The Secret Behind The Greek’s Return by Michelle Smart

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

NIKIHADBEENamazingly well behaved on the flight over to Mykonos. Unfortunately, the return journey was yet to go so smoothly. He’d taken one look at the plane at the private airfield they were flying from and started bawling. He was still bawling and the plane hadn’t even taken off. Marisa soothed him as much as she could but all her bribes of food and drink—she kept emergency ready-made baby food and baby milk in the change-bag—went to waste.

Picking him up and pacing the cabin while rubbing his back, she asked the cabin crew the reason for the delay. They’d been ready to take off for twenty minutes. None of the crew knew or, if they did, weren’t sharing the reasons with her.

She sat down again and made another attempt at giving Niki milk. This time he accepted it and quietened.

Marisa soon wished he would become fractious again. Resting her head back against the leather seat, she squeezed her eyes shut and tried to banish Nikos’s face from her mind. Tried to ignore the unbearable pain in her heart. Tried to banish the tempest of emotions swelling inside her. Tried to stop the force of the painful ragged rise and fall of her chest from pushing out the tears forming behind her eyes. It would have been easier to stop the sun from rising. They fell down her face like a burning stream.

Her hands full with feeding Niki, she couldn’t wipe the tears away, and she turned her face to the window to stop them falling onto him and tried her hardest to get control of herself. She didn’t want her devastation to feed into Niki’s developing emotions. She must keep hold of herself until she was in the security of her home and the privacy of her bedroom. She could fall apart then, just as she’d done during those desolate months and months spent believing Nikos to be dead. Pack her emotions back inside her.

‘Are you okay?’ One of the cabin crew was hovering beside her, clearly concerned.

She gave a jerky nod, and something she hoped was a smile, but couldn’t open her mouth for fear the anguish would pour out of it.

Turning back to look out of the window, she saw through the film of tears clouding her vision something large and black approaching.

She blinked vigorously then found herself freezing when her vision cleared enough to recognise the object. It was a car. One of Nikos’s cars.

She blinked again to see him jump out of the front passenger seat before the car had even come to a stop.

His long legs sped in a blur towards the plane.

Moments later and he was in the cabin and striding over to her.

His eyes locked straight onto hers. His Adam’s apple moved up and down his throat repeatedly before his lips finally parted.

‘Don’t leave me,’ he said in a hoarse voice.

She could only stare at him. Was this really Nikos? Was this wild-eyed, dishevelled man the same perfectly groomed and contained man she’d left only an hour ago?

His frantic eyes held hers. There was a sheen in them...

And then she remembered what an excellent actor he’d already proved himself to be and turned her face away. ‘Go home, Nikos. I’ve already said we can make an agreement for custody that’s fair to all of us. You’ve nothing to worry about. I won’t stop you seeing Niki.’

‘This is nothing to do with our son. Please, Marisa, I am begging you... Don’t go.’

‘Why?’ she asked tonelessly.

‘Because I can’t live without you.’

Thinking she might be sick at the new lows he’d just plumbed, she snapped her face back to him. ‘You sick, lying bastard.’

Nikos winced but accepted the deserved blow. ‘I am a bastard. I’ve treated you appallingly but I’m...’ He took a deep breath and pulled viciously at his hair. ‘Can you give Niki to one of the crew? There are things I need to say that I don’t want him to hear.’

Her red eyes—Theos, his cruelty had caused that—narrowed but after a moment she rose from her seat and carried Niki to the door behind which the cabin crew stayed.

Nikos sank into the seat opposite the one she’d been sitting in and bowed his head, scraping his nails over the back of his skull, trying to gather his thoughts before she returned.

His thoughts were still splintered when she sat down again.

He lifted his head.

Her legs were crossed, spine straight, an imperious expression on her blotchy, tear-stained face. He recognised that expression. It was the one she’d used in the weeks after he’d broken her heart when he’d brazenly confessed to having had no intention of telling her to her face that he was alive. Why hadn’t he recognised her stance as a protective shield?

‘My grandfather told me earlier that I lack empathy,’ he said slowly, the answer to his own question coming to him.

‘He is not wrong.’

‘He is. To a degree.’

She arched a brow in response.

‘I learned at a young age to block feelings.’

‘I’ve already guessed that. And you have my sympathy for the reasons behind it.’

‘I don’t want your sympathy.’

‘I know that too.’

‘I can stop my heart from feeling. Turn it to stone.’

‘To stop yourself from being hurt again. You don’t need to be Freud to understand that, Nikos.’

He nodded his agreement. ‘It stops me being hurt but it also stops me being able to recognise other people’s pain.’ He grimaced and corrected himself. ‘Rather, it enables me to ignore their pain, even the pain of those who are close to me.’ He gave a grunt of gloomy laughter. ‘Not that I have let anyone get close to me, not even my grandfather—even from him I can separate my heart. I lived in England for seven years and barely thought of him. Can you believe that? That man saved me, put up with all my rebellions and I treated him like that?’

