All those years of trying to have a baby, of longing for a baby, and when it had finally happened she hadn’t had a clue until Markos had put forward the possibility of it yesterday.
Her initial shock the evening before had quickly been followed by a feeling of absolute awe. She was pregnant at last. Nestled safe inside her was the baby of the man Eva loved so much she ached with the emotion.
‘That’s why I was going to call you this morning. I couldn’t wait to share the wonderful news with you.’ Her excitement wavered slightly as she looked down at Markos uncertainly. ‘Markos, please say something, my darling…’
He sat up to take her gently in his arms. ‘Thank you, my Eva,’ he murmured gruffly into the silkiness of her hair.
‘You’re pleased about the baby?’
Markos pulled back slightly when he heard the uncertainty in Eva’s voice, his hands moving up to cradle each side of her face. ‘I am ecstatic about the baby,’ he assured her firmly.
The way in which Eva had told him the news—the way in which she had said, ‘We’re pregnant, Markos!’—not I’m pregnant, but we’re pregnant—and that he was going to be a father—dear Lord, the wonder of such a thing! It told Markos more than anything else ever could have done that those plans Eva had once had to have a baby on her own, without the complication of a man in either her bed or the life of her baby, no longer existed. She had wanted to share their baby with him from the moment she knew of its existence.
‘I love you, Eva. I will always love you!’ His arms tightened about her with a possessiveness he hadn’t known he was capable of feeling until this moment of holding Eva and their baby in his arms.
Eva was his.
As Markos was hers.
And the baby she carried was and always would be theirs to share, and love, and nurture…
Together.
* * * * *
Keep reading for an excerpt of A Secret Disgrace by Penny Jordan!
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CHAPTER ONE
‘YOU say it was your grandparents’ wish that their ashes be buried here, in the graveyard of the church of Santa Maria?’
The dispassionate male voice gave away as little as the shadowed face. Its bone structure was delineated with strokes of sunlight that might have come from Leonardo’s masterly hand, revealing as they did the exact nature of the man’s cultural inheritance. Those high cheekbones, that slashing line of taut jaw, the hint of olive-toned flesh, the proud aquiline shape of his nose—all of them spoke of the mixing of genes from the invaders who had seen Sicily and sought to possess it. His ancestors had never allowed anything to stand in the way of what they wanted. And now his attention was focused on her.
Instinctively she wanted to distance herself from him, to conceal herself from him, she recognized, and she couldn’t stop herself from stepping back from him, her ankle threatening to give way as the back of her pretty wedged shoe came up against the unseen edge of the gravestone behind her.