Evidently the contents of the house had been packed up ready to be loaded onto a removals van. He came out in a cold sweat, thinking that if he had not read Sam’s note for another few days he would have been too late to confront Ava.
‘Answer me, damn it,’ he said harshly.
Ava was cornered in the cramped room and she grabbed a heavy-based frying pan from one of the packing boxes. ‘Stay away from me,’ she said fiercely, waving the frying pan in the air. ‘I’ll defend myself if I have to.’
Giannis forced himself to control his temper when he heard real fear in her voice. ‘I’m not going to harm you,’ he growled. ‘All I want is your honesty. I have a right to know if you had conceived my child.’
After several tense seconds she slowly lowered her arm and dropped the frying pan back into the box. Her teeth gnawed on her bottom lip. ‘All right...yes. I had just found out that I was pregnant when I flew back to London.’
Giannis stared at her slender figure in dark jeans and a loose white sweater. Her honey-gold hair was tied in a ponytail and her peaches-and-cream skin glowed with health. She looked even more beautiful than he remembered. But she did not look pregnant. Surely there would be some sign by now? When his PA in Greece had been expecting, her stomach had seemed to grow bigger daily.
He shoved his hands into his coat pockets and clenched his fingers so tightly that his nails bit into his palms. ‘You said that you were pregnant,’ he said stiltedly, fighting to hold back the volcanic mass of his emotions from spewing out. ‘Does it mean that either by accident or design there is no longer a baby?’
Now she stared back at him and her eyes were as dark as storm clouds. ‘Accident or design? I don’t think I understand.’
‘Your brother said in the Christmas card that it was a shame about the baby. And before you left Athens you told me you wanted to focus on your career. Did you terminate the pregnancy?’
She reeled backwards and knocked over a box of Christmas decorations, sending gaudy baubles rolling across the carpet. ‘No, I did not.’
Giannis snatched a breath. He needed her to spell it out for him. ‘So you are carrying my child?’
‘Yes.’ Her voice was a whisper of sound, as if she was reluctant to confirm the news that blew him away. ‘Sam thought it was a shame that we had broken up when I am expecting your baby,’ she muttered.
Euphoria swept through Giannis but it was swiftly replaced with anger. ‘Why the hell did you try to keep it a secret from me? I had a right to know that I am to be a father.’
‘Don’t take that moral tone with me. You have no rights to this baby, Giannis.’ Colour flared on Ava’s pale cheeks and her eyes flashed with temper. ‘I know what you are. I’ve heard the rumour that you are involved with the Greek mafia.’
‘What?’ Shock ricocheted through Giannis. He wondered if Ava was joking, even if the joke was in very poor taste. But as they faced each other across the room full of packing boxes and spilt shiny baubles he realised that she was serious.
‘No doubt you will deny it. But I didn’t tell you about my pregnancy because I won’t take the risk of my baby having a criminal for a father.’ She crossed her arms defensively in front of her and glared at him.
He kept his hands in his pockets in case he was tempted to shake some sense into her. Not that he would ever lay a finger on a woman in anger, and certainly not the mother of his child. Giannis’s heart lurched as the astounding reality sank in that Ava was expecting his baby.
Five years ago he had lost his unborn child, but by a miracle he had been given another chance to be a father. A chance perhaps of redemption. He wanted to be a good father, as his own father had been, and he would love his child as deeply as his father had loved him. Emotions that he had buried for the last fifteen years threatened to overwhelm him. But he had to deal with Ava’s shocking accusation and somehow defuse the volatile situation.
‘Of course I deny that I belong to a criminal organisation because it’s not true. Who told you the rumour about me?’
‘I’m not prepared to say.’
‘It must have been at Stefanos’s party.’ Giannis knew he had guessed correctly when Ava dropped her gaze. He remembered that her attitude towards him had changed when they had spent the night on Gaia. She had left the party early, saying she had a headache. When she had been sick the next morning she had blamed it on a migraine, but she must have known then that she was pregnant.
Fury swirled, black and bitter, inside him at the realisation that Ava had tried to hide his child from him because she had believed an unfounded rumour. A memory flashed into his mind.
‘I saw you talking to Petros Spyriou at the party while I was with Stefanos. Did he tell you the ridiculous story that I am a criminal?’
‘I don’t know the name of the man who spoke to me.’
‘So you believed the words of a stranger without question and without giving me a chance to refute his slanderous allegations?’ When she bit her lip but said nothing, Giannis continued, ‘We had been lovers for a month before we went to Gaia, yet what we shared clearly meant nothing to you.’
‘What did we share, Giannis, other than sex and lies? You blackmailed me to be your fake fiancée so that you could trick Stefanos to sell his company to you.’ Her voice faltered. ‘When I heard a rumour that you use TGE as a cover for your criminal activities I didn’t know what to believe.’
‘So you ran away,’ he said scathingly. The savage satisfaction he felt when colour flared on her face did not lessen his unexpected sense of betrayal, of hurt, damn it, that she had so little faith in him.
When they had stayed on Spetses he had spent more time with her than he’d done with any other woman. Even when he had dated Caroline for nearly a year, their relationship had amounted to meeting for dinner a couple of times a week and occasional weekends together when their work schedules had aligned.
‘Petros Spyriou is Stefanos’s nephew,’ he told Ava. ‘Petros believes that his uncle should have put him in charge of Markou Shipping instead of selling the company to me. He is jealous of me, which is why he made up disgusting lies about me.’ Giannis gave a grim laugh. ‘Petros succeeded in scaring you away but he’ll find himself in court facing charges of slander and defamation of character.’
‘He said that a few years ago a journalist tried to investigate you but was dissuaded from publishing information that he’d discovered about you.’
Inside his coat pockets, Giannis curled his hands into fists and wished that Stefanos’s weasel of a nephew was standing in front of him. His criminal record had been expunged ten years after he’d served his prison sentence, which was standard procedure in Greek law. But somehow a journalist had found out about it and demanded money to keep quiet. Giannis had been loath to give in to blackmail, but coming soon after he’d broken up with Caroline, and the loss of his first child, his emotions had been raw and he’d been desperate to keep the details of his father’s death out of the media spotlight.
He had no idea how Stefanos’s nephew had found out about the journalist, and he guessed that Petros did not know what information the journalist had discovered. But the suggestion that there were secrets Giannis wanted to keep hidden must have been useful to Petros when he’d told Ava lies about him being involved with the Greek mafia. The story was so crazy it was laughable—yet Ava had believed Petros and as a result she had hidden her pregnancy, Giannis thought bitterly.
His jaw clenched as he remembered that while they had lived together at Villa Delphine he had been tempted to confess to Ava that he had been responsible for his father’s untimely death. Thank God he had not bared his soul to her. He certainly would not tell her the truth now. He could imagine her horrified reaction and he dared not risk her disappearing again with his baby.
‘Everything Petros told you was pure fabrication.’ He shrugged. ‘Believe