an heir: he’d rebuilt the company from the ground up. He’d renamed it Liontari, and over the next fifteen years, he’d made it a global empire through will and work and luck. He’d fought his way through business acquisitions, hostile takeovers, and created, through blood and sweat, the worldwide conglomerate now headquartered in New York.
But none of those battles, none of those hard-won multimillion-dollar deals, had ever made him feel as triumphant as Daisy agreeing to dinner tonight.
This was personal.
Leonidas had never been promiscuous with love affairs, having only a few short-term relationships each year, but the women in his life had often accused him of being cold, even soulless. “You have no feelings at all!” was an accusation that had been hurled at him more than once.
And it was probably true. He tended to intellectualize everything. He didn’t feel things like everyone else seemed to. Even when he beat down business rivals, he didn’t glory in the triumph. Losing a lover made him shrug, not weep.
But he told himself he was lucky. Without feelings, he could be rational, rather than pursuing emotional wild goose chases as others did. The only emotion he really knew was anger, and he kept even that in check when he could.
Except when he’d been Leo.
It was strange, looking back. For the month he’d been Daisy’s lover, it had been exhilarating to let down his guard and not have to live up to the world’s expectations of Leonidas Niarxos, billionaire playboy. In Daisy’s eyes, he’d been an ordinary man, a nobody, really—but somehow she’d still thought him worthy.
And he’d loved it. He’d been free to be truly himself, instead of always being primed for battle, ready to attack or defend. He’d been able to show his silly side, like the time they’d nearly died laughing together while digging through vintage vinyl albums at a Brooklyn record shop, teasing each other about whose taste in music was worse. Or the time they’d brought weird flavors of ice cream home from an artisanal shop, and they’d ended up smearing each other with all the different flavors—chocolate cinnamon, whiskey banana and even one oddly tart sugar dill... He shivered, remembering how it had tasted to suckle that exotic flavor off Daisy’s bare, taut nipple.
In the back of his mind, Leonidas had always known it could not last.
But this would.