Maid's Pregnancy Bombshell
Author
Lynne Graham
Reads
15.8K
Chapters
10
The Greek only needed a bride! Now he has a surprise baby on the way in this accidental pregnancy, marriage of convenience, billionaire boss romance. Their temporary arrangement… has a permanent consequence! Shy hotel maid Alana Davison is desperate to clear a family debt. So desperate that, when she discovers Greek tycoon Ares Sarris urgently needs a wife, she blurts out a scandalous suggestion: in exchange for his help, she'll become his emergency bride! To fiercely controlled Ares, Alana is a convenient solution; their marriage will allow him to secure the inheritance his illegitimacy denied him. What's inconvenient is the chemistry blazing like a wildfire between them! And Alana's shock announcement that in nine months' time, Ares's well-ordered life will be disrupted further — by a baby! Previously published at The Maid's Pregnancy Bombshell.
CHAPTER ONE
THE GREEK TYCOON Ares Sarris was a billionaire loner. He had shed his team of bodyguards for the occasion of the Durante wedding because they kept everyone at arm’s length and he did not like to lend truth to the rumour that he was antisocial...even if he was. His unusual silver-blond hair glittered below the lights, his dark eyes very serious, his lean, strong face taut.
He had had a long hard road to the remarkable triumphs that were now his. Born in the back streets of Athens, he was the child of a drug-addicted mother and a rich man, averse to taking responsibility for his blunders. Furthermore, his earliest memory was of his mother calling him a mistake and abandoning him. He didn’t look back to those days very often because his childhood had been a nightmare.
Yes, he acknowledged with the grudging aspect of an intellectual man who refused to dwell on the past, his life was very much better now. People didn’t tell him what to do any more. They didn’t denigrate him or hit him. They didn’t act as though his genius level IQ were either some hellish annoying fault or a blessing he didn’t deserve. Why? He was much too rich now to be that vulnerable and that made him smile because he had only first set out to make money at the age of eighteen to feel safe.
His immense wealth, nonetheless, had failed to protect Ares from being coerced by an old, bitter, snobbish woman he had never met into doing what he didn’t want to do. To inherit the Sarris ancestral home as the bastard that he was, he had to be married. Married! As desirable a prospect to a male as private and reserved as Ares as sticking his hand into an open fire and the vindictive old witch had known it too! Why else had his grandmother imposed that clause in her will? By law, prevented from leaving the property to anyone other than the last living Sarris, she had contrived to slip in, ‘Ares and his wife’.
Katarina Sarris had been well aware that Ares, foolishly frank in the only press interview he had ever given at the age of nineteen, on the acquisition of his first billion, had sworn never to marry. Although he had never met the woman who had been his late father’s mother, and only a disastrous plane crash killing both his father and his half-brothers in adolescence had finally allowed him to be publicly recognised as a Sarris, Ares longed to possess that firm family foundation of history that had eluded him all his life.
His birth father’s denial of his existence when he was a child had broken something in him while also warning him that his bone-deep need for validation was a dangerous weakness. Through DNA tests done at the time, the family lawyers, however, had acknowledged that Ares was a Sarris and had ensured that his educational needs were met. His grandmother, appalled by his background and antecedents as only a very snobbish woman could be, had refused to meet him even after the rest of her family had died. That the sudden death of his father and legitimate half-brothers had immediately given Ares recognition as a Sarris had been a tragic truth. But sadly, no warm welcome had awaited Ares in the bosom of his long-lost family when he’d finally arrived.
Ares had long told himself that he did not need that welcome now that he was an adult. But that house, the home of his paternal ancestry, could not, should not be denied to him by some petty clause in a will. Of course, he could have gone to court and easily overturned his grandmother’s will but Ares refused to allow his sordid background to be exposed in an open court. As a child and teenager, he had undergone deep humiliation on that score. He would never subject himself to that anguish and embarrassment again. No, marrying a stranger simply to meet the exact terms of the will was, by far, the wiser option and a quick, clean solution to a thorny problem.
And that recollection brought Ares straight back to this evening’s idiocy. He groaned, pacing restlessly in the well-lit boarded seating area by the side of the hotel’s ornamental lake. His future bride, Verena Coleman, very much a paid role-player in his determination to inherit that property, had demanded this private meeting with him. That the woman should demand anything set Ares’s even white teeth on edge. Until that evening, he had never actually met the lady in the flesh although she would become his wife at the end of the month. His lawyers had dealt with her. She had signed the watertight complex contract and for a very handsome price she would show up at the altar and start acting as his fake wife.
