Reluctant Mistress, Blackmailed Wife

‘But that would have been six or seven months after we broke up. By then you must have known you were pregnant for a long time. Why did you wait until then before trying to contact me?’ he demanded incredulously.

Katie almost winced, for it was a question she had hoped he would never ask. But now that he had asked she felt she had to give him an honest reply. ‘I was waiting to see if you would phone me first.’

His ebony brows pleated. ‘I don’t get it.’

Katie lifted her chin, denying the raw sense of rejection she still felt. ‘I wanted to know if you would get in touch with me again off your own bat. You didn’t, which told me all I needed to know.’

‘I’d have phoned if I’d known you were pregnant!’ Alexandros launched back at her in disbelieving frustration. ‘By the time you made the effort to call me, your name had been removed from the list—and that’s why you didn’t get to speak to me!’

‘Some of us don’t operate a datelined filing cabinet approach to our love-lives,’ Katie murmured sourly.

At that crack, which was full of a defiant feminine logic utterly at war with the unemotional reserve, practicality and self-discipline that Alexandros prized, he drew in a slow, steadying breath of restraint. He was shocked to appreciate that he was a hair’s breadth from losing his temper with her again. His scorching golden eyes veiled and cooled. Not with his grandparents still under the same roof. He had witnessed his grandfather’s dismay that his grandson should even have raised his voice in Katie’s vicinity. He had been dourly relieved that the older man’s hearing loss would have prevented him from distinguishing words at such a distance. Unhappily, Pelias thought all women were like his wife—fragile flowers, with eternal smiles, adoring yielding natures and no temper whatsoever.

The only place Katie yielded was bed, Alexandros reflected grimly, reckoning that it was a great shame that he had ever allowed her out of the tower. Never again would he put food before sex. It was a time to think out of the box and come up with a fresh creative approach. But in the short term he felt he should step back and let her work out for herself what she was missing.

‘Stay on here at the villa for a while,’ Alexandros advised Katie equably, rising magnificently above that last comment of hers. ‘It’ll give me more time to sort out a suitable apartment for you in London.’

Katie was disconcerted at that change of subject, and at the calm agreement that she should have a home of her own. She looked up at him uncertainly. ‘Alexandros…I understand if you’re still annoyed with me, but I really feel we’ve taken a wrong turn and—’

‘A couple of hours ago you were in my bed…don’t please ask me to be friends now,’ Alexandros incised with slashing derision. ‘It’s too late for that.’

‘Maybe that was never a possibility,’ Katie conceded, responding to a barely understood desire to soothe and placate that embarrassed her. She found it easy to argue with him, but the instant he started to pull back from her something perilously like panic took hold of her.

‘Don’t expect me to stand by and watch you bedding other men either.’ Alexandros was determined to spell out her boundaries before he departed.

Dismayed that he could think that she would lurch straight out of his arms into another man’s, Katie reached down to touch a lean brown hand in an intimate gesture that she did not even think about. ‘I’m not like that. Don’t you know that yet? I’m not planning—’

‘You are pushing your luck.’ Hard golden eyes glittering with warning, Alexandros backed her up against the wall and braced his hands on either side of her head, effectively imprisoning her. ‘Don’t touch if you don’t want to be touched back, pedhi mou.’

Her breath snarled up in her throat and her mouth ran dry. The fire in his gaze set up a shameful tingle in her body. He was so close that she shivered, and she was shamed by the awareness that it was not apprehension that powered her. A helpless anticipation was making her heart-rate pick up speed

‘You need to work on your resistance level, because I haven’t given up,’ Alexandros spelt out, soft and low like a purring tiger. ‘When I want something, I go all out to get it. The next round, I may well fight dirty, thespinis mou.’

With a sardonic smile, he dropped his hands, straightened, and stepped back with exaggerated courtesy to allow her free passage.

CHAPTER SEVEN

FOUR weeks later, Katie attended the opening of an art gallery in the company of a handsome young Greek businessman and his sister.

