The Secret Behind The Greek’s Return by Michelle Smart
CHAPTER FOUR
NIKOS, ARMSFOLDED across his chest, gazed at Marisa fast asleep on the sofa in exactly the same position she’d been when he’d left the suite an hour ago. He should wake her. That couldn’t be a comfortable position to sleep in.
He whispered her name. No response.
Swallowing back the lump in his throat, he placed a finger to her shoulder and carefully prodded. No response.
He stepped back and considered his options. He could leave her as she was or carry her to his bed. When he’d lifted her into his arms earlier after her faint it had been an automatic reaction, something he’d done without any forethought.
A small part of him acknowledged he’d swept her out of the party room before Raul regained his wits enough to try and bring her round himself.
He could hardly believe the rush of exultation that had swept through him at Marisa’s admission that she hadn’t slept with her fiancé.
Marisa was the only woman Nikos had been with whose sexual appetite matched his own. His shock at her virginity had quickly been forgotten as her inhibitions had disappeared. In the bedroom, she’d blossomed, gained a voracious appetite that had blown his mind and fed his own hunger into a heady lust that had kept him with her far longer than he usually stayed with a lover. As bad as it had been to imagine her enjoying those same heady, sensual appetites with that vile man, he wouldn’t have thought any less of her for it. Humans were carnal creatures, Marisa especially so.
What had stopped her enjoying them with Raul? Did motherhood reduce a woman’s libido?
He took another step back and cursed himself for speculating and exulting over something that was none of his business. It was natural that he would still feel stirrings for her. There hadn’t been anyone since her, no one for him to transfer his lust to. He would rectify that as soon as possible.
Spinning on his heel, he strode to the suite’s bedroom and looked in the wardrobe. There, he found spare bedding. He grabbed some and carried it back to the living area.
Working swiftly, he put the pillow on the edge of the sofa and then gently coaxed her flat so her head rested on it.
She stirred and mumbled something that made him freeze and sent his pulses soaring.
It sounded like she’d said his name.
For a passage of time that lasted an age, he stared at her beautiful face, hardly able to breathe, the thuds of his heart echoing in his ears.
She stirred again and pulled her knees up to the foetal position. The familiarity of it wrenched something in his chest.
He gritted his teeth and forced air into his lungs.
It was late. It had been a far more emotional evening than he’d anticipated and he too had drunk more Scotch than was good for him. It was no wonder his reactions were all over the place. A few hours’ sleep would put him back on his usual even keel.
In one burst of action, he pulled her shoes off, draped the blanket over her and strode to the suite’s bedroom, closing the door behind him.
Marisa opened her eyes, going from heavy sleep to full alertness in an instant.
Nikos.
He was alive.
Or had she dreamt it?
A look at her watch told her it was four in the morning.
She threw the soft blanket off—where had that come from? Had he put it on her?—and her stockinged feet sank into thick carpet.
Rubbing her eyes, she stared at the sofa. At some point while she’d slept, Nikos had put a pillow under her head, laid her flat on her side and covered her.
She hadn’t dreamt him.
Heart in her throat, she found herself in the adjoining room before she even knew she’d opened the door and walked into it.
The light in there was incredibly faint, the little illumination coming from the lamp Nikos had left on for her in the living area. It was enough for her to see the shape of his body nestled under the covers, breathing deeply.
She definitely hadn’t dreamt him.
Nikos was alive.
The relief was almost as overwhelming as it had been the first time, and, eyes glued to his sleeping shadowed face, she stretched out a trembling hand and lightly pressed her fingers against his cheek. The warmth of his skin made her sag with fresh relief and assailed her with memories of the joy she’d felt to wrap herself against him at night and bask in the heat that had radiated from his body. After their first night together, any nights spent alone had always felt so cold. From the nightmare day she’d been told he was missing, the coldness had lived in her constantly.
The relief was short-lived. A hand twice the size of her own flew like a rocket from under the sheet and wrapped around hers.
‘What are you doing?’
Her heart jumped into her throat, the beats vibrating through her suddenly frozen body.
Nikos raised his head and blinked the sleep from his eyes, trying to clear the thickness from his just awoken brain, and stared at the motionless form standing beside him.
‘Marisa?’ His voice sounded thick to his own ears too. Was he really awake? Or dreaming?
As his eyes adjusted he saw the shock in her wide eyes before his gaze drifted down to notice the buttons of her dress around her bust had popped open in her sleep to show the swell of her breast in the black lace bra she wore.