For a split second, Ares thought that he saw an odd shimmer of movement in the darkness below the trees and he spoke in Greek to ask if anyone was there, and then in Italian. After all, he was in Italy. Silence rewarded him and he shrugged a shoulder, reckoning that nobody but him was chilling down by the lake unless they were a smoker and, for very good reasons, he would never belong to that tribe.
At last, he heard the sound of feminine heels tap-tapping down the path to the beach and he frowned. Verena had pushed her way into his presence during the wedding reception and thoroughly exasperated him. She was provocatively dressed in a style he viewed as vulgar and everything he disliked in a woman but, for all that, she would still be his wife come the end of the month. She swam into view, all smiles and heaving cleavage on display. She was a curvy brunette from a minor English aristocratic family but if there was a hint of refined blue blood in her it definitely didn’t show on the surface. His lawyers had not done well in choosing her.
‘Ares!’ she carolled, hurrying towards him as if they were friends when they were not even acquaintances. It had been an unpleasant surprise to meet her at the wedding, which he guessed she had only gained entrance to by accompanying the glitzy wedding planner.
‘You were directed to address any enquiries to my lawyers,’ he reminded her. ‘Why would you need to speak to me in person?’
‘This is something that only you can deal with,’ she announced importantly. ‘I’m in a bit of a pickle, I’m afraid. I’m pregnant.’
‘Pregnant?’ Ares exclaimed in disbelief, and as quickly added, ‘That means you’ve broken our marriage contract—’
‘But why should it matter?’ Verena demanded angrily. ‘It’s not as though sex is included in our arrangement. It’s not as if you’re even planning to share the same house.’
‘If I marry you when you’re pregnant, the child will be assumed to be mine and that is a legal maze of complication which I have no intention of touching in these circumstances. I do not want your child approaching me in the future believing that I may be his parent. I do not want the squalid rumours that would engulf us all over time either.’
‘So, you’re asking me to terminate my pregnancy?’ Verena assumed.
Ares lifted his proud fair head high. ‘I would not dream of making such a request of any woman, nor would I wish such a sacrifice to be made and laid at my door. No, it is much simpler than that: you’ve broken the contract. Our arrangement is now at an end.’
‘You can’t do this to me! I was depending on that money!’ Verena flashed back at him furiously.
Ares said nothing because he truly had nothing more to say. Verena had after all already received a substantial payment for merely signing the contract.
‘But you need a wife by the end of the month!’ Verena reminded him.
‘You are not the only woman who would be willing to enter a marriage of convenience for a price,’ Ares retorted with precision.
Verena slung a handful of filthy curse words at him and stalked off. Ares was appalled and he swung away to look out over the moonlit lake. It had been an error not to request a personal meeting with her before he signed that contract. His legal reps had certainly not done him proud with her selection, he reflected grimly. She was too ignorant. She might only have been a fake bride-to-be, but naturally he did not want a boorish woman carrying his name or potentially figuring in the media as his wife. The binding NDA she had signed would keep her quiet though. He dug out his phone and texted his chief lawyer to warn him that the search was back on for a bride.
As he spun back round, intending to leave, he was taken aback to find a blonde in a long green dress that shimmered standing barefoot in the sand only a few feet away, her shoes clutched in one hand. It was, to his astonishment, the bridesmaid who had caught his attention earlier that day. Why? She was downright stunning from her sheet of natural blonde hair to those bright aqua-green eyes framed in her heart-shaped face with skin so flawless her complexion glowed. He had watched the men queuing up to take her onto the dance floor, all of them desperate to impress her, and he had noticed her seeming indifference to their efforts with detached amusement. Had he thought of approaching her on his own behalf? No...she was far too young for him, barely out of her teens, in his estimation.
‘Can I help you with something?’ he asked politely in English because he was aware that the sole bridesmaid was the bride’s sister.
Nervousness made her twitch, and her extraordinary clear eyes evaded his. ‘I was rather h-hoping I could help you,’ she stammered in a rush. ‘If you need a fake wife in a hurry for a price, I’d like to put myself forward as a candidate.’
And Ares, who was very rarely surprised by any development in life, was totally astounded by that proposition. It was a dazzlingly inappropriate offer as well and he rather thought that her new distinctly rich brother-in-law, Lorenzo Durante, would be shocked to the core by a member of his family approaching any wealthy stranger with such an offer.
Alana had never had as much attention in her life as she received from the men at her sister, Skye’s wedding. But once the novelty wore off, she had no interest. She didn’t have room for a man in her life when she was too busy working and the reasons why she had to work so hard and so endlessly boiled up afresh in her on the dance floor, making her eyes sting with sudden tears.
