The Mills & Boon Stars Collection

‘My loss?’ Grace repeated uncertainly, her brow indenting as she struggled to work out how such a misunderstanding could have taken place. ‘But I didn’t have a miscarriage...I’m still pregnant.’

Her father gave her a perplexed look, clearly confused.

‘Did Leo tell you I had miscarried?’ Grace asked abruptly and when he nodded, everything fell into place for Grace and she finally realised that she had totally misinterpreted Leo’s silence about her health and threatened miscarriage. Evidently, her text had gone astray and, having failed to receive it, Leo had assumed the worst and had then tactfully avoided any reference to pregnancy or babies. ‘My goodness,’ she whispered in shock, appalled to appreciate that Leo had been walking round London in ignorance of the reality that he was still going to be a father.

She explained the misunderstanding to her own father while trying to come to terms with the knowledge that, even divided as they currently were, Leo had still sought out her father and gone to see him for what could only be for her benefit.

‘Are you saying that your husband still doesn’t know that you didn’t lose the baby?’ he commented in consternation. ‘You should go and phone him right now!’

‘Leo’s due back tonight and I’d prefer to tell him face to face,’ Grace admitted with an abstracted smile, hoping that he would believe it was the very best news. ‘I gather it was Leo who persuaded you to come to Italy and meet me?’

‘I needed very little persuasion. I have waited over twenty years for this opportunity,’ Tony Roberts pointed out with a wry smile. ‘I assumed that you would hate me because your mother did. I didn’t even know Keira had a brother in London. I never met any of her family because she didn’t get on with them. I also had no idea that your mother had died when you were eleven. Had I known I would have asked if you could come and live with me instead of your aunt and uncle.’

Josefina brought out a tray of coffee and biscuits and Grace chatted to her father, satisfying her curiosity about his side of the family tree and asking about his three children and his wife. Tony had been so excited about the chance to meet his long-lost daughter that he had gone straight to his partners in the surgery where he worked and requested time off to fly straight out to Italy for the weekend. Grace was doubly touched, overwhelmed by her father’s eagerness to meet her and stunned by the effort Leo had gone to on her behalf. Leo cared about her happiness, she realised, warmth filling her heart. Only a man who cared about her would have taken the trouble to set up such a meeting.

Morning coffee stretched into a leisurely lunch out on the terrace and the sunny afternoon sped past fast as father and daughter got to know each other, registering their similarities in outlook and interests with acceptance and pleasure. As the daylight faded, Tony took his leave, only then confiding that his wife, Jennifer, was waiting for him back at his hotel. Grace invited the couple to come for dinner the following evening and she watched the older man drive off in his hire car with genuine regret. She suspected that he would have been a lovely supportive father to have when she was younger and then she told herself off for concentrating once again on the negative rather than the positive. She decided it was wiser to be grateful for the enjoyable day she had spent in her father’s company and was already looking forward to meeting her three younger half-siblings when she returned to London.

She prepared for Leo’s return with care, donning a green dress with elaborate beadwork round the neckline and elegant heels. Hearing the helicopter come in to land, she breathed in deep and crossed her fingers for luck. He would probably still be angry with her because he hadn’t received her text and she had behaved badly at the hospital. She was still brushing her hair when Leo entered the bedroom.

‘I phoned Josefina and asked her to put dinner back an hour because I knew I was running late,’ he told her, pausing directly in front of her to gaze down at her with shrewd dark golden eyes. ‘How have you been?’

‘Good, really good. Leo...I sent you a text from the hospital but I don’t think you got it,’ Grace said uncomfortably. ‘I owe you an apology for some of the stuff I threw at you.’

‘You were very distressed.’

‘It wasn’t the right time or place to spring all that on you,’ Grace muttered guiltily. ‘I was in a bad frame of mind.’

‘Understandably,’ Leo cut in, stroking a long soothing forefinger along the taut line of her compressed lips. ‘You’re very tense. What’s wrong?’

Grace backed away a few steps to clear her head. That close to Leo, her very skin prickling with awareness and the familiar scent of his cologne teasing her nostrils, she found it impossible to concentrate. ‘If you’d got that text you’d have known that there’s nothing wrong,’ she told him with a wary half-smile. ‘You were right and I was mistaken. I was being too pessimistic. The second scan picked up our baby’s heartbeat the following morning.’

