One Night to Risk It All Read online

  “Including an island.”

  “I won this,” he said.

  “You won it?”

  “In a card game. It was one of the more interesting gambling experiences of my life. Yes, I was a literal gambler there for a while. At first with other people’s money.”

  “How?”

  “Card counting is a particularly useful skill. I happen to have the gift. I was a kid living on the streets doing card tricks for tourists and a rich guy picked me up, offered to kit me out to play in the casinos with his money, for a cut. I said ‘of course,’ naturally.”

  “Naturally,” she said.

  “I won a lot of money. And I got to keep part of it. Rented myself an apartment, started offering up an underground service. Until I had enough money to go gamble for myself at least once a week.”

  “And?”

  “I ended up in a high rollers’ game. There were things in that pot by the end that you wouldn’t believe, including a night with a man’s wife, which I turned down, by the way. But the island... I took the island.”

  She looked hard at him, blue eyes glittering. “You’re really twenty-six, Alex?”

  “Yes. And I was eighteen when I was doing that. From there, I figured I better decide what to do with the money I’d earned. So I walked away from the casino and started looking into investing. And I proved to have a knack for that so I thought...why not do it for other people? An extension of where I came from.”

  “A self-made man,” she said.

  He laughed. “None of us are really self-made, Rachel. We’re made with the aid or misfortune of other people. In my case, people had to lose money so I could gain it. Now, the people I make money for are aided by me, as I am by them. You are made by your father, by the media, and you were to be finished by Ajax, am I right?”

  “Finished?”

  “It’s how you were going to spend the rest of your life in comfort. You found a man who would close the loop neatly on everything you’ve built.”

  “I don’t think of it that way.”

  “No?”

  “No.” She wobbled in the sand and he reached over and caught her arm, holding her steady. She froze for a moment, her eyes falling to his lips. She swallowed hard. “I don’t think of it...of him...that way. It’s not how it is.”

  “Then how is it?”

  “I don’t know. He’s a friend. And...maybe like a brother, almost, which I can see right at this moment is so ridiculous it’s... I don’t know why I thought I could marry him. I don’t know why at all. I thought caring could be enough. I thought it was enough.”

  “Only because you’d never had passion.” He’d been the one to show that to her.

  “Don’t be so smug—it’s nasty. Truly, I wouldn’t crow about it if I were you. Is there an easier conquest than a woman who’s still a virgin at my age? ‘Hard up’ doesn’t even begin to describe it.”

  “That’s not what it was though. I myself was not particularly hard up, as you call it, and I still felt the electricity between us.”

  She stopped short, arched one eyebrow. “Oh, really?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Don’t deny that you felt it.”

  “No, I mean, ‘oh, really, you weren’t hard up?’ What does that mean? When was the last time you were with someone else?”

  “Jealousy, Rachel? I didn’t think you liked me.”

  “I’m not jealous. I’m curious.”

  “And if I tell you, you won’t be angry?”

  “I’ve been angry at you for a solid month, Alexios. I’m not making you any guarantees on that score. You could breathe funny and make me angry at this point.”

  “Don’t be dramatic. It had been a couple weeks by the time I met you.”

  She sniffed loudly as she’d done at the airport, a sign of her pique, he was realizing. “It had been twenty-eight years when I met you, but whatever.”

  “Are you saying I’m special, Rachel?”

  “Heck. No. I am not saying that. I am not saying that even a little bit. I’m just saying—some of us don’t run around with our pants around our ankles all the time.”

  “And you’re sure that Ajax was celibate the whole time you were together?”

  “I...I just... I... Yes.”

  “Probably you’re delusional,” he said. “As you were about marrying him in the first place.”

  “Okay, Alex, answer this question. Has there been a woman since you were with me?”

  “No.” She looked far too triumphant when he admitted that. This honesty thing where she was concerned really had to stop.

  She seemed to bring it out in him. He’d held back next to nothing since he’d met her. He’d told her. About why he’d seduced her, about his mother, about why he hated Ajax.

  Well, he’d told her most of it. There were things he couldn’t bring himself to speak out loud into an empty room. Much less share with with anyone else.

  His house came into view. He’d had it custom built when the island passed into his control. It was completely modern. Square, with hard, clean edges, windows that faced the sea. There was no gilded excess, no old-world opulence.

  That would have reminded him too much of the Kouklakis compound. And he had no interest in that. It was too much in his mind as it was.

  Stale, filthy opulence. And a carpet stained with blood.

  “It’s certainly different,” she said.

  “Is it?”

  “Very...minimalist.”

  “I’d had enough Persian rugs and intricate carvings to last a lifetime. I wasn’t interested in living in it for the rest of my life.”

  “Oh.”

  “What about you?” he asked. “What sort of architecture do you prefer?”

  Rachel paused on the path, his question hitting a nerve for some reason she couldn’t really identify. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know what sort of house you would have liked to live in one day?”

