One Kiss in... London: A Shameful Consequence / Ruthless Tycoon, Innocent Wife / Falling for her Convenient Husband

She knew for she had found out all she could about him since that night, had trawled the internet, had read about his success and the teary complaints from scorned lovers.

Their only complaint was that he had ended it, that Nico simply refused to even consider a relationship, or, as Nico called it, being tied down.

‘Hello.’ He spoke in English now, his voice harsh and a touch brutal and she drew in a sharp breath and rapidly hung up.

She could not speak to him, could not be the tearful, upset women again to him. She was better than that, Connie told herself. She was stronger than that.

She would get to the mainland and then, when she had got herself together, when she had found a job and somewhere to live, then, if necessary, she would call him.

And if not necessary, Connie thought with a smile, she might still call him!

Thank you. She said it in her head. She said it a thousand times a day, would not regret the potential of a life inside, not even for a second. In fact, it made her decision to leave easier.

There was no way her parents would accept what had happened.

She had, after all, qualified for an annulment given the marriage hadn’t been consummated.

So she wrote the letter, said sorry for the pain she had caused, but truly hoped that one day her father would see she was right, that one day he could again be proud of her. Her third attempt and still she wasn’t satisfied with it and Connie stood and wandered the room again, trying to find the words to tell her father that she loved him, but she had to live her own life.

Her hands explored the ornaments he collected, just as she had as a child, and then went to the drawers, just as she had as a child, too. As the catch gave, Connie realised that in all the drama and haste of her father’s collapse and the doctor being called, for once her father had left things unlocked.

Connie checked each drawer, her heart in her mouth, terrified that her mother might come in and see what she was doing, but she was curious as to what he kept in there. There was nothing of much interest at first, just endless files, her father’s meticulous notes.

And then she opened another drawer, a file marked ‘Housekeeping’ that she almost didn’t bother looking into but she did. Almost immediately she wished she hadn’t. The folder was thick and within was a file with some work for Dimitri, Stavros’s father. She read of some less than legal deals her father had brokered for Dimitri, and the payments her father had received. Her eyes welled up as she realised the stellar island lawyer she had been taught to respect, the man who had been held up as shining example of all that could be achieved by honest hard work and study, was as much a criminal as the clients he at times defended.

Why would he keep this stuff? She went to close the folder, appalled at what she knew, but her first instinct for her father was to save him from the shame and disgrace if this ever came out.

‘Eliades.’

The file caught her eye and the name burnt in her brain as she slammed closed the folder.

Eliades wasn’t a particularly unusual name, Connie told herself. And her father would surely have no dealings with them, given they lived on Lathira. Nico’s family would have lawyers and advisors of their own. They hadn’t even spoken at the wedding. They were friends with Stavros’s family, and, because she’d noticed Nico, she had noticed them but certainly hadn’t seen them interacting with her family.

And yet she recalled showing her parents the guest list, and her father’s face had frozen for a moment as he’d read who Stavros had intended to invite.

‘Perhaps a smaller wedding …’ Her father had attempted that night, but that was, of course, impossible. Their only child—of course the wedding had to be stupendous.

She wanted to close the folder, wanted to close the drawer, to forget what she knew, except another part of her wanted to know more.

It was Nico’s family.

The papers were old and yellow and her heart seemed to lift to her mouth as she saw that her father had arranged Nico’s adoption.

An illegal adoption.

She could feel her pulse in her temples, thought she might be the second in her family to collapse this morning as she realised the Eliades had bought a child.

Had bought Nico.

And it was her father who had sold him.

Did Nico even know he was adopted?

She saw the shaky handwriting of a woman, and tried to see the surname, but could only make out the first name and it was Roula. Her eyes filled with tears when she saw the paltry sum the woman had been paid.

How could she contact Nico now? Connie asked herself. How could she face him, knowing what she knew and, worse, the part her father had played in it all?

Her mouth filled with saliva. For a moment she thought she might vomit, the room was so stifling. It was suddenly imperative that she sit down.

