The Kyriakis Baby

“You’re saying that for Lexi’s sake, you’d risk being used for sex?” Leon asked.

It wasn’t like that, she told herself. It wasn’t just sex. Maybe that was his attitude to her at the moment, but she’d convince him of her innocence, and then his feelings would change.

It was a huge gamble. But worth going for.

“If that’s the price,” she mumbled crossly.

Her gaze was fixed with unlikely intensity on the floor. The atmosphere burned around Emma as, presumably, Leon battled to stop himself laughing out loud.

“Agreed,” he said when she’d abandoned all hope of an answer.

They’re the men who have everything—except a bride…

Wealth, power, charm—what else could a heart-stoppingly handsome tycoon need? In the GREEK TYCOONS miniseries you have already been introduced to some gorgeous Greek multimillionaires who are in need of wives.

Now it’s the turn of favorite author Sara Wood, with her attention-grabbing romance The Kyriakis Baby.

This tycoon has met his match, and he’s decided he has to have her…whatever that takes!

The Kyriakis Baby

Sara Wood

MILLS & BOON

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My thanks to Maria Doumas for all her help, and to Richie and Heidi for providing me with the essential element of my research on little Lexi—my two-year-old granddaughter Hannah!

Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

PROLOGUE

EMMA sat staring into space, her eyes huge with fear. Her solicitor would come, she told herself. He’d have the answer. He must.

The question wouldn’t go away. It was driving her mad. Over and over again it hammered into her aching head.

Where is my baby?

She broke her numb silence with a whimpering moan of despair, a thin, poignant figure drawn in on herself, a woman lost in her own dark world.

Only two weeks ago, she’d stood petrified with fear in the dock and had heard the foreman of the jury pronounce her guilty. It had all been a blur from then on. At Leyton Women’s Prison, a note had been handed to her from her brother-in-law, Leon. It had been brutal in its simplicity. ‘I have your child.’

She’d heard nothing since. Her baby, Alexandra, had vanished off the face of the earth.

From that moment on, life had been suspended for Emma. Perhaps she had eaten at some time—she wouldn’t know. And sleep had come only when her exhausted body could take no more of the waking hell. Even then she’d been plagued by nightmares from which she’d woken sobbing, and drenched in a cold sweat.

That morning, preparing for visiting time, she’d noticed with sudden shock that the months of stress had etched a network of fine lines around her mouth. Furrows scoured her high forehead and a deep notch had been excavated between her brows.

Leon had done this to her.

In the cheap mirror she’d seen that her blonde hair was now lank instead of thick and lustrous. Emma had grimaced, had scraped the lifeless hanks back into a severe pony-tail and had fastened them carelessly with a rubber band, unconcerned that spikes of hair stuck out at all angles.

She looked awful. So what? Who was there to see? She just didn’t care. Nothing mattered any more. How could it? Alexandra was her baby and she’d been spirited away. And she was just six months old.

Her baby. The focus of her entire existence. Something miraculous, salvaged from a terrible marriage to Taki. Sweet, dimpled little Lexi, whose chuckles and sunny nature could make her smile despite her worries and who’d roused in her such a fierce and tender passion that she’d been shaken by its profundity.

And now Lexi had disappeared. Sitting disconsolately at her appointed place, she took a dog-eared photo from her pocket and stared at it with empty eyes.

Her thoughts tortured her. What happened, she wondered miserably, when a baby was abruptly parted from its mother? Would she eat? Would her child be bewildered and upset—or would anyone’s arms, anyone’s smile be acceptable? She thought of Lexi, sick from crying, and groaned.

‘Oh, my baby!’

She lifted a frail hand to stifle a sob. The action made her vaguely aware that people were stirring around her, their voices rising above the normal subdued mutter that was normally adopted in the large visitors’ hall.

Dragged from her inner torment, she lifted her head and gloomily followed the source of interest. And instantly she froze, transfixed by the man who stood in the distant doorway.

Not her solicitor. Someone tall, dark and broad and undeniably Greek, his sharply tailored city suit and impeccable grooming quite incongruous amid the plethora of T-shirts, jogging pants and designer trainers.

