Adara couldn’t help covering a gasp as he revealed the soft pink diamond pulsing like a heart stone of warmth from the frozen arrangement of white diamonds and glinting platinum setting.
“No matter what happens, we have each other.” He fit the ring on her right hand.
Her fingers spasmed a bit, not quite rejecting the gift, but this seemed like a reaffirmation of vows. She had been prepared to throw their marriage away a few weeks ago and didn’t know if she was completely ready to recommit to it, but she couldn’t bring herself to voice her hesitations when her ears were still ringing with his words about his mother. Every time she’d lost a baby, his mother had died for him again. Small wonder he didn’t wear his heart on his sleeve.
Given time, would it become more accessible?
He kissed her knuckles and when he looked into her eyes, his gaze was full of his typical stamp of authority, already viewing this as a done deal. The impact was more than she could bear.
Shielding her own gaze, she looked at his mouth as she leaned forward to kiss him lingeringly. “Thank you. I’ll try to be less of a scaredy-cat if you could, perhaps, let me tell my mother before calling the architect?”
She glanced up to catch a flare of something in the backs of his flecked eyes that might have been disappointment or hurt, but he adopted her light tone as he said, “I’m capable of compromise. Don’t drag your feet.”
* * *
For a woman battling through an aggressive cancer treatment, as Adara’s mother, Ellice, was, the quiet of Chatham in upstate New York was probably perfect. For a man used to a nonstop pace through sixteen-hour days, the place was a padded cell.
It’s only one afternoon, Gideon chided himself. Adara had tried to come alone, but he had insisted on driving her. Still reeling over yesterday’s news, he already saw that the duration of her pregnancy would be a struggle not to smother his wife while his instinct to hover over her revved to maximum.
Letting her out of his sight when they’d arrived here had been genuinely difficult, but he respected her wish to speak to her mother alone. She had yet to bring up the topic of Nic. Ellice had been too sick for that conversation, but with doctor reports that weren’t exactly encouraging, Adara was facing not having many more conversations with her mother at all.
Scowling with dismay at the rotten hands life dealt, Gideon walked the grounds of the property that Adara’s father had bought as an “investment.” The old man had really been tucking his wife away from the city, isolating her as a form of punishment because he’d been that sort of man. Gideon saw that now. Not that it had been a complete waste of money. The land itself was nice.
Gideon wondered if either of Adara’s brothers wanted this place when their mother passed. With only a dried-up pond for a water view, it wasn’t Gideon’s style. He didn’t need a rolling deck beneath his feet, but he did like a clear view to the horizon.
Maybe that was his old coping strategy rearing its head. Each time his world had fallen apart, he’d looked into the blue yonder and set a course for a fresh start. One thing he’d learned on the ocean: the world was big enough to run away from just about anything.
Not that he was willing to abandon the life he had here. Not now.
He stilled as he noticed a rabbit brazenly munching the lettuce in the garden. Bees were the only sound on the late-summer air, working the flowers that bordered the plot of tomatoes, beans and potatoes. The house stood above him on the hillock, white with fairy-tale gables and peaks. Below the wraparound veranda, the grounds rolled away in pastoral perfection.
It was a vision of the American dream and he was exactly like that invasive rabbit, feeding on what wasn’t his.
His conscience had already been torturing him before Adara had turned up pregnant. Now all he could think was that he’d be lying about who he was to his son or daughter along with his wife.
But he couldn’t go back and undo all the things he’d done to get here. He’d barely scratched the surface of his past when he’d told Adara he’d started working young. Child labor was what it had been, but as a stowaway discovered while the ship was out to sea, he could as easily have been thrown overboard.
Kristor had put him to work doing what a boy of six or seven could manage. He’d swabbed decks and scrubbed out the head. He’d learned to gut a fish and peel potatoes. Burly men had shouted and kicked him around like a dog at times, but he’d survived it all and had grown into a young man very much out for his own gain.
By the time he was tall enough to make a proper deckhand, Kristor was taking jobs on dodgy ships, determined to build his retirement nest egg. Gideon went along with him, asking no questions and taking the generous pay the shady captains offered. He wished he could say he had been naive and only following Kristor’s lead, but his soul had been black as obsidian. He’d seen dollar signs, not moral boundaries.
The ugly end to Kristor’s life had been a vision into his own future if he continued as a smuggler, though. Gideon had had much higher ambitions than that. He’d been stowing his pay, same as Kristor, but it wasn’t enough for a clean break.
Posing as Kristor’s son, however, and claiming the man’s modest savings as an “inheritance” had put him on the solid ground he’d needed. Kristor hadn’t had any family entitled to it. Yes, Gideon had broken several laws in claiming that money, even going to the extent of paying a large chunk to a back-alley dealer in the Philippines for American identification. It had been necessary in order to leave that life and begin a legitimate one.
Or so he’d convinced himself at the time. His viewpoint had been skewed to basic survival, not unlike Adara’s obdurate attitude when he’d first caught up to her in Greece. He’d been cutting himself off from the pain of losing Kristor in exactly the way he’d fled onto Kristor’s ship in the first place, running from the grief and horror of losing his mother.
He couldn’t say he completely regretted becoming Gideon Vozaras. At sixteen—nineteen according to the fresh ink on his ID—he’d sunk every penny he had into a rusting sieve of a tugboat. He repaired it, ran it, licensed it out to another boatman and bought another. Seven years later, he leveraged his fleet of thirty to buy an ailing shipyard. When that started to show a profit, he established his first shipping route. He barely slept or ate, but people started to call him, rather than the other way around.
Fully accepted as an established business by then, he’d still possessed some of his less than stellar morals. When he was ready to expand and needed an injection of capital, he started with a man known to let his ego rule his investment decisions. Gideon had walked into the Makricosta headquarters wearing his best suit and had his salesman’s patter ready. He’d been willing to say whatever he needed to get to the next level.
He’d been pulled up by an hourglass figure in a sweater set and pencil skirt, her heels modest yet fashionable, her black hair gathered in a clasp so the straight dark tresses fell like a plumb line down her spine. She turned around as he announced himself to the receptionist.
He was used to prompting a bit of eye-widening and a flush of awareness in a woman. If the receptionist gave him the flirty head tilt and smooth of a tendril of hair, he missed it. His mouth had dried and his skin had felt too tight.
Adara’s serene expression had given nothing away, but even though her demeanor had been cool, his internal temperature had climbed. She had escorted him down the hall to her father’s office, her polish and grace utterly fascinating and so completely out of his league he might as well still have had dirt under his nails and the stink of diesel on his skin.
Three lengthy meetings later, he had been shut down. Her father had refused and Gideon had mentally said goodbye to any excuse to see her again. No use asking her to dinner. By then he had her full background. Adara didn’t date and was reputed to be holding on to her virginity until she married.
When she had unexpectedly asked to see him a few weeks later, he’d been surprised, curious and unaccountably hopeful. She’d shown up in a jade dress with an ivory jacket that had been sleek and cool and infuriatingly modest, not the sort of thing a woman wore if she was encouraging an afternoon tryst.
“I didn’t expect to see you again,” he’d said with an edge of frustration.
“I...” She’d seemed very briefly discomfited, then said with grave sincerity, “I have a proposal for you, which may persuade my father to change his mind, if you’re still interested in having him as a backer. May I have ten minutes of your time?”
Behind the closed doors of his office, she had laid out what was, indeed, a proposal. She had done her homework. She had information on his financials and future projects that weren’t public knowledge.
“I apologize for that. I don’t intend to make a habit of it.”
“Of what?” he’d asked. “Snooping into my business or running background checks on prospective grooms?”