the greek tycoon's blackmailed mistress(29)

Ella kicked off her shoes just inside the front door when they arrived and padded off straight to the nursery to satisfy her desperate need to see Callie. When she looked up from the cot and the peacefully sleeping child, Aristandros was on the other side of it.

‘I really screwed up tonight—the opera thing,’ Ella said ruefully. ‘I know it was important. I’m sorry I didn’t make it.’

Aristandros gave her a wryly amused appraisal. ‘You left me standing. But then I’m used to you embarrassing me in front of my family.’

Ella blinked. ‘Your…er…family?’

‘Yes. Pretty much the whole tribe attended that benefit, and I was planning to show you off to them all.’

‘My word; truthfully?’ Ella prompted as she followed him out of the nursery. ‘Why did you want to show me off?’

‘Because I very much hope you’re going to marry me, but I wasn’t so stupid that I was going to make an announcement without thoroughly discussing terms with you in advance,’ he explained smoothly.

Her bright-blue eyes grew very wide. ‘You’re proposing again?’

‘A tactful woman would have left out that last word,’ Aristandros told her, walking her out on to the terrace where a champagne bottle and glasses sat on the table. ‘Are we celebrating or not?’

Ella winced. ‘I’m totally, madly in love with you and just like the last time I really, really want to marry you and be with you for ever. But I also spent a large chunk of my life training to become a doctor.’

‘And you can still be a doctor.’ Aristandros frowned as she looked at him in shock. ‘I was being very selfish, which I hate to admit comes naturally to me around you. My mother was so obsessed with the film world that she had no time or energy to spare even for me, never mind my father. I don’t want a marriage like that. I once resented your medical career because you chose it over me.’

Her lovely face was pensive in the moonlight. ‘No, I think I used it as my get-out clause because I’d suffered Theo as a horrid example of a womaniser and I was so afraid of getting hurt. I should have had more faith in you.’

‘We didn’t have enough time together.’ Aristandros lifted her hand and slid a ring on to her engagement finger. ‘It’s the same diamond I planned to give you seven years ago, but I’ve had it reset.’

‘It’s glorious.’ Ella watched the glittering stone sparkle like starlight on her hand and a warm, deep sense of happiness began to fill her.

‘We were too young then,’ he admitted ruefully. ‘If we’d been more mature we would have tried to find a compromise and a way of being together that we could both live with. Instead I lost my temper with you because you made me feel foolish, which was very superficial.’

‘You really broke my heart,’ Ella confided, ready to be totally frank now that she had his ring on her finger and a proper secure future to look forward to. ‘I couldn’t believe you’d ever loved me.’

‘I loved you so much that I never found anyone else to replace you. With you I thought I could break the Xenakis tradition of bad marriages. I believed that settling down while I was still quite young into marriage would give me a much better prospect of happiness than, for instance, the life I’ve been leading since then.’ His rich, golden eyes were full of regret. ‘But I fell at the first challenge.’

Ella wrapped her arms round his neck, her fingers gently feathering through the silky, black hair at his nape. She wished she had understood him better seven years earlier and recognised that his troubled background had made him crave a much more stable life with one woman rather than a succession. ‘You were so all-or-nothing about everything, and then you just walked away from me and I never heard from you again.’

‘You just walked away too,’ he reminded her. ‘I was too proud to chase after you, although I thought of looking you up when I was over in London at least fifty times.’

‘There’s never been anyone else for me. I never stopped loving you although I didn’t realise that until recently.’

‘I fell in love with you on our first date. You got drenched with sea spray and you laughed. Every other girl I knew would have thrown a fit.’

‘I’m not vain, but I’m a jealous cat,’ she warned him, cherishing the ease with which he could look back through those years and recall one tiny incident, in much the same way he had remembered her admiring comment about the church on Lykos. The idea that he loved her was becoming more and more real and credible with every passing second. She smiled, and soon discovered that she couldn’t stop smiling.