Leon. The unfeeling brute who’d abducted her baby.

The pain in her chest intensified as a harsh protest scraped its way from her throat. He’d come to gloat! To read her the riot act, to talk about her lack of morals and his right to take Alexandra.

Right! she seethed. What about her right to justice? Her rights of motherhood? Why had she automatically lost her rights as a human being?

Battle-ready, Emma drew her weary body upright, her eyes glittering with anger. She’d have him arrested! He was a fool to have come…

The thudding of her heart seemed to trip and falter as logic poured cold water on her impetuous thoughts. Leon was no fool. If he was here, it was to say something important. What could that be?

Her fevered imagination quickly provided answers. Her baby was dead. A cot death. An accident. An unidentified sickness…

She gasped, and somehow she was on her feet, catapulted by an unknown force that had flung her chair violently to the ground. Leon’s eyes swerved to meet hers and he recoiled in shock, as if her appearance appalled him. But Emma was way beyond personal pride.

‘Is she dead?’ she yelled hysterically across the vast hall.

Aghast, he shook his head and mouthed one word. ‘No!’

She swayed, her whole body sagging in relief. A warder roughly ordered her to sit but her knees were already giving way beneath her and if a fellow prisoner hadn’t righted her chair Emma would have collapsed in a crumpled heap onto the floor.

Her baby was alive. Alive! ‘Thank you, God. Thank you,’ she whispered emotionally.

She trembled all over, her knees juddering against the low metal table. Hands as shaky as a drug addict’s covered her eyes. She knew she couldn’t take much more.

I must stay calm, she thought in panic. To be more controlled and rational. OK, maybe restraint had seldom featured in her impulsive and passionate nature and her life had been splattered with spectacular foot-in-mouth mistakes—but she had to find some semblance of control. Leon must be persuaded to surrender Lexi.

All her instincts were urging her to hurl abuse and accusations at Leon, to repeat the terrible things she’d privately called him over the past nightmare days. After that, she thought grimly, it would be a nice twist to get him thrown in jail.

But a rare caution warned her against this. He held the welfare of her baby in his hands. Perhaps only he knew where Lexi was. If she annoyed him, she might never see her daughter again.

Her bitter scowl of disappointment would have unnerved him if he hadn’t been engrossed in talking to a warder. She glared. Surrounded by grey and depressed people, he looked indecently fit and vigorous as he finished his conversation and threaded his way carefully between the seated prisoners and their visitors.

It seemed to Emma that his whole manner suggested he was concerned that any contact with them might contaminate him irrevocably with some vile disease.

Yes, she thought, near to choking with indignation, this place is a terrible dump! The atmosphere is rank, the bare walls are grimmer than Alcatraz and the clank of keys and clang of gates are two of the most chilling sounds on earth! And she, sweet heaven, she would have to suffer it every wretched day of her life for the next five years!

The injustice made her head spin. She was innocent. Innocent!

Aching with anger she tortured herself with the milestones she could miss in five years of little Lexi’s life. Her baby’s first words, her first steps, the momentous day when she’d start school. And daily cuddles. Smiles, gurgles, small loving arms…

She gave a shuddering sob. Those joys were her right as a mother! This was her baby, her very flesh and blood, and the person she cared for above all others. How dared he play hide-and-seek with her child!

Resolutions scattered. Uncontainable fury brought her to her feet again when he had come to a mere yard or two’s distance of her trembling figure.

‘Where is my baby? What have you done with her?’ she demanded fiercely.

‘Sit down.’ Leon snapped.

His outstretched hand gave an imperious wave and, to her amazement, it halted the two frowning warders bearing down on her. Authority, she thought with glowering resentment. He has it in spades. Well, not with me!

‘Answer my question, damn you!’ she insisted grimly, remaining on her feet out of sheer cussedness.

Tense, and smouldering with a volcanic ferocity, Leon slid into the seat at her table. And yet even there he still managed to dominate the room, perhaps because when seated his height and breadth seemed more than that of the average man. Emma scowled. Nothing about the handsome Leon could ever be remotely termed average.

