He swore in Greek, looking at her with weary resignation. “Mikos told me today where you were planning on having lunch yesterday. I figured since you hadn’t tried to come at me with a blunt instrument, you must not have seen us.”
“Civilized or quick, Iakovos?” she asked again.
“How about neither?” he said, with a little smile.
“You really don’t want that one remaining testicle, do you?” she said, coming toward him with murder in her eyes.
He laughed, grabbing her arms when she was within reach, easing her down so she was straddling his legs. “Does your back hurt?”
“Yes, you bastard. What’s going on, Iakovos?”
He raised his eyebrows. “What, you don’t think I’m cheating on you?”
“Of course I don’t think you’re cheating on me.” She was silent for a moment. “You’re not, are you?”
“No, I’m not. How about we make a deal—you rub my head, and I’ll rub your back.”
“Your testicle is at stake here, may I remind you, Mr. Papadomomu. There had better be one hell of an explanation to go along with that backrub.”
“For the sake of any future children we might want, I will do my best, Mrs. Papaioannou.” His hands were warm on her back as he tipped her forward until she was leaning against his chest. She put her thumbs against his temples and started rubbing in little circles.
“Your meetings with Patricia—are they related to work?”
“Yes, they are.”
“Is she decorating a love nest for you?”
His eyebrows rose for a moment, then settled back down. “Theo.”
“Yes. I overheard him this afternoon.”
“Ah.” He nodded tiredly. “Yes, she’s decorating an apartment for me.”
“And the work on that has been taking you there at night?”
“Yes. We’ve been so busy during the day with the two mergers and the acquisition, the only time I had to see Patricia was the occasional lunch and at night.”
“You’re very close to being a eunuch,” Harry warned him, striving to keep both her voice and her hands gentle on his head.
He smiled, damn his delicious hide.
“Are you planning on living in this apartment that your ex-girlfriend is decorating for you at night?”
He nodded, his eyes closed.
She was silent for a few minutes, thinking about him, thinking about them. “It’s for me, isn’t it?”
His eyes opened, and she saw the exhaustion in them, but she also saw the love that shone so brightly that it warmed her to the tips of her toes. “Yes. You never seemed to like this place, and since it’s Elena’s and Theo’s home as well as ours, I thought you would want a place just for us and the babies.”
“I am happy to tell you that your testicle’s future is now secure. Oh, Iakovos. I would love a little place just for the four of us. Not that I don’t love Elena and Theo, but this has never really seemed like home.”
“I know. That’s why I wanted Patricia to decorate it. Despite your feelings about her, she really is a talented decorator. It was just ironic that you had the same thought at the same time.”
“So she’s not going to redecorate this place?”
“She will, but I wanted ours done first.”
“That’s why she has been dragging her feet,” Harry mused, feeling a hundred times like a fool.
A tired little smile pulled at one side of his mouth, his hands warm on her legs. “She thought I should tell you about the apartment, but I figured if she got your opinion on things using this one as an excuse, I could surprise you with it.”
Does she know?
No.
You are going to tell her soon, I hope.
“Oh. You did surprise me.” Understatement of the year, Harry.
“Mm-hmm.” His eyes were closed again, his head back against the cushions of the suede couch as she rubbed his temples. His hands went slack on her legs.
He had done it all for her. He was working insane hours to try to build in some time to take off for the babies’ arrival and to give her a home that she could love. He did all that, and still tried to give her everything else she needed from him—his time, his love, his devotion.
She leaned forward and said, “I love you, Iakovos Panagiotis Okeanos Papaioannou,” before kissing him.
He gave a little jerk, waking himself up. “Sorry? Did you say something?”
“No.” She got off his lap and held out her hand. “Come on, sleepyhead. Bedtime for you.”
CHAPTER 24
The day he was finally going to let Harry see the apartment that he had worked so hard to get ready for her dawned with the promise of being a wholly glorious one, filled with her excitement, but life, as he was later to note, has a way of promising one thing and delivering another.
It was, in fact, the worst day of his life, surpassing the day his stepmother died of cancer, the day his father died from drinking himself to death, and the day he woke up in the hospital to be told he had lost a testicle and would never father children.
“Please, Yacky,” Harry had begged him as he was leaving, batting her lashes at him and trying to look seductive despite the big belly and the fact that her hair, always a barometer of her inner tempest, was pulled back into a demure ponytail. “You went to all this work for me. I want to see it. I want to plan where to put all the baby things in it.”
“You’ll see it soon enough,” he said, nibbling on her lower lip. “Patricia says the last of it should be installed today, and then it will be perfect for you.”
“Just remember your promise,” she told him with an arrogance that he found endearing. “She can’t touch you. She can’t put her head near yours. She can’t kiss you.”
“You’re adorable, do you know that?” he said, kissing her, then collecting his laptop, briefcase, and a grinning Dmitri.
“Now would be a good time to tell me you love me!” she bellowed after him.
He gave her a cheery wave.
She yelled an obscenity in Greek.
He stopped at the door, gave Dmitri a long look, and made a mental note to line up a tutor for her.