  “Ajax’s house,” she said, bristling. “And his penthouse in the city. All nice places. And nothing not to like about them.”

  “And before that?”

  “I had an apartment. In New York.” She’d liked her apartment a lot, but she’d given it up before the wedding, naturally. But it hadn’t been a place for entertaining. It had been a place just for her. Giving it up had been a lot harder than she’d anticipated, in truth, but it wasn’t worth crying over. “And when I come to Greece I stay in the family vacation house.”

  “If you were going to have a home built, what would it be like?”

  “I don’t know, okay? I’ve never thought about it, but what does it matter? I was going to have a beautiful home with Ajax. Now I may very well end up being homeless because I just walked away from a deal that was essential to both my father and to Ajax. Because... Because...”

  Suddenly her fists tightened. “You knew,” she said, her tone getting cold. “You knew and you’re over here pretending to be all honest and ‘marry me’ and crap, but you knew.”

  He didn’t blink, his blue eyes focused on her.

  “Whoever marries first gets my father’s company. That’s what you want. It’s not me, or hurting Ajax by taking my virginity or whatever else. It’s that you were going to try and get me to marry you so that you could screw him out of Holt. You’re trying to take my family business!”

  “Rachel...”

  “You—”

  “If I had wanted that, if that was the route I’d decided to take, I would have sweet-talked you back in Corfu when you saw my ID. As it is, I let you go.”

  “And then you came back. Were you going to make some sort of declaration of love and try to woo me away from the wedding and to...Vegas or something?”

  The thing that was so unsett
ling about that prospect was the fact that it might have worked. That if she hadn’t found out she was pregnant, if he’d walked in and kissed her, and told her that he hadn’t stopped thinking about her for the past month, that he loved her, she would have probably dropped everything and run away with him.

  Because she had feelings for him. Feelings that she couldn’t quite understand or deal with, but they were definitely feelings. Stupid, stupid feelings.

  Feelings that should be utterly choked out by this most recent revelation.

  “I don’t understand. Even if the past that you share—that you say you share... Even if it’s true I don’t know why you would want to destroy him so badly.”

  “Of course you don’t,” he said, walking in front of her, toward the house, “because you live in a dream world, little girl. You don’t know anything about the way the world works. And you should be thankful for that.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  RACHEL LAY DOWN on the white down-filled blanket and stared at the ceiling. She would ask for him to take her home if she wasn’t such a coward. If she wasn’t so afraid she didn’t have a home to go back to.

  Even if she did, it would be crawling with reporters, ready to get the juicy dirt on why she’d left Ajax at the altar. And the lame thing was there was tons of juicy dirt. If the bride being pregnant with another man’s baby wasn’t a great scandalous headline, she really didn’t know what was.

  Society wedding of the century became farce just that quickly and the press would absolutely adore it.

  There was a knock on the door. Not Alex, (A) because he wouldn’t have knocked, and (B) because it was soft, a woman’s hand, she was almost certain.

  “Yes?”

  The door opened a small woman with dark hair came in. “Mr. Alex has requested that you join him for dinner out on the terrace.”

  “Oh, has he now?”

  “Yes,” the woman said, either not picking up on Rachel’s annoyance, or choosing not to acknowledge it.

  “When does he expect me?”

  “Ten minutes, miss.”

  “Tell him it will be twenty—I need to dress for it. And tell him not to let that go to his head.”

  The woman nodded and backed out of the room. Rachel felt like a shrew. A sweaty, mean one. She was hot from the walk, still, and in a foul mood.

  A quick shower did wonders for the sweaty part, but the meanness still seemed to be simmering beneath the surface, even while she slipped into a simple black shift dress and a pair of black heels. She fastened a string of pearls around her neck and looked at her side profile. Her hair was neat, in place as it should be. Her makeup looked good.

  She looked normal. Like the Rachel she was accustomed to seeing in the mirror every day.

  Which was so strange because she didn’t feel like normal Rachel. She hadn’t. Not since that day she’d locked eyes with stupid Alexios Christofides.

  She let out a harsh breath and exited her room to find the maid standing there waiting for her.

  “I will take you to Mr. Alex.”

  “Thank you,” Rachel said, even while she thought that he was only sending her an escort to make sure she didn’t bribe his pilot to get her off the island.

  That was when she realized how stuck she was. With each step across the white marble floor and out toward the terrace, she felt a rope tightening around her neck, her pearls suddenly feeling heavy, like they were choking her.

  She reached up and unfastened them as they walked, wadding them up in her shaking hand, holding them down at her side.

  “Miss Rachel,” the maid said, announcing her as though she were a duchess of some kind.

  Alex stood and her heart squeezed. No matter how angry she was, he never failed to leave her utterly speechless. He was wearing a simple white button-up shirt, unfastened at the collar, the sleeves rolled up past his forearms.

  His skin looked a deeper bronze in that color, a glimpse of chest hair visible through the open neck. He looked so effortless. So ridiculously sexy.

  It wasn’t fair.