Leo froze, his ebony brows pleating in bewilderment. ‘You mean...you’re saying...?’

‘That I’m still pregnant and everything looks fine. Feeling a bit sicker, mind you,’ she burbled, suddenly shy beneath the burning intensity of his appraisal.

‘You haven’t lost the baby? Truly?’ Leo pressed, striding forward, dark eyes alight like flames.

‘Truly,’ she whispered shakily as his arms closed tightly round her and she leant up against him for support. ‘Sometimes I’m a terrible negative thinker, Leo. I only realised you didn’t know about the baby when my father came to see me today. I thought possibly you hadn’t mentioned the baby on the phone because you had changed your mind about certain things.’

‘Well, I have changed my position on some stuff,’ Leo stated in a driven undertone and then he startled her by swinging her up into his arms and spinning her round in a breathless rush. His charismatic grin lit up his lean dark features. ‘That’s the most wonderful news, meli mou! I didn’t quite grasp how much I wanted our baby until I believed he was lost.’

‘You’re making me dizzy...put me down,’ Grace urged, perspiration beading her short upper lip. With a groan of apology he settled her down at the foot of the bed where she lowered her head for a minute to overcome the nausea and dizziness the sudden spinning motion had induced.

‘Are you all right?’ Leo demanded, crouching at her feet and pushing up her face to see it. ‘You are pale. I was an idiot. I just didn’t think about what I was doing.’

Grace’s nebulous fears about how Leo would react to her news had vanished. Leo was being so normal. There was no distance in him at all and he had been genuinely overjoyed to learn that she was still pregnant. That was not the reaction of a male who was considering the possibility of reclaiming his freedom with a divorce. Relief quivered through her slim, taut frame.

‘I’m fine, Leo. I just get a little dizzy if I do anything too quickly. I’ve also been sick a couple of times,’ she explained prosaically. ‘It’s like my body’s finally woken up and realised it’s pregnant.’

‘It’ll settle down,’ Leo forecast cheerfully. ‘How did things go with your father today?’

‘What made you go and see him?’ Grace asked instead.

‘Well, I knew you wanted to meet him and I thought it would give you something else to think about,’ he paraphrased a shade awkwardly. ‘Grace—I’ve never felt so helpless in my life as when I believed you were losing our baby...’

‘Me too...it wasn’t something we could control.’ Grace’s fingertips stroked soothingly down his cheekbone to his strong jawline. ‘All my worst instincts went into overdrive.’

Leo sprang lithely upright. ‘No, I saw your point once I thought over what you’d said to me. I did make it all about the baby rather than about us. You could even say I used the baby as an excuse. Considering that I wanted you the very first moment I laid eyes on you and never stopped wanting you, I wasn’t being honest with either of us.’

Her eyes widened at that admission. ‘The very first moment?’

‘It was like sticking my finger in an electrical socket,’ Leo quipped. ‘The attraction was instant and very powerful. I had to know you and then I had to have you. When I found myself wanting to hang onto you the morning after our night together, it freaked me out.’

‘You did?’ Grace was frowning. ‘But we were only together one night.’

‘One night with a very special woman who made me want much more from her than any woman I’d ever met,’ Leo completed huskily. ‘Why do you think I was too impatient to wait to hear from you afterwards? I was obsessed. I couldn’t think of anything but seeing you again. It’s a wonder I wasn’t boiling bunnies...’

Grace was in shock but hanging onto his every word. ‘Can’t imagine that...but you said—’

‘I said I didn’t do love and then you threw me out of that hospital room when I badly needed to be with you and I had to get by without you for a week.’

‘During which you suffered some sort of brainstorm?’ Grace framed shakily.

‘No, it finally hit me that I was very deeply attached to you and that it had just happened, regardless of all my doubts about such feelings.’

Grace finally stood up and approached him. ‘Very deeply attached?’

‘Hopelessly,’ Leo told her with his irresistible smile. ‘Somewhere along the way I fell in love with you but I didn’t recognise it. I knew I liked you, wanted you close and needed to look after you. I knew I was jealous of your friendship with Matt and very relieved when you didn’t succumb to Bastien’s legendary appeal. But I honestly did think that I was feeling all those things because it was natural for me to feel protective towards you when you were pregnant.’

