Nine Months To Tame The Tycoon by Chantelle Shaw, Annie West
CHAPTER TEN
THEWEDDINGTOOKplace at the civic hall in Athens a month after Lissa had been discharged from hospital and Takis had brought her to Greece. Jace and Eleanor flew in from their home in Thessaloniki, and Lissa shed emotional tears when she hugged her sister.
‘It’s so exciting that our babies will be born only a few months apart,’ Eleanor said when they were in the waiting room before the ceremony. She gave Lissa a thoughtful look. ‘I’ll admit I was surprised when you told me you are pregnant. I didn’t realise that you and Takis were together, although it was obvious at the charity ball that the two of you couldn’t take your eyes off each other. Was it love at first sight?’
‘It was,’ Takis answered for Lissa. She tensed as she looked around and found he was standing behind her and must have overheard the conversation with her sister. He smiled urbanely at Eleanor. ‘At your wedding to Jace when I was the best man and Lissa the chief bridesmaid, we both felt an instant connection, didn’t we, agapi mou?’
He met Lissa’s startled gaze and the indefinable expression in his eyes made her tighten her fingers on the bouquet of freesias that he had surprised her with before they’d driven to their wedding. She reminded herself that they were pretending to be in love so as not to arouse her sister’s suspicions. Lissa knew that Eleanor would be concerned if she guessed the real reason for her decision to marry Takis.
They both wanted security for their son, but Lissa was starting to realise that she hoped for more than a sterile marriage of convenience. Her pulse accelerated when Takis slipped his arm around her waist. There had been no physical contact between them in the run-up to the wedding when they had lived at the house that Takis had leased in a leafy suburb of Athens.
The rental house was sleek and modern, but in Lissa’s opinion the decor was unimaginative. Since she had left her job as manager of Francine’s hotel she’d focused on the interior design course she was studying online. There was minimalist and there was boring, she’d told Takis when she ordered brightly coloured cushions to bring life to the living room. Takis had merely raised his eyebrows and disappeared into his study, where he spent most of his time when he was not at the Perseus hotel chain’s head office.
Lissa had the sinking feeling that he wanted to avoid her, but she had reminded herself that the situation was odd for both of them. They were almost strangers, but once they were married she hoped they would begin to build a life together and create a family unit ready for when they welcomed their son into the world.
She looked down at the engagement ring on her finger. The previous day her hopes of building a relationship with Takis had been boosted when he’d unexpectedly joined her for dinner. Most evenings she dined alone because he did not return from work until late. But when she had walked into the dining room, she’d found him waiting for her and her heart had performed a somersault.
She had been reminded of the first time she’d met him at her sister’s wedding when she had been desperately aware of his smouldering sensuality. Nothing had changed, she’d thought as her pulse had quickened when she’d smelled the distinctive spicy scent of his aftershave.
‘I have something for you,’ Takis had said after the butler had served the first course and left the room. He’d handed her a small box, and Lissa’s heart had thumped when she’d opened it to reveal a ring with a deep blue sapphire surrounded by diamonds.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she’d said huskily.
He’d given her a brisk smile and picked up his wine glass. ‘Your sister would think it odd if you did not wear an engagement ring.’
I don’t care what anyone else thinks, she had wanted to tell him. For goodness’ sake, walk around the table and kiss me! But she hadn’t dared say the words out loud. Instead she had slipped the ring on to her finger and sternly reminded herself that their marriage was a practical arrangement and Takis was not likely to have gone down on one knee when he’d presented her with the ring.
Lissa pulled her mind back to the present and realised that Eleanor was speaking to Takis.
‘How did you persuade my sister to have a small ceremony? It was always Lissa’s dream to have an over-the-top wedding with dozens of bridesmaids and hundreds of guests and an amazing dress. Although you look lovely,’ Eleanor told Lissa quickly. ‘A cream suit is so elegant, and you will be able to wear it again.’
‘A big wedding would take a long time to organise.’ Lissa quickly made the excuse, conscious that Takis was looking at her speculatively.
‘Lissa is still recovering after being seriously ill,’ he explained. ‘It is better that she does not have too much excitement.’
There was no danger of her getting overexcited when her fiancé had barely paid her any attention, Lissa thought wryly. She slanted a glance at Takis as they walked into the wedding room, and the glittering look he gave her made her wonder if he had read her mind.