‘I’ve sown my wild oats, but I didn’t enjoy myself so much that I want to do it again, agapi mou,’ Aristandros confided with blunt sincerity. ‘I wanted a second chance with you. I wanted to hear you say you’d misjudged me. But when I found out about your wife-beating stepfather I got a step closer to understanding why you were so unwilling to trust me. When you threw that jealous scene after the Ferrand party, I was overjoyed, because that proved that you still had feelings for me just as I did for you.’

‘So, what do you want now?’ Ella enquired tightly.

‘All I really want now is more of what we already have. I’m very happy with you. To be frank, I was disappointed that you weren’t pregnant. I want to have a baby with you.’

Ella released a happy sigh at the prospect and beamed at him. ‘How soon can we start trying?’

Aristandros laughed with rich appreciation. ‘Would tonight be too soon?’

Ella regarded him with eyes as starry as the night sky above. ‘No; I’m available without appointment whenever you want.’

‘I should warn you that I want you pretty much all the time, latria mou,’ Aristandros admitted, bending down to press his mouth to hers and kissing her slowly and skilfully until the blood drummed through her veins in a passionate response. ‘It’s an effort to go away on business when I’ve got you in my bed.’

‘I don’t want you going anywhere right now,’ Ella confessed, her hands curling into the lapels of his suit jacket at the mere mention of him needing to go away from her. ‘I want you all to myself. Will we get married on the island?’

‘Yes. And soon,’ he urged. ‘Speaking as a guy who was once engaged for about five minutes, I don’t believe in long engagements.’

‘Neither do I,’ Ella agreed fervently, while she busily thought about wedding dresses and Callie as a little flower girl, not to mention the provision of a baby to keep Callie company. She was so happy at the prospect of those delights that her heart felt as though it was overflowing.



Fourteen months later, Ella watched Kasma tuck Ari’s son and heir, Nikolos, into his cot.

At three months old, Nikolos was already revealing Xenakis traits of character. He was very impatient, and screamed the place down if he wasn’t fed immediately if he felt hungry. He truly adored an audience of female admirers and basked in their attention. He was advanced for his age in size and development. He already looked as though he was likely to be as tall as his father, and he had definitely inherited his father’s heartbreakingly charismatic smile.

These days Drakon Xenakis spent more time on Lykos than in Athens. He was enchanted by his grandson’s perfectly ordinary family life with Ella, Callie and the new baby. It was what he himself had never managed to achieve with his own late wife and children, and he appreciated the commitment it took for such a busy couple to make it work.

The house had been virtually rebuilt during the extensive renovations Ella had organised and was now a much more comfortable family-orientated home. It had not been easy to live in the house while all the work had still been going on, particularly while Ella was pregnant, but with her mother’s help, and that of the staff, Ella had managed.

Jane had got divorced. Theo was still in prison serving time for that final assault on his ex-wife, while Jane lived in a city apartment and enjoyed a healthy circle of friends with whom she shared interests. At least once a month the older woman visited her daughter and, if both Ella and Aristandros were abroad together, she came to stay and took charge of the household.

But actually Aristandros was travelling a great deal less than he once had and worked more from home, while Ella was putting in part-time hours as the island doctor and taking an interest in the charitable endeavours of the Xenakis Foundation. Just as Aristandros had gone to a good deal of trouble to ensure that business rarely parted them, Ella had been equally careful to ensure that her job didn’t steal too big a slice of her time and energy, and after a year she reckoned that she had got the balance exactly right. Plentiful help on the home front had been invaluable, and Callie currently attended a play group in town several mornings a week. That winter the whole family would be moving to the Athens villa to enable Ella to undertake a paediatrics course at the hospital.

Ella was blissfully happy. She and Aristandros had enjoyed a huge engagement party, and her wedding a couple of months afterwards had been the fairy-tale event that she had always secretly dreamt of having. Although Ella had been just a little pregnant at the time, she hadn’t been showing. Lily had been her chief bridesmaid, and was currently applying for a surgical job at a Greek hospital after meeting up with a Greek businessman of her own at the wedding.