The Secret Behind The Greek’s Return by Michelle Smart

CHAPTER NINE

MARISASHOOKHERhead as if expelling water from her ears. She’d been holding onto herself by the skin of her teeth, desperately fighting the craving to lie in Nikos’s arms and recapture the closeness she’d always adored after making love when he’d dropped his bombshell on her. He thought they should marry?

How was she supposed to process something like that? It would have been less of a shock if he’d told her he wanted fly to Jupiter and colonise it.

She stared at his dimly lit face, looking for a sign that he was joking. He lay stretched out on the bed, arms folded above his head, his gorgeous face expressionless, but she sensed him soaking in her shock, waiting for her to get herself together. It was an expression that made her hackles rise.

Shifting her entire body round to face him, she folded her arms tightly around her chest, afraid he would see the ferocious thudding of her heart. ‘You think we should marry?’

‘Yes.’

She shook her head again. ‘What on earth for?’

‘For Niki. For all of us.’ He rolled onto his side and propped himself up on his elbow. ‘Being away from you this week made me realise how much I need you both in my life. I want us to be a family, agapi mou.’

How she wished the strings of her heart didn’t tug so hard at this. ‘You’ve changed your tune.’

‘I didn’t know how much being a father would change my perspective on life. You had an idyllic childhood with a mother and father who were together and I want that for our son. Don’t you want that for him too?’

She’d wanted that once, she thought with a deep wrench. She’d ached for it. Her early pregnancy had been spent clinging to the futile hope that Nikos was still alive, cast away on a desert island sending smoke signals and creating a giant SOS on a beach. He would be found. She would tell him of the pregnancy and he would drop to one knee, declare his love for her and they would live happily ever after.

But that hope had always been in vain, and she’d known it. He’d fallen overboard in the Mediterranean. His crew had discovered him missing the morning after a night anchored at sea in bad weather. The last person to see him alive reported he’d been standing on deck, watching the surrounding storm. The hunt for him had been one of the largest undertakings the region had ever seen. All the small uninhabited islands in the Balearics, the area in which he’d disappeared, were thoroughly searched numerous times. No body had been found.

The sea had swallowed Nikos up. Eventually, her heart had accepted this, as well as the knowledge that her son would never know his father. When her own father was subsequently murdered, she’d had to deal with the unimaginable pain of his death and the aching realisation her son would have no father figure in his life. Once, she’d hoped Raul might be the father figure Niki would come to need. Blind desperation for help with the business, and safety and protection for her son had seen her propose to him.

And now Nikos was offering her the one thing she’d always longed for from him and all she could think was that he hadn’t cared to tell her he was alive and well until he’d learned about their son.

‘Since when do you need me in your life?’ she asked.

‘Since I came back into it.’ His gaze didn’t falter. ‘I thought we’d both moved on but what we’ve shared tonight is proof that what we had is still alive.’

Her pelvis clenched and blood thickened to remember exactly what they’d just shared and she pressed her thighs tightly together, doing everything she could not to allow all the internal sensations show on her face. ‘Is that what tonight was about?’ she asked as evenly as she could. ‘A seduction to remind me how good we are together? To soften me up with sex so I’m more open to the idea of marriage?’

‘Partly.’

She closed her eyes at the sting of his admission and turned away from him.

‘But you can’t deny the chemistry between us has been getting stronger,’ he added into the silence. ‘What we just shared was going to happen and it will happen again whether you agree to marry me or not.’

‘Your ego is as big as ever,’ she said shakily.

The mattress dipped. Tingles raced up her spine, breath catching as she felt him close the gap between them. When he placed his hands on her shoulders and pressed a kiss on the arch of her neck she had to clench her teeth to stop a moan escaping.

‘Not my ego,’ he murmured into her hair, pressing his chest into her back. ‘The truth. And I know you feel it too.’

Nikos cupped a weighty breast and rubbed his thumb over a nipple that hardened at his touch.

‘See?’ he whispered. ‘Already you want me again. There is not a minute when I’m with you when I don’t fantasise about us being together like this.’

She caught hold of the hand manipulating flesh that had always been so sensitive to his touch. Her fingers dug into his skin and stilled as if in hesitation before lacing through his.

‘This is just sex,’ she said with a sigh.

‘Good sex. Great sex. Just as we had before. Remember how good we were together? We can have that again.’

She yanked his hand off her breast and shuffled away from him. ‘If we were so good together, why didn’t you come back to me?’

He chose his words carefully, regretting his honesty in those hours after his return. If he’d known then what he knew now—if he’d felt then what he felt now—he would have handled things differently.

‘You’d moved on. You were engaged to another man. I thought I’d moved on too but no one compares to you.’ He closed the gap she’d created and put his hands on her hips. ‘There has been no one but you since the day we met, and I know we can make it work. We can be a real family and give Niki the love and stability I never had.’

She was silent for a long time but he took comfort that she didn’t pull away from him again.

‘Tell me about it,’ she said.

‘What?’

Now she did pull away, stretching across the bed to put the bedside light on. Then she turned round to face him. ‘Tell me about your childhood.’

‘It’s history,’ he dismissed.