When she had returned from Italy Alexandros had been in New York, and she had spent more than a week as a guest in Pelias and Calliope Christakis’s comfortable London home. There she had met a lot of people, because the sociable older couple had made a special effort to draw her into their social circle. Damon and Eugena Bourikas, who had initially visited Pelias and Calliope in the company of their elderly father, had been welcome new acquaintances as they were in Katie’s own age group.

For the first time in a long time Katie was in a position to enjoy a social life, and she was trying to push herself out and about to do exactly that. She was also planning to look for a part-time office job, to ease her back into the swing of working life. The breathtaking speed of change over the past weeks, however, had challenged her more than she had expected.

She had finally picked up the courage to phone her mother in New Zealand and tell her about the twins. The news that she was a grandmother had come as a shock to Maura. Although she had been hurt that her daughter had not confided in her, she had phoned Katie back a day later to ask a flood of questions about the little boys and request some photos of them.

Although Katie was now free of any immediate financial or accommodation woes, she was suffering from shamefully low spirits—which she did her best to conceal behind a cheerful smile. She felt that a job would give her a fresh focus. If she got back into the employment market she would start earning some independence again. Was she planning to live as some sort of kept woman on Christakis largesse for ever? No way. And perhaps a return to the workplace would give her something better to think about than the fact that she missed seeing Alexandros. That intense sting of loss wasn’t getting any easier to bear with the passage of time. He had been abroad a great deal on business. He had also contrived to visit the twins on three separate occasions when she was out; what contact they had enjoyed had been bereft of privacy and distinctly edgy in tone.

Only a week had passed since Katie had moved in to the stunning fully furnished apartment which Alexandros had organised for her. It was infinitely larger, fancier and more centrally located than she could ever have envisaged. Alexandros, however, had dismissed her protests with the declaration that his sons had a right to benefit from every possible advantage and comfort.

‘I guess the rumours about you and Alexandros Christakis must be true.’ Damon Bourikas allowed that provocative statement to trail in the air while they wandered round the gallery exhibits.

Wishing his sister had not drifted off, leaving them alone, Katie tensed. ‘I never talk about Alexandros…’

‘Did the tabloids say it all for you?’ the young Greek riposted.

Katie went scarlet. ‘My goodness, that was all rubbish! What are the rumours you mentioned?’

‘That you’re not together in any way with him. I made the comment because I saw your nanny when she brought the children

to visit Pelias and Calliope.’

Katie studied him in bewilderment. ‘I don’t understand…’

‘Your nanny, Maribel, is a seriously tasty package,’ Damon explained. ‘Only a woman unafraid of competition would employ a nanny who resembles a supermodel in her home. Particularly one who is an exact match of the female profile preferred by the Christakis males: a leggy blonde with heavenly curves…’

As his meaning sank in, Katie turned bone-white. Until that moment Katie had never thought about the fact that Maribel was a beauty, but now her thoughts went into overdrive. Did the nanny’s undeniable charms explain Alexandros’s recent visits to the twins when she herself was elsewhere and unavailable? Was Damon trying to give her a warning? Was Alexandros chasing her nanny and was she, Katie, the very last to know?

‘Yes, she is lovely, isn’t she?’ Katie managed to say through teeth that were almost chattering from the sudden chill that was creeping through her taut body. ‘I suppose she might remind him of his late wife.’

‘She would be a hard act to follow, I would think.’

‘Who are you talking about?’ His sister Eugena, a talkative brunette, rejoined them at that point.

‘Ianthe Christakis,’ Damon supplied.

‘My mother used to hold her up to me as a role model,’ Eugena confided with a rueful expression. ‘Of course Ianthe was much older than me. She was gorgeous, though, and always doing charity work. She was also totally devoted to Alexandros—’

‘He married her and turned into a workaholic,’ Damon remarked.

‘Everybody knows that they had the perfect marriage!’ Eugena shot her brother a look of reproof.

Thrown off-balance by Eugena’s generous litany of praise, Katie swallowed hard. ‘Pelias and Calliope never mention Ianthe.’

‘They were all devastated when she died. It was so tragic that she never had a child.’ Then, as if realising what she was saying, Eugena reddened with discomfiture. ‘I’m sorry, Katie. I hope you don’t think I meant—’