The Secret Behind The Greek’s Return by Michelle Smart

CHAPTER SIX

NIKOSFOLDEDHISarms across his chest and eyeballed his club manager. ‘Did I, or did I not make it clear when I employed you that my clubs have a zero-tolerance policy on drugs?’

Toni’s face was a classic mixture of fear and wounded pride. ‘We do our best. We can’t be held responsible for everyone who comes in.’

Nikos leaned across his desk. He’d deliberately not invited Toni to sit. ‘And that’s where we disagree. You have let the issue slip in my absence.’

‘I didn’t—’

‘Do not interrupt me. Whatever our clients take before they enter our premises is nothing to do with us unless they are visibly wasted but the rules of the club are simple. Each guest is searched upon entry. All drugs are confiscated and destroyed. Those who refuse are themselves refused entry whether they’re an office worker or a rock star. Those who don’t like the rules are welcome to party in other establishments.’ He held up the bag he’d swiped from a young lad on the dance floor. ‘There must be a hundred pills in this. Let in on your watch. You’re fired.’

‘It was one mistake,’ Toni protested.

‘I’ve been in touch with the authorities. In my absence there has been a steady increase of drug-related incidents linked with this club. It’s clear to me that you’ve been running a policy of turning a blind eye. Those days are over. The buck stops with you. Now get out.’

Toni’s jaw clenched. For a moment Nikos wondered if he would have to physically remove him but then he turned on his heel and stormed out, slamming the door behind him.

Toni was the second club manager he’d fired in five days. Both for the same reason. Nikos hadn’t spent eighteen months ‘dead’ to bring down a drug cartel and stop them poisoning his guests with their evil substances for his own staff to allow those same substances onto his premises.

Dear God, it had been men like Toni the cartel had targeted and put under threat, men like Toni that Nikos had given up eighteen months of his life to protect. When his Madrid club manager had gone missing days after his London club had been set fire to, he’d immediately quadrupled security at his clubs and employed bodyguards for high-profile employees like Toni. Including Toni. He’d conference-called them to spell out the danger they were in and all he was doing to mitigate it. Which had been everything. He’d been too sickened with fear for his employees’ lives to do anything less than everything.

And then he’d found the photo of Marisa and the sickening fear had turned to icy terror. For as long as he resisted the cartel’s demands, no one connected to him would be safe.

Shaking off the memories that still felt too fresh for comfort, Nikos rose, straightened the sleeves of his shirt from beneath his suit jacket and left his office.

When he’d opened his first club, the one in Ibiza, other club owners had called him mad for refusing to turn a blind eye to drugs. Club-goers wouldn’t set foot in a club where they couldn’t take the fuel that allowed them to party all night long!

He’d proved them wrong. Lure in the best DJs, provide top facilities and an exclusive, hedonistic atmosphere and the club-goers would flock to you.

That night, as usual, his Barcelona club was heaving with clubbers.

Nikos entered the VIP section and gestured for a drink as he joined the old friends waiting to celebrate his resurrection with him. This was something he’d done during all the club visits so far; get the business side sorted first and then party hard. After eighteen months of solitude, he had a lot of partying to make up for.

Champagne and raucous conversation flowed. Beautiful women displaying their wares fluttered their eyes at him and drank flirtatiously through straws. He could take his pick of them. Hadn’t he been looking forward to taking his pick and to the familiarity of the chase that had been missing for eighteen months? Two years if you counted the six months he’d been with Marisa. Not just with her but faithful to her.

But, just as when he’d sat in the VIP sections of his other clubs that week, Nikos had to actively force himself to have a good time. Despite all his best efforts, nothing worked. Instead of feeling a part of things, he felt like an observer on the outside looking in. It all just seemed so damned superficial. It was at times like this he found himself missing the physical aspect of life in the Alaskan mountains. There had been a purpose to felling a tree, stripping it and chopping it into firewood. Cathartic too. A means to release the demons that had plagued him in those long, long lonely months.

After all that solitude he should be ravenous for female company but, yet again, he felt absolutely nothing. Not one woman captured his interest. Not as much as a flicker of attraction.

