Mediterranean Mavericks: Greeks
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They’d have to leave behind all the final memories from Fairholme. From her childhood. From her mother.
The thought made her throat ache.
But Letty was six months pregnant now. Her heart pounded as she put her hand protectively over her baby bump. She knew from the ultrasound at the doctor’s office that she was expecting a boy. How had time fled so quickly? In less than three months, by late November, she’d be cuddling her sweet baby in her arms.
Or else she’d be weeping as the baby’s coldhearted father took him away from her forever. She still remembered Darius’s cold, dark eyes, heard the flat echo of his voice.
If by some unfortunate chance you become pregnant, selling me our baby would be your only option.
She was suddenly terrified she’d waited too long to leave New York.
Going into the tiny kitchen, she tried to keep her voice cheerful as she said, “Dad, I’m going to pick up my last paycheck, then buy bus tickets.”
“I still don’t understand why Rochester,” he said with a scowl.
She sighed. “I told you. My friend Belle knows someone who knows someone who might be able to get me a job there. Everyone says it’s nice. I need you to start packing.”
“I have other plans today.” His voice was peevish.
“Dad, our lease is up in two days. I know it’s not fun, but whatever you don’t pack, I’m going to have to call the junk dealer to take.” Her throat ached. Maybe all their leftover stuff was junk, but it was all they had left. Of Fairholme. Of her mother. Her voice tightened. “Look, I know it won’t be easy.”
Sitting at the peeling Formica table where he was doing the crossword, Howard glared at her with irritation. “You just need to tell that man of yours you’re pregnant.”
They’d been having this argument for months. She gritted her teeth. “I can’t. I told you.”
“Poppycock. A man should be given the opportunity to take care of his own child. And you know, Letty,” he added gruffly, “I won’t always be here to look after you.”
Howard—look after her? When was the last time that had been true, instead of the other way around? She looked at her father, then sighed. “Why don’t you believe me?”
“I knew Darius as a boy.” Fiddling with his untouched coffee mug, he looked at her seriously. “If you’d just help him see past his anger, he’s got a good heart—”
“I’m not gambling on his good heart,” she said bitterly. “Not after the way he treated me.”
Her father looked thoughtful. “I could just call him…”
“No!” Letty shouted. Her eyes blazed. “If you ever go behind my back like that again, I will never talk to you for the rest of my life. Do you understand? Never.”
“Okay, okay,” he grumbled. “But he’s your baby’s father. You should just marry him and be happy.”
That left her speechless for a minute.
“Just be packed by the time I return,” she said finally, and she went out into the gray, rainy September morning. She picked up her last check at the diner—for a pitiful amount, but every dollar would help—and said farewell to her fellow waitress Belle, who’d moved to New York from Texas the previous Christmas.
“Anytime you need anything, you call me, you hear?” Belle hugged her fiercely. “No matter where you are, Rochester or Rome, remember I’m only a phone call away!”
Letty didn’t make friends easily, so it was hard to say goodbye to the only real friend she’d made since she’d left Fairholme. The thought of going to yet another new apartment in a new town where she didn’t know anyone, in hopes of starting a job that might not even exist, filled her with dread. She tried to smile.
“You too, Belle,” she managed. Then, wiping her eyes, she said goodbye to everyone else at the diner and went back out into the rain to deposit her check at the bank and get two one-way bus tickets to Rochester.
When Letty got back home, her hair and clothes were damp with rain. Her father wasn’t at the apartment, and his suitcases were empty. All their belongings were still untouched, exactly where she’d left them.
She’d just sort through everything herself, she thought wearily. Once she’d figured out how many boxes they’d have to leave behind, she’d call the junk dealer.
Of the eight billion dollars her father’s investment fund had lost, three billion had since been recovered. But the authorities had been careful not to leave him with anything of value. Their possessions had been picked over long ago by the Feds and bankruptcy court.
What was left was all crammed into this tiny apartment. The broken flute her mother had played at Juilliard. The ceramic animals Constance had painted for her daughter as gifts, starting with her first birthday. The leather-bound classic books from her grandfather’s collection, water-damaged, so worthless. Except to them. Her great-grandfather’s old ship in a bottle. Her grandma Spencer’s homemade Christmas ornaments. All would have to be left.
