A Ring for the Greek's Baby

CHAPTER ONE

WHEN THE SEVENTH TEST came back positive, Emily knew it was time to face the truth. Face it or spend a fortune on pregnancy tests until there wasn’t a pharmacy she could walk into in the whole of London without blushing with an ‘it’s me again’ grimace. She’d thought buying a jumbo box of tampons was embarrassing, but a basket full of pregnancy tests was way worse. There was no avoiding it. Those little blue lines weren’t lying even if she wished they were.

She. Was. Pregnant.

Not that she didn’t want to have a baby. Some day, with some nice guy who was madly in love with her and had married her at a big, white wedding first.

Her first ever one-night stand and look what had happened. How could she be so fertile? How could condoms be so unreliable? How could she have slept with a man so out of her league? Emily was all for aiming high in life, but a Greek billionaire? And not one of those short, fat, balding middle-aged ones, like those in her local deli, but a six-foot-four heart-stoppingly gorgeous man who had eyes so brown you could lose yourself in them.

Which she had promptly done. Completely and utterly lost herself in a sizzling sexual encounter unlike anything she’d experienced before. Which, truth be told, was not saying much, because her experience could hardly be described as extensive given she’d wasted seven years with her ex-partner Daniel. Seven years. Argh! Why couldn’t the number seven be lucky for her like everyone else? For seven long years she’d waited for a proposal. It had got so bad that every time her ex had bent down on one knee to pick something up off the floor she would get all excited thinking this was it—the moment she’d been waiting for.

It had never happened.

What had happened instead was she’d got cheated on. The ignominy of being betrayed was bad enough, but to be left for a male lover was a whole new level of humiliation. How could she have been the last to know Daniel was gay?

But it wasn’t the betrayal that hurt her the most. It was the loss of being a part of a couple; the shock of being single for the first time in so long she had forgotten how to be single. Going out at night without a partner by her side felt weird, like going out with only one shoe on. Or eating in a restaurant on her own, working her way through a meal, wondering if everyone was speculating if she’d been stood up or

something.

She used to love going out to dinner with Daniel, who was a bit of a food and wine connoisseur. They would try different restaurants and cuisines and sit for hours over a meal, discussing the food, the presentation, the wine and even the other diners. She used to love coming home from work knowing she had someone to talk to about her day. Daniel had been her ‘guess what happened to me today’ person, her sounding board, her back-up, her anchor. The person who’d provided the stability she’d craved since she was a child.

She hadn’t had much luck since with dating. Her New Age relationship-therapist mother said it was because she was subconsciously sabotaging her male relationships because of her father issues. Father issues. And whose fault was it she didn’t have a father? Her mother hadn’t managed to get his name and number when she’d had sex with him under a rain-soaked tarpaulin at a music festival.

Emily looked at the pregnancy test again. No. She wasn’t having a nightmare. Well, she was. A living nightmare. A nightmare that involved fronting up to commitment-phobe Loukas Kyprianos and telling him he was going to be a father.

Oh, joy.

Such a task would be a whole lot easier if he had called her in the month since their night of bed-wrecking, pulse-throbbing sex. Or sent a text message. Or an email. A carrier pigeon, even. Given her some tiny thread of hope he might want to see her again.

Although, come to think of it, she hadn’t exactly done herself any favours in that department. She could write a book on how to get a guy to lose interest in one date. When she was nervous she talked too much. Way too much. When she gushed like that, she didn’t just wear her heart on her sleeve but on every visible part of her body. A couple of drinks down and she’d mentioned her dream of marriage, four kids and a dog—an Irish Retriever, no less. To a man who had a reputation as an easy come, easy go playboy.

What was wrong with her?

Emily walked out of the bathroom and picked up her phone. No missed calls. No text messages...apart from four from her mother with links to her prescribed daily meditation and yoga practices. It was easier to let her mother think she used the links than to argue why she didn’t. She had learned a long time ago that arguing with her mother was a pointless and energy draining exercise.

Emily didn’t have Loukas’s number even if she could summon up the courage to call it. She could get it from her friend Allegra, who was married to Loukas’s best friend, Draco Papandreou, but somehow telling Loukas over the phone didn’t seem quite the way to go. Hey, guess what? We made a baby! would probably not be such a great opening gambit.

No. This called for a face-to-face conversation. She needed to gauge his reaction. Not that he was an easy person to read. He had one of those faces that gave little away in terms of expression. His facial muscles were into energy saving or something. It was like trying to see what was behind a curtained stage. But he had an aura of quiet authority she’d found overwhelmingly attractive. His aloofness had intrigued her at the wedding. He didn’t seem to need people the way she did. She was like a too-friendly puppy at a garden party, moving from group to group, trying to win approval.

He, on the other hand, was like a statue.

Emily’s phone rang and she almost dropped it in surprise. She didn’t recognise the number and answered it in her best legal secretary voice. ‘Emily Seymour speaking.’

‘It’s Loukas Kyprianos.’

Her heart kicked her ribcage out of the way, leapt to her throat and clung there with hooked claws.

He’d called her. He’d called her. He’d called her.

The words were beating in time with her panicked pulse. She needed more time. She wasn’t ready for this conversation. She needed to rehearse in front of the mirror or something, like she used to do as a kid with a hairbrush as a pretend microphone. She tried to calm herself but her breathing was so choppy it felt as though she was having an asthma attack.

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

She could do with some of her mother’s mindfulness techniques right about now. ‘Erm...hi. How are you?’

‘Fine. You?’

‘Erm...good, thank you. Great. Super. Fantastic.’

Apart from a little morning sickness.

There was a tick-tock of silence.

‘Are you free this evening?’

Emily swallowed. Free for what? Hook-up sex? She didn’t want to sound too available. A girl had her pride and all that. But she had to tell him about the baby. Maybe over dinner would be the best way to do it. No. No. No. Not in a public place. She would have to do it in private. Private was best. ‘I’ll have to check my diary. I seem to remember I have something...’

He gave a soft sound that could have passed for an amused chuckle. ‘You don’t have to play hard to get with me, Emily.’

Yes, well, it was a little late for that, she had to admit. The way he said her name with that subtle Greek accent made the base of her spine go all squishy. Em-il-ee. It wasn’t a name when he said it. It was a seductive caress, as if he had circled each and every bump of her vertebrae with a slow-moving fingertip. ‘Look, I think you should know, I’m not usually like that...like I was the night of the wedding. I don’t normally drink so much—’

‘Have dinner with me.’

Emily took umbrage at the way he said it, like a command instead of an invitation. Did he think she’d been sitting by her phone waiting for him to call? Well, she had, but that was beside the point. She wasn’t going to let him think he could call her out of the blue and get her to drop everything to have dinner with him—even if she had nothing to drop. ‘I’m not free this evening so—’

‘Cancel.’

Cancel?

What the hell? Why should she cancel something at his say-so? ‘I don’t think so.’

She was quite proud of the haughty I-haven’t-been-Superglued-to-my-phone-waiting-for-you-to-call tone in her voice.