Here he was reclaiming his life and all he could see when the scantily clad beauties paraded before him was Marisa.

Two more nights and she would be in Mykonos with him. The thought alone tightened his sinews and thickened his blood more than a whole nightclub of scantily clad women could do.

Their relationship hadn’t come to a natural end, he now realised. The flame of desire between them hadn’t been allowed to burn itself out and, until the flame extinguished itself naturally, he was stuck. He couldn’t move on.

To hell with the complications of another, much shorter affair. To hell with never going back. Nikos wanted his life back and that couldn’t happen while Marisa remained unfinished business.

Marisa held Niki securely as she disembarked from Nikos’s private plane, grateful her son hadn’t suffered on the flight. He’d flown for the first time only a month ago and had hated every minute of it. This time she’d been prepared and he’d spent the flight content.

A large black car was parked a short distance from them and her already erratic heart ballooned painfully to see the long, lean figure standing against it.

Nikos’s presence in her life these last seven days had been reduced to two snatched, fleeting visits to see their son. His near absence had brought no relief. It shattered her that far from his distance giving her space to properly get her head around their situation, she still woke every morning having to assure herself that he was alive. She had to stop her hands grabbing her phone to call him just to hear his voice.

Worse was the way her heart had thrummed for the entirety of those short visits. Worse still was the way it leapt whenever he fixed his gleaming eyes on her. The way her pulse thrummed when his gaze lingered too long on her... Dios, it was a sensation she hadn’t felt in so long and it was terrifying how pleasurable a sensation it was. No matter how hard she tried to find it again, the control she’d mastered around him and that had cracked in the restaurant seemed far out of reach.

He strode towards them, shades on, a wide smile on his stubbly face, dressed in faded jeans, a grey V-neck T-shirt and a battered leather jacket. She’d forgotten how good Nikos looked in jeans and she frantically beat away memories of the washboard stomach and snake hips beneath them.

She forgot to hold her breath when he pressed a hand to her hip and leaned in to brush his cheek to hers. A flash of warmth against her skin and an enticing dose of spicy cologne hit her senses at the same moment he scooped Niki from her arms and set about planting huge kisses over his face.

She had just enough sense to be grateful he’d taken their son from her. From that moment of bodily contact, her limbs had weakened into mush.

‘Comfortable trip?’ he asked casually.

She semi-successfully curved her lips into a smile. ‘Thanks for sending your plane for us.’

Holding Niki securely around his belly, he lifted him above his head. ‘Only the best for my son and his mama.’

Their luggage had already been whisked into the boot of the car. A baby car seat had been installed in the back and Nikos strapped him in as if he’d done it a thousand times. The seat was so large it shrank the spacious interior.

The minute the door of the car enclosed them all inside she regretted not sitting up front beside the driver. Nikos’s cologne filled the cabin, the bulk of his body, which was placed between her and their son, taking up almost as much space as the car seat. From the corner of her eye she saw him remove his jacket. For the first time since his return, she could see his arms and the contours of his body, and she pressed herself closer to the door and fought her greedy eyes’ attempts to stare at him.

Was she imagining that, without a suit to hide most of his spectacular body, he was more muscular than she remembered?

She crossed her legs away from him and breathed through her mouth.

Soon they were driving through narrow streets in pretty towns with thick white walls and colourful roofs. She focused her attention on the nearing Aegean Sea, glimmering brightly under the setting sun, and tried to tune out the man who sat beside her.

‘He’s asleep.’

Nikos sounded so put out by this that she found herself smothering an unexpected giggle. ‘He always falls asleep in cars.’

‘There is still much for me to learn about him.’

‘You know all the important things. Everything else is just window dressing.’

There was a long pause.

‘Thank you.’

She turned her face to him before she could stop herself. ‘For what?’

‘For bringing him here.’ His smile was wry but there was a softness in his eyes. ‘I know it can’t be easy for you to accept me into your lives when you spent all that time thinking I was dead. The way you’ve handled things has been incredible. When I think of everything you’ve been through, with the cartel and losing your father the way you did... I know how close you were to him.’

