Gorgeous Greeks: Seductive Secrets

He arched one eyebrow, coldly disdainful. ‘Are you questioning my business practices?’

‘No, I just object to the idea of a party that makes it look like you care about these people when you really don’t.’ Jace stilled, his face blanking, and too late Eleanor realised how she had betrayed herself. Who she’d really been talking about.

Me.

She let out a slow, shuddery breath and reached for her wine. ‘Just give me some details, Jace.’

Jace’s mouth tightened, his eyes narrowing. ‘I believe I mentioned yesterday that many of the employees here have families. The party needs to be family-friendly. Children will be invited.’

Eleanor’s hand tightened around the stem of her wine glass. She didn’t expect it to hurt so much to hear Jace talk of children. She realised, with a sudden laser-like dart of pain, that he could be married. Maybe he had children of his own. Maybe he just hadn’t wanted her children.

The children she’d never have.

She had to stop thinking like this. She’d got over Jace and his betrayal—unbearable as it had been—years ago. She had. She’d even accepted her own loss, the heartache that she’d always carry with her. She’d moved on with her life, had made plenty of friends, developed an exciting and successful career—

‘Family-friendly,’ she repeated, trying to keep her mind on track. She’d forgotten that rather crucial detail in her flurry of plans. Conveniently. She preferred not to think about families—children—at all. They no longer figured in her life. At all. They couldn’t.

‘Yes,’ Jace confirmed, and his voice held an edge now. ‘As I told you yesterday. Weren’t you taking notes?’

Finally goaded past her emotional endurance, Eleanor set her wine glass down with an undignified clatter. ‘Perhaps I just had trouble believing a man like you could be interested in anything family-friendly,’ she snapped. ‘The image doesn’t really fit.’

‘Image?’ Jace repeated silkily. ‘What are you talking about, Eleanor?’

‘You, Jace.’ The remembered pain and hurt was boiling up, seeping through the barely healed-over scars. She stood up from the table, surprised by this sudden, intense rush of feeling. Suddenly she didn’t want to keep her composure any more. She wanted it to slip, wanted Jace to see the turbulent river of emotions underneath. Even to know how much he’d hurt her. Perhaps she’d regret the impulse later, but now it was too overwhelming a need to ignore. ‘You’re not “family-friendly“.’ She held up her hands to make inverted commas, her fingers curling into claws. ‘You certainly weren’t when I knew you.’

Jace stood up too, his hip bumping the table, sloshing wine onto the pristine white tablecloth. With a jolt Eleanor realised he was just as angry—and emotional—as she was. Maybe even more so.

‘I wasn’t family-friendly?’ he repeated in a low voice that was nearly a growl. ‘And just how and when did you draw that ridiculous conclusion?’

Eleanor nearly choked in her fury and disbelief. ‘Maybe when you left your apartment, left the damn country when I told you I was pregnant!’ There was a buzzing in her ears and distantly she realised she was shouting. Loudly.

Jace let out an ugly snarl of a laugh. ‘Oh, I see. How interesting, Ellie.’ On his lips her name was a sneer. ‘So I’m some monster that doesn’t like children simply because I didn’t want to take on another man’s bastard.’

Eleanor’s mouth dropped open. The buzzing in her ears intensified so she couldn’t hear anything. Surely she must have misheard him. ‘What did you say?’ she asked numbly, still slack-jawed.

Jace’s lip curled in contempt. ‘You heard me. I knew that baby wasn’t mine.’

CHAPTER THREE

THE room was silent save for the draw and tear of their own ragged breathing. Numbly Eleanor turned away from Jace, from the table with its jostled dishes and spilled wine, and walked on wooden legs to the window.

Outside the sky was the ominous grey-white that promised a storm, the world below a winter palette of browns and greys.

Another man’s bastard. Jace’s words echoed in his ears, over and over, so Eleanor could not frame another thought or even a word. Another man’s bastard. Bastard. Bastard. Bastard.

She closed her eyes.

‘So you have nothing to say,’ Jace said coldly, and that too was an indictment.

Eleanor shook her head. Her heart was thudding sickly and her knees nearly buckled. She’d never had such a physical reaction to a single piece of information, except when—

Tell me what’s wrong.

No. She wasn’t going to open up that Pandora’s box of memories. Not with Jace in the room, with his ugly words still reverberating through the air.