The wedding officiant greeted them, and the civil ceremony began. In a surprisingly short time the officiant pronounced them married. Lissa’s heart missed a beat when Takis bent his head and brushed his lips over hers. It had been so long since he had kissed her, and she could not hide her response to him. Her body softened as she melted against him and parted her lips beneath his. She trembled with desire that only Takis, her husband, had ever made her feel.
He hesitated for a fraction of a second before his arms came around her, drawing her even closer to him so that her breasts were crushed against his chest and she felt his hard thighs through her skirt. She put her hand on his chest and felt his heart thudding as erratically as her own.
The heat of his body spread through Lissa, causing a molten warmth to pool between her legs. Instinctively, she pressed her pelvis up against his and felt the hard proof of his arousal.
He still wanted her. That at least was a start. She smiled against his mouth and heard him give a low growl as his tongue tangled with hers. The doubts she’d felt that she was doing the right thing by marrying him faded. They had never discussed one crucial aspect of their marriage, but she could feel the evidence of Takis’s desire for her. Tonight was their wedding night, and she was sure he wanted to make love to her as much as she wanted him to.
A discreet cough from the officiant broke the magic. Takis lifted his mouth from Lissa’s and looked faintly stunned when he realised that they had made a very public display. She heard Jace give a throaty chuckle, but Takis was grim-faced when they walked the short distance to the restaurant where they were to have lunch.
It was late in the afternoon when Eleanor and Jace left for the airport to fly back to Thessaloniki. A car collected Takis and Lissa and took them to his office building, where a helicopter was waiting on the helipad to take them to Santorini. He had explained that he owned a villa on the island.
It was a perfect location for a honeymoon, Lissa thought as the helicopter flew over the sea, which was dappled with gold in the sunset. From the air the island’s half-moon shape around the rim of the caldera was clearly visible. The coastline was dramatic, with towering volcanic cliffs and beaches with unusual black sand.
‘The scenery is spectacular,’ she said as the helicopter dipped lower and a village with square, whitewashed houses came into view. ‘The buildings with blue domed roofs are churches, aren’t they?’
‘Yes, they’re popular with tourists who want a photo opportunity,’ Takis told her. ‘Santorini, and the other, smaller islands nearby were formed after a massive volcanic eruption thousands of years ago. The crater that was left after the eruption is the only sunken caldera in the world and the lagoon is said to be four hundred metres deep.’
The villa stood alone on a headland and had incredible views of the sea. Lissa had expected Takis’s island home to be modern and minimalist, but the coral-pink exterior was the first of many surprises. Inside, there was colour everywhere; green and terracotta tiles on the floor, walls painted a soft cream, and in the living room there were brightly patterned cushions scattered on the sofas. A vase of vibrant yellow chrysanthemums stood in the fireplace.
‘This is lovely,’ she commented. ‘I didn’t think you were a cushions kind of person.’
‘My housekeeper Efthalia is responsible for those,’ Takis said drily. ‘Her husband, Stelios, also works for me as a caretaker and driver. The couple live in the staff cottage.’ He gave Lissa a brief smile. ‘I suggest you rest before dinner. You look tired.’ He moved towards the door. ‘I have a couple of calls to make.’
No woman wanted to be told that she looked tired, especially on her wedding day. Or be left alone by her new husband. Lissa stared at the door after Takis closed it behind him and wondered what phone calls were so important. She was being oversensitive, she told herself. The truth was that her pregnancy did make her feel more tired. She was showing now, although she suspected that her bump was partly due to the wonderful meals the cook at the Athens house had prepared.
She climbed the stairs to the second floor of the villa and found the master bedroom, but not her luggage. A connecting door led to another bedroom, and she spied her suitcase. Her clothes had been unpacked and hung in the wardrobe. Perhaps the housekeeper assumed she would use the second bedroom as a dressing room, Lissa thought as she slipped off her shoes and lay down on the bed. She would close her eyes for five minutes and then go and drag Takis out of his study if she had to.
When she woke, it was dark outside the window and someone had switched on the bedside lamp. The nap had revived her, and she was looking forward to an intimate dinner with Takis. The dress she had bought for her trousseau was a scarlet sheath made of jersey silk that clung to her new curves. She ran a brush through her hair that she’d recently had trimmed into her usual jaw-length bob, applied scarlet gloss to her lips and sprayed perfume on her pulse points before going downstairs.
