Free The Greek Billionaire's Innocent Princess by Chantelle Shaw Page B

gone that I faced the fact that you had run out on me.

    ‘If you had stayed I would have told you there was a possibility you could have conceived, and
    insisted we kept in contact until we knew either way,’ he finished curtly.

    Nikos drew a ragged breath, recalling his concern in the days after he had had sex with Rina in
    the cave that a faulty contraceptive could have resulted in a child. When he had tried to trace her, and found that she seemed to have disappeared from the planet, his concern had turned to a gut-wrenching fear he could not dismiss, despite telling himself that history could not repeat itself.

    Now he knew that it could.

    Memories of the past that he had ruthlessly suppressed for so long surged into his mind. Five
    years ago his lover had fallen pregnant with his child. During his relationship with Greta he had
    confided that he felt as though a part of his identity was missing because he did not know who
    his father was, and he had vowed he would not abandon a woman if she fell pregnant with his
    child. Soon after, when Greta had revealed she was expecting his baby, he had immediately
    proposed. But his desire to marry the Danish model had not only been for the sake of the child.

    He had loved her, Nikos acknowledged grimly. After his mother’s death, work had become his
    obsession and he had never allowed any of his lovers to get too close. But Greta had been
    different. Their affair had been Nikos’s longest relationship, and he had finally admitted that the
    beautiful blonde had got beneath his guard and captured his heart.

    After his initial shock he had been glad about the baby, knowing that his child would be his only
    blood relation in the world. But a month after he and Greta had married, tragedy had occurred.
    To his dying day he would never forget her phone call from Denmark, where she had gone for a
    modelling assignment, telling him that she had miscarried.

    Nikos stared blindly out of the palace window, remembering the sorrow that had swamped him.
    It had been a bitter blow, but he had dealt with his grief privately, and done his best to comfort
    Greta—unaware that her tears had been an act. In the months that had followed she had appeared
    to recover well, and quickly returned to modelling. But it had not been long before cracks
    appeared in their relationship. Greta loved to party, and had accused him of being a boring Greek
    husband. And she had been adamant that she wanted to concentrate on her career when Nikos
    had suggested they should try for another child.

    Her open use of cocaine, and her revelation that she had hidden her habit before their marriage,
    had led to a series of increasingly bitter rows, and it had been during one of her drug-fuelled
    rages that Greta had screamed the truth at him. She had never wanted a baby—but when she had
    fallen pregnant, and Nikos had proposed, she had seized her chance to marry a multimillionaire.
    She had waited until after the wedding, but on her trip to Denmark she hadn’t miscarried their
    child—she had chosen to terminate her pregnancy.

    Nikos swallowed the bile in his throat, and forced his mind away from his ex-wife. Greta was in
    the past. The newspaper reports two years ago of her death from a drug overdose had elicited no
    sympathy from him. From the moment he’d learned how she had callously deprived him of his
    child his heart had frozen over, and, although he was a living, breathing man, inside he was
    emotionless and cold.

    But he did not feel dead inside now. For the first time in five years something stirred within him,
    and he stared at the woman who had sworn she was carrying his baby, his heart pounding. Fate
    had given him another chance, another child— and he would move heaven and earth to ensure
    that the tiny speck of life created from his seed would have a chance of life.

CHAPTER SIX
    KITTYstared numbly at Nikos, shaken by the bleakness in his eyes. He looked devastated by the news that she was