The Secret Behind The Greek’s Return by Michelle Smart

CHAPTER TWO

NIKOSDIDN’TMOVEaway or attempt to defend himself from the fists beating against his chest and the screamed indecipherable words. He kept his composure, his gaze fixed above her head, determined to remain dispassionate against the onslaught of Marisa’s rage.

She’d always been his temperamental opposite. Where he was cool and analytical, she was warm and passionate. Even her fury, he was now discovering, was passionately delivered.

But when the impact of her beating fists weakened and he sensed her purge was over, he looked down and his guts twisted.

It wasn’t fury that had contorted her beautiful face and turned it into something red and swollen. And it wasn’t fury that dropped her to the floor with a thud, made her fall onto her side, pull her knees to her chin and weep in a rocking ball.

Unprepared for such an emotional display, he rubbed his cheek and swallowed air through rapidly tightening lungs.

A box of tissues sat on the suite’s bureau and, needing to do something, he strolled over and picked it up then placed it on the floor beside her before finishing his drink.

Theos, he needed another one, and poured himself an even heftier measure, which he downed in one. His next measure was more sedate and he poured an equal amount in another glass before taking it to Marisa.

Her sobs and the racking of her frame seemed to be lessening but he kept a cautious distance as he crouched down. ‘Here,’ he said quietly, speaking in English, a language they were both fluent in. ‘Drink this. It will help.’

Marisa wanted to cover her ears and drown out his voice. Nikos’s voice. This was simply too much to take in.

All those long nights she had dreamed of this, Nikos alive, the time that had passed since his death nothing but a vivid nightmare.

Oh, God, he wasalive.

Dragging her trembling hands over her face and trying her hardest to catch a breath in a chest so bruised, she sat up. Not yet ready to look at him again, she took a handful of tissues and blew her nose.

A glass was thrust in front of her face. Fine dark hairs poked out beneath the sleeve of his shirt around his wrist. It was enough to make fresh tears fall and she grabbed more tissues to wipe them away before taking the drink. She threw the liquid down her throat. Unused to neat spirits, she didn’t expect the fiery burn that followed but it helped, cutting through the fog of her brain and sharpening her senses.

‘Another?’ he asked.

Still unable to look at him, she nodded.

When the refilled glass held by the long, tapered fingers appeared before her again, she snatched it off him and downed it.

‘Better?’

She blew out a short breath before daring to meet his stare.

He was crouched on his haunches, light brown eyes studying her. ‘Ready to talk?’

But her throat was too constricted to speak. Rising to her knees, overwhelmed with the need to touch him and assure herself that she hadn’t hallucinated him into life, that Nikos truly was here, mortal, breathing, she reached out a hand and pressed it to his cheek.

Gazing into his intense eyes, she rubbed her thumb over his strong jaw, felt the unshaven dark bristles tickle against it, then gently skimmed it down to his mouth. The heat of his breath warmed her skin before she reached her other hand to his face and traced her fingers over it. The furrowed brow, the lines around his eyes, the long nose that bent a little to the left, the cleft in his chin, not a millimetre of skin left unexplored.

He didn’t blink, not even when she brushed her fingers up to the widow’s peak of his hairline and dived them through the cropped dark brown hair to trace the contours of his head and down to his neck. Only when she felt the beat of the pulse beneath his ear and felt her own pulse beat in response did she drop her hands and sag back on her bottom.

A beat of charged silence passed before he rose and walked his long, lean frame to the armchair.

Nikos sat heavily and watched Marisa shuffle until her back rested against the base of the sofa opposite him. She hugged her knees to her chest and rested her chin on them.

He tried to gather his thoughts, a task made harder by the sensation dancing over his skin where her fingers had caressed. Theos, hers was the first real human touch he’d felt in eighteen months.