And she wasn’t going to defend herself either. There was so clearly no point.

Slowly she turned around. ‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘I have nothing to say.’

Jace nodded in grim acceptance, and Eleanor knew she’d just confirmed the worst he’d ever thought about her. Judged again. She hadn’t even realised, ever known, that she’d been judged in the first place. All these years she’d had no idea Jace had been thinking that. Believing the worst. And why? What reason had she ever given him?

She walked back to the table and reached for the attaché case she’d propped against her chair.

‘I’m going to go now,’ she said steadily. She was grateful her voice didn’t tremble or break. ‘I’ll make sure Lily assigns someone else to your party.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Jace demanded, and Eleanor almost laughed. Did he actually think she’d work with him now? Considering what had just happened—what he thought—

She shook her head again. ‘Clearly, Jace, we can’t move on from the past, and it’s affecting our—our work relationship.’ What a ridiculous idea, as though they could have any relationship at all. ‘There’s no point continuing this way. Someone else will serve you better.’

‘So you expect me just to forgive and forget,’ Jace surmised, his voice sharp with sarcasm.

Now Eleanor did laugh, a short, humourless bark. ‘No. I’m the one who can’t. Forgive or forget.’ She hoisted her bag on her shoulder and gave him a grim little smile. ‘Goodbye, Jace.’

And somehow, somehow she managed to walk from the room with steady legs, her head held high.

Jace watched Eleanor walk away from him in stunned disbelief. He heard the click of the door shutting, the surprised murmur of his PA, the whoosh of the lift doors. And he still didn’t move.

I’m the one who can’t forgive or forget.

What the hell had she been talking about?

Muttering an angry oath, Jace whirled towards the window. What could Eleanor Langley possibly have to forgive? All right, perhaps he’d been ruthless in the way he’d cut her out of his life, leaving Boston—leaving her—so abruptly and absolutely. But he’d done it because the realisation that she’d been deceiving him all along had been too terrible to bear. He’d felt quite literally gutted, empty and aching inside. And meanwhile she—she had been trying to foist another man’s child on him. Living a lie all along. She’d never really loved him.

Yet apparently Eleanor did think she had something to forget. To forgive.

What?

Impatiently Jace turned away from the window where a few random snowflakes had begun to drift down onto the asphalt. He felt restless, angry, uncertain. The last was what bothered him the most; he’d never felt doubt before. How could he? He’d known since he was fifteen years old that he was infertile.

Sterile. Like a gelded bull, or a eunuch. As good as, according to his father. For what good was a son who couldn’t carry on the family name? Who had been unmanned before he’d even reached his manhood?

What use was a son like that?

Jace already knew the answer, had known the answer since his test results had come back and his father’s dreams of a dynasty had crumbled to dust. Nothing. A son like that—like him—was no use at all.

He’d lived with that grim knowledge for half of his life. Felt it in every quietly despairing stare, every veiled criticism. His own infertility had consumed him before he’d even been ready to think of children, had dominated him as a boy and become part of his identity as a man. Without the ability to have children, he was useless. Worthless.

And yet now, with Ellie’s words, doubt, both treacherous and strangely hopeful, crept into his mind and wound its tendrils of dangerous possibility around his thoughts. His heart.

What did Ellie have to forget? To forgive? What had she been talking about?

Half of him wanted to ignore what she had said, just move on. He’d get a different event planner, forget Eleanor Langley even existed. Never question what she said.

Never wonder.

Yet even as these thoughts raced through his brain, Jace knew he couldn’t do that. Didn’t even want to. Yes, it was saner, safer, but it was also aggravating as hell. He didn’t want to doubt. Couldn’t let himself wonder.

He needed to know.

Eleanor walked all the way back to Premier Planning’s office near Madison Square Garden, oblivious to the cold wind buffeting her face and numbing her cheeks. She was oblivious to everything, every annoyed pedestrian, cellphone clamped to an ear, who was forced to move around her as she sleepwalked the twenty-three blocks to her office. She felt numb, too numb to think, to consider just what Jace had said. What he’d thought all these years.

She stood in front of the building, still numb, still reeling, and realised distantly that she couldn’t return to work. Lily would be waiting, anxious for a report—or worse. Perhaps Jace had already rung. Perhaps her job was already in jeopardy.

