CHAPTER ELEVEN
LEANINGBACKAGAINSTthe leather banquette seat, Achileas stared across the blue water, his heart pounding in time with the thump of the launch’s hull as it bounced over the waves. It was finally happening. Today, for the first time, he was going to step inside the Villa Thymári—Andreas’s waterside mansion.
In his head it had become a mythical place. A kind of Greek Camelot.
His shoulders tensed.
Guinevere’s failure to produce an heir had, in part, led to the fall of King Arthur’s legendary home. Did he still want that to happen to the house of Alexios?
He had thought so. In all the years he’d spent plotting his revenge, it had been the yin to the yang of Andreas’s rejection. The ultimate sting in the tail.
But if that was the case, why had he had unprotected sex with Effie on the beach?
Short answer: because he hadn’t wanted to wait.
Long answer...
He frowned. Was there a long answer? Basically, he had wanted her, there and then, and she had seemed certain it was safe, and he had trusted her.
His eyes shifted to the woman sitting beside him as he tested that sentence inside his head. It was true: he did trust Effie. But it had still been a stupid risk to take. He didn’t want children. He didn’t have the right instincts. How could a fatherless boy be a father?
And yet he couldn’t seem to get the idea out of his head that she could be pregnant. That a baby...their baby...might be forming inside her.
And for some reason it wasn’t freaking him out.
There was a reason, he told himself firmly. He’d waited so long to get even with his father and now the moment of reckoning was finally here, so naturally he was feeling completely off-balance.
His chest tightened. It wasn’t just that.
When Effie had told him that he loved his father and wanted to get to know him, not punish him, it had been as if she had thrown a light switch and spun him round in the darkness. And now he didn’t know up from down.
She was wrong, but it had knocked him off course like a rogue wave, sweeping away all the recognisable pointers.
Not all of them, he thought, gazing at the woman sitting beside him. Effie had made her way to him in the darkness. And remembering the moment when she’d sat down beside him on the sand, he felt calm again—safe, like a ship in a storm seeing the beam of a lighthouse marking out a safe path through the rocks ahead.
On impulse he caught her arm, turning her and pulling her against him.
‘We haven’t really talked about what happened last night. I know you said you thought it was safe, but I want you to know that you don’t need to worry,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ll look after you. I mean, if you are—’
‘I won’t be,’ she said quickly. She smiled stiffly. ‘My period is due in a day or two, so I’m completely safe.’
Safe in that she almost certainly wasn’t pregnant, Effie thought as his eyes locked with hers. But she wasn’t safe from the hunger in his narrowed blue gaze, or the softness of his mouth, or the hard, insistent press of his body...
Wasn’t that why they were having this conversation? Because he made her reckless? Made her want things...need things? Made her lose control. Made her walk into the sea even though she could barely swim.
His touch made her shiver inside—made her feel so hollowed out with longing there was nothing else. Certainly no common sense.
What other explanation could there be for what she had let happen—no, conspired to make happen? Sex without protection was beyond reckless—it was crazy.
What if it hadn’t been that time of the month? Would she still have taken the risk? It was one thing lying to other people, but they couldn’t lie about their relationship to a child. A child Achileas didn’t want. And yet he had been as reckless as her.
Stomach cartwheeling, she stared ahead to where a huge, pale house sat like an opal on a ring beside the shimmering aquamarine water. Why would he take a risk like that?
Of course the answer to that was obvious. Clearly his head had been all over the place. But in time, with her support, that could change—
In time? With her support?
She wasn’t safe from that either. That instinct, inherited straight from her mother, to hope for the best, to go with the flow however bad things were, however painful it was for her to do so, and wait for things to change.