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Leah rested back in the shade and lifted her book, only to blink in surprise a few minutes later when her brother’s security chief approached in a beach buggy. She froze when he explained that Gio Zanetti was asking to see her.
‘Er...yes, of course,’ she heard herself choke out in sheer shock. Gio had arrived on the yacht? Refusing to see him struck her as being childish when she had been hiding away at her brother’s home for so long.
Gio,hereon the island. She could barely get her head around that fact, straining her eyes to stare across at the pier on which a tall, well-built male stood gazing back. Well, the giant silhouette of her even in the distance would identify her, she thought unhappily. She had got even more pregnant and large since their last meeting. Legs feeling weak, she stayed sitting down, watching as the other man used his radio and Gio climbed into another buggy to be driven over to her.
‘Would you like me to stay with you, Miss Stefanos?’ the security chief enquired protectively.
‘Thanks, Dmitri...but that won’t be necessary,’ Leah declared with a weak smile intended to reassure that Gio might be many things but he was not a threat to her safety...only her peace of mind, she acknowledged as the buggy drew closer and she glimpsed Gio’s lean, hard-boned features.
He was still so beautiful that he took her breath away and it stunned her every time she saw him afresh. Yet he lacked that arrogant strut, that unmistakeable conceit that could characterise very good-looking individuals. She had watched every female head swivel, every gaze linger in that doctor’s waiting room but she had also witnessed his lack of awareness. Now she saw Gio spring out of the buggy, all six foot plus of him, casually clad in khaki chinos and a black tee, and he looked absolutely breathtaking as she rose to greet him.
‘No, sit down...don’t let me disturb you,’ Gio urged in his dark deep masculine drawl that sent tremors down her taut spine.
Leah’s cheeks flamed because she was thinking that he probably thought that she resembled a barrel on spindly legs and looked likely to topple over. The filmy, shapeless white kaftan she wore had not been chosen to be flattering. It had been picked because it was light and comfy in the heat.
Gio, however, was thinking something else entirely. He was transfixed by his first sight of Leah in months. Black hair tumbled round her expressive little face and down her back in a river of glossy curls. With her creamy skin tinted a deeper shade and her huge honey eyes locked to him, she had the rich luminescent glow of a gold ingot in sunshine. The proud swell of her pregnant outline took him aback and he acknowledged that she was carrying part of him,hischildren, and that could only fill him with awe.
‘You look incredible,’ Gio intoned.
Leah rolled her eyes at him. ‘Yeah,’ she agreed mockingly.
Gio tensed. ‘I wasn’t joking—’
‘Then say something I can accept. I’m as big as a house!’ Leah pointed out tartly and sat down again just as one of the beach-house staff approached to offer refreshments. ‘Please sit down and relax,’ she added brittly, belatedly recalling her manners.
‘I appreciate that stuff is tense between us right now,’ Gio remarked.
Leah sighed. ‘Understatement.’
‘I want to change that,’ Gio stated tautly. ‘Those babies are mine as well.’
Leah’s expressive eyes opened wide in wonderment and she stared back at him.
‘I’m not stupid. I worked it out...finally. You don’t want anything from me. You don’tneedanything from me, so why would you lie?’ Gio framed grittily. ‘But on another note, when did you change your surname to Stefanos?’
A huge grin lifted the tension from Leah’s face. ‘As soon as my brother asked me to consider it. I had no special attachment to my mother’s name and being a Stefanos, being fully accepted by my brother in public and in private as a member of his family, means a huge amount to me,’ she confided. ‘I pretty much lost the family I started out with, so it’s very important to value the relatives that I have left.’
Gio’s brows pleated and he looked unexpectedly grave. ‘I feel that way too but the only relatives I have left alive refuse to recognise me because of my father—’
‘But why?’ Leah cut in, genuinely curious about such an attitude.
Gio breathed in deep. ‘He was the worst of the worst. A murderer, an abuser of women, a drug dealer. I can say nothing good about him even now that he’s long dead—’
Leah was so hurt on his behalf that she leant across the space that separated them and grasped his hand in her tiny one. ‘I’m so sorry. That is very sad and even harder for you to deal with,’ she told him sympathetically.
Gio surveyed her anxious, compassionate expression with veiled amazement before he blinked and studied their linked hands. ‘Well, if telling you the sordid story of my background wins me a hearing from you, I’ll talk about it—’
‘Don’t you normally talk about it?’
‘Why would I?’ Gio had been knocked violently off his prepared script because the conversation had not gone in a direction he had foreseen.
‘Because talking about that sort of stuff is good and it can help,’ Leah remarked ruefully. ‘My twin brother became a heroin addict. After my mother’s death and our father’s abandonment, he suffered from depression and anxiety. I can tellyouthat, but I can’t tell Ari that. He feels guilty enough about his father’s behaviour without knowing how severely our brother was affected by those losses. Unfortunately, Lucas wouldn’t discuss those things when we were teenagers and I barely saw him after that age.’
‘I didn’t talk to anyone about my feelings or experiences either,’ Gio admitted uneasily. ‘Perhaps it’s harder for men... I don’t know. I just wanted to forget about it and move on. That struck me as the healthiest approach. Can we talk about us now?’
‘But everything that happened to you when you were young is still influencing you,’ Leah pointed out apologetically, already feeling that she understood so much more about him since he had told her about his father and confessed that he believed suppressing bad memories was wiser than acknowledging them and dealing with them in the present.
‘I don’t do the chest-baring stuff,’ Gio told her stiffly.