Arousal coiled its seductive way through his bloodstream to remember the taste of her skin on his tongue and the heady scent of her musk. He tugged her closer to him, suddenly filled with the need to taste it again, taste her again, to hear the throaty moans of her pleasure and feel the burn of their flesh pressed together. It was a burn he’d never felt with anyone but her.
Her lips parted. Her breath hitched. Her face lowered to his...
His mouth filled with moisture, lips tingling with anticipation. He put his other hand to her neck and his arousal accelerated.
It had been so long...
Then, with her mouth hovering just inches from his, she jerked back and snatched her hand away. It fluttered to her rising chest.
‘I’m sorry for waking you,’ she whispered, backing away some more. ‘I was just checking I hadn’t dreamt you.’
And then she disappeared from his room as silently as she’d entered it, leaving him blinking at the empty space she’d filled only seconds before.
Nikos put his fingers to his cheek. If he couldn’t still feel the burn from the mark of her touch, he would believe he’d just dreamt the whole thing.
Marisa unlocked the door and stepped inside the reception room. She removed her shoes and waited for Nikos to do likewise. In silence, they headed for the stairs. It was only six thirty. She’d messaged Estrella to tell her she was coming home. Her mother would still be in the suite she’d expected to share with Marisa at the hotel but the rest of household would be sleeping. There was one member of it, though, that she was confident would be awake. Her son.
The silence between her and Nikos had been almost total since he’d appeared in the suite’s living area, freshly showered and ready to meet his son.
Neither of them had mentioned her visit to his bedroom. If she had her way it would never be spoken of. It had been a foolish, impulsive thing to do. She tried not to beat herself up about it but it was hard. It seemed like everything she did lately was wrong.
But when she opened her son’s bedroom door and found him lying on his back, kicking his plump legs in the air, she allowed herself the credit of knowing that when it came to him, she mostly got things right. He was a happy, healthy baby. What mother could ask for more?
As soon as he saw her, his legs kicked even more frantically and he held his arms out to her.
She leaned over to scoop him up. ‘Good morning, baby boy,’ she murmured, kissing his cheek.
Wide awake, he grabbed at her hair and jiggled in her arms. And then he caught sight of the stranger in the midst and stared at his father with frank curiosity.
Nikos found himself holding his breath, his stare totally and utterly captivated by the chunky bundle in Marisa’s arms. Eyes of a colour he couldn’t determine were fixed on him, cute little mouth making funny blowing noises. He had a cleft in his chin Nikos recognised from his own baby photos.
His heart swelled. For a moment he felt light-headed.
That was his son.
He blinked and caught Marisa’s cautious stare.
‘Do you want to hold him?’ she asked.
He’d never held a baby in his life. ‘How breakable is he?’
‘If you don’t drop him, we won’t find out.’ Then she smiled. ‘You won’t drop him, so don’t worry. Here.’ She passed the happy, curious child to him.
Baby Nikos, completely unperturbed to be handed to a stranger, immediately grabbed at Nikos’s nose.
Having expected something light and noticeably fragile, it was a relief to feel his son’s solidity, even if it did come with additional bounce.
He laughed and met Marisa’s stare again. ‘He’s beautiful,’ he said, awestruck.
‘Yes. He is.’ She sighed but her expression was as enchanted as he knew his must be. It was an expression that put to rest his fears that she could be anything like his own mother. Then her expression changed into something wistful. ‘Let me change his nappy and then we’ll get him some breakfast.’
The hours that passed were the most surreal of Nikos’s life. As someone who’d never wanted to be tied down by anything so had never considered having a child, even as some distant future thing, the depth of feelings for his son were like nothing he’d felt before. And they were immediate. One look and he’d been spellbound.
But that wasn’t the most surreal aspect. Marisa’s willingness to show him the ropes and to answer all his questions about their child—and there were many, he had almost a year of his son’s life to catch up on—was astounding. Considering how his resurrection had affected her, he’d braced himself for a fight, had half expected her to make a quick introduction and then boot him out of her home.
He’d also braced himself for her mother’s appearance but Rosaria had surprised him too. She’d returned from the hotel and joined them for brunch in the dining room, much thinner than he remembered but as impeccably made up, her demeanour curious but with only a little of the frostiness he’d expected.
Not until Marisa announced she was going to put their son down for a nap and would take a shower, leaving him and Rosaria alone together, did she bring up the elephant in the room. Namely, his faked death.
He explained it as he’d done to Marisa the night before. She listened carefully and asked many questions, only little tells of emotions flickering on her face. He’d just finished his narration when Marisa returned.
When she’d left the dining room she’d still been wearing the ugly party dress she’d slept in and her hair had turned into something that had resembled a rat’s nest.
