Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Ava reached down, stroking Christos through his pants.
He was so hard he could feel his pulse between his legs.
He was close to losing it all. Not exactly the suave playboy image he liked to maintain, but with Ava all bets were off.
They always had been. She was a fire that he’d never been able to control.
He lifted her chin and captured her lips with his. She sighed and wrapped her arms around him. When he looked down at her, tears were visible in her pretty blue eyes.
“What’s the matter?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. It’s just…I’ve dreamed of this for so long.”
“Making love with me?” he asked. “Moro mou, you are easy to please.”
“I guess I am,” she said. “When it comes to you and Theo, I think I have everything a woman could want.”
He felt a twinge of something close to anger at her mention of Theo.
Not directed at the boy, but directed at Ava, because he still couldn’t accept her insistence that he was the boy’s father.
And at his brother, because Stavros had known how much Christos was into Ava that summer, and he should have stayed away from her.
“What is it? Why does your face get all tight when I mention Theo?”
“I hate the fact that…”
“That you don’t believe that you’re his father?”
He lifted her off his body and set her on the bed, no longer in the mood to linger there with her. He reached for his shirt and drew it on as he paced across the room to the wet bar.
“Christos.”
“Yes?”
“You must be coming to believe me, right? Why else would you marry me?”
He shook his head. Even he knew better than to tell her that he was marrying her for the Theakis heir and, well, hell, for the sex that had always been incredible between them.
“What will it take to convince you?” she asked at last.
He glanced over his shoulder, noting that she’d drawn her sweater back on. She had her hands on her hips and he knew she was angry with him.
Too damn bad.
He was angry, too. Things had been going well between them. “What the hell difference does it make? Theo is here, I’ve claimed him and you and I are to be married.”
“It makes all the difference in the world. Even you must be able to see that. Do you really want to marry a woman who you think is capable of sleeping with you and another man? Your own brother?”
“Hell, no. Our prenuptial agreement is specific about what will happen if you do that again.”
“Again? I never did it before.”
“It’s past, Ava, let it go.”
“How can I, when you won’t?”
“I’m not going to argue this with you.”
“You can’t walk away from this. I’m not going to let you. If you want me to marry you, if you want Theo to stay here on Mykonos, we need to finish this now.”
“How?”
“I guess trusting me is out,” she said, nibbling on her lower lip in that sexy way she always did.
“You lied to me,” he said. She had lied about several things. Things like who her family was and where she’d come from.
“That was different. My family is nothing like yours. I thought you’d prefer a woman who came from a similar background.”
He understood that. Would have forgiven her the tales about her family back in the States if she’d come to him and told him the truth.
But instead he’d had to find out about it from Nikki.
His sister-in-law had been concerned when she’d learned of his and Ava’s affair and had revealed Ava’s background check to him.
Everything in it suggested that Ava was a poor girl hoping to bag a wealthy husband. Her lies had only confirmed that.
“I was young and I told you the truth eventually.”
But it had been too late. He could never believe that she hadn’t overheard him and Nikki talking that morning on the terrace.
“It’s inconsequential.”
“It’s not. That’s the reason you believe I’d sleep with Stavros.”
He set down his whiskey glass before he threw it across the room. He hated those images in his head. The ones of Ava and his brother that he’d never been able to erase.
“Enough. Leave this room.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I’m sure that’s a word you don’t hear very often but I think you know what it means.”
“Ava—”
“Christos, I’m prepared to be very stubborn about this. I want us to have a real marriage, to have a real family with Theo, and we can’t if you don’t believe me.”
“Fine, we’ll have a paternity test.”
“Now you’d believe a test over my word?” she asked, there was something broken in her voice and though he wanted to pretend it didn’t affect him, it did.
“Ava…”
“Forget it. We’re not taking a paternity test. I no longer want to do that. I’m going to convince you that you’re wrong.”
“How will you do that? Stavros is dead. I can never ask my brother about what happened between the two of you.”
“You never talked to him about it?”
“No. And he never denied it when we fought over you.” He’d told Stavros they were dead to each other and had left Mykonos and Greece, spending the majority of his time traveling to his various businesses and staying so busy he never had time to feel the gaping wound that had been left by that action.