The blue-black of his hair was more intense, the density of his dark and expressive eyes more mesmerising than any she’d ever seen. The people who met him were always disturbed, intimidated or attracted, depending on their sex and their connection with him. But no one ever forgot the charismatic Leon Kyriakis.

And nor had she. Not one moment of their lovemaking. Despite everything, she felt his inexorable sexual pull now and wilted at the sheer strength of his strong-boned and finely chiselled face, and the curl of his electrifyingly sensual mouth that once she’d kissed and tasted so avidly, so lovingly. Until his utterly callous betrayal.

The furnace in her loins fuelled her loathing as his burning eyes captured her gaze. For a second or two a crackling hostility shot between them, heating up the atmosphere till she felt her skin too must be on fire. And then his ink-black eyes silvered with lethal contempt.

‘Sit down, Emma,’ he repeated harshly, ‘or you’ll be back in your cell with your knitting and your mug of cocoa and I’ll be halfway to the airport.’

Alarmed, she promptly obeyed, her head lowered in anger while she curbed a wealth of tart answers. She could have kicked herself. She’d known she had to handle him carefully. And yet she’d stupidly waded in with all guns blazing. Not much of a kid-gloves approach, was it?

Calm. Restraint. Operate brain before mouth. But how, when violent emotions constantly erupted within her? She missed her baby desperately and her greatest fear was that Lexi might be pining too. No one else knew her little ways. Nobody could understand her baby as she could.

Tears suddenly blurred her vision. Knuckling them away miserably, she looked up with dead, hopeless eyes, all the agony in her heart showing plainly on her ashen face.

‘I can’t bear this any longer! If you have a shred of pity, you must tell me! Where is my baby?’ she implored.

Leon immediately edged his chair back, frowning down at the table. ‘Safe.’

He cleared his throat and fiddled with his cuff, apparently annoyed that it was showing a centimetre less than its twin.

‘Thank God,’ she whispered.

She swallowed ineffectively. There was a solid lump blocking her throat and she gagged on it, desperate to clear it so she could speak. Seeing this, he pushed a glass of water towards her and she stared, oddly surprised at the contrast between their two hands.

His was tanned, broad and virtually pulsing with life. Hers looked a ghastly white, just skin and bone, as if, she thought deliriously, she was in a living death.

She clasped the glass as if grabbing a lifeline but her hand shook too much when she raised it and she abruptly put it back on the table. No histrionics. Reasoned argument. For her baby’s sake…

The hard lump eased a little and she could swallow. ‘How…how is she?’

Her voice quavered and his mouth immediately contracted into a hard line. What had she said to annoy him? Emma felt awash with terror in case he lost his not inconsiderable temper and refused to listen to her.

‘Don’t do this to me. I must know,’ she begged wretchedly.

‘Alexandra is well and happy.’

He spoke in a stiff undertone and she leaned far across the table, frantic to hear every word he uttered. Leon seemed to shrink back as if she was invading his space. He loathed her, she thought dully. How was she to win him round?

She bit her soft lower lip intently, anxious to hear about her beloved baby. ‘Is she very upset? Does she…cry much?’ she said jerkily.

‘No.’

Her eyes widened. ‘Don’t lie to me!’ She flung the words at him. ‘She must!’

‘If I say she doesn’t, then it’s true,’ he answered irritably. ‘She’ll cry for a while when she’s tired or hungry or needing comfort but she soon stops. Otherwise she’s content. I am not a liar. I come from an honest people,’ he pointed out, forcing the words fiercely through his tightly clenched teeth.

‘I’m honest too. I don’t deserve to be in prison, accused of fraud,’ she hurled.

‘Such injustice.’ He tutted, his expression cynical and disbelieving.

Emma realised that it was no use trying to persuade him that she was whiter than snow. He had her down as a criminal and that was that.

‘Lexi’s OK, then?’ she persisted in a plaintive tone. ‘She’s eating properly?’

‘How many times do I have to tell you?’ he said irritably. ‘She’s absolutely fine. Use your common sense. Why would I allow any harm to come to her?’