A lump formed in her throat and she had to swallow hard to speak past it. Losing her father on the heels of losing Nikos had ripped at the fabric of her sanity. ‘It hasn’t been easy. If not for Niki...’

‘If not for Niki...?’ he prompted when she stopped her words from running away from her.

The weight of his stare pressed on her chest.

‘He pulled us together,’ she said quietly. ‘Getting through the rest of the pregnancy and preparing for his birth gave us focus. Mama...’ She shook her head and looked back out of the window, trying her hardest to keep control of the words falling from her lips. ‘Grief is like swimming through a black cloud and when it’s someone you loved with all your heart and who you’d imagined yourself growing old with, it’s a physical bruise that hurts with every breath you take. But having a child forces you to be strong, whether the child’s an unborn baby or an adult. The primal urge to protect them is too powerful and so you pack away the pain and grief just to get through the days. You pack away all feelings. Bury them.’

And never let them out again.

Suddenly afraid her control had failed and she’d revealed too much about herself, she added as temperately as she could manage, ‘That’s how Mama got through it...how she gets through it. The only emotions she allowed herself were maternal ones. She was like a tiger roaring to keep her cubs safe.’

It had been like that for both of them. Two bereaved souls trying desperately to keep their heads above water enough to stop their children drowning with them.

Her skin prickled at the intensity of Nikos’s probing stare that she could sense was trying to penetrate her skull to read her mind but the next time he spoke was as they approached a small village and he casually mentioned they’d reached his land.

Not until the car stopped in front of a sprawling three-storey, square-roofed villa did she realise the village was one huge interlinked complex. She counted ten properties surrounding the main villa in a horseshoe formation, all a pristine white.

She got out and felt a sigh of pleasure form in her throat. Surrounded by gentle rolling hills with the sea lapping to the rear, Nikos had made himself a home in paradise.

Hot tears stabbed the back of her eyes and her pleasure soured. How she’d longed to come here in the months when she’d been head over heels in love with him. She’d dropped enough hints but they must have been too subtle because he’d never picked up on them. Always he’d had a reasonable excuse not to invite her to accompany him on his visits home. She’d swallowed it every time and suppressed the nagging doubts that if he was as serious about her as she believed, he would want to show his main home off to her.

Deep down she’d known he didn’t want her here. If she hadn’t she would have gone further than drop hints. She would have asked him outright.

By not doing that she hadn’t had to deal with his certain rejection. She could continue believing they were meant to be together.

She’d opened her home to him. Her family had opened their hearts to him. He’d failed to reciprocate and she’d ignored it. How had she been so wilfully blind?

Nikos carried his son from the back of the car. Marisa was staring at his home with her arms tightly folded. The last of the sun’s rays poured on her, turning her hair into a curly golden halo. Her beauty was something that never failed to dazzle him and now that he was resolved on the path he intended to take with her, he welcomed the fizz her presence put in his veins.

‘What do you think of my home?’ he asked when he joined her.

She dropped her arms and blinked, but before she could answer, Niki decided the time was right to throw himself into his mother’s arms. Like a slippery eel, he dived out of Niko’s hold to her. If Nikos hadn’t had such a good grip on him and if Marisa’s reflexives weren’t so honed, their son would have hurtled head-first to the ground. In the blink of an eye, the pair of them were holding their son sandwiched between, Marisa’s breasts crushed against their interlinked arms.

For the briefest moment, time stood still.

Nikos found his gaze locked onto her wide eyes. Her face tilted, lips parted in frozen shock. And then he saw the colour creep over her cheeks and her throat move, and the compulsion to cover her parted lips and kiss her so thoroughly that she couldn’t stand sent a rush of heat flooding through him.

Because, in that brief moment of triumph, Nikos’s strong suspicions were confirmed.

His mouth curled into a slow smile.

Marisa’s attraction to him was still there. He could practically taste it.

A warm beat echoed in Marisa’s head. She didn’t know if it was shock at her son’s daredevil antics or being trapped in Nikos’s stare that was causing it. At that moment, all she knew was that he was gazing at her as if he wanted to eat her whole.