‘Easy mistake to make,’ Grace told him breathlessly, unknotting his tie, yanking it free of his collar before embarking on his shirt buttons. ‘You’ve just told me you love me and, since I love you too, we should be celebrating.’

‘You love me? Even after all the mistakes I’ve made?’ Leo pressed, stunning dark golden eyes locked to her flushed face and her huge beaming smile.

‘Yes. Unlike you,’ Grace murmured in unashamed one-upmanship, ‘I never expected the man I married to be perfect.’

‘But I do think you’re perfect,’ Leo argued heatedly. ‘Absolutely perfect for me. You’re beautiful and clever and warm and loving and you will make an absolutely brilliant mother.’

‘Tell me more. My ego loves this,’ Grace urged, laughing. ‘I really should’ve guessed you loved me when you tracked down my father for me and got him out here. Instead I was too busy worrying about you dining out with Marina.’

Leo tensed. ‘Why on earth would you worry about that?’

‘Because you thought she was perfect and you were with her for three years.’

‘If she’d been perfect for me I’d still have been with her and my sex drive would have centred on her,’ Leo pointed out levelly. ‘And Marina isn’t perfect. Not only did she once have a one-night stand with my brother...’

‘Bastien?’ Grace pressed in surprise.

‘Yes. She’s also currently having an affair with a married man, although it is not quite as bad as it sounds,’ Leo conceded reluctantly. ‘His wife has been suffering from early onset dementia for years and is currently in a care home and recognising neither him nor his children. He’s been living in limbo for a long time. You won’t ever have to worry about my relationship with Marina. We’re good friends and would be even better friends had we just settled for that.’

Grace smiled, accepting his explanation, putting those fears to rest. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that you were planning to look up my father?’

‘I had to check Tony out first. He could have been hostile to an approach from you. He could have hurt your feelings and I couldn’t have stood by and let that happen to you,’ Leo assured her without apology. ‘As it was I met him, liked him and saw quite a bit of you in him.’

‘I did feel very comfortable with him.’ Involuntarily, Grace’s eyes flooded with tears and she rested her head down on Leo’s shoulder with an apologetic sniff as she fought to regain control. Leo was so protective of her and after a lifetime of always having to look out for herself the depth of his caring and kindness meant a great deal to her. Yet once his managing ways had irritated the hell out of her, she acknowledged, marvelling at how much her outlook and his had changed since their first encounter. ‘In the same way I’ve always felt comfortable with you.’

Leo lowered her back down to sit at the foot of the bed. ‘Now for something very important that I skipped the first time around...’ he husked, dropping down gracefully on one knee and lifting her hand. ‘Grace Donovan...will you marry me?’

‘Aren’t we already married?’ Grace breathed, taken aback and utterly mystified as he lifted her hand.

‘Are we? Father Benedetto in the chapel in the village quite understands that you don’t feel quite married after a civil ceremony and he has agreed to do the honours for us again,’ Leo explained, deftly threading a ring onto her wedding finger. ‘All we need to do is book our day.’

Her face the very picture of wonderment, Grace extended her hand, splaying her fingers the better to admire the breathtaking diamond cluster he had given her, and then she glanced down at the startling picture of Leo at her feet in romantic mode. ‘I love the ring. Everything’s happening backwards for us. We’re getting engaged after we got married!’

‘Better late than never,’ Leo growled, springing back upright. ‘You still haven’t said yes—’

‘Yes...yes...yes!’ Grace carolled without hesitation, her sheer happiness bubbling over. ‘Yes to marrying you, yes to another wedding, yes to loving you for the rest of my life!’

Leo tugged her gently up the bed and flattened her to the pillows. ‘Do you think you can do that, agapi mou? I’m very far from being perfect.’

‘Now that you know that, the sky’s the limit in the improvement stakes,’ Grace teased, wriggling as he skimmed her hair out of his path and claimed a scorching kiss that she felt all the way down to her curling toes. ‘But you definitely don’t need to improve at this...’

And Leo laughed and thought how shallow and empty his life had been before Grace and how much richer and more interesting it had become with her. As for Grace, she was much too busy getting Leo out of his shirt and admiring his muscular chest to think about anything.