We’ll get through it, Letty told herself fiercely. They could still be happy. She’d raise her baby with love, in a snug cottage overlooking a garden of flowers. Her son would have a happy childhood, just as Letty had.
He wouldn’t be raised in some stark gray penthouse without a mother, without love…
Letty started digging through the first pile of clutter. She planned to stay up the whole night scrubbing down the apartment, in hopes their landlord might actually give back her security deposit.
Hearing a hard knock at the door, she rose to her feet, overwhelmed with relief. Her father had come back to help. He must have forgotten his key again. Sorting through their possessions would be so much easier with two of them—
Opening the door, she gasped.
Darius stood in her doorway, dressed in a black button-down shirt with well-cut jeans that showed the rugged lines of his powerful body. It was barely noon, but his jaw was dark with five-o’clock shadow.
For a moment, even hating and fearing him as she did, Letty was dazzled by that ruthless masculine beauty.
“Letty,” he greeted her coldly. Then his eyes dropped to her baby bump.
With an intake of breath, Letty tried to shut the door in his face.
He blocked her with his powerful shoulder and pushed his way into her apartment.
CHAPTER FOUR
SIX MONTHS AGO Darius had wanted vengeance.
He’d gotten it. He’d ruthlessly taken Letitia Spencer’s virginity, then tossed her out into a cold winter’s night. He’d seduced her, insulted her. He’d thrown the money in her face, made her feel cheap.
It had been delicious.
But since then, to his dismay, he’d discovered the price of that vengeance.
In Darius’s childhood, back on the Greek island where he was born, his grandmother had often told him that vengeance hurt the person who committed it worse than the one who endured it. When the kids at school mocked his illegitimate birth, sneering at his mother’s abandonment—Even your own mitéra didn’t want you—his grandmother had told him to ignore them, to take the high road.
He’d tried, but the boys’ taunts had only grown worse until he was finally forced to punch them. They’d all been bloodied in the fight, but especially Darius, since it had been one against four.
“So you see I’m right,” his grandmother had said gravely, bandaging him afterward. “You were hurt worse.”
In Darius’s own opinion, that vengeance had been not only justified, but strategic. The boys at school had never taunted him again.
But this time, his grandmother had been proved right. Because Darius’s vengeance against Letty had hurt him more than he’d ever imagined.
Instead of quenching the flame, that night together had only built his desire for her into a blazing fire.
He wanted her. Every night for the last six months, he’d half expected Letty to contact him. Once her prideful anger had faded, surely she would want him back—if not for his body, then obviously for his money.
But she never had. And when he’d remembered the haunted look on her beautiful heart-shaped face the night she’d told him she loved him, the night he’d taken her virginity and tossed her ruthlessly into the dark, he’d had moments when he’d wondered if he might have been wrong.
But how could he be wrong? The evidence spoke for itself.
Still, in the months since their night together, his continual raw desire for her had made him edgy. He’d intended to remain as his company’s CEO for a year, guiding his team in the transition after the sale. Instead, he’d gotten into an argument with the head of the conglomerate and left within weeks. Darius could no longer endure working for someone else, but he’d signed a noncompete clause, so couldn’t start a new business in the same field.
Bereft of the twenty-hour workdays that had been the entirety of his life for a decade, he hadn’t known how to fill his hours. He tried spending some of his fortune. He’d bought a race car, then ten cars, then a race track. He’d bought four planes, all with interiors done in different colors. No. Next he’d tried extreme sports: skydiving, heli-skiing. Yawn.
Worst of all, he’d been surrounded by beautiful women, all keen to get his attention. And he hadn’t wanted a single one of them.
He’d been bored. Worse. He’d felt frustrated and angry. Because even with the endless freedom of time and money, he couldn’t have what he really wanted.
Letty.
Now, seeing her in the flesh, so beautiful—so pregnant—he hated himself for ever taking his vengeance. No matter how richly she’d deserved it, look where that thrill of hatred and lust had led.
Pregnant. With his baby.