She was in debt to her eyeballs but that had to remain a giant secret. Yes, her new brother-in-law, Enzo, could have rescued her from her problems in five minutes. After all, Enzo was very generous. He had bought her a car as a bridesmaid’s present, even offered to help her return to her art and design course at university. But to request Enzo’s help, she would have to lie to her sister and she couldn’t imagine Enzo lying to his bride if she told him the truth. Enzo and Skye had a thing about not keeping secrets from each other and Alana was hiding a huge secret that she was determined not to share with the big sister she adored.
Skye had idolised their stepfather, Steve Davison. Absolutely idolised the man who had adopted them and whom they both had called Dad. But the older man had been rather more flawed than Skye could ever have suspected. Unbeknownst to their mother and his eldest daughter, Steve had been a gambler and when he had got into trouble with money he had approached Alana for help, knowing that she was the least judgemental person in his family.
Alana had been far too fond of him to refuse to borrow money on his behalf with the loan shark he had taken her to meet. Every week out of his earnings as a taxi driver, Steve had faithfully brought her his payment towards the loan and there hadn’t been a single problem. Well, the problem had really only begun when her mother and stepfather were killed in a train derailment the year before and Alana was left struggling to keep paying that loan out of what little she earned as a hotel maid.
But even worse, the debt kept on growing at a fantastic rate. She was paying a phenomenal interest rate and she knew it was illegal but there was nothing anybody could do about that aspect when the loan was in her name and her stepfather had picked a moneylender who was more of a criminal than an upstanding loan officer. Steve Davison had wanted that debt off the books, under the counter, hidden and she had made the biggest mistake of her life when she had agreed to the debt being placed in her name.
And when it had occurred to Alana that the best thing she could do with that lovely new car Enzo had bought her would be to sell it for the cash, she had cringed in shame and guilt and had left the wedding reception to seek the darkness down by the lake to lick her wounds. Of course, she couldn’t sell that gift, but she genuinely didn’t have the money to run a car in any case. She got around on a bike for good reasons. Not because she was obsessed with keeping fit, as her sister had teased...oh, if only Skye knew the truth!
But as Alana sank down on a rock in the shadows of the thick belt of trees girding the beach, she knew she wasn’t ever going to tell Skye the truth about their stepfather’s gambling debts. They had two younger siblings, Brodie and Shona, aged two and one, and Skye had taken full charge of them. She and Enzo were currently in the process of adopting Alana’s little brother and sister. Skye had done enough. She had already made more than enough sacrifices on their family’s behalf and she deserved to retain her illusions about the late father she had adored.
Now it was Alana’s turn to do her bit and continue to handle the unfortunate financial repercussions of their parents’ premature demise. Making heavy weather of her difficulties wasn’t going to change anything, she scolded herself impatiently.
As footsteps sounded on the board path above the beach she glanced up, momentarily drawn from her unhappy reverie. A very tall, broad-shouldered male stepped into view below the fairy lights strung round the seating area. Instantaneous recognition leapt through Alana: it was Ares Sarris. That platinum fair hair was unmistakeable, although it had got a little longer since she had first seen him at the Blackthorn Hotel where she worked. He was probably a guest at her sister’s wedding, although she hadn’t noticed him at the reception because there were hundreds of guests.
The one and only time she had seen Ares Sarris before had been in the Presidential Suite at the Blackthorn Hotel. A US president had stayed there once to play golf and there was a plaque on the wall commemorating his visit. Ares had taken Alana’s breath away at first glance. Give him a pair of feathered wings and a sword and he would resemble a warrior archangel. Her cheeks burned in the darkness. What a silly comparison! But, seriously, the guy was heartbreakingly beautiful from the crown of his silvery blond head to the soles of his doubtless handmade shoes. He had stopped her in her tracks, made her fumble her words and stare and she still winced thinking about that moment and of how she had later watched him leaping into his helicopter to leave again. She was a grown woman, not an adolescent fangirling over a popstar.
As a female came tripping down the same path, Alana looked on curiously while also beginning to rise to her feet to leave and then the woman announced quite loudly that she was pregnant and Alana dropped back down on her rock perch in shock because she definitely didn’t want to walk out into the middle of that kind of scene and the only way off the beach would be past the couple. Their voices carried very clearly even though she was trying hard not to listen. The conversation was too confidential to interrupt, she told herself, all the while as her brows rose so high they vanished into her hairline because the idea that Ares Sarris, in all his gorgeous bronzed-angel glory, could have to pay a woman to marry him shook her rigid.
