Could they actually be happy together?
The idea was growing harder to resist. It would be too easy to love a man like Stavros, when he poured on the charm. She fell a little every time he spoke to her. And when he’d kissed her—
All night afterward, she’d lain awake, wondering what would have happened if she hadn’t insisted on separate bedrooms. If she’d let him share her bed. Wondering, and knowing. And wishing...
Now, as Holly looked at Stavros across the breakfast table, with the morning sun shining gold from the double-story window and the sea outside a brilliant blue, her heart was in her throat.
They barely said a word to each other as they ate breakfast. She was dressed simply, in a T-shirt and jeans, while he was in his usual tailored shirt, jacket and trousers. He’d just looked at her, then kissed her on the cheek. But that had been enough to make her pulse pound.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Stavros said now as his eyes met hers over the table. She broke out in a hot sweat.
“Oh?” she said, praying he didn’t.
He tilted his head. “You’re wondering how long we have to wait. I say we don’t.”
“Really?” she croaked, still filled with images of him naked in her bed.
He gave her a crooked grin. “Honestly, I’m glad my father never showed up last night. I only brought you here because I couldn’t think of any other way to convince you to give me a chance. I knew with your loving heart, you would feel like you had no choice but to let him meet his grandson.”
Her loving heart really was starting to sound ridiculous. As if Holly was determined to see only the best in people, even when her positive image of them was totally untethered to reality. What she’d learned last night about Stavros’s father didn’t make her particularly keen to get to know him better, either.
As Freddie started fussing in her arms, she reached for a
prepared bottle on the table. “You want to leave after breakfast? Without seeing him?”
“It would feel like dodging a bullet.” Leaning forward, he suddenly asked, “Could I hold the baby, Holly?”
His darkly handsome face was vulnerable, his deep voice uncertain, as if he wasn’t just asking her permission, but her opinion.
He still hadn’t held their son yet. Because Holly hadn’t let him.
Suddenly, she hated herself for that. Who did she think she was, keeping Freddie from Stavros—a man who’d made it clear that he only wanted good things for their baby?
“Of course you can,” she said. “You’re his father.”
His dark eyes lit up. “Yes?”
“Definitely.” Gently, she lifted the two-month-old into his father’s strong arms, where Stavros sat on the other side of the breakfast table in the morning room. She handed him a warmed bottle. “You’ll need this.”
“Like this?” he asked, angling the bottle. His boyish uncertainty made her heart twist inside her.
“Tilt your elbow a little more,” she suggested, touching his bare forearm. He looked up at her, and for a moment, electricity crackled between them. She saw him start to rise, as if he intended to take her in his arms.
Then he looked back down at the baby, and didn’t move from his chair. Freddie wrapped his hands around the bottle, drinking with greedy gulps, his black eyes looking up at his father trustingly.
Holly watched them with a lump in her throat. The baby’s sucking noises gradually slowed, then stopped altogether, as his eyes grew drowsy as he drifted off to sleep, held tenderly in his father’s powerful arms.
Stavros looked up with obvious pride, his dark eyes shining.
“Look,” he whispered. “He’s sleeping!”
And something broke inside Holly’s heart.
Stavros seemed so different now—
“So you finally came crawling back.”
Holly looked up to see a wiry, elderly man standing in the doorway with two young women on his arm. The man had brightly colored, youthful clothes that did little to disguise his potbelly and skinny legs. His hair was pitch-black, except for half an inch near the roots that was white. Even from this distance, he reeked of alcohol, cigarettes and expensive cologne.