Even wearing an oversize white T-shirt and baggy jeans, Letty was somehow more sensual, more delectable, than any stick-thin model in a skintight cocktail dress. Letty’s pregnancy curves were lush. Her skin glowed. Her breasts had grown enormous. With effort, he forced his gaze down to her belly.
“So it’s true,” he said in a low voice. “You’re pregnant.”
She looked frozen. Then she squared her shoulders, tossing her dark ponytail in a futile gesture of bravado. “So?”
“Is the baby mine?”
“Yours?” Her eyes shot sparks of fire, even though she had dark shadows beneath, as if she hadn’t been sleeping well. “What makes you think the baby’s yours? Maybe I slept with ten men since our night. Maybe I slept with a hundred—”
The thought of her sleeping with other men made Darius sick. “You’re lying.”
“How do you know?”
“Because your father told me.”
The fight went out of her. She went pale. “My…my father?”
“He wanted me to pay for the information, but when I refused, he told me everything. For free.”
“Maybe he was lying,” she said weakly. She looked as if she might faint.
“Sit down,” Darius ordered. “I’ll get you a glass of water. Then we’ll talk.”
She sank into the old pullout sofa, her cheeks pale. It wasn’t hard for him to find the kitchen. The apartment was pathetically small—just a postage-stamp-sized living room, surrounded by an even smaller bedroom, bathroom and kitchen.
He looked around him, amazed that the onetime heiress of Fairholme, born into a forty-room mansion, was now living with her father in an apartment the same size as the room her mother had once used to arrange flowers off the solarium.
Old boxes and mementos were packed everywhere. The leftovers of her family’s former life—items that obviously weren’t valuable enough to be sold, but too precious to be thrown away—were clustered around the old television and piled tightly along the walls. A pillow and folded blanket sat beside the pullout sofa.
Darius walked across the worn carpet to the peeling linoleum of the telephone-booth-sized kitchen. Dust motes floated in the weak gray sunlight. The barred window overlooked an air shaft that faced other apartments, just a few feet away. With the bars across the window, it felt like prison.
It’s better than they deserve, he told himself firmly. And it was still nicer than his childhood home in Heraklios. At least this place had electricity, running water. At least this place had a parent.
Darius’s own parents had both left him, in different ways, two days after he was born. His unemployed father had discovered his newborn son crying in a basket by his door, left out in the rain by his former lover, a wealthy, spoiled heiress who’d abandoned the child she’d never wanted.
Fired from his job, Eugenios Kyrillos found himself unable to get another. No other rich Greek fathers, it seemed, wanted to risk their daughters’ virtue to a chauffeur who didn’t know his place. Desperate to find work, he’d departed for America, leaving his baby son to be raised by his grandmother in the desolate house by the sea.
The first time Darius had spoken to his father in person had been at his grandmother’s funeral, when he was eleven. Then his father had taken him from Greece, away from everything and everyone he’d ever known, and brought him to America.
Fairholme had seemed like an exotic palace, where everyone spoke a language he couldn’t understand. His father had seemed just as strange, the emotionally distant chauffeur of this grand American king—Howard Spencer.
And look what the Spencers had come to now.
Darius had long ago torn down his grandmother’s shack in Heraklios and built a palatial villa. He had a penthouse in Manhattan, a ski chalet in Switzerland, his private race track outside London. His personal fortune was greater than anything Howard Spencer ever dreamed of.
And the Spencers were now living in this tiny, threadbare apartment.
But instead of feeling a sense of triumph, Darius felt strangely unsettled as he walked through her dreary kitchen and poured a glass of water from the tap. Returning to the equally depressing living room, he handed Letty the glass, then looked at the folded blankets and pillow on the floor.
“Who sleeps on the sofa?”
Letty’s cheeks turned pink as she looked down at the sagging cushions. “I do.”
“You pay all the rent, and your father gets the bedroom?”
“He hasn’t been sleeping well. I just want him to be comfortable.”
Darius looked at her incredulously. “And you’re pregnant.”
“What do you care?” she said bitterly. “You’re just here to take my baby away.”
