A Ring to Secure His Heir

‘Would you like to come and stay with me in my home in Athens?’ her grandfather asked her baldly without the smallest warning. ‘You’d be very welcome.’

Rosie reddened and shifted in her seat, mortified by her reluctance, for she could now see that the older man was a warm-hearted person, willing to move past his own views of her current pregnant and unwed condition purely to build a family relationship with her. ‘I … er—’

‘Don’t want to leave Alexius,’ he slotted in, a glint of amusement in his dark eyes. ‘So, you are a couple?’

‘Right now … I’d like to spend more time with him,’ Rosie admitted in a rush, her colour higher than ever at being put on the spot to quantify something she couldn’t even begin to describe.

‘My invitation remains open. I would love to have you as a guest and I’d like to hold a party to introduce you to my friends and relatives,’ Socrates declared with enthusiasm. ‘But that can wait.’

‘I’m grateful that you understand,’ Rosie responded guiltily, for hadn’t she originally agreed to come to Greece to get to know her grandfather? When had she allowed Alexius to become the sole focus of her happiness and her dreams?

Socrates Seferis shook his head slowly. ‘I don’t understand why you won’t marry him … feeling as you so obviously do about him,’ he confided equably. ‘But you’re old enough to know your own business best.’

After that slightly awkward exchange, Socrates told her about his problems with his own family and she admired his honesty and respected his wry admission that he had spoiled and indulged his children in an attempt to compensate them for the death of their mother. He moved on to discuss the fact that he had asked Alexius to get to know her and Rosie then told her grandfather about his godson’s deception, which the older man found surprisingly funny.

Alexius strolled lithely out to join them and mention that dinner would soon be served. Clad in an open shirt with every sleek muscular line of his body defined by cropped denim jeans, he took her breath away. She was amused to see Bas stumbling along in his wake, little tail wagging like a metronome as soon as he saw Rosie. She lifted the little dog onto her knee and introduced him to her grandfather.

‘He followed me into my bedroom and started chewing one of my shoes,’ Alexius delivered grimly, choosing not to admit that he had been relieved that his ankle was not the target again.

‘He does have bad habits. He wasn’t very well trained when he was a puppy,’ Rosie explained.

‘You spoil him. He’s an animal, not a human being.’

‘Well, I’m sorry about the shoe but I’m not putting him outside in a kennel!’ Rosie told him squarely.

Socrates watched the exchange as if he were in the front seat viewing an enthralling show and, catching him in the act, Rosie flushed with self-consciousness, wondering if she and Alexius looked as ill suited from the outside as she felt they had to be. Never mind his wretched money and pedigreed background, she thought painfully, he was so damned clever while she was always aware that she had to study long and hard to pass exams.

After dinner the two men chatted with an ease that relieved her fear that their confrontation on the day of her arrival had caused lasting damage to their relationship. The helicopter arrived to collect her grandfather and convey him home. She walked back indoors by Alexius’s side, suddenly shy again, tied in knots by the potential pitfalls of a relationship that had no boundaries or definition.

‘Did Socrates ask you to go home with him?’ Alexius asked darkly, scrutinising the shuttered look of her delicate profile with suspicion while noting the faint sunburn that had already turned her cheekbones pink, and lingering on the lush pout of her soft mouth.

Rosie lifted her head, pale hair falling back from her brow, her eyes evasive. ‘Yes.’

Alexius tensed. ‘And what did you say?’

‘Not just yet.’ Rosie swallowed, feeling like a shameless hussy for admitting that so openly, for obviously she had no reason to stay other than to share his bed.

His wide sensual mouth narrowed thoughtfully. ‘That’s good.’

‘Howev

er, I do intend to take him up on the invite soon,’ Rosie continued doggedly, keen to let him know that he was not saddled with her as a house guest in an open-ended arrangement. ‘I’m sure you’ll be jetting off somewhere soon to work.’

Alexius had come to a halt, his face taut, his eyes shielded. ‘I’m planning to take some time off. How soon is soon?’ he queried.

‘A … week?’ Rosie tested the concept on him uncertainly. ‘I don’t feel I can put my grandfather off much longer than that. After all, I did come to Greece to spend time with him and here I am staying with you.’

Alexius ran a teasing forefinger below her full lower lip that made her tingle, and she glanced up into his mesmerising eyes, liquid heat spiralling between her slender thighs. ‘A week isn’t long enough for what I want, moraki mou.’

‘This … us,’ she specified unevenly, ‘isn’t going anywhere.’

Alexius scooped her up in his arms, ignoring Bas, who was bouncing round their legs and barking at the move. ‘Right now, we’re going to bed.’

Sex, his first port of call, his main means of self-expression, she thought despairingly even as the wild excitement of his hungry mouth on hers and his arms crushing her to him leapt like a burning flame to her every pulse point. Sex, shorn of emotion, was the lowest possible denominator. But did that matter if she wanted to be with him more than anything else in the world? She shrugged off her doubts and insecurity, and reminded herself that she had turned down a marriage that would have tied him to her whether he liked it or not. She didn’t want to become the wife he felt duty bound to marry because she was carrying his child. Eventually, he would come to resent her for such a sacrifice. No, what little they had now was still more honest and true than a second-rate marriage would have been, she told herself urgently, for one truth she had divined: Alexius Stavroulakis was constitutionally incapable of accepting anything second-rate.

CHAPTER NINE

WHEN are you going to tell Alexius? was the question running on a constant loop inside Rosie’s head. Tell him that she was leaving tomorrow? Her grandfather had already arranged transport for her and set the date of the promised party for the weekend.