Even Nikki had noticed and warned her away from her brother-in-law. Reminded her in that forceful way of hers that Ava’s responsibility was to Nikki’s children.
She stiffened in Christos’s arms and pushed away. “Are you really going to marry me or is that just a ploy to get me to cooperate?” she asked.
Christos kept his hands on her waist holding her steady even though she tried to draw away. “You’ll just have to wait and see, won’t you?”
“Christos—”
“Don’t question me, Ava. You’ll have to trust what I’ve told you. There is nothing you can say that will make me change my mind.”
“Icanmake this difficult for you,” she said, after a long moment. She hated that this issue of trust was between them. There could never be peace between them until he acknowledged he’d been wrong five years ago.
“You’re welcome to try, but I fight hard and always win.”
“Funny. I would have said our first match-up ended in a draw. Did pushing me out of your life and accusing me of infidelity feel like a win to you?”
He cursed. Then leaned down so close that their noses touched. “Don’t bring up the past or I’ll take Theo out of here and never look back.”
She felt a frisson of fear and tears stung her eyes. The thought of losing her son was more than she could bear.
Christos cursed again and drew her back into his arms. “Sorry.”
“For?”
“Being a bastard. I don’t want to talk about the past with you. I can’t forgive what you did or how things ended between us.”
His arms were gentle around her and she wondered at the contradiction of this man. She was afraid to trust and at thesame time afraid not to. Despite the fact that he had that icy control over his emotions, she could feel the fire beneath the surface.
She blinked to try to stop the tears that were burning in her eyes, but they fell anyway, flowing down her cheeks.
“I’m not going to take your son away,” he said.
“We could have a DNA test,” she said at last. She’d resisted having one originally, because she’d gone to Christos a virgin; he should have understood that she would never give her body so easily to another. And she wanted his trust. What woman in love didn’t want her man to trust her?
“That’s not necessary. Theo is of Theakis blood, that is enough.”
She nodded against his shoulder, suddenly very tired. Christos tipped her head up and thumbed away the tracks of her tears.
Then he brushed his lips over hers. “Let’s start anew.”
She nodded. Yes, starting anew sounded good to her. Christos left a short while later and she tried to tell herself that they’d resolved the past, but a part of her knew they hadn’t. She hoped leaving it be would be enough, but experience had taught her that incidents from the past always came back to haunt her.
Chapter Four
The muted sounds coming from the nursery enticed Christos out of his office. The singing was off-key and the words undistinguishable, but the joy…he could hear it all the way downstairs.
He was tempted to leave the work he really didn’t want to do and go upstairs and join them—the boy he’d claimed as his heir and the woman…the woman he wanted to claim as his own.
Ten days shouldn’t change a man’s life, he thought, yet that was exactly what had happened. It was ten days since he’d seenheragain. Since he’d met Theo for the first time and wished for things he’d never wanted.
His mobile phone rang. The last thing he wanted to do was talk to anyone. When he glanced at the caller ID screen and saw it was his father, he was tempted to let it go to voice mail, but the old man would simply call Antonio and force Christos to take the call.
“Hello,patera.”
“Why haven’t you called?” Ari Theakis asked. Straight to business. The old man wasn’t exactly known for his emotional outbursts. That might be why Christos had given in when hisfather, lying in a hospital bed, had begged him to take over where Stavros had left off.
“Was I supposed to?”
“Yes. Have you seen my grandson?”