* * *

Four years later, Grace stood on the deck of Hellenic Lady’s successor while her daughter Rosie played on deck with the family dog, a fluffy pug called Jonas. Grace was relaxed as she always was on such trips. She worked long hours as a doctor in the paediatrics department of a busy London hospital and cherished every day of her time off.

‘Daddy...Daddy!’ Grace spun round to watch her daughter throw herself boisterously at her father as he emerged from the main saloon.

Leo looked amazing in swim shorts, his lean, powerful body well-honed by exercise, black hair blowing in the breeze. They had enjoyed an incredibly busy four years together. Raising Rosie without a team of nannies would have been impossible with the hours Grace had been working while she trained in various hospitals, but since then, having attained a more settled working day, she had had the time to become a more hands-on mum. Rosie had Grace’s red hair, Leo’s rich dark eyes and skin that didn’t burn in the sun the way her mother’s did. She was a lively, affectionate child, happily attending nursery school.

Leo lowered his daughter to the deck and fought off the energetic advances of the dog. ‘We’ll be docking soon,’ he reminded her with a lazy grin, stunning eyes straying appreciatively over the lush curves Grace had showcased in a blue bikini.

The heat of the Turkish sun was already beating down on Grace’s bare shoulders and she lifted a towel to drape it round her and cover her skin, which never took a tan. They were returning to Marmaris to celebrate her twenty-ninth birthday at the Fever nightclub where they had first met. Anatole and her father’s entire family were on board with them. She got on very well with her two adult half-brothers, who were students, and her little half-sister, who was still at school. From her stepmother, she had received the warm family acceptance that she had tried and failed to win from her uncle’s family.

‘I’ll go and get changed.’

Leo banded an arm round her on the way down the stairs. ‘How much of a hurry are you in?’

‘It’ll take me more than an hour to do my hair and get ready.’

Her husband dropped a kiss on the slope of her shoulder. ‘Do you have an hour for me?’

Heat and anticipation shimmied through her. ‘I’ve always got time for you,’ she declared with an impish smile. ‘You’re a very demanding man.’

‘But you like that about me, agapi mou,’ Leo told her teasingly, closing the door of the master suite behind them.

And Grace had to admit, she did like that about him. They were very well-matched in the bedroom department, she acknowledged as he claimed a lingering blatantly sexual kiss that made her body hum and her heart thump with awareness. Being married to Leo was never bland or boring. He was everything she had ever dreamt of in a husband and she was blissfully happy with him.

‘I was thinking...’ Leo purred, extracting her from her bikini with skill while pausing to worship her full breasts and the sleek curve of her hips. ‘Since we’re on holiday and you’re all mine night and day, do you think we should consider working on extending the family?’

‘Jonas would probably love some company.’

Leo found the most ticklish spot on her entire body and punished her for that crack until she dissolved into laughter. ‘You know very well I wasn’t thinking of the dog!’

‘Well, maybe I don’t like you describing the conception of another child as work,’ Grace countered tartly.

‘Work I love, work I can never get enough of, you maddening woman,’ Leo groaned into the fall of her hair. ‘You know I’m crazy about you, don’t you?’

Grace fingered the flawless diamond pendant at her throat, which he had given her for her birthday, and smiled. ‘The suspicion has crossed my mind once or twice.’

‘Rosie is like a mini you and I’d love another one.’

‘I’ll put my pills away,’ Grace murmured with amusement, linking her arms round his strong brown neck, appreciating his lean, darkly handsome features and his gorgeous eyes. ‘I love you, Leo.’

‘Nowhere near as much as I love you, agapi mou,’ Leo countered.

‘You’re always so competitive,’ she complained without great heat as she arched into the hard strength of his body and let her senses sing to the sensual magic of his demanding mouth.

* * * * *

The Greek Commands His Mistress

Lynne Graham

CHAPTER ONE

‘IT’S OVER, REBA,’ Bastien Zikos pronounced with finality.

The stunning blonde he was addressing flashed him a pained look of reproach. ‘But we’ve been great together.’

‘I’ve never pretended that this is anything more than it is...sex,’ Bastien traded impatiently. ‘Now we’re done.’

Reba blinked rapidly, as though she was fighting back tears, but Bastien wasn’t fooled. The only thing that would reduce Reba to tears would be a stingy pay-off. She was as hard as nails...and he was no more yielding. Indeed, when it came to women he was tough and cold. His mother, an eighteen-carat-gold-digging promiscuous shrew, with a polished line in fake tears and emotion, had been the first to teach her son distrust and contempt for her sex.

