Modern Romance August 2018 Books 5-8 Collection. Julia James

about the weather when her marriage to Giannis would be as fake as their engagement five months earlier had been.

      Since the incident by the pool they had maintained an emotional and physical distance from each other. The closest contact they’d had was when their hands had accidentally brushed as they’d passed each other on the landing, on the way to their separate bedrooms.

      She was thankful that the wedding would be a small affair. It had been arranged at short notice, and both her mother and Giannis’s mother were on holiday in the warmer climes of the southern hemisphere and could not attend. Her best friend Becky was coming, and Sam had promised to be there. Ava was looking forward to seeing him—although if her brother had not been partly responsible for damaging Giannis’s boat she would not now be pregnant and about to marry a man who had become so remote that sometimes she wondered if the close bond she had felt between them on Spetses had been in her imagination.

      But the problem was not only Giannis, she acknowledged. Her trust issues meant that she found it difficult to lower her guard. And now her father was once more in the forefront of her mind.

      It had started with an email she’d received from an author who was writing a book about East End gangs and had discovered that Ava was Terry McKay’s daughter. The author wanted to ask her about her childhood growing up with her notorious gangster father.

      She sent a message back saying that she never discussed her father. But Ava knew she could not stop the book being published. People were fascinated by crime, and even though she had changed her name to Sheridan there was always a chance that she would be revealed as Terry McKay’s daughter.

      It would be unfair for Giannis to find out about her father in a newspaper article or book review, her conscience nagged. She ought to tell him the truth about her background before she married him. Especially as she had come to believe that Stefanos’s nephew had lied about Giannis having links to a criminal organisation.

      But she could not forget Craig’s suggestion that her children might take after her criminal father, and she was fearful of Giannis’s reaction. Would he reject her and his son? Maybe she should just keep quiet and hope that he never discovered her real identity. Tormented by indecision, she withdrew into herself—which did not go unnoticed by Giannis.

      ‘You’re very pale, and you have barely spoken a word all day,’ he commented during dinner on the evening before their wedding. He frowned. ‘Do you feel unwell? The baby...’

      ‘I feel fine, and I’ve felt the baby kicking and I’m sure he is fine too,’ she was quick to reassure him. She knew that Giannis’s obsessive concern about her health was because he cared about his child. But how would he feel if he was to learn that his son’s genes came from a very murky pool? She pushed her food around her plate, her appetite non-existent. ‘It’s just pre-wedding nerves.’

      He gave her a brooding look from across the table. ‘There is no reason for you to feel nervous. I have told you that I will not make demands on you,’ he said tersely.

      If only he would! Ava wished he would whip off the tablecloth, plates and all, and make hot, urgent love to her on the polished mahogany dining table. Sex would at least be some sort of communication between them, rather than the current state of simmering tension and words unspoken.

      There had been times over the past weeks when she had caught Giannis looking at her with a hungry gleam in his dark eyes that made her think he still desired her. But then she remembered how he had wrenched his mouth from hers that day by the pool, and her pride would not risk another humiliating rejection if she made the first move.

      She went to bed early, giving the excuse that she was tired, and ignored his sardonic expression as he glanced at the clock which showed that it was eight o’clock. Surprisingly she fell asleep, but woke with a start from a dream where she was standing in the church with Giannis and someone in the congregation halted the wedding and denounced her as a gangster’s daughter. The look of disgust on Giannis’s face stayed in her mind after she had opened her eyes and her stomach gave a sickening lurch as she jumped out of bed and, without stopping to pull on her robe, ran down the hall to his room.

      ‘Ava.’ Giannis was sitting up in bed, leaning against the pillows. The black-rimmed reading glasses he wore only added to his rampant sex appeal and in the soft light from the bedside lamp his bare chest gleamed like bronze, covered with whorls of dark hairs. He dropped the documents that he had been studying onto the sheet and sat bolt upright, concern stamped on his handsome face. ‘What’s wrong?’

      ‘I can’t marry you,’ she blurted out.