One Night to Risk It All

His house came into view. He’d had it custom built when the island passed into his control. It was completely modern. Square, with hard, clean edges, windows that faced the sea. There was no gilded excess, no old-world opulence.

That would have reminded him too much of the Kouklakis compound. And he had no interest in that. It was too much in his mind as it was.

Stale, filthy opulence. And a carpet stained with blood.

“It’s certainly different,” she said.

“Is it?”

“Very...minimalist.”

“I’d had enough Persian rugs and intricate carvings to last a lifetime. I wasn’t interested in living in it for the rest of my life.”

“Oh.”

“What about you?” he asked. “What sort of architecture do you prefer?”

Rachel paused on the path, his question hitting a nerve for some reason she couldn’t really identify. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know what sort of house you would have liked to live in one day?”

“Ajax’s house,” she said, bristling. “And his penthouse in the city. All nice places. And nothing not to like about them.”

“And before that?”

“I had an apartment. In New York.” She’d liked her apartment a lot, but she’d given it up before the wedding, naturally. But it hadn’t been a place for entertaining. It had been a place just for her. Giving it up had been a lot harder than she’d anticipated, in truth, but it wasn’t worth crying over. “And when I come to Greece I stay in the family vacation house.”

“If you were going to have a home built, what would it be like?”

“I don’t know, okay? I’ve never thought about it, but what does it matter? I was going to have a beautiful home with Ajax. Now I may very well end up being homeless because I just walked away from a deal that was essential to both my father and to Ajax. Because... Because...”

Suddenly her fists tightened. “You knew,” she said, her tone getting cold. “You knew and you’re over here pretending to be all honest and ‘marry me’ and crap, but you knew.”

He didn’t blink, his blue eyes focused on her.

“Whoever marries first gets my father’s company. That’s what you want. It’s not me, or hurting Ajax by taking my virginity or whatever else. It’s that you were going to try and get me to marry you so that you could screw him out of Holt. You’re trying to take my family business!”

“Rachel...”

“You—”

“If I had wanted that, if that was the route I’d decided to take, I would have sweet-talked you back in Corfu when you saw my ID. As it is, I let you go.”

“And then you came back. Were you going to make some sort of declaration of love and try to woo me away from the wedding and to...Vegas or something?”

The thing that was so unsettling about that prospect was the fact that it might have worked. That if she hadn’t found out she was pregnant, if he’d walked in and kissed her, and told her that he hadn’t stopped thinking about her for the past month, that he loved her, she would have probably dropped everything and run away with him.