‘You got bored with me, didn’t you?’ Reba condemned. ‘I was warned that you had a short attention span. I should’ve listened.’

Impatience shivered through Bastien’s very tall, muscular frame. Reba had been his mistress, and terrific entertainment in the bedroom, but it ended now. And he had given her a small fortune in jewellery. He took nothing for free from women—not sex, not anything.

Bastien turned on his heel. ‘My accountant will be in touch,’ he said drily.

‘There’s someone else, isn’t there?’ the blonde snapped.

‘If there is, it’s none of your business,’ Bastien told her icily, his dark eyes chilling in their detachment as he glanced back at her, his lean, extravagantly handsome features hard as iron.

His driver was waiting outside the building to ferry him to the airport for his scheduled flight north.

A very faint shadow of a smile softened the tough line of Bastien’s mouth as he boarded his private jet. Someone else? Maybe...maybe not.

His finance director, Richard James, was already seated in the opulent cabin. ‘Am I allowed to ask what secret allure—evidently known only to you—exists in this dull northern town we’re heading to, and about the even more dull failed business enterprise you have recently acquired?’

‘You can ask. I don’t promise to answer,’ Bastien traded, flicking lazily through the latest stock figures on his laptop.

‘Then there is something special at Moore Components that I haven’t yet picked up on?’ the stocky blond man prompted ruefully. ‘A patent? A new invention?’

Bastien dealt the other man a wryly amused glance. ‘The factory is built on land worth millions,’ he pointed out drily. ‘A prime site for development close to the town centre.’

‘It’s been years since you played asset-stripper,’ Richard remarked in surprise, while Bastien’s personal staff and his security team boarded at the rear of the cabin.

Bastien had started out buying and selling businesses and breaking them up to attain the maximum possible profit. He had no conscience about such things. Profit and loss was a fact of life in the business world. Trends came and went, as did contracts. Fortunes rose and fell as companies expanded and then contracted again.

Bastien was exceptionally gifted when it came to spotting trends and making millions. He had a mind like a steel trap and the fierce, aggressive drive of a male who had not had a wealthy family to give him his breaks. He was a self-made billionaire, who had started out with nothing, and he took great pride in his independence.

But just at that moment Bastien wasn’t thinking about business. No, indeed. Bastien was thinking about Delilah Moore—the only woman who had ever rejected him, leaving him tormented by lust and outraged by the frustrating new experience. His ego would have withstood the rebuff had she been genuinely uninterested in him, but Bastien knew that had not been the case. He had seen the longing in her eyes, the telling tension of her body when she was close to him, had recognised the breathy intimate note in her voice.

He could forgive much, but unquestionably not her deceitful insistence that she didn’t want him. Fearlessly and foolishly judgemental, she had flung Bastien’s womanising reputation in his face with as much disdain as a fine lady dismissing the clumsy approaches of a street thug. In reaction, Bastien’s rage had burned, and now, almost two years on, it was still smouldering at the lack of respect she had demonstrated—not to mention her lies and her sheer nerve in daring to attack him.

And now fortune had turned the tables on Delilah Moore and her family. Bastien savoured the fact with dark satisfaction. He didn’t believe she would be hurling defiance at him this time around...

* * *

‘How is he?’ Lilah asked her stepmother in an undertone when she spotted her father, Robert, standing outside in the backyard of her small terraced house.

‘Much the same...’ Vickie, a small curvaceous blonde in her early thirties, groaned at the sink, where she was doing the dishes with a whinging toddler clinging to one leg. ‘Of course he’s depressed. He worked all his life to build up the firm and now it’s gone. He feels like a failure, and being unable to get a job hasn’t helped.’

‘Hopefully something will come up soon,’ Lilah pronounced with determined cheer as she scooped up her two-year-old half-sister Clara and settled her down with a toy to occupy her.

When life was challenging, Lilah was convinced that it was best to look for even the smallest reason to be glad and celebrate it. Just then she was busy reminding herself that, while her father had lost his business and his home, their family was still intact and they all had their health.