She was brought back to her senses by her son, merrily jiggling between his parents’ crushed bodies, oblivious that he’d been nanoseconds from a fractured skull, waving his arms around and smacking her in the face.

‘Niki,’ she chided, disentangling an arm from Nikos’s hold to gently take her son’s wrist. Niki grabbed her hair with his other hand. Before she could remove it, Nikos took the offending hand.

‘Leave Mama’s hair alone.’ He pressed even closer to her to unpluck the little fingers clutching her hair.

Sensation brushed from the tips of her hair and danced into her skin. Her already thrashing heart went into overdrive and she held her breath, trying her hardest not to inhale his scent.

He smoothed her hair back into place and looked down at her. His eyes glimmered, a smile spreading over his face before he finally stepped away from her with a murmured, ‘That was close.’

She breathed deeply and swallowed, jiggling Niki on her hip, trying her best to look serene, trying her best to appear oblivious to the current of heat that had just passed between them.

But she couldn’t deny the expression in Nikos’s eyes, not when she’d seen it so many times before, right before he would crush his lips to hers and make passionate love to her.

She tightened her hold on Niki and willed her heartbeats to stop crashing against her chest.

It was a look he must have given to hundreds of women in his time. If she hadn’t been a naive virgin finally ready to fall in love, she would have known she was nothing special to him a long time ago and better protected herself.

Romance and love had never been on her radar. From her earliest days Marisa had wanted to join the family business and had taken seriously her father’s decree that she must work hard and earn her place in it. Unlike her sister and most of her friends, she’d studied hard at school and had rarely bothered with boys. School holidays in her teenage years had been spent shadowing her father as he’d gone about his business.

She’d studied at Valencia University so she could continue learning everything about the business while she completed her business degree. She hadn’t been entirely single-minded but she had been very focused, and when she’d graduated and taken her place at her father’s side, she’d had the best of all worlds—a great career and a wonderful circle of friends. She hadn’t wanted or needed more.

And then she’d met Nikos and fallen head over heels in love.

He’d turned to the smartly dressed man who’d appeared from the house. Nikos introduced him as Angelos, his butler, and then they were swept inside where a handful of staff waited for introductions in the large reception area.

Marisa tried to pay attention to their names but was too taken with the villa’s interior. Even Niki stopped wriggling in her arms to gawp. Where her home in Valencia was traditionally Spanish with plenty of colour, this was almost exclusively white, from the thick, high walls to much of the furniture. Only the hard floor beneath her feet differed in being a pale, warm grey. And yet there was nothing cold about it.

Where her home had defined rooms with doors leading from one to the other, this had defined spaces reached through open arches, and she followed Nikos through one into a huge living space with four separate sofa areas. Through another arch in the far distance she could see the sea...

No longer waiting for Nikos to guide her, she shifted Niki in her arms and headed for the arch. Stepping through it, she found herself in a vast living space that extended seamlessly to an equally vast terrace. Open-mouthed, she slowly craned her neck from left to right, taking in the long infinity pool that lapped inside and then seemed to stretch out to the Aegean itself.

The hairs on the nape of her neck rose before Nikos’s voice rumbled in her ear. ‘What do you think?’

‘It’s stunning.’

He grinned and stepped onto the terrace, beckoning for her to follow. ‘Let me show you the grounds.’

Marisa tried her best to pay attention to the tour itself rather than her tour guide, but her attention grew increasingly fractured. Not only did she have to concentrate on holding a bored baby in her arms but Nikos kept close enough to her that her senses threatened to go into overdrive. At one point he even rested a hand on her back when showing her the playground he’d had installed for their son and then, when he took Niki from her, his eyes held hers with the gleam in them that never failed to make her belly melt.

She could only manage appreciative murmurs at the spa and business centre situated in two of the smaller villas, the open-air cinema, the soft play room for Niki near the shallow end of another swimming pool so large a holiday resort would be proud to have it.

When they returned to the villa, a matronly figure stood with the butler waiting for them with a small suitcase at her side.

Nikos shook her hand, spoke to her in Greek then made the introductions. ‘Marisa, this is Seema. I’ve employed her as Niki’s nanny for your stay here.’