‘Your history. If you want to marry me so Niki has the love and stability you never had, then I want you to tell me why. Explain it to me. Make me understand. Otherwise my answer is no.’

Nikos could see from the set of her jaw and her unwavering stare that Marisa wasn’t bluffing. He cursed himself for unwittingly opening the goal for her to shoot into.

He’d never brought Marisa to Mykonos when they’d been dating because he’d needed to keep a separation between them. He’d never discussed his childhood, had always made it clear from the outset in any relationship that it was an off-limits subject. But Marisa was not like his other lovers. On the surface, she’d been of the same breed as the others. Glossy. Immaculate. But surfaces were deceptive and hers was more deceptive and far deeper than most.

The first obvious difference between her and his other lovers had been her refusal to go home with him that first evening. It hadn’t been the refusal that had marked her as different but that she had meant it. Marisa hadn’t been playing a game of hunt and chase. She’d had self-respect and he’d quickly come to respect her hugely for it. She’d got closer to him than anyone ever had, and it had been a battle to fight through the intoxication of their lovemaking to resist letting her get any closer.

He’d resisted bringing her to the home of his early childhood because he’d sensed she had the capacity to dig beneath the villa’s glossy, immaculate exterior and bring the ugly truth into the light.

To bring Marisa here would have meant answering questions about a part of his life he preferred to forget.

His instincts back then had been right.

But his past had been pushing for air, swirling into his thoughts during his time in exile, the memories strengthening and blindsiding him ever since his son had come into his life.

Stomach churning, he leaned back to rest against the headboard. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘Everything. But we can start with your parents and why your grandfather took custody of you.’

He wanted to rip his gaze from her stare. Instead, he straightened his spine and met it head on. ‘My parents were drug addicts.’

There was a flickering in her eyes.

‘You sure you want to hear this? It isn’t pretty.’

‘I’m sure.’

He shrugged. So be it. Maybe giving the memories the oxygen they wanted and Marisa wanted would be enough to silence them for ever.

‘Don’t misunderstand me—I don’t want you to imagine a scene of squalor like the junkies that are portrayed in films. I mean, they were junkies, but they were high functioning. They were both clever, high maintenance individuals who needed a steady fix of narcotics to help them function.’

‘You keep saying were? Are they both dead?’

‘My father’s alive but I haven’t seen him in a long time. Fifteen years, maybe. My mother died ten years ago. She came from a wealthy family...’ he waved his hand around to indicate the villa he’d inherited from her ‘...and was what in today’s terms would be a socialite. My father was a musician. I’m told he was once an excellent one. They were both mild drug users when they got together but their influence on each other was destructive. They supposedly loved each other once but all I remember is them hating each other. They had many all-night parties here and would just erupt in front of everyone.’ He laughed grimly. ‘Everyone acted as if it was normal, two grown people throwing ornaments and threatening each other with knives...’

‘What?’ She interrupted, her set face suddenly cracking with horror. ‘You saw this?’

‘I witnessed a lot of violence and drug taking. I was put in my grandfather’s custody when my mother smashed a glass over my father’s head. He wasn’t seriously injured but there was enough blood that one of their friends called for a doctor.’

He blinked away the memories of the blood pouring over his father’s shocked face that moments before had been twisted in a goading snarl. Nikos had been playing with his stuffed elephant, making it ride his toy truck, and he remembered the sickening thuds of his heart as he’d pretended not to see or hear, just kept the elephant and truck circling and circling.

‘The doctor saw me playing on the floor surrounded by vast quantities of drugs and felt duty-bound to call the authorities. They took me away and gave me to my grandfather.’

‘And you were six?’ she asked faintly. Her face had turned ashen.

‘Yes. It was agreed my parents’ lifestyle wasn’t conducive to raising a child and my grandfather agreed. I didn’t know it then but he’d been fighting for custody of me for years. He’d never approved of what he thought of as their champagne lifestyle but his suspicions of drug use had been just that—suspicions. He had no hard evidence and my mother had the wealth and contacts to ban him from their home and put a stop to his interfering. Those were the days I presume she had some form of maternal feelings for me.’ Those maternal feelings hadn’t lasted long enough for Nikos to remember any sign of them.

‘So overnight you were taken from your parents and given to your grandfather?’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t even begin to understand how that must have felt.’

‘You know what you just said about everyone’s normal being different? Drug addicted parents who hated the sight of each other was my normal. It took a long time for me to understand and accept I would never live with them again.’

Months and months of nightmares.

His parents had been his world and he’d loved them. His life had centred round pleasing them. A smile from his mother or an absent pat on the head from his father had been enough to fill his childish heart with joy that would last for days.

His mute terror at the violence he’d witnessed between them and the ache in his heart when another night would roll around without a goodnight kiss had been nothing to his terror at being taken from them.

Marisa brought her knees up to her chin and tried to take it all in as dispassionately as Nikos had narrated it. It was impossible. All she could see in her mind’s eye was a little dark-haired boy playing on the floor surrounded by stoned adults, drugs and blood. She saw faceless authority figures swooping in and leading him out of the only home he’d known by his hand, the little boy not knowing his world was on the cusp of changing for ever. Or that he was on the cusp of changing for ever.