At the same time Lilah was marvelling at the reality that she had grown so close to the stepmother she had once loathed on sight. She had assumed that Vickie was another one of the good-time girls her father had once specialised in, and only slowly had she come to recognise that, regardless of their twenty-year age gap, the couple were genuinely in love.

Her father and Vickie had married four years earlier and Lilah now had two half-siblings she adored: three-year-old Ben and little Clara.

Currently Lilah’s family were sharing her own rented home. With only two small bedrooms, a cramped living room and an even tinier kitchen, it was a very tight squeeze. But until the council came up with alternative accommodation for her father and his family, or her father found a paying job, they didn’t have much choice.

The impressive five-bedroom home that her father and his wife had once owned was gone now, along with the business. Everything had had to be sold to settle the loans her father had taken out in a desperate effort to keep Moore Components afloat.

‘I’m still hoping that Bastien Zikos will throw your dad a lifeline,’ Vickie confided in a sudden burst of optimism. ‘I mean, nobody knows that business better than Robert, and surely there’s a space somewhere in the office or the factory where your father could still make himself useful?’

Lilah resisted the urge to remark that Bastien was more likely to tie a concrete block to her father’s leg and sink him. After all, the Greek billionaire had offered to buy Moore Components two years earlier and his offer had been refused. Her father should’ve sold up and got out then, she thought regretfully. But the business had been doing well and, although tempted by the offer, the older man had ultimately decided that he couldn’t face stepping down.

It was no consolation to Lilah that Bastien himself had forecast disaster once he’d realised that the firm’s prosperity depended on the retention of one very important contract. Within weeks of losing that contract Moore Components had been struggling to survive.

‘I’d better get to work,’ Lilah remarked in a brittle voice, bending down to pet the miniature dachshund pushing affectionately against her legs in the hope of getting some attention.

Since her family had moved in Skippy had been a little neglected, she conceded guiltily. When had she last taken him for anything other than the shortest of walks?

Thoroughly unsettled, however, by her stepmother’s sanguine reference to Bastien Zikos as a possible saviour, Lilah abandoned Skippy to pull on her raincoat, knotting the belt at her narrow waist.

She was a small, slender woman, with long black hair and bright blue eyes. She was also one of the very few workers still actively employed at Moore Components now it had gone bust. The Official Receivers had come in, taken over and laid off most of the staff. Only the services of the human resources team had been retained, to deal with all the admin involved in closing down the business. Engaged to work just two more days there, Lilah knew that she too would soon be unemployed.

Vickie was already zipping Ben into his jacket, because Lilah left the little boy at nursery school on her way into work.

It was a brisk spring day, with a breeze, and constantly forced to claw her hair out of her eyes, Lilah regretted not having taken the time to put her hair up long before she dropped her little brother off at the school. Unfortunately she had been suffering sleepless nights and scrambling out of bed every morning heavy-eyed, running late.

Ever since she had learned that Bastien Zikos had bought her father’s failed business she had been struggling to hide her apprehension. In that less-than-welcoming attitude to the new owner, however, Lilah stood very much alone. The Receivers had been ecstatic to find a buyer, while her father and various resident worthies had expressed the hope that the new owner would re-employ some of the people who had lost their jobs when Moore Components closed.

Only Lilah, who had once received a disturbing glimpse of the cold diamond-cutting strength of Bastien’s ruthlessness, was full of pessimism and thought the prospect of Bastien arriving to break good news to the local community unlikely.

In fact, if ever a man could have been said to have scared Lilah, it was Bastien Zikos. Everything about the tall, amazingly handsome Greek had unnerved her. The way he looked, the way he talked, the domineering way he behaved. His whole attitude had been anathema to her and she had backed off fast—only to discover, to her dismay, that that kind of treatment only put Bastien into pursuit mode.

Although Lilah was only twenty-three she had distrusted self-assured, slick and handsome men all her life, fully convinced that most of them were lying, cheating players. After all, even her own father had once been like that—a serial adulterer whose affairs had caused her late mother great unhappiness.

Lilah didn’t like to dwell on those traumatic years, when she had begun to hate her father, because it had seemed then that he could not be trusted with any woman—not her mother’s friends, not even his office staff. Mercifully all that behaviour had stopped once her father met Vickie, and since then Lilah had contrived to forge a new and much closer relationship with her surviving parent. Only now Robert Moore had settled down was his daughter able to respect him again and forgive him for the past.