The Sarantos Secret Baby

She turned. She had to, to breathe. She couldn’t, as long as she saw the end of her foolish hopes in his eyes. “Then do what you always do—act only when you have everything planned to the last detail. As for us, we were an experiment. Failing it was always the probable outcome.”

A shock wave of silence and stillness emanated from him, almost knocked her over.

At length, he rasped in a voice like a saw cutting steel, “What are you talking about?”

She pretended to busy herself with pouring the herbal tea she’d prepared for them. “If it’s not working, it isn’t. Best thing to do is to move on. Good thing we found this out early.”

He moved. She barely saw him in her peripheral vision, but he filled her senses. She bit down on a keen of screaming tension as he came to stand before her. She kept her eyes averted, felt nothing but the waves of his power buffeting her.

Then he grated, “You think I meant that we are not working?”

His vehemence forced her eyes up. “What else?”

“I meant this!” He flung his hand toward the phone that was ringing again. “It rings at all hours. And I can’t turn it off because if I do, they’ll do anything to find me, and I don’t want them following me here. Theos, Selene—you thought…”

He stopped, his eyes blazing, his Adam’s apple working.

Then he suddenly clamped her shoulders in convulsive hands. “How could you think that? I’m at my wit’s end only because this is interfering with my ability to be with you and Alex. This…intrusion is what isn’t working, what I have to end.”

As soon as the blow of relief almost buckled her legs, another of realization wiped it away, made them rigid again. “But that—” she nodded at the phone that was ringing again “—can’t end. It’s your life.”

“No,” he said. “This is my biggest war yet, and I can’t fight it properly because it involves your family, because I can’t bring us into it and because on account of it, I’m unable to be what I need to be for you and Alex.”

She shook her head again. “But there will always be bigger wars. This is your life, and if dealing with it stops you from being whatever you want to be for us, it always will.”

His eyes grew burning in their urgency. “No, it won’t. We don’t have an established relationship. I’m new to this, am just learning what it takes to have others in my life. We are testing me, and I can’t be fairly tested under these conditions. At this stage, it’s setting me up for failure, and I can’t afford to fail. That is why I need to be away from it all.”

She tried to step back, to escape the renewed confusion. He wouldn’t let her, clamped her flesh tighter. “I didn’t mean for a second that I want to be alone. Come with me, Selene. Just the three of us. For as long as it takes.”

Aris stared at Selene, afraid his heart was thundering so violently it was shaking him, so deafeningly she couldn’t hear him over its racket.

She looked as if she hadn’t heard him. Or as if she’d suddenly stopped understanding him.

Or was it only that she thought he’d lost his mind to propose what he had?

And he had. The harsh intellect and uncompromising logic that had governed his life were no more. He was driven by impulse, possessed by desire, tossed about by need without a hint of calculation or premeditation. Nothing was left inside him but one imperative necessity—to be with her and Alex.

He’d been going after them with more single-mindedness than the focus that had seen him to the top. And he’d come to realize both he and she had been wrong about him. He wasn’t unfeeling. Where it came to them, he was anything but.

He’d always thought it safer, more efficient, to keep his dealings with others on a practical, cerebral level. He’d never let his family close, never developed the ability to communicate with them, had served them in easily and unequivocally quantifiable ways. His brothers and sisters had their own lives, and he’d never felt they were missing anything by him keeping his distance.

But Selene and Alex were another matter.

Selene and Alex were his.

The possessiveness he felt toward both, the overriding emotions, were new, overpowering. All encompassing.

But he couldn’t just say these feelings existed. He was a man of action. Most important, he had to make sure he was capable of handling all that. Having a family of his own was such an enormous concept, it terrified him. At the same time, he couldn’t breathe with wanting it. Wanting it all with her. With both of them.

So he’d plunged into the deep end of the frightening, exhilarating unknown territories of being a suitor and one half of a parent duet. He couldn’t believe the sheer unbridled…joy just being around them brought, the emptiness he suffered when he had to leave. The anxiety that this might not be for real, for always.

That dread had been increasing by the moment as the world kept intruding when it was all still so new, so fragile and untested. He was terrified of messing up. He couldn’t risk letting the world tear them apart before they had something solid that would weather whatever it would throw at them.

Her reaction now compounded his fear. She’d misunderstood him too readily, had agreed to let it end too easily.

Did that mean she hadn’t been there with him since they’d started on this journey? Or was it that she simply had no faith in him at all, believed he’d fail her, and Alex, sooner or later, had even been waiting for him to do so? Was that why she’d found it so easy to believe he already had, and so soon, as to be so pragmatic about accepting his failure, so unaffected by it?

A red-hot lance of disappointment drove through his vitals. But he couldn’t even blame her. He wasn’t about to wipe away his lifelong track record on the strength of two perfect days and the odd stolen hour over two more weeks.

This made it more imperative that he get the chance to prove to her—and to himself—that he had staying power, that he could be what he longed to be, what they needed him to be.

That chance was all about where and when. Away from the world, now, and for as long as it took.

He repeated his request, urgency bursting in his heart. “Come to Crete with me, Selene. A few weeks in the sun, to forget the demands of the world and concentrate on us, on Alex. I haven’t had a vacation in over twenty-five years. I’m sure you haven’t had one in at least ten. We owe ourselves and each other time away from everything. Where better than on the golden shores of my homeland?”