By the time, the foul-mouthed lady had departed in a snit, however, Alana’s brain was engaged in an entirely different direction. The baby wasn’t his? He needed a fake wife? He was willing to pay for the service? No sex was involved? In the midst of her frantic ruminations, it struck her that here was a vacancy she could fill, a job with better prospects than the one she had because she knew that Ares Sarris was even richer than her brother-in-law. According to repute, the Greek technology mogul was one of the richest men in the world.
Was she a gold-digger to even think of approaching him?
It was disgusting, wasn’t it? To be so desperate for money that she would consider such an option? But that same desperation moved Alana stiffly and uncertainly out of the shadows. What drove her forward was remembering the days she’d lain sleepless, fretting about how she would scrape enough cash together to make the next payment to Maddox, the moneylender. He was a nasty, revolting little man, who had told her more than once that there were other options if she was struggling to find the money. She strongly suspected that Maddox was a pimp.
Focusing on a point somewhere to the left of Ares Sarris, after he had asked her whether he could help her with something, she heard herself stammer in a mortifyingly little voice, ‘I was rather h-hoping I could help you. If you need a fake wife in a hurry for a price, I’d like to put myself forward as a candidate. I’m in debt and I need the money,’ she added, like an afterthought.
Ares loosed an unexpected laugh because she was so embarrassed and so gauche and so young that she couldn’t even look him in the eye. ‘Does Enzo know about this?’
Alana’s cheeks flamed and she looked up at him, disconcertingly aware of his great height in comparison to her below average five feet three inches, to say, ‘Of course, he doesn’t. There are very good reasons why I can’t go to Enzo for help.’
Credit-card debt, Ares ruminated, extravagance, drugs? ‘If it’s drugs, I should be sharing this conversation with him. I’m not a snitch but you are his family now and, in his position, I would want to know such a thing.’
Alana blanched. ‘It’s not drugs!’ she gasped in horror. ‘What do you think I am?’
Ares chuckled, amused yet again by her sheer incredulity at such a suggestion. ‘I know nothing whatsoever about you. How do I know whether or not you’re a party girl?’
‘Well, I’m not!’
‘But you are an eavesdropper,’ he pointed out drily.
‘I heard the woman say she was pregnant and then I thought I couldn’t interrupt because it was too private and I didn’t want to embarrass anyone,’ she protested vehemently. ‘I didn’t intend to hear the rest of it. I just felt trapped there in hiding. I’m very sorry that I heard what I shouldn’t have.’
‘How can you possibly apologise when you’re trying to use what you heard?’ Ares demanded unanswerably.
‘If I wasn’t pretty desperate, I wouldn’t have dreamt of coming up to you like this!’ she muttered shakily.
He gazed down at her. The jewelled eyes glistened with tears. A rare shard of compassion infiltrated Ares Sarris, by repute a male with a heart of stone. Yes, he would be asking her to sign an NDA on his behalf in the near future, but she couldn’t hide a single emotion that crossed her lovely face. Honesty, innocence and regret shone out of her like a luminous light and he found that weirdly attractive because he was infinitely more accustomed to women who concealed every genuine feeling.
‘How old are you?’ he enquired.
‘Twenty-one,’ she told him with a hint of defiance.
She was a little older than he had guessed but not by much. Listening to her, he felt about a century more mature because he didn’t believe that he had ever enjoyed such innocence. ‘Sit down,’ he urged.
‘Why?’ she asked even as she obediently sat down.
In silence he detached her shoes from her loose grip and crouched athletically low to attach them to her sandy feet. ‘I’m assuming you don’t want to walk them into the water first?’
Swallowing hard, she shook her head in agreement, seemingly dumbstruck by his assistance with her shoes. He brushed sand away with a light sweep of his hand across the top of her foot and Alana shivered, extraordinarily conscious of the firm fingers at her ankle holding it steady. Unwarily, she looked up at him for the first time and sank into dark eyes that under the lights above were tortoiseshell perfection set in his lean bronzed face. Every shade of amber and gold swirled in those eyes. And those cheekbones, she enumerated, that sculpted shadowed jaw line, that unexpectedly full sensual mouth and the faint breeze playing with the silvery fair strands across his sleek dark brows. She wanted to touch him. In all her life she had never wanted so badly to reach out to touch anyone and she pushed her hands below her thighs to ensure that she kept them to herself.
‘You’re not even considering me for the job, are you?’ Alana condemned. ‘You think I’m—’
Ares looked levelly back at her. ‘Too young, too naïve and probably unreliable into the bargain.’