And then, as she turned over the piece of paper, Connie realised that she never, ever could contact him, for she was holding a birth certificate. Not the one that had been falsified to create a new identity—this gave the real date of birth, moved his age to a few months older and, far worse than that, there was another name.

Alexandros.

Nicolas had born eighteen minutes later.

In that moment, Connie knew that she had lost not just the man she loved but possibly the father to her baby.

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘WELL, if the baby’s two months old, I don’t see how the marriage could have been annulled. Clearly there were …’ Everything had gone black then. Somehow Nico had maintained the phone conversation, had listened to his mother spout the latest gossip circling the two islands, had even managed to fire a few questions of his own in a voice that was presumably normal for his mother had not hesitated in her responses.

‘She went to Athens, but Dimitri soon drove her out. She’s in London now apparently …’ his mother said in a loud, stage whisper, ‘completely broke. Naturally, her parents cut her off when all the scandal happened … We’ll see how long she lasts. No doubt she will return with her tail between her legs.’

‘And Stavros?’ Nico demanded.

‘Stavros!’ His mother forgot to whisper. ‘Stavros left the island months ago—after that little tart shamed him. How could you not know that?’

Because they hadn’t spoken in almost a year, Nico could have pointed out to his mother, but he chose not to.

But what a year it had been.

He had flown from Xanos to Lathira after the wedding and walked into a blistering row of his own. Of course he wasn’t adopted. His mother had laughed and pointed to his birth certificate, told him the proof was there in front of him.

‘Where?’ Nico had asked, for they had always been vague with details. ‘Where was I born?’

‘On the mainland. We moved here to start the new business.’ And then, when Nico, unsatisfied with her responses, had requested DNA, she had screamed and raged and ranted, his father joining in, too. Only now, all these months later, had they started talking again, but it was back to talking about the weather. The real issue was too sore to be raised, no matter how many times he tried to.

And now he put down the phone to the news he could be a father.

Nico rested his head in his hands, tried to take the news in. His first instinct was to find and confront Constantine.

How could she not tell him? His first response was anger. She had his number, how dare she take away his right to know? Nico closed his eyes, dragged in a breath and wrenched that thought out, because it simply could not be.

He had sworn he would never be a father.

He was overreacting, he told himself. So what if a woman he had slept with nearly year ago had had a baby? It didn’t mean it was his. Anyway, Nico gave a cynical sigh, if it were his baby, there was no doubt in his mind that he would have been contacted long, long ago.

But, still, he wanted an answer, wanted perhaps to see her, to make sure for himself that she was all right, given all she must have been through. After a moment he had telephoned Charlotte, and it hadn’t taken long. The ever-impressive Charlotte had drawn a blank at first, but when Nico had told her to say she was asking after Connie, rather than Constantine, phone numbers had led to more phone numbers, and then to a few employment agencies and now, a few hours and a plane trip later, he stood at dusk outside a large London home. The heavy iron gate dragged in the dirt and weeds as he pushed it open, sure, quite sure that the address must be the wrong one. The place looked uninhabited. Certainly he couldn’t imagine Constantine living here, but he rang the bell and waited, then rang again, unsure what he was doing there. What he would he say if she did answer the door?

‘Nico?’ Had she not said his name, he would not have thought it was her.

She looked nothing like the woman he had met that day, nothing like the woman he had held that night.

She had put on weight, a lot of weight, her face was puffy and swollen, those gorgeous blue eyes peered out from two slits and that lush, ripe body was bloated now. Her once wild tumble of dark curls hung tired and lank and even that delicious mouth was dry and cracked, but it was not that which made her so unrecognisable, it was more her stance, the defeat in her as she opened the door as if all the fire, all the energy, all the passion that made her her had been extinguished.

And Connie was painfully aware of that.

She could see the shock in his features, the same shock she felt sometimes when she stared dull eyed at her reflection in the mirror and tried to reconcile what she saw with the woman she once had been.

She wanted to close the door, to hide—for never, ever would she want him to see her like this.

