One Night to Risk It All(18)

Alex who? Anyone I know?





Well, what was the point in lying? It was going to come out. The press would see her with Alex. She would have to explain eventually that she was pregnant. And who the father was.

She might as well let the bomb drop in stages. She typed in a reply.





You don’t know him. Alex Christofides. Unexpected. And I’m sorry.





It was sort of a lie. Leah wouldn’t know him. But Ajax would. And the way she’d phrased it made it sound like she didn’t know who he was. Also a lie.

She was big into self-protection at the moment.

Well, who wasn’t? Except for Alex. That was a strange thought, but when she looked back at their night together...

When she’d confronted him, he’d been honest. About why he’d seduced her. About who he was. It didn’t make a lot of sense, really.

“Why didn’t you defend yourself?” she asked. “Why didn’t you lie?”

“Because I couldn’t think,” he said.

It pained Alex to admit it, but it was the truth. He hadn’t been able to think up a lie with her looking at him as though he’d personally stabbed her in the chest. Because somehow, during the course of their day together, his seduction had been genuine.

He had wanted her. It had been easy to forget just who she was. Who she belonged to. He didn’t look at her and see Ajax Kouros’s fiancée.

He’d looked and seen Rachel. So soft and elegant, with wildness that ran strong beneath.

He’d seen her. And he had wanted her with every piece of himself.

So he’d taken her, and when she’d confronted him, he’d been able to do nothing but speak the truth because he’d deviated so far from his plan he had no idea how to get back to it. He should have lied. Appealed to her. Kept to the original plan.

But he hadn’t, and it was too late to go back now.

He would have let her go if it was what she’d wanted. But things were different now. She was pregnant and that meant he had to keep her.

He ignored the slug to the gut that rebelled at the idea of allowing her to marry Ajax, pregnant or not. Of course, had she wanted to do so, he wouldn’t have stopped it. He could have let her go.

The inability to do so would imply that she was special. That he had feelings for her.

Alex didn’t have time for feelings.

He’d made time in his life for two things: making money and getting revenge. Everything else was an incidental. A distraction he couldn’t afford.

Of course, now that there would be a child he’d have to make room for a third thing.

Because he would be damned if any child of his left to be raised by a stranger. If any child of his wasn’t in his sight at all times.

Alex knew about all the evil in the world, and if there was any way for him to shield his own child from it, he would do so.

As though his own life depended on it.





CHAPTER FIVE


HIS ISLAND WAS BEAUTIFUL. He would never get tired of it. Of the fact that it was his. Of the fact that he now owned a place he possessed total control over.

Back in the compound, everything had been shared. Perhaps share was too generous a word. It had been fought over. There had been a serf class in the compound. The women, the security guards. And the security guards had had guns, which put the women square on the bottom rung.

And beneath that...

The children of those women.

Many of them had been given away by their mothers. Sold, Alex now realized, for drugs. He had spent many years feeling astonished, grateful, that his mother hadn’t done so. That she’d put some sort of value on him. That he’d stayed safe.

A miracle, it had seemed.

But then he’d found out the truth. And the truth hadn’t been rainbows and a mother’s love. No. The truth had been poison.

He was the monster he’d always despised. A tool that kept his mother near her favorite addiction. Not heroin, but Nikola Kouklakis himself.

The older man had, of course, kept her there since she was the mother of his son. Since Alex was his son. But Alex had discovered the truth and when his mother was no longer useful it had all come crashing down.

And Alex had run. Run away and never looked back.

And when he’d finally stopped, when he’d won enough card games that he had some money—money and this island—met enough people that he’d forged business connections and learned about the stock market, when he’d finally reached the pinnacle of success, that was when he’d looked back for the first time.

He’d looked back at all of the pain, all of the injustice, and then he’d looked at the one man who had risen above it. Clean, pristine and well-respected. Rich as god with a beautiful woman hanging on his arm.

And he’d known that next on his agenda was making sure that Ajax Kouros knew helplessness. That he knew fear. That he knew what it was to lose the things he loved.

And while he hadn’t destroyed the other man’s business yet, not for lack of trying, he did have Ajax’s fiancée.

And though he wasn’t actively using Rachel as revenge at the moment, that thought almost made him cheerful.

“Where are we?” Rachel asked as the plane touched down, white sand and turquoise sea rushing into view.