As she walked through the villa, Lissa was surprised to hear from outside the whir of rotor blades. She stepped into the garden, and her stomach swooped when she saw Takis walking towards the helicopter.
‘Wait!’ Her muscles unfroze and she tore across the lawn. ‘Where are you going?’ She cursed as she stumbled in her high heels and pulled off her shoes. ‘Takis?’
He turned around slowly. His hard-boned face was expressionless, and in the darkness that seemed to press around them he was a forbidding stranger. ‘I came to your room to say goodbye, but you were asleep, and I did not want to disturb you. I must return to Athens.’
‘Must?’ Temper beat through Lissa. ‘Why?’ He made no response and she said huskily, ‘Explain to me how our marriage is going to work when you go out of your way to avoid me. We hardly spent any time together in Athens and I understood that you work long hours. But you brought me here to your villa, it is our wedding night and I thought...’
Her voice trailed off when he lifted his brows in that arrogant way of his that made her feel small and insignificant. She’d had a lot of practice at feeling insignificant when her grandfather had taken no interest in her, Lissa remembered bleakly.
‘Why would we spend time together?’ Takis sounded surprised. ‘The only reason we married is so that our child will be born legitimate. We agreed that in public we will give the impression that our marriage is real, and your sister was convinced by our performance.’
‘Was it a performance when you kissed me? Because it didn’t feel like you were pretending.’
She had made the decision to marry him knowing that love was not involved. But she’d believed that they wanted the same things in the marriage, friendship, security for their child and yes, sex. She’d hoped that their physical compatibility would be a base on which to build their relationship, and she was sure she had not imagined the gleam of desire in Takis’s eyes at their wedding.
‘This conversation is pointless,’ he said, stepping away from her. ‘I have an early morning meeting in Athens before I’m due to fly to St Lucia to view a hotel that I am considering buying.’
‘You’re going to St Lucia without me?’ Disappointment tore through Lissa. ‘I thought we had come to Santorini for our honeymoon.’ He could not have made it clearer that he was not prepared to make room for her in his life. In Athens she’d thought he was giving her time to recover from her illness, but now she realised that he regarded her as a nuisance. Would he think the same of their son when he was born? she wondered sickly.
‘You have everything you need at the villa.’ Frustration clipped Takis’s voice. ‘The staff will take care of you.’ He started to walk towards the helicopter and Lissa followed him.
‘When will you come back? What am I supposed to do while you are away?’
‘You are on a paradise island and I’m sure you will find plenty to do. Stelios will drive you to wherever you want to go.’
Lissa noted how he avoided her first question. She watched him climb into the helicopter and wondered how she could have been so stupid as to think he might want to spend time with her or get to know her. She should have realised when he’d mostly ignored her in Athens that he wasn’t interested in her. But this was not just about her.
‘What about when our son is born?’ she demanded. ‘Will you use work as an excuse to hide in your office and ignore him too?’
Takis closed the door of the aircraft without answering her, and the whomp-whomp of the rotor blades grew louder. She would not cry, Lissa told herself sternly. He wasn’t worth her tears, but her vision was blurred when she watched the helicopter take off. Moments later it was a beacon of light in the dark sky, taking her fragile hopes for her marriage with it.
Takis stared out of the helicopter at the night that was as black as his mood. Even as the glittering lights of Athens grew nearer he fought the temptation to instruct his pilot to fly him back to Santorini and Lissa.
When she had run across the garden wearing a sexy dress that had surely been designed to blow any red-blooded male’s mind, he’d come close to forgetting that he could not have her. Could not allow himself to have her. He was determined to resist his desire for her. The damage had already been done and she was pregnant with his child, but he was not going to compound his folly by becoming more involved with her than was necessary. By letting her believe they could have anything more.
When they had arrived in Athens a month ago Lissa had still been fragile after her illness. Takis could not shake the guilt he felt that he was the reason she had almost lost her life. Her thyroid condition had become acute because of a hormonal imbalance caused by her pregnancy. He had taken a stupid risk one time when he’d made love to her and he would have to live with the repercussions.
He felt another stab of guilt as he remembered her disappointment when he’d left her behind on Santorini. Theos, he had not done anything to give her the idea that he’d taken her to the island for a honeymoon, he assured himself. He had kept his distance from her. Except when he had kissed her at their wedding, he recalled grimly. He had only meant it to be a token, a nod to convention when the wedding officiant had pronounced them married.
