Ella knew that once again her own plans would be forced back on hold because it would be incredibly difficult for her to adequately complete her training while she was pregnant. But she knew too that sometimes it was necessary to make the best one could of a life change that came as a surprise. It would only be a bad development if she allowed herself to think that it was. All right, she conceded, the timing wasn’t what she would have chosen but she had always wanted children. She thought of all the worse things that could have happened, imagining how she would have felt had she had trouble conceiving, and before very long her dismay subsided entirely. As for Nikolai? She would wrap up her news like the gift she believed it to be and present it to him at the best possible moment.
* * *
‘You look so beautiful,’ Gramma enthused warmly as Ella twirled at the foot of the stairs.
Her father was misty-eyed at the picture his daughter made in her lace wedding gown. The gorgeous lace was her only adornment because Ella, conscious of her diminutive height, had opted for a plain design that bared only her back while encasing her arms and slender body in sleek lace. On her feet she rocked a considerably less conservative set of strappy, very high-heeled lace ankle boots, teamed with stockings and a garter. Nikolai liked boots and Ella was in the mood to give her bridegroom boots.
She hadn’t breathed a word about her pregnancy since she left the surgery. She felt that announcement should first be heard by her baby’s father. They travelled to the little local church in the limo Nikolai had sent, her bodyguard bringing up the rear in his own vehicle. The church was full and she walked down the aisle slowly on her father’s arm, noting all the unfamiliar faces on Nikolai’s side of the church and thinking it sad that he had not a single relative to grace those pews. She had, however, from the letters and cards she had found in the town house, discovered that Nikolai’s grandfather had twin sisters still living on the island of Crete, where the Drakos family had originated, and she wondered if Nikolai would make use of that information.
Nikolai watched his bride approach with bated breath. His brain told him there was no such thing as perfection but he saw only perfection, from the sleek coil of Ella’s bronze hair to the fine-tuned delicacy of her figure encased in exquisite lace. It had been less than a week since he had seen her but it felt like a lot longer. Thee mou, he couldn’t sleep for wanting her and, as he had so frequently told himself, getting married meant an end to cold showers and wondering where she was, who she might be with and what she was doing. He watched her drift towards him with keenly appreciative eyes of possession and pride.
Ella smiled at the altar, looking up into those melted-caramel eyes, admiring the smooth angle of his strong jawline, the jut of his nose and the high cheekbones that lent his lean, darkly handsome features such electrifying magnetism. The ring went onto her finger and she thought about the baby with a deep inner sense of happiness. Since she had found out so early it would be ages until she started showing and she had plenty of time before she needed to worry about telling Nikolai that he was going to be a father.
They travelled to the hotel where the reception was being staged. ‘You have a lot of friends,’ she remarked.
‘Mostly business acquaintances,’ he corrected. ‘While you seem to have hundreds of cousins.’
‘Dad has five sisters,’ she reminded him.
‘My very best wishes. I’m Marika Makris, Cyrus’s sister.’ A middle-aged brunette wearing a superb diamond necklace introduced herself to Ella while the bridal couple circulated amongst their guests before the wedding breakfast was served. Nikolai had mentioned in passing that Marika would be attending and she knew that the older woman had been estranged from her brother for years, so there should be nothing uncomfortable about the meeting.
‘Ella... Drakos,’ Ella framed and laughed. ‘It’s so hard to say a different name but Nikolai very much wanted me to take his name.’
‘Naturally, you are Nikolai’s crowning triumph,’ Marika informed her with a smug little smile.
‘Well...thank you,’ Ella responded after a blank pause in which no inspiration came to mind.
‘Nikolai and Cyrus have been enemies for so long that my brother forgot to watch his back,’ the brunette remarked sagely before drifting on at a regal pace.
Ella blinked in bewilderment. Enemies? Since when had Nikolai and Cyrus been enemies? She knew they didn’t get on, but thought they were just business rivals. But enemies spoke of something much deeper between them. Both men were Greek, which she supposed was the connection. Resolving to ask Nikolai about that comment later, she took her seat for the meal.