Well. True. His eyes fell on the empty suitcases. “Where were you planning to go?”
“Anywhere you couldn’t find us.”
Darius stared down at her grimly. After his conversation with Howard Spencer, he’d had his investigator check up on Letty and found she’d only recently left her job as a waitress. She was still broke. None of the other employees remembered seeing any men around her, except one waitress, Belle, who had described Darius himself.
It seemed that, contrary to all previous assumptions, Letty wasn’t a gold digger. Not with other men.
Not even with Darius.
In that, he’d misjudged her. After the way Letty had crushed him so devastatingly ten years ago, informing him that she was leaving him for a richer man, he’d believed Letty was a fortune hunter to the core.
It made sense. His own mother had abandoned him as a two-day-old newborn for the exact same reason. To Calla, Darius had been the embarrassing result of a one-night liaison with her wealthy family’s chauffeur. She’d been determined to marry as befitted her station. She’d cared only about money and the social position that went with it.
But Letty wasn’t the same. At least not anymore.
Darius abruptly sat down on the sofa beside her. “Why didn’t you come to me when you found out you were pregnant? You had to know I would give you everything you needed and more.”
“Give? I knew you’d only take!” she said incredulously. “You threatened me!”
He ground his teeth. “We could have come to some arrangement.”
“You threatened to buy my baby, and if I tried to refuse, you would take the baby from me and—what were your words?—drive me into the sea?”
Darius didn’t like to be reminded of what he’d said six months ago. He’d rationalized his cruelty on the grounds of justice. But now…strictly speaking, he might have sounded a little less than civil, if not outright crazy. Irritated, he glared at her. “Drink your water.”
“Why? What did you put into it?” She sniffed the glass. “Some drug to make me pass out so you can kidnap me to a Park Avenue dungeon?”
He snorted a laugh in spite of himself. “The water came from your tap. Drink it or not. I just thought you looked pale.”
She stared at him for a moment, then took a tentative sip.
He looked around the tiny apartment. “Why are you living here?”
“Sadly, the presidential suite at the St. Regis was already booked.”
“I mean it, Letty. Why did you stay in New York all these years? You could have just left. Moved west where no one would know you or care about what your father did.”
She blinked fast. “I couldn’t abandon him. I love him.”
The man was a liar and a cheat, so of course Letty loved him. And she’d intended to raise their baby with him in the house, the man Darius blamed for his own father’s death. He ground his teeth. “Are you even taking care of yourself? Do you have a doctor?”
“Of course,” she said, stung. “How can you ask me that?”
“Because you’ve been working on your feet all day, until recently. And living in a place like this.” He gestured angrily around the threadbare, cluttered apartment. “It never occurred to you I’d want better for our child?”
She glared at him. “I wanted better! I wanted my baby’s father to be a good man I could trust and love. Instead, I got you, Darius, the worst man on earth!”
“You didn’t think so ten years ago.”
He immediately wished he could take the words back, because they insinuated that he still cared. Which he didn’t.
“Oh, you’re actually willing to talk about ten years ago? Fine. Let’s talk about it.” She briefly closed her eyes. “The reason I never showed up the night we were supposed to elope was because I was protecting you.”
His lip curled scornfully. “Protecting me.”
“Yes.” Her expression was cool. “The day we were going to elope, my father told me his investment fund was a fraud. It had stopped making money years before, but he’d continued making payouts to old investors by taking money from new ones. The Feds were already on his tail. I knew what was going to happen.” She lifted her luminous gaze. “I couldn’t let you get dragged into it. Not with all your big dreams. You’d just started your tech company…” She took a deep breath and whispered, “I couldn’t let my father’s crime ruin your life, too.”
For a moment, Darius’s heart twisted as he looked at her beautiful face, her heartbreaking hazel eyes. Then he remembered that he no longer had any heart vulnerable enough to break.
“You’re lying. You left me for another man. A rich man who could—how did you express it?—give you the life of luxury you deserved.” He snorted. “Though obviously he wasn’t much good. He must have dumped you the moment your father was arrested.”
“He couldn’t dump me.” She gave a low laugh. “He never existed.”
“What?”