Gritting his teeth, he forced himself back to the matter at hand. He’d composed what he would say to her on the flight over, had run over it many times in his head, had known much of the delivery would depend on her reaction to him. He’d guessed emotions would be involved—this was Marisa after all—but he’d never imagined those emotions would be so raw. So hard to witness.

Their affair had lasted much longer than his previous relationships but it had never been serious. Nikos didn’t do serious, never had, never would. He liked the bachelor life and greatly disliked being answerable to anyone, a hangover from his teenage years. As he liked to tell people, if you want to watch an innate rebellious streak bloom in real time, send a wilful fourteen-year-old to a strict foreign boarding school.

He’d lasted two terms before being expelled. He’d lasted a whole four months at the next one. He’d only avoided expulsion at the third because his grandfather had bribed him. If Nikos could survive the school year without as much as a sanction and pass his exams, he could finish his education and have fifty thousand from his trust fund. There had been other conditions attached but they’d been ignored the minute the money had hit his bank account. He’d been sixteen years old.

Nineteen years later and Nikos still lived his life on his terms. Until his forced exile, life had been great. He’d loved making money and he’d loved spending money. He’d loved having the wealth that meant the world’s most beautiful women gravitated to him and allowed him to take his pick of the crop.

Marisa had been the first woman he’d actively pursued. She’d been in the VIP section of his Ibiza nightclub when they’d met. Instantly attracted to her, he’d nonetheless assumed she was another vacuous socialite. His assumption that she’d willingly come to his villa for a night of no-strings fun had been swiftly disabused.

Unused to female rejection, he’d gone all out to woo her. She’d agreed to meet him the next day for lunch by the pool at his villa...and had turned up with a gaggle of friends. It had taken a week of messages and calls for her to agree to a date. It had taken another month to get her into bed and then had come the next surprise—she’d been a virgin.

He supposed that’s why their affair had lasted as long as it did. It had been impossible to get bored with someone who refused to play the usual games and constantly kept him on his toes. Marisa had her own life, one she’d been unable and unwilling to revolve around him. Her parents had been grooming her to take over the running of the family shipping business, something she’d taken very seriously.

As he’d had more flexibility with his working hours, Nikos had found himself in the strange realm of being the one to make all the running. It had been worth it. Marisa had taken work seriously but outside office hours she had been excellent company; passionate, funny and witty, open-minded, as happy dining in a cheap café as she was in a Michelin-starred restaurant. That she was as sexy as sin had been the icing on the cake.

She was also naturally affectionate. She would end a short phone call with a good friend saying she loved them. She told everyone she loved them. She’d told Nikos she loved him hundreds of times but for Marisa, they were just words, so to have witnessed such naked distress at his resurrection sat heavily in his guts.

He didn’t see how it could be real. Even his grandfather hadn’t been this emotional at Nikos’s return.

He was pretty sure his father hadn’t known he’d been missing. Even if he had, Nikos doubted he’d suffered more than a solitary pang. His father hadn’t cared for him as a child and cared even less for him as an adult.

Swirling the remaining single malt in his glass he went straight to the subject that had brought him here. ‘You have a son.’

Her brown eyes flickered. He read the surprise in them. He’d often thought how their eyes were mirrors of their personalities; Marisa’s dark and warm, his light and cold.

‘I saw you with him. Two days ago,’ he added when her mouth dropped open.

Tears filled her eyes. He held his breath and warily waited for them to spill over and for her to fall to pieces again.

It didn’t happen. She swallowed rapidly and nodded.

‘He’s mine?’

She brushed a falling tear and nodded again.

He took a large sip of his drink. He’d known it in his heart but having it confirmed still came as a rush.

‘You named him for me?’ He asked the question though he already knew the answer. He’d seen the birth certificate.

Nikos Marco Lopez. Born eleven months ago weighing three kilograms. Born seven months after he’d faked his own death.

She let go of the hold around her knees and rested her head back against the base of the sofa. ‘Why...?’ Her husky voice broke.