Either way, she couldn’t face it. She turned her back on ten years of professionalism and went home.

Back in the apartment she dropped her bag on the floor, kicked off her heels, and slumped into a chair, staring out into space. She didn’t know how long she stayed like that for, without moving, without thinking, but the sky darkened to violet and then indigo, and her stomach rumbled. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and that had been no more than half a bagel as she hurried to work. Yet she still couldn’t summon the energy to eat. To feel. Anything. She hadn’t felt this numb—the pain too consuming to allow herself to feel it—for a long time. For ten years.

Finally she stirred and went to the bathroom. She turned both taps on full and stripped off her clothes, leaving her savvy suit crumpled on the floor. Who knew if she’d need it any more?

Twenty minutes into a good soak she felt her mind start to thaw. So did her heart. So Jace assumed she’d been unfaithful, had been labouring under that unbelievable misapprehension for ten long years. No wonder he was so angry. Yet how could he be so wrong?

How could he have thought that of her, considering what they’d been to one another? Even the logistics of infidelity were virtually impossible; she’d spent nearly every waking moment working, at school, or with him.

Yet he’d believed it, and believed it so strongly that he’d judged her without trial, without even a conversation. He’d been so sure of her infidelity that he’d left her, left his entire life in the States, without even asking so much as a single question.

Somehow it was so much worse than what she’d thought all these years: that he’d developed a case of cold feet. In her more compassionate moments, she could understand how a twenty-two-year-old man—boy—with his whole life in front of him might get a little panicked at the thought of fathering a child. She understood that; what she didn’t understand, had never understood, was the way he’d gone about it. Leaving so abruptly. Abandoning her without a word or even a way for him to contact him. Cellphone disconnected. No forwarding address.

It hadn’t been merely a slap to the face, it had been a stab wound to the heart.

And he’d done it not because of his own inadequacy, but because of hers. Infidelity. He actually assumed she’d cheated on him.

The bath water was getting cold, and Eleanor rose from the tub. There was no point letting herself dwell on the recriminations, the regrets. If Jace Zervas had been able to believe something so atrocious and impossible about her so easily, obviously they’d never had much of a relationship at all.

And that was a truth she’d lived with for ten years.

She’d just slipped on her comfort pyjamas—soft, nubby fleece—when her doorbell rang. Eleanor stilled. She lived on the thirtieth floor in a building with two security personnel at the front door at all times, so no one made it to her door without her being alerted. The only option, she supposed, was a neighbour, although she’d never really got to know her neighbours. It wasn’t that kind of building, and she didn’t have that kind of life.

Cautiously Eleanor went to the door. She peered through the eyehole and felt her heart stop for a second before beginning a new, frenetic beating. Jace stood there.

‘Eleanor?’

He sounded impatient, and it was no wonder. Eleanor realised she was hesitating for far too long. Resolutely she drew a breath and opened the door.

‘What are you doing here, Jace?’

‘I need to talk to you.’

She folded her arms and didn’t move. She didn’t feel angry now so much as resigned. ‘I told you in your office I had nothing to say.’

‘You may not, but I do.’ He arched an eyebrow. ‘Are you going to let me in?’

‘How did you get my address?’

‘Your boss gave it to me.’

Eleanor gave an exasperated sigh. Of course. Lily would do just about anything for a client, especially a rich one like Jace. ‘How did you get past security?’

‘I sweet-talked him.’

Eleanor snorted. ‘You?’

‘Andreas is manning the door tonight. He has six grandchildren back in Greece.’ Jace smiled thinly. ‘He showed me pictures.’

Eleanor slowly shook her head. She’d been on the end of Jace’s charm once; she knew how forceful it was. And how false.

Sighing in defeat, she turned away from the door. ‘Fine. Come in.’

He entered, shutting the door carefully behind him. Eleanor moved to the window, her arms creeping around her body despite her effort to maintain a cool, composed air. She felt vulnerable, exposed somehow, as if from the stark modernity of her apartment Jace could somehow guess at the emotional barrenness of her life.

Stop. She couldn’t think like that. She had a job, friends, a life—

She just didn’t have what mattered.

Love.

Stop.

‘What do you want?’

