‘Do we have a deal?’
And from somewhere deep inside her, a hidden part that should never even have had a voice, she heard words bubbling up inside her. Before she knew it they were on her lips, spoken.
‘Okay.’ She held her breath. ‘I’ll do it.’
* * *
Nikos exhaled with satisfaction. And not a little relief. He’d got her. The minor triumph felt good.
For all his outward confidence, and his brusque, businesslike assertiveness that Kate would accept his offer as the only sensible course of action—snatch his hand off, in fact—deep down he’d been none too sure how she’d react.
Kate O’Connor was a law unto herself, and after the way they had parted anything could have happened. But he’d done it. Now he just had to close the deal.
He leant back in the booth, his arms behind his head as he surveyed the space where Kate had sat before excusing herself to go to the bathroom. She hadn’t been able to get out fast enough, sliding across the seat and straightening those long legs before disappearing into the depths of the diner behind him. If she was regretting her decision, trying to think her way out of it, it was too late. She had already sealed her fate.
Nikos took another mouthful of coffee. The reason why he had been so insistent that Kate and only Kate must be the woman he would take for his wife he preferred not to examine in too much depth. All he knew was that as soon as his lawyers had told him his case for guardianship would be considerably strengthened if he was married Kate’s name had come into his head. And once there it had refused to shift.
He’d spent so long trying to erase her from his mind, trying to rid himself of her memory, rueing the day he had ever met her, it had almost become an obsession. But he was forced to admit that where Kate was concerned obsession came all too easily. His mistake had been confusing it for love.
Infatuation had been there from the start. Coming across her that evening, seated at one of the rickety tables on the beach outside his father’s taverna, Nikos had been instantly smitten. With her long dark hair and gorgeous eyes, the dazzling smile she had given him when she had taken the menu out of his hands had arrowed straight to his heart—or his groin...or both. Making it his mission to find out everything about her, he had quickly discovered that she was on a solo three-month tour of Europe and that her first stop had been Athens, where someone had recommended this ‘wonderful little place’ in Crete and here she was.
What she had failed to mention was that she was part of an extremely wealthy American confectionery dynasty that actually bore her name.
Captivated by her exotic American beauty, her New York accent, her enthusiastic and infectious love of all things Cretan, Nikos had been guilty of seriously neglecting the other diners that night—until he had been pulled back into line by his father, Marios, fiery chef and owner of the modest establishment, who had stood on the terrace with his hands on his hips, demanding that Nikos stopped flirting with the customers and did some ‘goddamn work’.
The relationship between Nikos and his father had never been an easy one. Left to raise Nikos on his own, after Nikos’s mother had upped and left them when Nikos was still a toddler, Marios had struggled to be the parent he should have been. He had resorted to the bottle more than had been good for him, or Nikos, and there had been far too many drunken rages, far too many times when Marios had blamed Nikos for his wife walking out on them, for not being a good enough son either then or now.
For ruining his life.
Marios would regret it when he sobered up, but even then somehow he had never been able to find the words to apologise, instead preferring to show his remorse with a plate of food, which he would gruffly set down in front of his son, ruffling Nikos’s dark curls when he was a boy, slapping him on the back as a young man.
Nikos had never blamed his father—maybe he was right...maybe it was his fault that his mother had walked out on them both—but Marios’s mood swings had meant that Nikos had decided he was going to leave home as soon as possible, reasoning that his papa would be better off without him.
Aged sixteen he had moved to Athens, picking up any job he could to keep himself off the streets. At eighteen he’d managed to get a scholarship to university, followed by a year’s national service in the army. With a taste for adventure he had then travelled around Europe for several months, with no plans to stop, until an impassioned plea from his father, insisting that his health was failing and that he needed his son to help him run the taverna, had brought Nikos back to his home village of Agia Loukia.