Page 88 of Modern Romance September 2025 1-4
‘Threaten my daughter again and I will personally see to it that you never father children.’
He gave a bark of laughter. ‘I didn’t threaten your daughter, I warned her, in the spirit of friendship, not to use that cutting tongue of hers to slander my family. You still have time to prepare for damage limitation and I would have thought you would want me on side when you launch it—after all, you already know to your cost that my family makes a very bad enemy.’
The older woman didn’t even blink, turning her long nose in the air and saying, ‘More threats. We don’t need or want your help or yourfriendship, and if my daughter chooses to use her cutting tongue to speak the truth about a family of degenerates then all I can say to that is that I wholeheartedly support her. Now come,baba. We have some damage limitation to be getting on with.’
To Alexis’s surprise, Thanasis and his father had already walked away without him even noticing, and then his heart sank when Lydia shook her head and blew out the fringe from her eyes. ‘I’ll catch up with you—I’ve got some people I need to practise sharpening my tongue on.’
‘Okay. Just don’t get cut yourself.’ Elektra eyed Alexis as she said that, then gave her daughter a kiss before hurrying after the two Antoniadis men.
Left alone with the one person he’d planned to actively avoid for the whole of his time spent on this damned island, Alexis clenched his jaw and kept his gaze fixed on the tender carrying his family across the sea to the jetty. ‘You’ve obviously got something on your mind so whatever you’ve got to say to me, get it over with,’ he said roughly. ‘I’ve got my own damage limitation to be getting on with.’
‘I’m pregnant.’
Her words didn’t so much hang in the air as swing on a giant Newton’s cradle, the silver balls knocking together to create a sudden deafening roar in his head.
‘Say that again,’ he dragged out.
‘I’m pregnant.’
His chest tightened into an ice-cold ball. The pendulum swung again. Slowly, Alexis turned his head to face the woman standing beside him.
Her stare, what he could see of it beneath her enormous blonde fringe, was fixed ahead at the sea, her chin lifted, a picture of what would be serenity if not for the tremors racking her shoulders.
‘You…’ He had to swallow to speak. ‘You are certain?’
‘I had my first scan last week.’
‘How…? Why…?’ It was like he’d forgotten how to talk. ‘Why have you waited all this time to tell me?’
‘I wasn’t going to tell you until the baby was born but Lucie running away changes everything. My job pays a pittance and my family are on the verge of bankruptcy so there is no way I can support the baby on my own now.’
There was a shout in the distance. He barely heard it, would have tuned it out completely if Lydia’s stare hadn’t flickered over to the direction it had come from. ‘Your family are here. You should go to them. We can talk later. Don’t mention the baby to anyone—I think everyone’s got enough to be stressed about today. We can tell everyone once we’re married.’
He’d barely picked his jaw up when the hazel eyes he’d never wanted to lock stares with again landed on him. ‘I’m sorry, Alexis, but I won’t have my child born into poverty. I need you to marry me.’
Her words had barely sunk in when she’d walked away and disappeared into the surrounding trees.
CHAPTER TWO
ONLY WHEN SHEwas quite sure that she was hidden amongst the trees did Lydia put a hand to a trunk to steady herself and heave up all the water she’d consumed that morning. Perspiration had broken out all over her skin but she had nothing to blot her face with.
She was shaking, inside and out.
She’d known within a week of her night with Alexis that she’d conceived, known it before her period had failed to arrive. She hadn’t told a soul outside the medical profession, had kept it a tightly held secret in her heart. A terrifying and yet miraculous secret. Terrifying because of how her family were going to react when they learned the identity of the father.
In the last six months or so Lydia had watched her parents age before her eyes, watched her father be removed from the company he’d founded and her brother installed in his place, and been subjected to a level of press intrusion she couldn’t even bring herself to wish on the Tsalikis. The stress on everyone had been intolerable and she’d had no means to help, could only watch despairingly as her happy family began to disintegrate under the strain of it all.
She’d known the only way their family could rise before the business became ashes had been through forming a truce with the Tsalikis, something her parents had reacted to with fury when she’d suggested it. Her brother though… Thanasis had taken the idea with his usual thoughtful consideration. A seed had been planted. All she’d needed to do, so she’d figured, was plant another seed. The question had been how to plant that seed without her family finding out. The Greek shipping world was a world where nothing stayed secret. There was no way she could waltz into Tsaliki Shipping’s headquarters and ask for a meeting without her parents finding out before she’d left the building. Even an innocuous email would be leaked, and so Lydia had dressed up in a nineteen-sixties-style silver mini dress and knee-high heeled boots, and taken herself to Alexis Tsaliki’s favourite nightclub, the place he was regularly pictured spending his Friday nights.
Memories were funny things, she thought as she tried to breathe her body back under control. Some events passed and you looked back on them hardly able to remember a thing that had happened. With other events, every minute—every second—became etched in the memory…
Lydia had been to Athens’ most exclusive nightclub only once before, years ago, for a friend’s twenty-first birthday party. As with the first time, she climbed the wide, rounded stairs to the VIP section. This time she climbed them alone, and when she passed through the roped barrier, it was to a booth reserved for one. She’d used half her month’s earnings to pay for this booth.
She gave it exactly fifteen minutes before carrying her champagne onto the dancefloor. Lydia loved dancing, but that night the only thing she had in mind was attracting Alexis Tsaliki’s attention, and so she moved to the music keeping her stare fixed on the club’s most private booth, the one most hidden in the shadows, where a tall, well-built man with perfectly quiffed hair so dark it was almost black was holding court with a harem of sycophants hanging onto his every word. Lydia would bet every woman at that table’s skirt was shorter than her own, and she’d gone as short as she dared without giving both her parents a heart attack. If she wanted to attract his attention, she needed to look the part.
As she’d known would eventually happen, the eyes of the face she only knew from a distance drifted past her and then zoomed back. Their gazes locked. A flicker of recognition flared.
She raised her glass, smiled, and then sashayed off the dancefloor back to her booth.