The transformation was remarkable. Her slim body was wrapped in a summery patterned teal chiffon off-the-shoulder dress that fell just below the knees, her hair damp and already drying into its natural curl with no frizz in sight. She’d applied a little make-up and, as she strode to the table, he found himself straightening when he caught a waft of her perfume. She smelled amazing.
She sat next to her mother opposite him and poured herself a coffee before turning her dark brown stare on him. ‘You’ve been filling Mama in on your death?’
Nerve endings stirring, he clenched his hands and shifted in his seat as he inclined his head. ‘Is Niki sleeping?’ Nikos couldn’t believe how easily the diminutive of his son’s name had come to him.
‘Yes.’ She put the baby monitor on the table.
‘Good. I have a proposition to discuss with you both.’
His lips twitched to see their heads tilt in unison.
‘I want to buy into your business.’
The time spent alone after putting Niki down for his nap had given Marisa time to collect herself. She’d been certain Nikos would want to discuss access and custody and all the things he, as a father, had a right to discuss, and she had wanted to be cool, calm and collected enough to deal with it.
The traumas of the last eighteen months had aged her inside and out. She’d carried a child. Her previously flat stomach was now rounded with silvery scars across her abdomen. Permanent exhaustion meant her skin no longer glowed with health and vitality, but the simple acts of showering and changing into non-horrible clothes had calmed her and made her feel better in herself, and she’d entered the room confident she was now in the right mental space to handle him.
But her confidence had been a delusion. One look at Nikos breathing and talking was enough to make her poise wobble. His comment that he wanted to buy into the business shattered it.
Nikos’s stare flickered to her mother before his light brown eyes settled on her. ‘If you’re in agreement, we’ll have the business independently audited and I will pay the recommended value for a third share of it. We will draft an agreement where the three of us each own a third or, if you prefer, the two of you and Elsa own two-thirds between you. Marisa retains overall control but we appoint someone—I have someone in mind—to manage the day-to-day running of it.’ He nodded his head at her. ‘That person will report directly to you.’
Marisa was too dumbfounded to speak. Nikos owned a chain of nightclubs across Europe. He invested in tech companies. His business interests were diverse but the common theme amongst them was that they were ‘hip’. The Lopezes’ shipping company was far too old-school and traditional to ever be called hip. In their six months together he’d been interested in the work she did but had never shown the slightest interest in the business as an entity, so for him to make this proposition...
It was left to her mother to pull herself together and ask the pertinent question. ‘You want to buy into the business...but why?’
‘To dissuade Raul Torres from starting a war against you.’ He turned his gaze back to Marisa. ‘I spoke to him last night, after you fell asleep. You were right about him wanting revenge for ending your engagement.’
Her head felt light. Fuzzy. Since waking, she’d been so wrapped up in Nikos and their son that she’d forgotten all about Raul. ‘You spoke to him? About our engagement?’ While she’d been zonked out on his sofa?
He shrugged. ‘He called your phone. I didn’t want to wake you so I answered it. We met in the lobby.’
Marisa clutched at her cheeks, digging her nails into the skin to sharpen her wits. ‘What did you talk about?’
‘It wasn’t a long conversation. I told him the engagement was off and that your businesses would no longer be aligning. He wants the ring returned,’ he added indifferently.
She touched the finger it should have been on. She’d stopped wearing the ring within weeks of the engagement, only slipping it on when she saw Raul. It had never felt right there.
It had been little over half a day since Nikos had appeared like a ghost at her engagement party. He’d lobbed one shock after another at her, all without breaking a sweat. Look at him now, announcing the termination of her engagement and the business deal she’d arranged with the nonchalance of someone announcing what they’d be having for their dinner.
She inhaled deeply through her nose and said through gritted teeth, ‘What gave you the right to do that?’
‘Can someone tell me what’s going on?’ her mother interjected. ‘You’re ending your engagement to Raul?’
Glaring at Nikos for revealing something she hadn’t got round to telling her mother about, she braced herself. ‘Yes.’
‘Thank God for that.’
Marisa faced her mother, open-mouthed with shock.
Her mother smiled wanly and shrugged. ‘I never thought he was right for you.’
‘Then why didn’t you say anything?’
‘I did try,’ she reminded her gently, her eyes conveying a reminder of a conversation between them that she would never repeat in front of Nikos. That she’d thought it was too soon for her. That Marisa shouldn’t commit to another man when her heart still belonged to Nikos.
Marisa had batted her mother’s doubts away. Giving her heart wasn’t part of the deal with Raul. She had no choice when it came to loving her son, that was something primal and ferocious, but her love for Nikos had been too strong, the pain of his loss too much to ever risk feeling like that about anyone again.