The sound of her anguish cut straight through him, and he filled the void of silence before she could find her voice again.

‘You must have many questions,’ he stated. ‘Let me explain as best I can. Anything I miss, ask when I’m finished. And then I will ask questions of you. Fair?’

Her gaze searched his before she closed her eyes and inclined her head in agreement.

He took a moment to put his thoughts in order. ‘As you must have guessed, I faked my death. It was not a decision I made lightly. An international drug cartel wanted to use my clubs to sell their goods.’ Her already ashen face paled even more and he leaned forward. ‘Yes. The same cartel.’

She brought her knees back to her chest.

‘They would not accept no as an answer. You remember the firebomb in my London nightclub? That was them. What you don’t know is they made a bomb threat against my club in Ibiza. It was fake but I have no doubt they were capable and willing to do it for real. In the space of eight days, my French lawyer, the head of my Santorini security and my club manager in Madrid disappeared. I received a package that contained photos of my missing lawyer. I won’t describe them to you but it showed the depraved lengths they were willing to go to in order to force my hand. Among those pictures was a photo of you.’

A whimper came from her tightly compressed lips. He ignored it, just as he ignored the violent churn in his stomach to remember his reaction to finding her photo nestled amid evidence of such cruel barbarity.

‘It was clear that no one associated with me would be safe until I gave in. But I would not submit. Drugs are an evil in this world and I will have nothing to do with them.’

Nikos understood too well the inherent wickedness of drugs. His parents had been addicts with the unfortunate blessing of a substantial monthly allowance from a trust fund on his half-English mother’s side to feed it. One of his earliest memories was of going into the living room one morning and finding her semi-conscious on the sofa with a needle stuck in her arm.

‘I employed an international security firm and with their help, I faked my death and disappeared. My business partners could legally take care of the businesses. My “death” meant the cartel had no reason to go after you or anyone else associated with me.’

There had been no debate in his mind about confiding his plans to Marisa. Safer for her to believe he was dead.

But he couldn’t switch off the horror of those photos and for his own peace of mind and to satisfy himself of her safety, he’d employed the same security force to keep watch over her.

‘Drowning gave a plausible reason for me to vanish. I was smuggled to Alaska and spent the months of my death alone in a cabin in the Alaska Mountain Range. Without a body, a death certificate can’t be issued for a number of years, which meant I could resume my life when it was over.’ He raised his shoulders. ‘And now it’s over.’

Over but with the wreckage still to be cleared.

Despite his best efforts, the Lopezes had still got caught in the cartel’s snare. He knew perfectly well it had been incidental to his own dealings with them—the cartel had needed to increase its distribution processes so they could get their evil goods into the nightclubs and other places it was sold—but it had still come as a blow when he’d learned via the daily report he’d received of Marco Lopez’s murder a year ago. A devastating blow made harder by being eight thousand kilometres away and helpless to do anything about it.

Marco had been a good man who’d welcomed Nikos into his family, and Nikos’s guilt that he’d only had Marisa watched sat like poison in his guts.

That had been the lowest point of his exile. It had also been the moment he’d understood why Felipe Lorenzi, the man who ran the security operation, had insisted on sending him to such a remote part of the world. Sitting idle while the world burned was not Nikos’s style but placing him one hundred and twenty kilometres away from the nearest road had gone some way to curbing his impulsive take-charge tendencies.

He didn’t like to remember how close he’d come to packing a rucksack and taking his chances in the Alaskan wilderness when he’d learned the devastating news. If Felipe hadn’t called to tell him the Lopezes had also hired him to run their personal security in the wake of Marco’s death, he would have made that hike.

And if a single one of the daily reports had mentioned Marisa’s pregnancy or the birth of her child...his child...he dreaded to think what he would have done.

Marisa tried to process what she’d just been told but there was so much to wrap her head around. Too much. Nikos had made a clear and conscious decision to fake his own death. He’d willingly allowed her to believe he was dead.