‘You didn’t call.’ It was not the words he would have chosen to greet her with if he could do it again, but he had not rehearsed this. In fact, he had pondered all the way what he might say to her, and had decided he would see when he got there. ‘I said, if ever you needed anything …’ He looked her slowly up and down. ‘And clearly you do …’

It was a touch brutal and again he wished he could retract his words as he saw her chin rise in defence.

‘So sorry!’ Connie snapped. ‘Had you given me some warning, I’d have put on make-up, and answered the door in something a little more fetching …’

She missed the slight twitch of his lips as he realised not all of that energy in her had died. She missed it because an angry, sinewy voice came down the stairs and then several loud thumps as his stick hit the floor and Connie’s heart raced again, for she was not allowed visitors. ‘Connie,’ the voice demanded, ‘who is it?’

‘Just a delivery,’ Connie called, and then looked at Nico with urgent eyes. ‘You have to go. I’m not allowed to entertain.’

‘I’m not asking to be entertained,’ Nico said,’ just to talk.’

‘I’m not allowed guests,’ Connie said. ‘Please, Nico, just go.’

‘So what time are you off?’ He saw her eyes screw closed, saw her shake her head and go to close the door, but he blocked it with his shoulder. ‘When do you have a day off?’

‘Please,’ she begged. ‘I don’t get time off. I have to be on call …’ She saw him frown, saw incredulity flicker across his gorgeous features and she just wanted him gone, did not want to be seen like this, but Nico just stood there. ‘He’s bedridden,’ Connie explained. ‘He needs someone here at all times.’ Still Nico stood. And for a fleeting second she saw escape, that maybe Nico could help. Maybe she didn’t have to tell him about her father. It was so wonderful to see him. His beauty, his presence she had never even for a moment forgotten, but somehow, to be kind perhaps, her mind had dimmed it; somehow she had convinced herself that he was surely not quite as stunning as she remembered. Yet here he was and she didn’t want it to end. ‘I’m going to the shops in the morning …’ Connie attempted. ‘Maybe we could meet for a few minutes for coffee.’

‘A few minutes …’

He heard something else then, the wail of a baby, and clearly it irritated the old man, because the thumping on the ceiling became more insistent and he demanded that she shut up that noise.

And Nico was furious, incensed on both her and the infant’s behalf, and he would not leave her there, not for a single night. There was no sensible thought pattern, no grandiose gesture. He just felt sick at what was taking place here, and he watched her eyes widen in horror as, without invitation, he pushed easily past where she held the door.

‘You can’t come in …’ Connie whimpered, but he could, and Nico put a finger to his lips and stood in the hallway. Connie stood shaking, wondering how she could get rid of him without making a noise.

‘Connie,’ came the reedy voice, ‘I need you …’

Nico’s jaw tightened. He stood in the dingy hall of a home that must once have been beautiful but now smelt of neglect and old man. Constantine did not belong here and surely neither did the baby that was still wailing. ‘I’m coming, Henry …’ She turned to race up the stairs, but he caught her wrist.

‘It sounds as if your baby needs you first.’

‘And I’ll tend to him soon,’ she whispered, but she was terrified to leave her baby. She could see Nico was angry and assumed it was at her. What if he simply took him? What if, as she tended to Henry, he simply plucked her son from his from the crib and left?

His son.

Connie felt her breath tighten in her chest, could not leave her babe, yet could not dare keep Henry waiting, especially as the banging was nonstop now.

‘Go to him,’ Nico said in a low voice. ‘I will wait here …’

‘No.’ She dared not trust him. She ran to the kitchen and scooped up her baby, and hushed him for a moment, but he was fretful as he nestled into her chest and heard his mother’s hammering, panic-stricken heart. She fled up the stairs with him, then gently placed him on the carpet outside Henry’s room where his screams intensified, but he was safer surely on the floor than in reach of a father who might choose to take him.