Turning back to Nikos, she glared at him even as her heart cried. ‘I want you to explain why you took it on yourself to end my engagement when I have a voice of my own.’
Her eighteen months spent mourning him had allowed her to put rose-tinted glasses on some of the less savoury aspects of his personality, namely his take-charge attitude. She wouldn’t go so far as to call him a control freak but when given a problem, he would immediately see a solution and implement it, which was great if you’d asked for a solution, not so great if you hadn’t.
She remembered them speaking via their personal laptops once when her screen had kept turning itself off. In the morning, a package had arrived before she’d set off for work. A brand new laptop from Nikos. It hadn’t occurred to him that she would prefer to fix her current laptop and that if it wasn’t fixable, choose a new one for herself. She’d been touched at the gesture but irritated that he’d gone ahead and sorted it without any consultation with her.
‘You were worried he’d turn nasty,’ he said with a shrug. ‘And you were right to be. But he will only pick a fight he knows he can win. He’ll think twice about starting a war against you if I’m part of the business.’
Her jaw would snap if she ground her teeth any harder. ‘Is that because only a man can save us?’
His eyes flashed. ‘No, because I’m someone who’s dealt with bullies like him before and know how to handle them.’
‘What do you think we’ve spent the past year doing against the cartel?’ she snapped back. ‘My mother met with their representatives on her own with a secret recording device to get evidence against them. Hers was the only non-circumstantial evidence that allowed their arrests. Without her you’d still be playing dead.’
Nikos dug the tips of his fingers on the table and leaned forward, glowering into the furious wide brown eyes.
He knew exactly the danger Rosaria had put herself in, knew too that she’d done it out of the protective mothering instinct his own mother had been born without. The united front and open defiance the whole Lopez family, Marisa included, had shown the cartel in the face of their intimidation tactics and violence had been astounding, but her insinuation that he’d hidden away like a coward until it was all over was beyond insulting.
That it was also close to how he’d felt during those impossibly long months only added fuel to his fury.
Having to stay hidden, far from civilisation, thousands of kilometres from the action, reliant on emailed reports for news of what the hell was going on, unable to influence anything, his only contribution the millions of his own money he’d thrown into it, had been torture. If the cabin he’d been given to bunker down in hadn’t needed constant maintenance, he would have gone stir crazy.
He’d given up his life to bring those bastards down. He’d lived as a recluse in an alien landscape. He’d done all that in part to protect her. To neutralise the cartel’s interest in her as a means to get to him.
‘What you two did to help defeat the cartel was incredible,’ he said, keeping a tight hold on his anger. ‘But Raul is a different kind of danger. You said so yourself. During my talk with him last night, I made it clear that if he attempts any kind of sabotage, I’ll come after him.’
Mimicking his pose, she put her own fingers on the table and leaned towards him. ‘For all we know, your threats might have made it more likely that he’ll try to sabotage us.’
‘My buying into the company puts my presence front and centre for him, and if he’s got any sense and searches my history, he’ll learn I’m not a man who makes threats—I make promises.’ There was a big part of him that hoped Raul did try some sabotage. It would give him the excuse he needed to destroy the man who’d abandoned his son and his son’s mother when they’d most needed him.
Never had he felt such loathing for another human being, different even from his hatred for the cartel who’d wreaked such evil damage. Every second of their chat had been spent fighting the urge to ram his fist in his face. Not even spelling out in graphic detail exactly what he would do should Raul attempt any retribution against the Lopezes and witnessing the Spaniard’s smug exterior crack had sated the urge.
‘You didn’t even consult me about it!’ she raged. ‘You took it on yourself to end my engagement and threaten, promise, whatever you want to call it, a man I categorically told you I did not want to start a war with!’
‘My chat with him last night was to prevent a war,’ he bit back.
Her dark brown eyes were ablaze and locked on his, the sparks shooting from them landing on his skin and penetrating into his bloodstream. The angry colour heightening her cheeks brought to mind so clearly the exact shade on her skin when he brought her to orgasm that he pressed his fingers even harder on the table to stop them snatching her to him. Theos, she aroused him, every part of him.
‘And I don’t know why you’re directing your anger at me when I’m trying to help you,’ he continued. ‘You proposed to Raul because you wanted a father for Niki and help in running the business—I’m his father and I’m offering you that help. I’m also offering an investment in it and giving you the opportunity that you wanted to have someone help you so you can take a step back without losing control. My offer gives you everything you wanted with added protection and your family retains majority control.’
The babbling that suddenly came through the baby monitor cut through the tense atmosphere like a grenade.