The Greek Millionaire's Secret Child - Spencer Catherine

Swallowing, she managed an answering, “Yiasu.”

“You speak a little Greek?”

“A very little,” she said. “I just exhausted my entire vocabulary.”

“That’s what I thought.”

The comment might have stung if he hadn’t tempered it with a smile that assaulted her with such charm, it was all she could do not to buckle at the knees. For heaven’s sake, what was the matter with her? She was twenty-seven, and if not exactly the most sexually experienced woman in the world, hardly in the first flush of innocent youth, either. She knew well enough that appearances counted for little. It was the person inside that mattered, and from everything she’d been told, Niko Leonidas fell sadly short in that respect.

His manner as he turned his attention again to Pavlos did nothing to persuade her otherwise. He made no effort to embrace his father, to reassure him with a touch to the shoulder or hand that the old man could count on his son for whatever support he might need during his convalescence. Instead he commandeered a porter to take care of the loaded luggage cart one of the flight attendants had brought, and with a terse, “Well, since we seem to have exhausted the formalities, let’s get out of here,” marched toward the exit, leaving Emily to follow with Pavlos.

Only when they arrived at the waiting Mercedes did he betray a hint of compassion. “Don’t,” he ordered, when she went to help her patient out of the wheelchair and with surprising tenderness, scooped his father into his arms, laid him carefully on the car’s roomy back seat and draped a blanket over his legs. “You didn’t have to do that,” Pavlos snapped, trying unsuccessfully to mask a grimace of pain.

Noticing, Niko said, “Apparently I did. Or would you have preferred I stand idly by and watch you fall on your face?”

“I would prefer to be standing on my own two feet without needing assistance of any kind.”

“Then you should have taken better care of yourself when you were away—or else had the good sense to stay home in the first place, instead of deciding you had to see Alaska before you die.”

Emily was tempted to kick the man, hard, but made do with a glare. “Accidents happen, Mr. Leonidas.”

“Especially to globe-trotting eighty-six-year-old men.”

“It was hardly his fault that the cruise ship ran aground, nor was he the only passenger on board who was injured. All things considered, and given his age, your father’s done amazingly well. In time, and with adequate follow-up physical therapy, he should make a reasonably good recovery.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then I guess you’re going to have to step up to the plate and start acting like a proper son.”

He favored her with a slow blink made all the more disturbing by the sweep of his lashes, which were indecently long and silky. “Nurse and family counselor all rolled into one,” he drawled. “How lucky is that?”

“Well, you did ask.”

“And you told me.” He tipped the porter, left him to return the airport’s borrowed wheelchair, then slammed closed the car trunk and opened the front passenger door with a flourish. “Climb in. We can continue this conversation later.”

As she might have expected, he drove with flair and expertise. Within half an hour of leaving the airport, they were cruising the leafy green streets of Vouliagmeni, the exclusive Athens suburb overlooking the Saronic Gulf on the east coast of the Attic Peninsula, which Pavlos had described to her so vividly. Soon after, at the end of a quiet road running parallel to the beach, Niko steered the car through a pair of ornate wrought-iron gates, which opened at the touch of a remote control button on the dash.

Emily had gathered Pavlos was a man of considerable wealth, but was hardly prepared for the rather frightening opulence confronting her as the Mercedes wound its way up a long curving driveway, and she caught her first sight of…what? His house? Villa? Mansion?

Set in spacious, exquisitely landscaped grounds and screened from local traffic by a stand of pines, the place defied such mundane description. Stucco walls, blindingly white, rose in elegant proportions to a tiled roof as blue as she’d always imagined the skies to be in Athens, even though, this late September afternoon, an approaching storm left them gray and threatening. Long windows opened to wide terraces shaded by pergolas draped in flowering vines. A huge fountain splashed in a central forecourt, peacocks preened and screeched on the lawns, and from somewhere on the seaward side of the property, a dog barked.

She had little time to marvel, though, because barely had the car come to a stop outside a set of double front doors than they opened, and a man in his late fifties or early sixties appeared with a wheelchair light years removed from the spartan model offered by the airport.

The devoted butler, Georgios, she presumed. Pavlos had spoken of him often and with great fondness. Behind him came a younger man, little more than a boy really, who went about unloading the luggage while Niko and the butler lifted Pavlos from the car to the chair. By the time they were done, he was gray in the face and the grooves paralleling his mouth carved more deeply than usual.