  It wasn’t fair that her body was drawn to a man like this. A man who had tricked her, used her and basically had her held captive on an island. What the ever-loving heck was wrong with her? Was she punishing herself for past sins? Or was there something that drew her to men who wanted to...use her?

  She sat down, and he took his seat.

  “I trust you had a nice rest?” he asked.

  “I don’t think you really trust that. I’m sure you know I spent the past hour quietly freaking out in the privacy of my bedroom.”

  “I suppose that’s only fair.”

  “I’ve just found out I’m having a baby, on top of everything else, so yes, it is only fair.”

  “That is why I proposed marriage,” he said. “Not to get Holt away from Ajax, but for the sake of the baby.”

  “Great. Fine. But please know that I will not marry you. Not for the baby, not for anything. At the very least not until my sister is married and I am certain, one hundred percent certain, that you won’t get Holt because of my indiscretion. I will not allow you to hurt Ajax or my family in that way.” A startling thought occurred to her. “And if you go after my sister I will be forced to remove your male member from your body with a very dull pocketknife, and don’t think I won’t do it. I might have been spoiled from birth, but I’m also from New York, and we don’t mess around over there.”

  “I have no desire to go and seduce your sister,” he said, leaning back in his chair, looking out at the ocean. As though they were discussing the weather, and not her desire to castrate him. “My plans, my priorities, have changed. My loyalty is to the child, not to my vengeance.”

  “Well, it’s very early in the pregnancy, and things can go wrong, so, yet again, marriage is off the table.”

  “Fine. For you, maybe it is, but not for me. I’ll continue to enter it into the discussion at times I feel are appropriate.”

  “You are a massive pain in the rear, do you know that?”

  “I absolutely do,” he said, lifting a glass of wine to his lips. Yeah, and he was drinking wine in front of her. He knew he was a pain. And he seemed to revel in it.

  “Well, stop it.” She took a sip of water from her glass.

  “Probably not. That’s twenty-six years of bad habits you’re asking me to break immediately, and I doubt it’s going to happen.”

  “Another good reason to avoid marrying you.”

  “Why is it you agreed to come with me?”

  “I’m a massive coward,” she said. “Among other things.”

  “What other things?”

  “An idiot. That’s the other thing I am. I can’t believe I fell for your charm and that boyish curly thing your hair does when it’s wet and your...sparkling blue eyes.”

  “Are you preparing to compose a sonnet about me?”

  “Shall I compare you to a horse’s ass?”

  “Is that your attempt at poetry?”

  “Yes. I thought it was good.”

  “Brilliant.” He took another sip of wine.

  “I have to ask, Alex, because it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me—what does a guy like you want with a baby?”

  “I don’t want a baby,” he said. “I want my baby and that’s an entirely different thing.”

  “Just a bit-of-sperm different at this point. It’s not like you know the child, not like you could even...feel him or get an idea he was inside of me for...months and months. I would think walking away from it would be really easy for you.”

  “Why is that?”

  She lifted a shoulder. “Because a lot of men do. It’s not an insult, it’s just that...well, a lot of men do. And since you just picked me up with the idea of getting revenge on Ajax and that’s all done, I w
ould have thought it wouldn’t serve your purpose to be involved with the child. Especially since I won’t marry you and let you take Holt from Ajax.”

  “This is a matter of honor.”

  “You have honor? Where was your honor when you were stealing my virtue in Corfu?”

  “This virtue I stole,” he said, leaning forward, “where was it when we were in Corfu? Virginity I remember. But I sort of remember you flinging it at me. I don’t really remember me stealing it.”

  She sniffed. “What. Ever. The thing is that I’m not really sure what’s in this for you and that makes me nervous. I’ve removed a couple of carrots and yet here you are still, like there’s another treat for you to catch—and I’m concerned about exactly what treats you think you’re going to be...getting from me. Because none. The answer is none.”

  “I want my child,” he said, setting his wine glass down, his palms flat on the table. “Because I know how the world is. Because I know what it’s like to grow up without a father. I know what it is to look at trees making shadows on your wall, and to not simply wonder what sort of evil things a bogeyman might do to you, but to know, with utter certainty, every horrible thing that could become of you. What it is to know that if the bogeyman ever did come there would be no one to protect you. My child will never know these fears. I will protect him. I will give him shelter with me, security. When I’m there, he will never worry. Not about one thing.”

  She looked down at the table and a plate of fish and rice was placed in front of her. It didn’t look appetizing in the least. Her stomach was too full of knots and anxiety for her to take a bite of anything.

  And Alex’s speech had only added to the knots. She didn’t want to see the good in him. It was far too dangerous. She wanted to be angry. To look at him and see a mustache-twirling villain bent on tying her to the tracks in an attempt to defeat Ajax, who she was still trying to place in the position of hero.

  Not that she could believe that Ajax was a villain, not in the least, but...but it wasn’t like she was longing for him to ride in on his white horse, either.

  “That’s really good of you, Alex.”