But Lissa had kissed him back and he’d been lost the instant he’d felt her mouth open beneath his. She had tasted like nectar, and he’d been powerless to fight his desire for her, which had rolled through him like a giant wave, smashing down his barriers. His wife tempted him beyond reason, which was why he had left her at the villa and instructed his pilot to fly him back to Athens.
The nagging ache in his groin mocked him. He could not give Lissa the relationship she wanted. Not even a purely physical one. And maybe she wanted more than that. He’d caught her looking at him with a wistful expression on her pretty face that had set alarm bells ringing in his head. He had married her because she and the child she carried were his responsibility. His to protect. But he felt uncomfortable when he thought of her accusation that he would ignore his son when he was born.
Takis could not imagine what it would be like to have a son. He did not know how to be a father. His own father had been a violent bully, and the only lesson Takis had learned from his childhood was how to survive. But love and tenderness? He knew nothing of those things.
When the helicopter landed at the house in Athens, he went straight to the private gym and worked out for hours in a bid to forget that this was his wedding night, and his beautiful bride was miles away. Eventually, when he was physically exhausted, he took a punishing cold shower before he crawled into bed, only for his dreams to be tormented by fantasies of having Lissa beneath him and hearing her soft cries of pleasure when he drove himself into her body.
Work was a distraction that Takis was glad to immerse himself in. He spent four days in St Lucia, finalising a deal to buy a hotel complex that would be a valuable addition to the Perseus hotel chain. To his annoyance he found himself imagining what it would be like if he had brought Lissa to the Caribbean with him and they’d honeymooned in one of the luxury lodges. If they’d made love on the private beach where the pure white sand ran down to an azure sea.
Back in Athens he spent long days at his office and when he returned to the house every evening he refused to admit that he missed Lissa being there, even though when she had shared the house with him he had avoided her as much as possible. Something that she had noticed, he thought with a stab of guilt, remembering her accusation when he’d left her at the villa that he used his work commitments as an excuse to stay away from her.
He must have imagined that Lissa’s perfume lingered in the rooms at the Athens house, but he retreated to his study, which was the one room she had never entered, and tried to concentrate on financial reports for his expanding business empire to take his mind off his wife, who intruded on his thoughts with infuriating regularity.
A week passed, and another. Lissa phoned him several times, and the calls were invariably tense as she demanded to know if he intended to avoid her for the rest of her pregnancy, and beyond that, what was going to happen when their baby was born?
‘I don’t care if you want nothing to do with me,’ she told him. ‘But our son will care when he is old enough to understand that you have rejected him.’
But for the past couple of days Lissa’s name had not flashed on to his phone’s screen, and there had been no terse conversations, which had made Takis feel uncomfortable and guilty and unable to explain that he did not know how to be a father, or a husband for that matter. He had no role model to follow, apart from his own drunkard father.
The tenderness that he sensed Lissa hoped he would show their child, and perhaps her, simply was not in him. Maybe it had been once, but Giannis’s death had made him hard and cold. It was impossible to change who he was, Takis thought, justifying his behaviour, and tried to ignore his conscience, which taunted him that he was afraid to try to change.
He flew to Naxos to visit the hotel he owned on the island and deal with an issue that needed to be resolved. His suspicions that the hotel’s manager had been fiddling the accounts and moving money into a personal account proved correct. Takis fired the manager, whom he had trusted, and he was in a foul mood by the end of a frustrating day.
‘I thought you should see this,’ his PA said when they boarded the helicopter. Rena handed him a tabloid newspaper. ‘Page three.’
Takis turned to the page and managed to restrain himself from swearing loudly when he stared at the photograph of a group of young people fooling around in a beach bar in Mykonos. He knew their type. The beautiful people, rich, bored, minor celebrities. Lissa was at the centre of the group and her smile seemed to mock him. His temper simmered as he read the caption above the photo, which had been taken the previous day.
Tycoon’s new wife parties with friends in Mykonos without her husband!
Lissa’s male friends were heirs to huge fortunes. They spent their time drifting around Europe’s fleshpots and had probably never worked a day in their lives, Takis thought furiously. Fury shot through him. What was Lissa playing at?
He called the direct number of the manager of the Mykonos hotel, Perseus One, and learned that Lissa had checked in two days ago and was not due to leave until after the weekend.
‘There has been a change of plan,’ Takis told his pilot. ‘You are to fly me to Mykonos before you take Rena back to Athens. I am planning to surprise my wife.’