Emma paused to consider this. In her experience Greeks loved children and had a way with them. Lexi was probably being spoiled rotten.

A twinge, as sharp as a knife, twisted in her breast with such force that her hand lifted to ease it. For her daughter’s sake she felt relieved that all was well, but she felt more bereft than ever.

Maybe she wasn’t necessary to Lexi’s well-being at all. Her child could exist without her. But could she exist without her child? Her heart went cold and she shuddered, sliding her thin arms around her shivering body, consoling herself with the fact that only she knew all the tiny things that made Lexi truly content.

‘She does have her teddy bear, doesn’t she?’ she began shakily. ‘And I don’t suppose you realise that she needs her yellow blanket—’

‘It’s with her as we speak. I removed everything from your house which looked remotely as if it belonged to Lexi,’ he retorted.

Emma gaped, astounded at his thoroughness. ‘You planned this!’ she accused hotly. ‘You knew exactly what you would do if the jury pronounced me guilty—’

‘Of course I did. I couldn’t allow my late brother’s child to remain in the care of a stranger,’ he snapped.

‘She’s my neighbour. Lexi knows her. It was only temporary, anyway,’ she argued. ‘I fully expected to be free—’

‘And what did you organise if not?’ he asked sardonically.

‘If there was a problem, my neighbour was to bring her to the mother-and-baby unit here.’

He still hadn’t answered the question. Where was her daughter? Suddenly she had a flash of fear, picturing her baby abandoned outside in a car, or in her buggy by the prison entrance where anyone could abduct her… She drew in a choking breath.

‘And what about your babysitting arrangements? If you’re here,’ she said jerkily, her voice rising in panic, ‘who’s looking after Lexi now?’

His eyes flickered. ‘Marina. My—’

But she’d got there before him. ‘Your wife!’ she said breathily.

Emma sat stunned. Of course. Who else? she thought dully. And then she noticed something strange. There was a sliver of pain knifing across the dark depths of his eyes and bitterness had drawn his mouth into a hard line.

He wasn’t happy, she realised with a shock. Pangs of half-remembered love touched her shuttered heart. She’d adored him once. They’d been students together and he’d been everything to her. But one day, totally out of the blue, she’d seen him emerging from a local restaurant with a drop-dead gorgeous blonde on his arm. Her world had disintegrated rapidly.

‘An engagement party,’ the obliging Greek waiter had said, his apron stuffed with tips from the affluent, laughing crowd.

The lintel above the entrance where they were posing for photographs had born a banner with the elaborately printed legend, Leon and Marina. It had been emblazoned with hearts and love knots. The waiter picked up a discarded menu with the same design and the appalled Emma had known that this must have been planned for some time.

Tears of rage and misery had rendered her speechless. He’d been organising his wedding while vowing he loved her…even while he was sleeping with her!

‘Leon!’ she’d cried rawly.

He’d looked directly at her and turned a deathly white. ‘Emma!’

All eyes had been upon her then. Clearly appalled that she’d found him out, he’d spoken to a younger man at his side who’d come over and introduced himself as Leon’s brother, Taki.

‘He’s the Kyriakis heir, she’s the Christofides heiress,’ Taki had explained gently as he’d driven her home. ‘Our families have been linked for generations. Don’t take this personally,’ he’d said soothingly, when she’d continued to sob. ‘It’s how we do things. We need sex so we find a woman who is amenable. Then we marry a more suitable virgin.’

The humiliating words dug deep. She’d been used as a whore! Bought presents, taken out to dinner…and in return he’d pillaged her heart and soul and body!

Broken-hearted, her self-esteem at rock bottom, she’d relied increasingly on the attentive, kind Taki. His respect for her had been deeply touching. Eventually she’d succumbed to Taki’s charm offensive and married him, unaware of his fatal need to outdo his rival brother.

She gave a grimace. Incredibly, Taki had believed that Leon would be jealous of his marriage to her. But why, when she had nothing—and the elegant, shopaholic Marina had breeding, wealth and social position?