Nikos watched Marisa’s dark brown eyes widen before her gaze darted from him to Seema then back again.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ she murmured, extending a hand.

‘Pleasure to meet you too,’ Seema replied shaking the offered hand. Then she spoke to their son. ‘You must be Niki.’

To his surprise, Niki shied away from her and buried his face in Nikos’s shoulder. No amount of coaxing would get him to look at her.

‘This isn’t like him,’ he said to Marisa. ‘Usually he’s so sociable.’

She shook her head tightly. ‘He always needs time to get used to new people.’

‘He took to me straight away,’ he pointed out.

She shrugged. ‘You’re the only one. Maybe it’s because on some weird baby level he recognised you as his father.’ Then, as Nikos was puffing up with pride at her observation, she addressed the nanny. ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be comfortable with you very soon but he’s in a new country in a home that is strange to him. I’ll take care of him tonight and then tomorrow we’ll introduce the two of you again.’

Seema looked to Nikos for approval. His orders to her had been clear—she would be responsible for his son’s routine that week, especially with regard to evenings and nights. As he could also feel Marisa’s laser stare piercing through him, he nodded. ‘Angelos will show you to your room and make you familiar with everything. If we need you this evening we’ll page you.’

She bowed her head and disappeared with his butler.

There was a moment of silence before Marisa said, ‘You’ve employed a nanny?’ Her low tone did not disguise the underlying menace in it.

He met her flinty stare. ‘Obviously.’

Her eyes narrowed and glinted. ‘You had no right.’

He bristled. ‘I had every right. I’m his father.’

‘And I’m his mother and I’m only here because I’m his mother.’

‘Seema has impeccable references. She was nanny to the King of Agon’s children.’

‘I wouldn’t care if she came gold-plated! You had no right to go over my head like that, no right at all, and don’t quote the “I’m his father” line at me again; you don’t know Niki well enough yet to know what’s in his best interests.’

‘Whose best interests?’ he disputed coolly. Nikos had been prepared for Marisa’s annoyance about the nanny but her line of attack on the matter was out of order. ‘His or yours?’

Angry colour stained her cheeks. ‘How dare—’

‘You hardly let him out of your sight. Even when we were organising the business partnership you brought him along to all the meetings. You do everything for him. When it comes to our son, you’re a control freak.’

The dark circles under her eyes proved how much she needed a break but a break would never happen if she had to get up at the crack of dawn each day to care for their son. He’d spent enough time with Mother Marisa to know she wouldn’t trust him to care for Niki on his own. Not yet. She’d get up and hover between them.

That employing a nanny to care for their son left more time and opportunity for seduction was only secondary...

The baring of her teeth made him quite sure that she would have slapped him if he didn’t have Niki in his arms.

‘Caring for Niki is my job,’ she snarled.

‘You never relax or take time for yourself.’

‘I’m a mother. It comes with the territory.’

His chest tightened as the image of his own mother floated in his mind and before he could stop himself he said, ‘Not for all mothers.’

Not all mothers were tigers who roared to keep their cubs safe, like Marisa and her mother. Not all mothers had a primal urge to protect. Some mothers looked at their children and felt nothing.

Marisa’s angry stare tempered, became contemplative. The piercing of the laser burn lessened as the composure he’d had so much fun cracking since her arrival visibly reset itself.

In a much calmer tone, she said, ‘In future, please consult me before making any decision about our son’s care.’

‘Does that work for me too?’ he challenged. ‘Only it seems that you’re the one who gets to make all the decisions for him.’

‘That’s because I’m the one who raised him without his father for eleven months. I earned that right.’ Then she looked at their son and her features softened. ‘But I take your point. If you disagree with my judgements then we should discuss it.’

‘Who gets the final say?’

‘Logic does. Failing that, me.’

Nikos had to control every muscle in his mouth to stop it from opening and biting back some home truths to her. He was acutely aware that, though their son couldn’t understand what they were saying, he would undoubtedly be picking up on the tense atmosphere between them. He would not allow Niki to witness any kind of war between his parents.

Swallowing back the rancid taste on his tongue, he indicated the winding staircase. ‘I’ll show you to your rooms.’