“Oh, Christos.”
He hated that she might pity him. “How do you mean to convince me?”
“By letting you see the woman I am. I could never betray you and I will stop at nothing to prove that to you.”
Ava hadn’t realized how much Christos had lost after she’d returned to America. They’d both had their lives shattered by the lies that Stavros had told, first to Nikki and then, when Nikki had gone to Christos, to his own brother.
Christos had seen her alone with Stavros on more than one occasion. She’d been providing a cover for her boss and his mistress, another lie that she’d contributed to that at the time had seemed…well, not exactly harmless, but necessary.
Convincing Christos to trust her was going to be difficult, she didn’t kid herself.
Not only because of the seeds of the past but because she was realizing she still didn’t really like who she was at the most basic level.
She’d spent her entire life pretending to be someone she wasn’t, pretending that the small, run-down trailer she’d grown up in was a large ranch house, for starters.
She’d lied about so much of where she’d come from that she didn’t want to face the truth. But it was past time for that. Theo had never met his maternal grandparents and never would. Her father had kicked her out of the trailer when she’d come home pregnant and jobless.
“I don’t like where I came from,” she said into the quietness. “And I would never have met you if I hadn’t created a different background for myself, so I’m not going to apologize for that. Perhaps it would have been better just to keep silent about my family.”
“I wouldn’t have judged you by your family. But lying about where you came from…I don’t understand that. Hell, half the time I’m hoping no one is judging me by my patera. He makes me crazy.”
She shook her head, allowing a small smile to touch her lips. “That’s because all the Theakis men have to have their own way.”
“True. But that’s not what you were running from.”
“No. I grew up in a run-down trailer that sits in the middle of nowhere. We never had any money.”
“Money’s not important,” he said.
“If you have it. If you don’t, it’s all anyone ever talks about.”
“I don’t see what this has to do with my trusting you,” he said.
She took a deep breath. Of course he wouldn’t. She realized in this moment that she had a choice. She could continue to avoid talking about how she’d grown up and never gain Christos’s trust, or she could slowly tear down those barriers.
And was there really a choice? She’d had a glimpse of real happiness in Christos’s arms when he’d held her and Theo. Taking a deep breath, she said, “I hate that part of my past. It’s the root of every lie I ever told, not just to you, but also to myself.”
He reached for the whiskey glass on the wet bar countertop and poured himself another drink. He picked it up and swallowed it quickly. “You lie to yourself?”
“Don’t you?”
He shook his head. “No. I face all my failings constantly. They are at times a running litany in my mind.”
“What failings?”
He shrugged. “Let’s keep this about you.”
“We can’t have a relationship if I’m the only one who talks.”
“We can start with you. Once you’ve…how did you put it? Ah, yes, once you’ve let me see the woman you are, then we can delve into my psyche.”
“You can be an arrogant jerk,” she said.
“So I’ve been told.”
“I don’t have many things that mean much to me,” she said. “Only my son and then this glimpse of a real relationship with you…”
She had no idea what else to say. She wanted to be witty and funny and charm him out of his arrogance but she suspected she’d never be able to do that.
She heard him set down his glass, then his footsteps echoed on the tiled floor as he walked toward her.
She couldn’t believe they’d just shared an explosive sexual encounter on the bed and now they were immersed in this conversation, embroiled in a past that, no matter how fast she ran or how many twists and turns she forced her life to take, still held her trapped.
He stopped in front of her, and she had a glimpse of his bare chest under the shirt that he’d not rebuttoned. She wished she’d just stayed there in his arms.
“Look at me,” he said.
She glanced up, surprised to see a very serious look in his eyes. “What?”
“I’m only arrogant when someone really strikes a chord deep inside me. I don’t know how to deal with genuine emotion, and you have always made me feel more than I’m comfortable with.”
She had no response to that.
He cupped her cheek and she stood very still, afraid she was going to say something that would drive him back across the room.
“I think the reason I felt so betrayed by you is enmeshed in that. If it had been any other woman, I would have just moved on, but you…you have always made me feel like I’m really alive.”
Tears burned her eyes and she knew she was right to push for this trust between them. “Me, too.”