‘And when you did accept it...how did you find living with your grandfather?’

He pulled a face. ‘Difficult. We both did. I’d had no discipline at all and was used to fending for myself. We clashed very badly, especially as I got older. He sent me to boarding school in England when I was fourteen. English boarding schools have a reputation for strictness. My mother paid for it.’ His face twisted bitterly. ‘She could have used her wealth to fight to keep me, paid others to care for me, all kinds of things she could have done to keep me under her roof, but she chose not to—turns out she found it preferable to live without the bother of a child. But she was more than happy to pay for me to move countries.’

Nausea churned in her belly. Nikos’s observation that Marisa’s childhood had been idyllic was true and something she’d always been aware of and thankful for. Compared to what Nikos had been through it had been served to her on a bed of rose petals carried by winged cherubs. Not for a single second had she wondered whether her parents loved her. Their love had been so deeply imbedded in her that there had never been a need to question it.

Struggling to speak, she whispered, ‘What about your father?’

‘Within months of me being taken from them, they split up and he left for the mainland. He’s still there now, in Athens, I think, playing his guitar in restaurants. He snorted and smoked most of the money he got off my mother in the divorce.’ A pulse throbbed on his jawline. ‘You know, I grew to hate them. I mean, really hate them. Especially my mother. She had the money to fight for me. I had a small inheritance of my own from her parents. It was put under my grandfather’s control.

‘He gave me a sum of it when I turned sixteen. I lived independently off that money and turned it into a fortune while having the time of my life, and didn’t return to Mykonos until I was twenty-three. I hadn’t seen her in six, seven years and the change I saw in her was enormous. She’d had so much work done to her face that it looked plastic but it didn’t hide the damage from her addictions and lifestyle. I still hated her but seeing her like that...’ His lips tightened. ‘I began to feel a responsibility to her.’

He laughed morosely. ‘It is strange how we change, isn’t it? I never thought I would feel that. A responsibility for that woman. But I did.’

‘Maybe it was seeing her with adult eyes,’ she suggested softly. ‘You could see her vulnerabilities.’

‘Maybe.’ He shrugged. ‘I got into the habit of calling her every few days. One day she didn’t answer. I tried a number of times. I was in London and called the Mykonos authorities. They found her dead on her bedroom floor.’

Cold horror sliced through her heart.

‘She’d overdosed.’

Marisa rubbed her mouth against her knee and closed her eyes to stop the threatening tears from falling. He didn’t want her sympathy.

In the end, all she could think to say was the honest, simple truth. ‘I’m sorry.’

Nikos swung his legs off the bed and opened the door to step onto the balcony.

He needed air.

Fingers tight around the balustrade, he rolled the tension from his neck.

For so many years he’d wished his mother dead. It had been a wish he’d hated himself for but one he’d been unable to block. Not until he’d learned she’d been dead for four days before her body had been found had he recognised the miserable loneliness of her death had been a mirror to the miserable loneliness of her life.

The grief he’d felt at her death had knocked him for six. How had Marisa described grief? Like swimming through a black cloud?

His had been a grief he’d never expected to feel and he’d hated himself for it. She’d never grieved for the loss of him so why should he grieve for the loss of her? He’d smothered the grief quickly and locked it away. Forgotten.

Until now.

He waited until the tight knots deep in his guts had loosened before returning to Marisa’s room.

The knots loosened some more to see his son sitting on the bed, wide awake. A huge beam spread over Niki’s face to see him.

Nikos met Marisa’s eyes.

She shrugged ruefully. ‘He’s not used to sleeping in new places. This is only the second time he’s not slept in his own cot. We spent a night in Geneva when the cartel was being taken down—I think he woke up four times.’

Niki held his arms out for him. Nikos slid under the bedsheets and pulled his son to him. If Marisa still wanted him to leave she’d have to ask again.

But she didn’t ask. She slipped under the sheets next to him and smiled to see their son bouncing on Nikos’s chest.

‘He loves you,’ she observed, her wistful gaze alternating between his face and their son’s.

‘I like to think so.’

‘He does.’ Lightly—so lightly it felt like a feather brushing against him—she ran a finger over his forehead then turned her attention to their son, whose cheek she kissed. Her shoulders rose before she let out a long sigh and lay down.

Pulling the covers over her shoulders, she said, ‘If you snore, you go back to your own room.’

His chest had filled with too much emotion for him to protest at this slight with anything stronger than, ‘I don’t snore.’

The sad amusement in her eyes filled his chest even more. ‘Don’t let him stay awake too long otherwise we’ll have a grumpy baby tomorrow.’

He swallowed the boulder lodged in his throat and nodded. ‘Understood.’

Her eyes held his for the blink of a moment before she turned her back to him and turned the light out.

Struggling to breathe, Nikos held his son’s wrists to steady him as he merrily bounced away on his chest and watched his happy, babbling face in the starlight.

‘Nikos?’ Marisa’s sleepy voice broke quietly through the darkness. ‘We’ll talk more about your suggestion tomorrow. Okay?’