Jace stood in the centre of her living room, seeming too big, too much for the space. He glanced around, and Eleanor saw him take in all the telltale signs of a single life. No jumble of shoes or coats, no piles of magazines or books. Just a single pair of heels discarded by the door. In the galley kitchen she saw her lone coffee cup from this morning rinsed and set by the sink. ‘You live here alone?’

She lifted one shoulder in a shrug that couldn’t help but seem defensive. ‘Yes.’

He shook his head slowly. ‘What about—the baby?’ He spoke awkwardly, the words sounding stilted. They felt stilted to Eleanor. She didn’t want him to ask. She didn’t want him to know.

She didn’t want to tell.

‘What about the baby?’ she asked evenly.

‘He—or she, rather—doesn’t live with you?’

‘No.’

‘The father retained custody?’

She gave a short, abrupt laugh. The weariness was fading away and the anger was coming back. Along with the hurt. She was tired of feeling so much, so suddenly, after ten years of being comfortably numb. She dropped her arms to her sides. ‘What do you really want to talk about, Jace?’

‘You said you were the one who couldn’t forgive or forget. And I want to know why.’ He spoke flatly, yet she saw something in his eyes she hadn’t seen in ten years, something that hadn’t been there yesterday or this morning. Need.

Hunger.

Why did he want to know? Why did he care?

‘Because you may have felt you had just cause, but the fact that you abandoned me the very day I told you I was pregnant was a hard thing to get over.’ She smiled thinly. ‘Surprisingly, it seems.’

Jace shook his head, the movement one of instinctive denial. ‘Ellie, you know that baby isn’t—wasn’t—mine.’

Anger, white-hot, lanced through her. ‘I know?’ she repeated, her voice rising in incredulity. ‘I know? I’ll tell you what I know, Jace, and that is that the only bastard I’ve ever met is you. First-class, A-plus, for thinking that.’

He took a step towards her in an action both menacing and urgent, his features twisted with what looked like pain. ‘Are you telling me,’ he demanded in a low voice, ‘that the baby was mine? Is that what you’re actually saying, Ellie?’

She lifted her chin. ‘That’s exactly what I’m saying, Jace. And the very fact that you could think for a moment—’

‘Don’t.’ He held up one hand, and Eleanor saw to her shock that it trembled. ‘Don’t,’ he repeated rawly, ‘lie to me. Not now. Not again. Not about this.’

For a second Eleanor’s anger gave way to another powerful emotion: curiosity. Jace faced her, his expression open and hungry. She’d never see him look so… desperate. There was more going on here than she understood.

‘I’m not lying,’ she said quietly. ‘What makes you think I ever was?’

Jace didn’t speak for a moment. His gaze held hers, searching for a truth he seemed hell-bent on disbelieving. ‘Because,’ he finally said, his voice little more than a ragged whisper, ‘I can’t have children. I’ve known it since I was fifteen years old.’ He let out a long, slow breath before stating flatly, ‘I’m infertile. Sterile.’

Eleanor stared. I can’t have children. Such a stark and sorrowful phrase; she knew just how much. And yet coming from Jace… the words didn’t make sense. They couldn’t. Then in a sudden flash of remembrance she recalled the moment she’d told Jace she was pregnant, and how he’d stared at her so blankly, his jaw slackening, his eyes turning flat and then hard. She’d thought he’d been surprised; she’d had no idea just how stunned he must have been. Infertile. Impossible. It had to be. ‘You must be mistaken.’

‘I assure you I’m not.’

Eleanor shook her head, speechless, disbelieving. ‘Well, neither am I,’ she finally said. ‘Mistaken, that is. I was a virgin when we got together, Jace, and I didn’t sleep with another man for—a long while.’ She swallowed. Years, in fact, but she wasn’t about to tell him that. ‘You were the only candidate.’

Jace smiled, the curving of his mouth utterly without humour. ‘The facts don’t add up, Ellie. Someone’s lying.’

‘I’ve told you not to call me that.’ She turned away from him and stared blindly out at the Hudson River, its murky black surface just visible under the city lights. ‘Why does someone have to be lying, Jace? What if you’re mistaken?’ She turned around. ‘Did you ever—even once—think of that?’

‘I’m not!’ The words came out in a roar, and she stilled, surprised by the savagery.

‘How can you be—?’

