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MADDIE winced at that direct hit. ‘Yes, but—’
Giannis focused on her with a fierce intensity that made her feel horribly like a condemned prisoner in the dock. ‘Is this the lie you mentioned?’
Maddie nodded reluctant confirmation.
Giannis lifted a strong hand and brought it down again in a compelling motion. A warning flare of gold was glimmering in his gaze. ‘You are not forgiven.’
‘I realise that this is a shock for you…’
Outrage was roaring through Giannis, who prided himself on his control of his temper. It was bad enough that she had disappeared, but that she should have done so when she carried his child incensed him. All those wasted months when they might have been together. ‘It is a great deal more than a shock—’
Coppery red curls streamed back from her oval face as her chin came up. ‘A disaster? That is how you labelled the possibility of me conceiving.’
‘That is unjust. You’re rewinding right back to the first day we met to quote a casual comment?’ Giannis shot back at her, fast as the speed of light.
‘What was casual about it? It wasn’t casual for me,’ Maddie protested painfully. ‘I may not have known it that day, but you were engaged. Yes, I accept that it was casual for you, and of course you didn’t want me to have your child. Why can’t you just admit that me falling pregnant is the worst situation you can imagine?’
His lean, darkly handsome face hardened. ‘Do not tell me how I think or how I feel,’ he intoned in sizzling disdain. ‘Don’t make excuses for yourself either!’
Maddie dealt him a defensive glance. ‘I’m not—’
‘You are—and it makes what you have done even more unacceptable. So I didn’t think you would conceive?’ Giannis flung up his hands and contrived to shrug his indifference to that angle of argument. His Greek heritage had never been more apparent to her. ‘But you did conceive and the instant that occurred everything changed for both of us.’
‘How?’ Maddie realised that she had very much underestimated the depth of his anger.
Stunning eyes fiercely intent, Giannis studied her. He moved away a little to get a better view. The lush mound of her once flat stomach was fast becoming a source of fascination to him. He could not recall ever looking at a pregnant woman before. He had not had the slightest interest. But this was different—she was different in that starring role. Somewhere deep within his male psyche a primitive glow of satisfaction burned with his every fresh appraisal of her altered figure. He was fertile. She was carrying his seed in her belly.
‘The child is mine,’ he pointed out. ‘From the first moment I had a right to be involved in every decision you made.’
Maddie was squirming, wishing he would stop glancing at her tummy as if he expected her to expand in girth before his very eyes, like Jack’s beanstalk. ‘That’s not how I see it.’
‘Then you had better learn to see it my way. Look at what a hash you have already made of things!’ Giannis launched in sudden fierce accusation. ‘How dare you go away without telling me you were expecting my child? What am I? Such a tyrant that you exclude me from what I should have known from the outset?’
‘I have not made a hash of things!’ Green eyes bright emerald with defiance, Maddie screwed her hands into fists. ‘I thought I was doing you and your fiancée a favour.’
‘Nonsense!’ Giannis raked back at her with lethal derision. ‘You took off without telling me because I was engaged. That was my punishment and your revenge—’
‘That’s an awful thing to accuse me of…As if I’d be so petty and selfish and downright spiteful!’
‘The first thing you can do is tell me where you have been all these weeks,’ Giannis informed her grimly.
Her brow was tight with tension and she rubbed it with her fingers. ‘I moved to Southend, but I had trouble with the landlord so I had to move on again—’
‘What sort of trouble?’
Her soft mouth compressed. ‘He kept on calling in to see me and it gave me the creeps.’
‘I would soon have dealt with him,’ Giannis growled, inflamed by that admission. ‘Why did you not phone me then?’
‘It wasn’t any big deal. But…’ Maddie worried at her lower lip and sighed unhappily, feeling ashamed that she had not managed the business of surviving more efficiently. ‘That second move left me broke, and it was hard to get work. With me in this condition, not every job was suitable either.’
Dragging his smouldering gaze from her, Giannis stood by the window, his tall well-built frame rigid, his broad shoulders straight as an axe handle. He was deeply aggrieved by her failure to approach him for support. Every word she spoke increased his displeasure. No woman had ever denied him his proper place in her life. No woman had ever behaved as though he could not be trusted.
‘So what happened to those fine principles of yours?’ he derided. ‘You were so proud of your ethics. Where were they when you walked away from me without telling me that you had become the mother of my child?’
Maddie shifted uncomfortably. ‘I really did think I was doing the best thing—’
‘But I listened when you talked about your principles and I trusted you.’ Giannis directed a chilling look of censure at her. ‘Yet you lied to me—’
‘It was an emotional time for me. I was feeling very guilty,’ Maddie muttered unhappily. ‘But I do see now that if I was involved in the break-up of your engagement then I shouldn’t have gone away after I discovered that I was pregnant.’
Giannis stiffened, and his brilliant dark eyes screened to a very wary glitter below his dense black lashes. That particular association of ideas disturbed him. She was moving way too far and too fast for him. ‘There was no connection. You played no part in the break-up,’ he emphasized, smooth as polished steel. ‘I hope that eases your conscience.’
‘Yes.’
But Maddie was quite unaware of her conscience at that moment. His sardonic response had struck like a dagger in the heart, and she felt so wounded by his blunt rejection that she did not dare to look at him. From that hurt came a deeper self-knowledge and a horrid sense of humiliation. The instant she had learnt that Giannis and Krista had split up she had grasped the first excuse to contact him and rush back to his side. How revealing was that? How full of herself she must have sounded when she made the assumption that their affair might have led to his change of heart about marrying Krista! She wanted to cringe.
‘Don’t tell me any more lies. I expect more from you, pedhi mou,’ Giannis concluded, keenly appraising her small figure again. Even as he looked, his anger at the way she had kept him in the dark steadily receded. Though pregnant, she was gorgeous. He was beginning to adjust to the shock of her new body shape. In fact he was finding her burgeoning figure distinctly pleasing. After all he, he acknowledged, was responsible for that change.
Maddie, on the other hand, was feeling more than a little fragile. He had knocked the emotional stuffing out of her. She was just a woman he had slept with who had got in the family way. As she brushed her curls back from her brow, her tummy gave a warning lurch of nausea. She was nothing special to him. Her forehead dampened with perspiration. But he had somehow become so very special to her. Terrified of being sick in his vicinity, she struggled to block that painful passage of thought. She snatched in a discreet gulp of oxygen in an effort to combat the wave of dizziness consuming her and backed blindly down into a seat.
‘Giannis, I…’ As the giddy attack of nausea worsened, Maddie leapt up again in a sudden movement, intending to leave the room. But darkness folded in on her like a suffocating blanket and she keeled over in a dead faint.
For a split second Giannis just surveyed her in horror. But then he reacted quickly. He hit the alarm on his watch to call his security team, and crouched down beside her to put her in the recovery position.
Maddie swam back to consciousness and loosed a startled moan as a camera flash almost blinded her. ‘What…what on earth?’
Mounting the steps to doors already flung wide for their entrance, Giannis tightened his arms round her slight frame. ‘Paparazzi,’ he growled. ‘They were waiting outside the hotel and they followed us here. Blood-sucking vultures!’
‘Where are we?’
‘A private clinic. I want you checked out.’
‘But I saw a doctor this morning,’ Maddie argued.
‘He didn’t do you much good,’ Giannis told her forcefully.
‘I haven’t eaten since breakfast, which was stupid of me,’ she groaned. ‘Put me down, for goodness’ sake. I can walk perfectly well!’