She met his stare and hugged her knees tighter. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

He raised a shoulder before having another drink. ‘My death had to be convincing. Believable.’

‘I understand that... Can I have some more Scotch?’ She would get it for herself but didn’t trust her legs to keep her upright. Everything inside her felt jellified.

He got to his feet and strolled to the bar. She couldn’t stop herself watching his every move, afraid that if she took her eyes off him for a second he would disappear again. None of this felt real.

She clasped the refilled glass tightly while he settled back on the armchair and she tried her hardest to get her scrambled thoughts in order. ‘I think I understand why you did it—faked your death. That cartel...’ she squeezed her eyes shut as memories flashed through her: her father’s coffin; gentle Rocco’s dead body floating in the swimming pool ‘...were evil. But I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me, why you were happy for me to believe you were dead.’

‘I wasn’t happy about any of it,’ he retorted bitingly.

‘You could have confided in me. Prepared me. I can keep my mouth shut, especially about something as serious as that.’

‘Secrets don’t stay secrets if they’re shared. And if I had told you, who else should I have told? My grandfather? My business partners?’

His indifference, both in his choice of words and his tone, pummelled through her. When she looked at him and found the indifference there in his stare too, her battered heart withered. ‘I would have confided in you,’ she whispered.

‘You don’t know that. Until you’re in a situation, you don’t know how you would react.’

‘There is no way I would have let the man I love think I was dead. I wouldn’t have put you through that pain.’

She caught a tiny flinch in his features before he said, ‘Not even if you knew the pain would be temporary and that the alternative would mean actual, physical danger?’

Temporary? Marisa had a large sip of the Scotch and let it burn down her throat. ‘The cartel was taken down two weeks ago,’ she said slowly.

He inclined his head in agreement.

‘Why are you only telling me now? Why not then, as soon as the danger was over?’

He took another drink of his own.

‘Are you only telling me now because you’ve learned about Niki?’

His light brown eyes flickered. ‘You call him Niki?’

She nodded. She’d named him for his father but the first time she’d said the name aloud she’d burst into tears. It had got easier hearing others say it over time but those tears and the fact that she’d wanted him to have his own identity without the burden of a dead father to live up to had found her developing her own variant of the name.

‘What’s he like?’

‘A baby. He’s beautiful. He has your colouring—I think he’ll be tall like you too. He’s crawling and tries to stand himself up, and he cut his first tooth two weeks ago...’ Her words trailed off as she was reminded, again, that Nikos could have safely knocked on her door two weeks ago and put her out of her misery. He’d chosen not to. ‘Tell me the truth, Nikos, are you only here now because of Niki?’

‘I can’t ignore the fact I have a child.’

‘No,’ she agreed. ‘You can’t. But what I want to know is would you have told me you were alive if you hadn’t found out about him?’

‘What would have been the point? You’ve moved on with your life. You didn’t need a ghost from your past showing up.’

She tilted her head back and breathed through the tightening in her chest. ‘So that’s a no, then.’

‘I did what I thought was best.’

‘For who? You or me? You can’t think I wouldn’t have found out eventually. You always intended to resume your life—we have friends in common. Someone would have seen you and told me. Sooner or later the media will pick up on it.’ She downed the rest of her Scotch in an effort to drown her growing anger. ‘Is that what you wanted for me? To get a call or read an article telling me the man I’d mourned for eighteen months was alive and kicking? Or was it that you didn’t care enough to tell me? That rather than it being me who’d moved on, it was you and this was one conversation you simply couldn’t be bothered to have?’

‘I didn’t imagine you’d moved on. This is your engagement party.’

‘And what, you made assumptions about my state of mind? Stop making excuses and be honest with me. You’ve had two weeks to tell me you’re alive and the only reason you’re here telling me now is because of Niki.’

Resting his elbows on his thighs he leaned forward. His features were expressionless as he said the cutting words, ‘So what?’