Henry was not best pleased. Connie had taken an hour off this afternoon to visit the doctor and he hated the baby that demanded his aide’s attention, and the noise, he told her, as she repositioned his pillows and rubbed his back, was not acceptable. ‘He’ll be quiet soon,’ Connie assured him. ‘He needs feeding and then he’ll settle.’ Then she felt Henry’s eyes linger on her heavy, aching breasts and she wanted to slap the disgusting old man, for his leers, for the endless silent innuendos, for the smile on his face as she washed him.

For so many things.

Except it was here or the street.

‘I’ll check on you later,’ Connie said when Henry was settled, but still her baby wept.

‘I’d like that.’

She did not respond, tried to ignore his veiled meanings, because, as she told herself so very often, he was all talk—but how she loathed it.

Loathed it so much her skin crawled in his presence, but she tried to look for the good in things. It was here she had worked through her pregnancy and Henry had hired someone to care for him for three weeks after a very difficult delivery and allowed her to stay there.

She picked up her babe and held him, closing her eyes against dizzy fatigue, and hoped against hope that the tablets the doctor had given her would work, that the cloud would soon lift and she could start creating a proper future for herself and her son.

‘We’ll get there,’ she said to her tiny baby, holding him tight, but he would not be soothed. All he wanted was to be fed. ‘Soon,’ Connie hushed, because first there was a difficult conversation to have, an unexpected visitor to attend to, and, most importantly, Henry must have no idea she had allowed someone to enter his home.

Nico watched as she came down the stairs, holding the still crying baby, and she pressed her finger to her lips, warning him not to speak. She gestured for him to follow, which he did, down the long hallway to the rear of the house where she pushed open a large door. He found himself in a kitchen area, much brighter than what he had seen of the rest of the house. There was a certain homeliness to it—there was a crib and there was also a sofa decorated brightly with cushions.

She turned on the television and still she did not speak, placing the baby in his crib and trying to placate him with a dummy. She stacked and turned on the dishwasher and then turned the television up louder and only when there was enough noise filling the room to disguise their words did she speak.

‘Please,’ she begged. ‘Keep your voice down.’

‘I’m not the one making the noise,’ Nico pointed out, because the baby had spat out his dummy and was again shrieking.

‘I need to feed him.’

‘Then feed him,’ Nico said. ‘I’ll make a drink.’ He found his way about the kitchen as the woman he had spent but a few hours with picked up her child and sat on the sofa and started to feed her babe.

It was not as awkward as she expected, just a relief to finally sit and feed him, to let her brain catch up with the turn of events as Nico boiled the kettle and read the instructions on a jar of instant coffee.

‘A teaspoon,’ Connie said, ‘and two of sugar.’

‘It looks revolting,’ Nico commented, because he had never had instant coffee before and certainly not the powdered home brand that was available to him now.

‘Don’t talk about my friend like that,’ Constantine said, because coffee was possibly her only friend at the moment. It was her saviour at two a.m. and again at four, and it woke her up in the mornings, and now, after this one, she could tackle the mountain of washing both Henry and the baby created. She watched Nico’s lips move into a small smile as he got her wry humour.

He was really rather patient, making her a drink and letting her feed her baby in gentle silence for a little while. Patient was something she would never have expected a man like Nico to be in a circumstance such as this.

She had read more about him, of course, since then.

A man who jetted around Europe and America, a man of many lovers and deals, he bristled with restless energy and yet, as she fed the baby, he sat on a barstool and sipped on his coffee. Then he looked, not in an embarrassed or awkward way because she was feeding, he just looked straight into her eyes and his voice when it came seemed to reach into her soul, because he was the first person to ask without accusation, the first person to want to hear her version of events.

‘What happened?’

And she hesitated, because she honestly hadn’t had time to assess—the stocktake of her life had been put into the too-hard basket as she’d merely struggled to survive. Now this beautiful man sat in someone else’s kitchen, and though he must have demands and difficult questions, he did not ask the one she had dreaded most, he did not refer to their son. He just looked to her and after a moment her answer came.

‘I don’t know.’ She waited for a caustic comment, for a mental slap in return for her vagueness, but still he just sat. ‘I don’t know how I got to this point.’ She closed her eyes for a moment, felt her child suckle her breast, and was so grateful for that, that even if her milk supply was drying up, for now she could feed him. She loved the moments together where the world disappeared and it was just the two of them, but always she was forced to return.