After eating, she went to the cloakroom to repair her make-up. As she paused at a crowded corner to allow people to pass her by she heard a woman say loudly, ‘What I want to know is what does she have that the rest of us don’t? Nikolai is the original ice man and he ditched all of us in record time!’
Ella’s brows rose. ‘Ditched all of us?’ Who was she eavesdropping on? The ex-girlfriends’ club?
‘She is beautiful,’ another female voice opined regretfully.
‘She’s the size of a shrimp!’ someone else objected. ‘But she must have some very special quality for him to be marrying her.’
‘Maybe she’s a wildcat in bed,’ the first voice suggested.
‘Maybe he’s finally fallen in love,’ the kinder voice that had described Ella as beautiful remarked.
There was an outbreak of female voices at that point. ‘If pigs could fly!’ was one of the few repeatable opinions expressed.
Lifting her chin and gathering her pride, Ella rounded the corner and passed the small group of fashionably dressed women all waving glasses around and talking loudly. Even a cursory glance in their direction was sufficient to warn her that Nikolai had very good taste and while Nikolai had apparently dumped those women they were all attending the wedding with partners. How naive she had been not to be prepared for the reality that Nikolai was almost certain to have former lovers attending, she thought wryly.
She studied herself in the mirror. A shrimp? Well, compared to those tall, shapely ladies outside she was indeed a shrimp in size, she conceded ruefully. Seemingly Nikolai had once had a particular type he went for because all those women were blonde. So where did she fit in? And why had he married her? She could not help recalling Cyrus’s claim that Nikolai was notoriously badly behaved with women. Possibly that had been true, Ella reasoned, but people could change...couldn’t they?
‘You’re as stiff as a fence post,’ Nikolai groaned as they opened the dancing, something Ella was not very confident about doing in front of an audience. ‘And you’re very quiet. Naturally I’m worried.’
‘How many ex-girlfriends of yours are here today?’
His wide shoulders tensed. ‘A couple, and only because they’re now married to friends of mine. Why? Has someone said something they shouldn’t?’
‘Don’t talk down to me like I’m a child!’ Ella snapped into his chest, feeling distinctly shrimp-like in spite of her heels.
‘If you won’t tell me what’s wrong there’s nothing I can do about it.’
‘There’s nothing wrong,’ Ella declared loftily, drinking in the scent of his cologne and the husky, intrinsic smell that was purely him and which warmed her somewhere down deep inside. There was no way on earth she was about to allow insecurity to drive her into arguing with him on their wedding day. ‘But be warned. I’m the jealous type. And I may be small but I’m lethal.’
‘I knew that already,’ Nikolai confessed, long fingers splaying caressingly across her bare spine as he shifted his lithe hips against her. ‘Lethally appealing and lethally sexy.’
‘Wait until you see the boots,’ she whispered teasingly, wildly aware of his arousal and flattered that he was in that state purely because he was close to her. ‘And the garter and the stockings.’
‘I’m getting you in stockings for my wedding night?’ Nikolai murmured thickly. ‘Bring it on, khriso mou!’
And Ella laughed and forgot about what she had overheard. Of course he had exes and a past but that was life and she had to live with it.
* * *
‘I felt sad when I realised that you didn’t have a single relative at our wedding,’ Ella admitted during the flight in the private jet to Crete.
‘I didn’t feel sad,’ Nikolai countered squarely, lounging back in his leather seat, very much in command. ‘But then I didn’t have a white-picket-fence childhood like yours.’
‘It wasn’t like that. I didn’t have a mother,’ Ella argued and shared her story.
‘You had a father and a grandmother who loved you. You were lucky.’
But Ella would never forget how rejected she had felt when she had first met her mother as a teenager. Her mother had not regretted never having got to know her and, more hurtfully still, had had no ambition to foster an adult friendship with her long-lost daughter either. It had been a one-off meeting and a disappointment. In truth it had made Ella better appreciate the family she did have.
‘Family can be toxic,’ Nikolai remarked with rich cynicism.