“No! It was not!” The words exploded from him. “I let my mother’s behavior color how I saw you. I had no reason to distrust you. You were so generous with me when we made love, so giving of yourself. I knew, I knew you could not have been that way with anyone else, but I was fighting a rearguard action against ending up as obsessed as my father had been. The feelings I had for you made me vulnerable. That was not acceptable, so I acted like the bastard you called me.”
Tears clogged her throat. “No.”
“Yes. My only excuse is that I was not thinking clearly. Worry for my grandfather, frustration over the promise he had extracted from me, it played hell with my thinking processes. The worst part was the desperation I felt at the thought of losing you. It horrified me and when I am afraid, I act. I lashed out at you and I lost you.”
“I waited a week for you,” she said helplessly. Not wanting him to feel worse than he already did, but wanting him to know she’d loved him enough to stay even after he had her evicted from the apartment. “I didn’t leave until I saw the announcement of your engagement to Phoebe.”
His eyes closed and his head went back, his jaw taut. “I knew I’d made the biggest mistake of my life when I let my grandfather put the announcement in the paper. It all hit me. How wrong everything was. How wrong everything would continue to be if I didn’t get you back, but you were gone, pethi mou.”
There was a wealth of pain in those words.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“I could not find you,” he said, as if she hadn’t spoken, “I had my detectives looking everywhere, but you had disappeared as if you didn’t even exist. When I slept, I had nightmares of you falling down a deep hole and vanishing forever.”
His skin broke out in sweat at the memory.
She stepped forward and laid her hand against his heart. “Losing you hurt so much, I thought I was going to die.”
He crushed her to him. “I’m sorry.”
Two words sincerely spoken, words she had never heard him say in all the time they had known each other. And they healed wounds deep in her heart.
“I love you, mon cher.”
He kissed her with a passion that seared her soul. She was lost in the beauty of his kiss when he pulled away abruptly.
“Ouch.”
She looked up, dazed. “What?”
“Something poked me.”
She looked down at her left hand where the hatpin protruded from her tightly clutched fingers. She lifted her hand and opened it to reveal the two objects she held. “I think it was the hatpin.”
“Hatpin?” he asked as if he didn’t know what one was. Maybe he didn’t. Not many women had them anymore, but her mother was old fashioned. She still carried starched hankies.
“Yes.”
“You planned to wear a hat?”
She laughed softly. “No. It was to pick the lock.”
“But I did not lock the door.”
“I wanted to be prepared.”
“You know how to pick a lock?” he asked, a smile tugging at his mouth.
She shook her head. “I wasn’t going to let that stop me.”
He laughed and pulled her back into his arms, this time with more caution. “Alexandra Petronides, you are my dearest treasure and I will love you forever.”
She gulped back tears and pleaded, “Say it again.”
He cupped her face between the solid warmth of his hands. “I love you whether you are the independent career woman, Xandra Fortune, the spitting kitten, Alexandra Dupree or any other persona you choose to take on. You are the wife of my heart.”
“Show me, Dimitri.”
And he did. Beautifully. Erotically. Thoroughly. Then he carried her back to their bed and showed her again. She fell asleep in his arms.
“So, what was the pregnancy test for, agapi mou?”
Dimitri had convinced Alexandra to redon the shimmery nightgown from the night before and she sat curled in his lap in a chair on their private terrace a little after sunrise.
“Just a minute. Let me show you.” She jumped off his lap and went in search of the small white stick. She found it with the hatpin on the floor of the guestroom. She went back out onto the terrace and couldn’t help smiling at the picture her husband presented in nothing but a pair of black silk boxers.
Her gown covered more of her body with fabric, but none of it with modesty and his eyes gleamed their appreciation at her as she approached him.
She knelt down on the tile by his knees and presented the pregnancy test to him. “I’m pregnant with your baby, Dimitri.”
His eyes widened, then narrowed in understanding. “You are giving me a second chance.”
“Love can erase the mistakes of the past.”
Something profound moved across his features and he reached for the stick. “I can think of nothing greater in life than to have you carry my child.”
They were the words she had wanted to hear so much five months ago and she smiled with a radiance she made no effort to hide. “I love you, mon cher.”
She’d said it so many times over the past hours, the words should have lost their impact, but she knew they never would and the expression on his face told her he felt the same.
“I love you, Alexandra. Never leave me again.”
“Never,” she agreed fervently.
He leaned down and kissed her softly before lifting her back into his lap.
“I still feel bad about your grandfather,” she admitted.
“Why should you feel this?”
“All those awful news stories. They must have devastated him.”
Dimitri tilted her chin so they were looking into one another’s eyes. “It was not the tabloid gossip that upset Grandfather so badly he had another attack.” Guilt chased across Dimitri’s features. “I am fully to blame.”
“But…”
“Grandfather didn’t even see the news stories until after coming out of the hospital.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I told my grandfather I couldn’t marry Phoebe and then I told him why.”
“Because I was pregnant with your baby.”
He shook his head, his eyes warming her. “Because I love you. He had the heart attack when he started yelling at me for being a fool after I admitted I’d evicted you from the apartment and could not find you.”
She couldn’t take it in. “You already knew you weren’t going to marry Phoebe before the tabloids ran the gossip about us?”
“I knew I wasn’t going to marry Phoebe the day you told me you were pregnant, but I was insane with unreasonable jealousy, angry at myself, angry at my grandfather. I went off the rails and didn’t get back on them until I saw you standing next to your sister that first night in New York.”
“I don’t know. You acted pretty derailed then too.”
“She told me you had died! Do you have any idea what that did to me?”
She was beginning to have an inkling. If he had loved her, and now she knew he had, such news would have been soul destroying. “I’m sorry, Dimitri.” She leaned forward and kissed him, wanting to heal the hurts of the past.
He kissed her back with enough passion to leave her gasping for breath a minute later.
“I don’t know if I can ever forgive myself for what I did to you.”
Her eyes misted, but she smiled. “Please. You have to. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking back. My present is glorious now that you are in it, now that I know you love me!”
“I saw the paparazzi outside the restaurant in New York and did nothing,” he said with the air of a man who felt he had to admit everything.
She tried to figure out what he was saying. “Are you saying you wanted them to make the connection with my Xandra Fortune identity?”
He did his best to look humble, but it didn’t come naturally. “I realize this was wrong.”
“But you would do it again.”
“I was desperate,” he defended.
Dimitri desperate. Her heart just melted. “That’s really sweet, mon cher.”
“You are not angry with me?” he asked warily.
She snuggled closer, curling her fingers in his chest hair. “No. It’s flattering to think of my Greek tycoon so desperate he stooped to nefarious means to win me,” she said cheekily.
“I will never let you go again,” he growled against her temple and then did something truly amazing with his tongue to her ear.
She shivered with the excitement only he could generate. “You’re stuck with me for life, Dimitri Petronides.”
“Count on it, agapi mou.”
The baby kicked and they both laughed.
She rubbed the taut skin over the protruding little foot. “He approves.”