‘You’re only twenty-nine. I read that somewhere!’ she added with the speed of embarrassment lest he suspect that she had searched out information about him, which she had many weeks earlier after his stay at the hotel. And in terms of an online search the known facts about Ares Sarris were very few and far between beyond his meteoric success as a tech mogul. Ares certainly didn’t live a playboy lifestyle in the public eye as her brother-in-law had done before he’d met her sister. He had been described as reclusive and mysterious because nobody seemed to know how or, indeed, even quite when he had appeared in the Sarris family.
‘And I’m not unreliable, not the least bit unreliable!’ she snapped in fiery addition.
Ares vaulted upright again, amusement his guiding principle in her presence and a rare experience for him. But for all that, he was very much aware that she was a true beauty in that unadorned classic way that so many women sought but missed out on. She sported nothing greater than a hint of shadow on her lids and lip gloss. And as he straightened and caught an accidental glimpse of her full creamy breasts below the neckline of her dress, he went momentarily rigid, fighting off an erection, because, in truth, it was quite some time since he had been with a woman. The reminder that he was a fully adult male with hormonal impulses was unwelcome to Ares. He had always put work first and foremost, scheduling occasional sex into his timetable while simultaneously reminding himself that sex was an indulgence he could do without.
He extended his hand. ‘Let me walk you back to the hotel,’ he suggested smoothly.
‘I would be really good as a pretend wife,’ Alana told him earnestly, much as if she were trying to sell herself in an interview.
His handsome mouth quirked. ‘Why do you think that?’
‘I’d do everything I was asked to do and think myself lucky to get the opportunity,’ she continued winningly. ‘I’d also hopefully be a bargain in terms of price!’
Above her down-bent head, Ares could not resist a wicked grin. ‘Let’s hope nobody else overhears this particular conversation.’
‘I only want enough to settle my one debt,’ she continued doggedly.
‘And how much is this debt?’ Ares could not resist asking, ridiculously diverted by her and not bored the way he usually was with her sex.
‘It’s a lot,’ she warned him in an undertone and then she practically whispered, ‘Thirty thousand pounds...’
Ares was trying hard not to laugh out loud. ‘Yes, you would be a very inexpensive acquisition for that amount—’
‘Are you considering me yet?’ she prompted hopefully, pausing on the path as the lights of the big hotel loomed into view ahead of them.
Ares gazed down at her with eyes that were now black as the night sky. ‘I’m afraid not. What’s your name? I don’t even know your name.’
‘Alana... Alana Davison. You’re not giving me a chance,’ she complained.
‘Why would I?’ Ares asked drily.
‘Because it would be perfect for both of us. Obviously, you don’t want a proper wife and I certainly don’t want a husband!’ she pointed out cheerfully. ‘And I’m very trustworthy. I promised my dad before he died that I would never tell my sister, Skye, about what he had done and I never have because if I did tell her, it would hurt her too much. I also have no family other than Skye and Enzo to be suspicious and, let’s face it, like most newly marrieds they’ll be very much wrapped up in their own little bubble. I’m a very hard worker—’
‘I wouldn’t be hiring you to do actual work,’ Ares inserted into that animated flood.
‘I’m sure I could do something. I’m very willing and adaptable. I like kids and pets...’ Alana looked up at him hopefully.
‘I have neither to offer for your care,’ he divulged ruefully, finding himself strangely reluctant to hurt her feelings when she was trying so hard to impress. ‘Is the hard sell over? Could we now return to the hotel?’
Her expressive face reddened as she moved on down the path. ‘At least promise to think about it...about me as a possibility,’ she pressed.
Ares released his breath on a slow hiss, drew out his phone and opened it. ‘Give me your number but, in all likelihood, you won’t be hearing from me,’ he warned her wryly. ‘But my lawyers will be asking you to sign a non-disclosure agreement very soon.’
‘Of course I’ll sign it,’ she muttered hurriedly, keen to reassure him.
‘I could pay you for doing that—’
‘No, no, no!’ she exclaimed in dismay. ‘You can’t pay me for having done something I shouldn’t have done—surely you see that?’
And that immediate refusal of cash when she was desperate for it was the most eye-opening experience that Ares had had in years. She had a sense of honour and that was rare indeed, he conceded as he strode away. She had connected with him on some level he didn’t understand but that didn’t mean that he appreciated her appeal. Ares didn’t like impulsive promptings or anything out of the norm for him. In fact, it made him immediately suspicious and ill at ease, although, he recalled, he had not felt uncomfortable while in her company. For curiosity value alone, he would have a background check done on Alana Davison and his lawyers would have the NDA signed. There would be no further personal contact. Why the hell would there be?