‘Trust me,’ he cut her off, the two words flat and brutal. ‘I am. And if I can’t have children, there must be another—’ he paused, his mouth curving in an unpleasant smile ‘—candidate.’

Eleanor cocked her head, curiosity and anger warring within her. ‘Is it easier for you to believe that?’

‘What the hell do you mean?’

She shrugged, a little unnerved by Jace’s anger but still refusing to be cowed. ‘You prefer believing I was unfaithful to you rather than the idea that you could be wrong, that it’s a mistake—’

‘It’s not a mistake!’ Jace leaned forward, lowered his voice to a savage whisper. ‘It’s impossible!

Eleanor blinked, discomfited by his intensity. ‘How did you find out you were infertile at such a young age?’ she asked slowly. ‘Most men don’t find out until they’re married and run into trouble with conceiving, don’t they—’

‘I had mumps. A lingering infection, and it made me sterile.’

‘And you were tested—?’

‘Yes.’ He bit off the word, his lips pressed together in a hard line.

‘But…’ Eleanor shook her head, genuinely bewildered. ‘Why? Why would you be tested at such a young age?’

Jace turned away from her. He drove his hands into his pockets, his shoulders hunched, the position one of defensive misery. ‘My father wanted to know,’ he said gruffly, his back still to her. ‘I’m an only son, as was he. The male line dies out with me.’

Eleanor didn’t reply. She couldn’t think of a single thing to say, for suddenly everything was making horrible sense. No wonder Jace was so sure he couldn’t be the father. No wonder he’d been so hurt. No wonder the whole idea of a pregnancy—a baby—that wasn’t his would be an affront, an abomination.

The male line dies out with me.

For a boy from a traditional Greek family, that had to be very hard indeed.

Regret replaced anger, and it hurt far more. She swallowed past the tightness in her throat. ‘Well, perhaps you should get yourself tested again. Because I assure you, Jace, the baby was yours. Why would I lie now? What point would there be?’

Jace was silent for a long, tense moment. ‘I don’t know,’ he finally said. ‘God help me, I don’t know.’ Eleanor stared at him, his back to her, his head bowed, and she wondered what he must be feeling now. Could he accept he wasn’t infertile, that he’d been living with an incorrect diagnosis for his entire adult life?

Would he?

It would be hope and tragedy mixed together, for what was lost, for what now could be—

But not for her. Eleanor swallowed past the tightness in her throat, closing her eyes as if that could blot out the pain. The memory. Never for her.

Jace drew in a ragged, desperate breath, his head still bowed, his back to Eleanor. He felt the rage course through him, consume him, and he didn’t trust himself to speak.

The baby was his. Could be his. Except in his gut—perhaps even in his heart—Jace knew the truth. He saw it in Eleanor’s eyes, dark with remembered pain. The baby was his.

He wasn’t infertile.

And all he could feel was anger. All he could think of was the waste. His life, his family, his father. Everything had pointed to his failure as a son, as a man. He’d lived with it, let it cripple him, let it guide and restrain his choices, and for what?

For a lie? A mistake!

The realisation made him want to shout to the remorseless heavens, to hit something, to hurt something. Someone. It wasn’t fair. The cry of a child, and yet it bellowed up inside him, the need so great he clamped his lips together and drew another shuddering breath.

Eleanor, he knew, would never understand. How could he explain how utterly sure he’d been of his own infertility, so that he’d been able to walk away without once considering that she’d been telling the truth? He’d always been so certain that even now he wondered. Doubted.

It can’t be.

And yet if it was…

Too many repercussions, too many unspoken—un-thought—hopes and fears crowded his mind, his heart. He pushed them down, unable to deal with them now, to consider what they meant, what changes to both the present and future—and, God help him, the past—they would require.

The baby was his.

The baby was his.

He had a child.

Jace whirled around again, the movement so sudden and savage that Eleanor gasped aloud and took a step towards the window.

He crossed the room in three long strides and grabbed her by the shoulders, his face thrust near hers. ‘Where is the baby? If it is my child—’

Eleanor closed her eyes. She didn’t want this. She didn’t want Jace here, stirring up memories, regrets, pain, and for what? Yet she knew he had a right to know. She swallowed again. Her throat was so very tight. ‘Was,’ she whispered. ‘It was.’