‘You asked for an annulment?’

Constantine’s eyes jerked up, realising he wanted the full story, and close to a year ago seemed like a lifetime now. It had been a very different life she had led since then, and she’d been a very different person then, too.

‘I couldn’t stay married.’ Connie said. ‘I simply couldn’t …’ And unlike her parents, unlike Stavros, unlike the priest, the lawyer, the maids, everyone, he did not roar or cry or beg or weep or explode, he just accepted her words. ‘I told them that night …’ She looked for his reaction, but he gave none. ‘The night I saw you in the bar …’

He gave nothing away, did not tell her how long that night had been, of the disappointment he had felt, the regret of waking in an empty bed, or that he had offered her more than he had any other woman.

Instead he waited for her.

‘They didn’t take it well.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘I know what families are like on the islands.’

And for a moment she conceded.

‘My mother …’ He hesitated after using that word, but he did not change it. ‘She said at first you had moved to Athens …’

Wearily she nodded. She had been too busy to stop and think of that terrible time, and it was exhausting even now to remember it. ‘I found a job, but it turned out that Dimitri knew the owner, or rather he made it his business to find out who he was and discredit me …’ Connie’s voice was flat. ‘Everything I touched turned to nothing, every door that opened slammed closed as soon as people knew my name. I was told when I left that Dimitri would do his best to destroy me …’ She gave a defeated shrug. ‘I guess they were right.’

‘They are cruel and fight nasty when they believe they have been slighted,’ Nico said, because his parents had once attempted the same with him, doing their best to halt any opportunity that presented itself, doing everything they could to get him to return. ‘What did you do?’

‘I had enough money to get to London. I thought I would have more chance here given that no one knew me, but my parents cut me off completely, the money I had soon ran out …’ She gave a tense swallow. ‘My pregnancy was starting to show …’ And she did not even attempt to explain it, for this he could not understand—no man could understand the fear of being pregnant with nothing and no one to fall back on. A fear not for yourself but for the life growing inside you.

He fought down the instinct to pounce, to ask the inevitable, because a deeper instinct told him now was not the time. He could feel her exhaustion, knew the terse, heated debate that it surely would be, and it was not fair to her to have it now.

She was in not fit state and it could wait, Nico told himself, for facts were facts, and, whoever the father, that would not change.

Still the question burnt within him and she could not know that he sat and wrestled with himself.

It must wait, Nico told himself, because, despite his ruthlessness at times, he only ever fought with equals, and at the moment she was weak.

‘This was the only job I could get,’ Connie continued as the unvoiced question remained unanswered. ‘I needed something that came with accommodation.’ She closed her eyes in shame, because this was never how she wanted to be seen. ‘And it was somewhere to come home to after the birth …’ She faltered for a moment because, of all the terrible times, that had been the worst. Giving birth in a busy hospital, feeling so alone and frightened, and it had been a complicated, difficult delivery. All she could hear at the end had been Nico’s name, for she had been screaming for him.

That he did not need to know.

All she had to show him was that she would be okay. ‘I am getting things sorted,’ she said. ‘Soon, in a few weeks, I will start applying for better jobs, once I have sorted out a creche and a flat.’ Her voice quivered at the enormity of all she faced. With no references, no money, how on earth could she support her child?

‘You don’t have to worry about money. I will—’

‘Oh, please …’ Far from comforting her, his words actually terrified her. She didn’t want him to have a hold on her, didn’t want to be tied to a man who, by his own admission, wanted neither a wife nor children. Her one brief foray into marriage had been a clear disaster. As for her relationship with Stavros, while in it, she had thought it bearable, had assumed that was how people lived, but looking back it had been hell. Her self-esteem was shot from the constant rejections and less than veiled criticisms. She wanted her child to have an independent, strong mother, and she would work her way towards being that, and certainly she could not imagine him, so sleek and elegant, sharing access to her son. ‘I want to make my own way. I want to support him myself.’