Her heart thudded in alarm. This was the woman who was now looking after her child! What, she thought with uncharacteristic sourness, did a clothes-horse on legs know about such things?

Her brows beetled together in a fierce scowl. ‘Your wife had better be the Mary Poppins of child care—or you’ll have me to reckon with!’ she muttered.

‘Marina has a daughter of her own,’ he drawled crushingly.

She felt she’d been stabbed in the lungs. Leon had a child. ‘Bully for you both,’ she cried, finding her breath again. ‘Then, you don’t need mine.’

‘Damn right, I don’t.’

Her mouth opened in astonishment. He didn’t even want her darling Lexi. ‘Then, why take her?’ she asked, aghast.

He looked down his patrician nose at her. ‘I had no choice.’

‘No…choice?’ She spluttered the words incoherently.

Leon looked grim. ‘She needs a home. She needs us.’

‘Me. She needs me. I’m her mother,’ she quavered.

‘Not much of one.’

‘I’m terrific.’

‘Matter of opinion.’

‘I’ll get out on appeal—’

‘I think not. The evidence was clear-cut and damning. Get used to this situation, Emma,’ he said sharply. ‘Serve your time—’

‘I will if I must, unfair though it is. I could bear anything if I had my baby back.’

‘Out of the question.’

Incensed, she banged the table and knocked over the glass of water which spilled onto her lap. Leon produced a handkerchief but she refused it, too caught up in her bid for her child to care that her dress was wet through.

‘If you’re a father,’ she said, hoarse with emotion, ‘then think how you’d feel if your child was taken from you.’

Astonishingly, his gaze became cynical, as if that wouldn’t be hard to bear. He has no heart, she thought bleakly. Her beloved baby wasn’t even wanted. How could he feel like that? The only Greek in the world who didn’t like children and he had to snatch her baby.

‘It’s happening all the time,’ he observed obliquely. ‘People split up, children end up with one of the parents—’

‘But I’m the remaining parent,’ she pointed out, barely clinging to sanity. Why couldn’t he understand what Lexi meant to her? She had no one else in the world. ‘You have no right to abduct my child. I could have you arrested.’

‘That would be extremely unwise,’ he said with quiet menace.

She tensed in alarm. ‘Why?’

‘It wouldn’t get your child back.’

‘Maybe not,’ she muttered bitterly, giving her wet dress a shake, ‘but it would bring a big grin to my face and play merry hell with your social life.’

His breath hissed in and he fixed her with eyes as cold as charity. ‘You’d do that to score points off me?’ he enquired softly.

Her desolation intensified. Of course not. She’d gain nothing—other than a useless, petty satisfaction—by giving Leon grief. And she’d ruin her chances of finding Lexi.

Her chest seemed to tighten with despair. ‘I’d do anything, anything to get my own child back where she rightfully belongs,’ she declared jerkily.

There was a lift of a black-winged eyebrow. ‘You’re at a slight disadvantage being in prison,’ he observed.

She flushed, a hectic colour burning two scarlet spots on her pale, bony cheeks.

‘Have you no heart? No soul? She should be with me—’

‘Alexandra might be legally yours but that’s as far as it goes,’ he said sternly. ‘You just aren’t fit to be her mother.’

‘That’s not fair,’ she seethed, outraged at the slur.

‘Fair? You dare to speak of fairness?’ he rasped, his voice shaking with barely contained fury as he struggled to keep the volume down. ‘How can you sit there claiming to be as innocent as a Madonna? You systematically defrauded members of my family and our lifelong friends and business acquaintances, and left them penniless,’ he hissed.

His big fists clenched on the table and she stared at them, suddenly frightened of his intense passion.

‘But that’s the point—I didn’t,’ she protested, her voice wobbling alarmingly. ‘It…it wasn’t me—’

‘You disgust me!’ he scathed. ‘Have you any idea of the consequences of your crime in our close-knit society? Our family bank here in London was seen as the safest place this side of Fort Knox. People relied on us. Trusted us. No wonder Taki got drunk! His own wife had destroyed his family business, his family honour and innocent lives. He’d lost his job and his own honour—’