Free The Passionate Greek by Catherine Dane Page A

Stephanie. We kept in touch after we met at the interviews.
None of this is her fault.
    ‘Don’t worry. I didn’t think you were in it
together. I had my own doctor treat her broken arm. I have only had
good reports of her and as soon as she is fit again she will be
looking after Electra.’ Melanie’s face fell at the reminder that
the care of her daughter was temporary.
    ‘You will have no job to go back to,’ Nicos
was saying thoughtfully. ‘Did you consider that?’
    ‘Yes, of course,’ she replied, but she
hadn’t. It was as if her mind refused to function beyond her desire
to be with her daughter.
    ‘You could start up a catering company
again,’ he suggested and Melanie was reminded how interested he had
always been in her work.
    Her thoughts went cart wheeling back to the
early heady days of their romance and that first evening when he
had come to her flat and told her he was going to become a regular
visitor.
    He would park his sleek sports car outside
her flat, bound up the stairs and enfold her in his arms. Often he
gave no warning he was on his way other than a brief text. She
might be curled up on the sofa tired out after a frantically busy
day but Nicos only had to call and all traces of tiredness
vanished. He loved taking her to dinner in the latest must- be
–seen-in restaurants where the celebrity chef inevitably came over
to say hello.
    To her embarrassment Nicos would proudly
introduce her as a fellow chef.
    Nicos,’ she would protest laughingly. ‘I’m
not in their league’
    On some evenings the familiar sports car
would be missing from the street outside her flat and Nicos’s
chauffeur driven Bentley would be there to take them out to
riverside country restaurants where they would dine in quiet oak
lined rooms. Talk between them flowed easily while underneath every
conversation a current of deep sexual attraction permeated their
words.
    On one such evening he had leaned across the
table and taken her hand. ‘I want you to have my baby,’ he had
said, looking searchingly into her eyes. ‘We are destined to be
together. Tomorrow we will visit the house I have bought for us.
You will like it.’
    Melanie shook her head ruefully at the
memories. So typical of Nicos to have gone out and bought the house
in the anticipation that she would both have his baby and would
also love the house in the English countryside that he had chosen
for them.
    But she had done both things. She loved the
old Cotswold stone house from the moment she saw it, the many happy
hours they had spent haunting antique auction rooms and country
house sales furnishing it just as they wanted it.
    Nicos was ecstatic when she became pregnant.
‘We will have the family I have always wanted,’ he told her
happily. Nicos never talked about his own family. When she had
casually asked he had fended her off, quickly turning the subject.
One day he will tell me, she thought. It’s not important. What
matters is now.
    He wanted her to give up her catering
business and she did so readily. . Her ambition, once so important
to her, melted away with each pregnant month that passed
    Nicos’s business interests took him away
often but wherever he was in the world he telephoned her without
fail every day. His sweet concern for her and their baby filled her
with happiness... As the months of her pregnancy went by, cocooned
in the comfort of his love for her, Melanie nurtured the growing
life within her and was blissfully content.
    She came to recognise that what she had at
first seen as arrogance in Nicos often only hid surety of purpose.
She learned to trust his judgement. He was right about so many
things. But she couldn’t keep the dark thought from her mind. Yes,
he was right about most things, except for the one thing that
really mattered and in that he was so dreadfully and
catastrophically wrong.
    His voice broke into her thoughts and she
started guiltily as if he could read her mind. ‘If you’re worried
about capital to