“It was the only way I knew you’d let me go.” She lifted her chin and added with deliberate lightness, “I knew your weakness, even then.”
“Weakness?” he growled.
“You always said a man could be measured by his money. I knew you wouldn’t accept my just breaking up with you without explanation. So I gave you one. I told you I wanted someone richer. I knew you’d believe that.”
He stared at her. “It’s not true.”
“I’ve always been a terrible liar.” She looked sad. “But you still believed it. And immediately stopped calling me.”
Darius’s cheeks burned as he remembered how he’d felt that day. She was right.
He had loved her beyond reason, had been determined to fight for her at any cost. Until she’d told him she didn’t want him because he was poor. He’d believed it instantly. Because money made the man. No money, no man.
His throat felt tight as he looked at her, struggling not to believe she was telling the truth when every fiber of him believed her.
“And my father?” he said hoarsely. “Were you protecting him, too—getting him fired?”
“It’s true. I did have him fired. I told Dad I couldn’t bear to look at Eugenios because he reminded me of you. I did it because I was afraid my dad might ask him to invest his life savings in the bankrupt investment fund. My dad still believed he could fix everything then. I knew your father would give him his savings. He was loyal to the core.”
“Yes, he was,” he bit out. His father had always made his employer his top priority, even over his own son.
Darius couldn’t remember when his father had ever put his son first, over his job. He hadn’t attended Darius’s school events, not even his high school graduation. Being eternally at Howard Spencer’s beck and call, keeping the ten luxury cars all gleaming and ready, had been Eugenios’s total focus in life.
Oh, his father had fed and clothed him and given him a place to live in the two-bedroom apartment over the Fairholme garage that went with his job. But emotionally, they were oceans apart. The two men never talked.
Until that one awful day Darius told his father what he really thought of him…
But that memory was so white-hot with pain, he pushed it from his mind with all the force of a ball thrown from the earth to the moon.
Letty sighed beside him on the sofa. “I was trying to get your father away from Fairholme before he lost everything. But it was too late. He’d already invested his life savings years before. My dad had accepted it for his fund, even though it was such a small amount,” she said in a small voice. “As a favor.”
A small amount? His father’s life savings! The arrogance of them! Darius’s dark eyebrows lowered in fury.
“Howard Spencer is a liar and cheat,” he said harshly. “He destroyed people’s lives.”
“I know,” she whispered, looking down. She bit her full, rosy lower lip. “He never meant to.”
“He deserves to suffer.”
She looked up. “He has suffered. During his arrest and trial, I tried so hard to be strong for him. When he was in prison, I was there every visiting day. I cheered him up. Encouraged him. And all the time, I felt so scared. So alone.” She gave him a watery smile. “Sometimes the only thing I had to cling to was you.”
“Me?”
“At least I hadn’t dragged you down with me,” she whispered. “At least you were able to follow your dreams.”
Darius stared at her in shock.
Then he narrowed his eyes. She was trying to take credit for his accomplishments. To claim that if not for her sacrifice, he never would have made his fortune. She thought so little of him. Ice chilled his heart.
“And you expect me to be grateful?”
She looked startled. “I—”
“When you found out about your father’s crime,” he said tightly, “you should have come to me. I was your future husband. Instead, you lied to me. You cut me out of your life. Rather than asking for my help, you apparently believed I was so incompetent and useless, you felt you had to sacrifice yourself to save me.”
“No,” she gasped, “you’ve got it all wrong…”
“You never respected me.” He forced his voice to remain calm when his shoulders were tight with repressed fury. “Not my intelligence, my judgment or my strength.”
“Respected you?” she choked out. “I loved you. But I knew what was about to happen. I couldn’t let you drown with us. You had nothing—”
“You’re right,” he said coldly. “I had nothing. No money. No influence. You knew I couldn’t pay for lawyers or speak to politicians on your behalf. So you decided I was useless.”
“No.” She looked pale. “I just meant you had nothing to do with it—”
“You were my fiancée. I had everything to do with it. I would have tried to protect you, to comfort you. But you never gave me the chance. Because you believed I would fail.”
Her voice sounded strangled. “Darius—”