“Can you take a break this afternoon?” Patricia asked him later that morning. She stood in his office, toying with the picture on his desk before she realized it was one of Harry that he’d taken out on one of his boats, her hair blowing around her as she laughed up at him. With a grimace, Patricia dropped the picture and leaned a hip against his desk.
“Is it done?”
“Done and ready for the walk-through. Sign off on it today, and it’s all yours. Or rather, all Harry’s.”
Iakovos was silent for a few seconds before saying, “We wouldn’t have suited, Patricia.”
She shrugged a negligent shoulder. “No, we wouldn’t have. But that doesn’t mean I have to greet your blushing—if gigantic—bride with open arms.”
“You like her, don’t you?” he asked, leaning back in his chair, wondering how it was that he knew. Patricia had always been very careful to keep him at an emotional distance. It was one of the reasons their time together had come to an end, and why he fell so instantly in love with the unrestrained Harry.
“Of course I don’t.” She looked out of his window, her face serene. “She’s horrid.”
“She likes you, too.”
Her gaze shot to his face. “You evidently haven’t been on the receiving end of her slaps if you think that.”
“She’s a wild one, my Harry,” he agreed. “She doesn’t hold back.”
Patricia sighed, slumping slightly. “She’s perfect for you. And absolutely head over heels in love with you. You deserve each other. I just hope she appreciates all the work I put into making her a perfect home to love you in.”
“She’ll appreciate it.” He sat up, consulting his calendar. “I’ll cancel a meeting and be there at four.”
He didn’t tell Harry it was ready. He just sent her a text to tell her to expect him for dinner. After rushing throu
gh an important consultation and pretending that the connection to a Singapore client was sufficiently poor that it made a conversation impossible, he hurried out to the apartment.
He found nothing wanting, and immediately put in a call for Mikos to pick up Harry and bring her to their new home.
“I hope she likes it,” Patricia said, making a face as she stood in the living room. “As much as it’s costing you.”
He looked around the comfortable room done in shades of eggshell, soft green, and marine blue. The apartment was half the size of his penthouse, with a master bedroom, nursery, and two guest rooms, one of which he had converted into an office for Harry. Two additional staff rooms were located on the other side of the apartment, one for a nanny, the other for a housekeeper.
“She’ll love it,” he said, filled with confidence. “She’ll love everything about it.”
Mikos called shortly after that. “I’m stuck in traffic,” he said, yelling over the sound of sirens and horns blaring. “Explosion at a petrol station. We’ll be here for hours.”
Iakovos swore and told him to keep trying to get through. He was about to dial Dmitri when he remembered that he’d sent his cousin to Corinth for the day.
He called home. “Sweetheart, can you get a cab and come out to me?” He gave her the address.
“To the new apartment?” she shrieked, deafening him for a few seconds. “I’ll be right there! Sooner!”
“I doubt that. There’s been an explosion, and Mikos says traffic is backed up everywhere. Tell the cab to go via the north and you may miss it.”
“I’ll be there faster than you can say ‘billionaire Greek playboy,’” she promised, and hung up.
He paced the length of the house, sitting in the little garden that was the main element that had attracted him to the apartment. That and the view of the Acropolis.
The sun started setting, and still Harry wasn’t there. He texted her to find out where she was, receiving an immediate reply that they were caught in the traffic that he had warned her about, but that she should be there in the next hour.
The next hour came and went, and night began to fall. He swore to himself and called Harry to find out where she was. He’d go out to find her himself.
There was no reply. Nor was there a reply when he tried to text her. A call home was likewise not answered.
Where the hell was she? He was just trying the figure the likeliest route the cab would have taken when his phone rang with a number he didn’t recognize.
“Mr. Papaioannou?” a cool voice asked.
“Yes? Who is this?”
“I’m the admitting doctor at the Agsavvas Hospital. We have a woman here identified as Eglantine Papaioannou. She’s been in an accident—”
He listened to the voice telling him that Harry had been in a car with Theo at the wheel, a car that slammed into a light pole, leaving him with a broken collarbone and Harry unconscious, and possibly bleeding internally.
He couldn’t speak, couldn’t think. His heart stopped—nothing seemed real as he gave permission to save her life no matter at what cost. His storm couldn’t die down, fading into nothing. He wouldn’t let her leave him. Not now, not ever.
Two extraordinarily horrible hours later, he shoved a handful of money at the cab that had crawled its way to the hospital, and lurched into the emergency room.
He heard her yelling even before he took three steps.
“I don’t care what you say, I am not having those babies before my husband gets here, do you understand me? No, I will not push! In fact, I’m sucking them back up into me, so you can just put the salad tongs away, because I refuse, I absolutely refuse to have these babies until Iakovos is here!”
He sank to his knees for a moment, his head bowed in silent prayer as he heard the anger in her voice, her wonderfully belligerent voice. His storm, his tempest was alive and fighting, and that’s all he asked for.
It took him a minute, but he managed to get to his feet again. “Eglantine,” he said, rounding the corner of the room.
Her face, bruised and cut, lit up with joy as she saw him. “Yacky! Where the hell have you been?”