‘You’ve made up for it with him.’

He felt a tiny release of the pressure on his chest at this slight softening.

‘And then I met you.’

She stiffened.

‘Marisa... You...’ He pinched the bridge of his nose and swallowed. ‘I don’t know why it was different with you but there is something about you I reacted to more strongly than I have ever reacted to anyone before. I have never craved someone’s company before and it was never just about the sex, even if I did try to kid myself that that’s all it was. I told myself your words of love to me were just words. How could you love me, someone so inherently unlovable his parents let him go without a fight?

‘But you would put your cheek to my chest and I’d know you were listening to my heartbeat. You wanted to feel my heartbeat. No one had ever done that before. No one had ever got close enough to. And I would feel your heartbeat against my skin too and the warmth of your body and just want to stay there and never let you go.’

The imperious expression on Marisa’s face had gone.

‘I think I fell in love with you a long time ago and didn’t know it. But even if I had, I would have fought it and the outcome would have been the same. I would have still faked my death without telling you and with no intention of resuming our affair because it was safer for me. You’d got too close... Every day of our affair lived in me the fear that you would see whatever was rotten in me that my parents had seen and push me aside without another thought.

‘When I found that photograph of you in the pile of photos of my lawyer’s dead body...’ He closed his eyes and sucked in a breath. ‘That was the first time I’d felt real terror since I was taken from my parents and it was a thousand times worse. That was the thing that pushed me over the edge into faking my death. I needed to protect you. I insisted on daily reports about you. I could only sleep at night if I knew you were safe. When I learned what had happened to your father... Theos, my terror for you...’

Her eyes glistened. Her chin was wobbling, throat moving.

‘Once it was all over, I never wanted to see you again. You’d made me feel things, agapi mou, and that terrified me. Feelings leave you vulnerable. It’s perverse logic, I know, but subconsciously I knew if I pushed you away first then you couldn’t leave me. You couldn’t hurt me.’

A tear rolled down her cheek. He wanted so badly to press his thumb to her cheek and brush the tear away.

‘I tried to stay away from you. I even told myself the day I waited outside your estate that all I wanted was one last glimpse as a private goodbye. If it hadn’t been for Niki, you wouldn’t have seen me again but he was the excuse I needed to justify throwing myself back into your life and even then I fought it. I fell in love with our son and I could accept that love because he was an innocent child who could never hurt me, whereas you... Marisa, you have no idea of the power you have over me. You have no idea how much it tortured me to imagine you with Raul. I thought you’d moved on—how could you not? How could I be special enough for anyone to grieve?

‘But I never moved on from you. It was impossible.’

The beats of Marisa’s heart were so strong the echoes thrashed in her dazed, barely comprehending head. The desperation with which she wanted to believe him...

But the fear.

She shrank back as he slid onto the floor to kneel before her and shrank into herself when he took her hand. She tried to block her ears to his words, deny them their power.

‘There is only you,’ he said quietly. ‘And I can’t fight it any more or deny it to myself. I love you. You have turned my stone-cold heart into something that beats freely with love for you. It’s you I need to be with. You I need to spend my nights with. You I trust with my life, my soul and my heart. Please, give me one more chance, let me prove myself to be the man you deserve, I beg you, and not for our son’s sake but for mine because I can’t live without you. I’ve tried and every road leads back to you. Let me earn your love and your trust. I swear on our son’s life that I will never betray it again. I swear.’

Marisa barely noticed her fingers had laced into his. The seams of her ripped, damaged heart were threading hesitantly back together and, finally, she dared to look at him. ‘When I agreed to marry you, it was for Niki’s sake.’

He breathed deeply. ‘I know.’

‘Everything I’ve done since I learned I was pregnant has been for him.’

His voice became a hoarse whisper. ‘I know.’

‘But you...’ She leaned forward, closer to him. ‘You brought me back to life. You made me remember that I’m not just a mother but a woman with needs of her own. And that woman loves you,’ she whispered. ‘She’s always loved you.’

His throat moved. ‘I never deserved it. But I will. If you’ll let me.’

Hands shaking, she cupped his cheeks and stared deeper into his eyes. The look she saw in them sewed the last piece of her heart back into place.

‘Yes.’ Unable to contain the feelings a moment longer, she brought her face to his and kissed him. ‘Oh, Nikos, yes.’

He made a sound like a prayer and then his arms wrapped tightly around her and she was enveloped in his arms so tenderly and lovingly that her mended heart soared into song.

Nikos stared into Marisa’s eyes, filled to the brim with emotions. And when she smiled and said, ‘Let’s get our son and go home,’ he knew he would spend the rest of his life worshipping her and thanking God every day for bringing her into his life and setting him free to love. To love her.