“Thought I’d take a stroll around the block. So you decided to have the babies early, did you?”
She grabbed him by his shirt, pulling her toward him, licking the spot above his upper lip, then kissing him with a ferocity that he more than matched. He wrapped his arms around her, ignoring the various tubes strapped to her, looking down at those beautifully stormy gray eyes. “Are you all right?”
“I am now that you’re here. It seems the babies don’t want to wait another month. Do you mind?”
“Not if you don’t, no.” He smiled at her, his heart light after what seemed like a lifetime of blackness.
Her expression sobered. “Theo . . . Iakovos, he—”
“We’ll talk about my brother later,” he said, not willing to examine the fury that threatened to crash over him when he thought of how close he’d come to losing her. Theo, who had sworn he would not take another drink . . . No. He couldn’t deal with that now. “Later,” he repeated when she was going to protest, kissing her hands instead.
“All right, but—” She stopped speaking and an indescribable look came over her face before she grabbed his hand and squeezed.
“That was a good one,” the nurse told her. “Just keep that up and we’ll soon have these babies born. You’re dilating nicely.”
“Well, I’m so glad to hear that,” she yelled, releasing his hand to glare at the nurse. “Because I don’t know how I’d ever live it down if I dilated poorly!”
The woman looked to Iakovos to see if she was missing some nuance of the language.
“Where are you going?” Harry demanded as he moved down to where the nurse was peering between her legs.
“To see how you’re dilating.”
A couple of sheets had been draped over Harry’s body to preserve her modesty, but if he bent down, he could see the fascinating sight of his wife’s body preparing to give birth to his children.
“You are not! You are not to go down there and look at me, Iakovos! I’m splayed out here like some gigantic birthing whale, and I refuse to allow you to see things that will haunt you for the rest of your days. Iakovos! Don’t you dare look at my private parts!”
“They’re not very private right now, sweetheart,” he said, leaning down with the nurse to get a good look.
“Argh!” Harry screamed in frustration, trying to kick him.
“Harry?” he said, looking up over the massive mound of her sheet-covered belly.
“What?” she snapped.
“I love you.”
She sucked in approximately half of the available oxygen in the room.
“You dare!” she gasped, then took another deep breath and yelled at the top of her lungs. “You dare look at my vaginal parts bulging all over the place, and oozing god knows what, and bleeding and the babies about to come—you look at all that and you have the nerve, the gall, the outright effrontery to pick this moment to tell me you love me?”
He grinned. God help him, he loved it when she stormed at him. “Love me?”
“No,” she bellowed, and with a dramatic sweep of her arm, pointed to the door. “I never want to see you again! I am divorcing you just as soon as I get out of this bed. Sooner! I’ll make you rue the day you insisted on not having a prenuptial agreement! I never want to see you or your gorgeous face, or that spot on your neck or your upper lip dip ever again, do you hear me?”
“That won’t make me stop loving you,” he told her, taking another quick peek at her intimate parts.
“Now, you just listen to me, Yacky Papafroufrou! You are not to look down there again. Do you hear me? You look at that part of me just one more time, and so help me, god, I’ll deck you like I decked your brother!”
By the time she got down to the business of having the babies, she did, in fact, inform anyone within earshot that not only were his parents not m
arried, but they were actually Martians, that he was going to be so traumatized by the sight of the birth that he would never want to make love to her again, and last—and he had a hard time trying to figure out her line of reasoning—that if he ever so much as thought of being on another world’s-most-eligible-bachelor list, she would personally geld him with an espresso cup and a dull table knife.
Through it all he held her up when she wanted to sit up, pushing back hard against him as she strained to birth the twins, helping her walk when she wanted to walk, wiping her face when she sat on the birthing chair, and telling her in both Greek and English just how much he loved her as the babies were, at last, born.
Twenty-two hours after he had rushed through the doors of the hospital fearing the worst, he looked down at the two blotchy little red bundles in the incubator, his heart swelling with love.
“I want to hold them again,” Harry said, moving restlessly in her bed.
He left the babies and returned to her side, leaning down to kiss lips that were chapped and scraped from the flying glass in the crash. He thanked god for the makers of air bags, for the person who first thought up a seat belt, and for whatever angel’s job it was to watch over his beloved goddess. “They just went to sleep, sweetheart. The doctor said we have to give them some time in the incubators so their immune systems are strong.”
“I know, but I want to hold them again. I don’t think I fed them for long enough. Maybe they’re hungry. Are they crying?”
“No, they’re sleeping. Which you should be as well.”
“I couldn’t possibly sleep. I’m too keyed up. We have babies, Iakovos!”
“Two beautiful daughters,” he agreed, seeing the exhaustion in her eyes. He scooted onto her bed until she could rest against him. “Two little storms in the making.”
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Epilogue
Harry listened with half her attention to the voice droning in her ear. Elena, she thought, watching as the twenty-one-year-old leaped about in the pool, splashing and laughing with the same abandon as the two little girls in their water wings. Elena looked particularly happy. Could she have a boyfriend at long last?