A Ring for the Greek's Baby Read online

  From no strings...

  Notorious playboy Loukas Kyprianos cannot forget his wild night with sweet, innocent Emily Seymour. But when he arrives in London to offer a no-strings arrangement, Loukas uncovers a surprise consequence of their passion—Emily is expecting!

  To wearing his ring!

  Despite their exquisite encounter, Emily knows Loukas can’t give her the fairy tale she dreams of—so when he insists they wed, she agrees for their child’s sake alone. But their engagement fuels their hunger, and when the irresistible Greek’s protection turns to seduction it’s only a matter of time before Emily succumbs to his touch!

  ‘Tell me you want me.’

  ‘I want you, but there’s—’

  Emily stepped back from Loukas with what little willpower she had left, but she stumbled over the pedal bin behind her left foot and it tipped over and spilled its contents in front of his Italian-leather-clad feet.

  An unpinned grenade would have had a similar effect.

  Loukas’s face drained of colour as if he was the one with morning sickness. He stood frozen for a moment. Totally statuelike. As if someone had pressed the ‘pause’ button on him.

  Emily watched as if in slow motion as he bent to pick up not one but seven pregnancy test wands. He examined the telltale blue lines, clanking the wands against each other like chopsticks.

  His eyes finally cut to hers—sharp, flint hard with query. ‘You’re...pregnant?’

  One Night With Consequences

  When one night…leads to pregnancy!

  When succumbing to a night of unbridled desire it’s impossible to think past the morning after!

  But, with the sheets barely settled, that little blue line appears on the pregnancy test and it doesn’t take long to realise that one night of white-hot passion has turned into a lifetime of consequences!

  Only one question remains:

  How do you tell a man you’ve just met that you’re about to share more than just his bed?

  Find out in:

  The Greek’s Nine-Month Redemption by Maisey Yates

  Crowned for the Prince’s Heir by Sharon Kendrick

  The Sheikh’s Baby Scandal by Carol Marinelli

  A Ring for Vincenzo’s Heir by Jennie Lucas

  Claiming His Christmas Consequence by Michelle Smart

  The Guardian’s Virgin Ward by Caitlin Crews

  A Child Claimed by Gold by Rachael Thomas

  The Consequence of His Vengeance by Jennie Lucas

  Secrets of a Billionaire’s Mistress by Sharon Kendrick

  The Boss’s Nine-Month Negotiation by Maya Blake

  The Pregnant Kavakos Bride by Sharon Kendrick

  Look for more One Night With Consequences stories, coming soon!

  A Ring for the Greek’s Baby

  Melanie Milburne

  www.millsandboon.co.uk

  MELANIE MILBURNE read her first Mills & Boon novel at the age of seventeen, in between studying for her final exams. After completing a master’s degree in education she decided to write a novel, and thus her career as a romance author was born. Melanie is an ambassador for the Australian Childhood Foundation and a keen dog-lover and trainer. She enjoys long walks in the Tasmanian bush. In 2015 Melanie won the HOLT Medallion—a prestigious award honouring outstanding literary talent.

  Books by Melanie Milburne

  Mills & Boon Modern Romance

  The Temporary Mrs Marchetti

  Unwrapping His Convenient Fiancée

  His Mistress for a Week

  Wedlocked!

  Wedding Night with Her Enemy

  The Ravensdale Scandals

  Ravensdale’s Defiant Captive

  Awakening the Ravensdale Heiress

  Engaged to Her Ravensdale Enemy

  The Most Scandalous Ravensdale

  The Playboys of Argentina

  The Valquez Bride

  The Valquez Seduction

  Those Scandalous Caffarellis

  Never Say No to a Caffarelli

  Never Underestimate a Caffarelli

  Never Gamble with a Caffarelli

  Visit the Author Profile page

  at millsandboon.co.uk for more titles.

  To my darling father, Gordon Luke, who passed away during the writing of this novel.

  You were an amazing father, grandfather and great-grandfather, brother, uncle and friend. You have touched so many lives with your funny stories, your generous spirit and strong work ethic. I will always treasure the memories I have of our relationship. The world would be a better place if everyone could have a dad like you.

  Rest in peace. xxx

  Contents

  Cover

  Back Cover Text

  Introduction

  One Night With Consequences

  Title Page

  About the Author

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  EPILOGUE

  Extract

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  WHEN THE SEVENTH TEST came back positive, Emily knew it was time to face the truth. Face it or spend a fortune on pregnancy tests until there wasn’t a pharmacy she could walk into in the whole of London without blushing with an ‘it’s me again’ grimace. She’d thought buying a jumbo box of tampons was embarrassing, but a basket full of pregnancy tests was way worse. There was no avoiding it. Those little blue lines weren’t lying even if she wished they were.

  She. Was. Pregnant.

  Not that she didn’t want to have a baby. Some day, with some nice guy who was madly in love with her and had married her at a big, white wedding first.

  Her first ever one-night stand and look what had happened. How could she be so fertile? How could condoms be so unreliable? How could she have slept with a man so out of her league? Emily was all for aiming high in life, but a Greek billionaire? And not one of those short, fat, balding middle-aged ones, like those in her local deli, but a six-foot-four heart-stoppingly gorgeous man who had eyes so brown you could lose yourself in them.

  Which she had promptly done. Completely and utterly lost herself in a sizzling sexual encounter unlike anything she’d experienced before. Which, truth be told, was not saying much, because her experience could hardly be described as extensive given she’d wasted seven years with her ex-partner Daniel. Seven years. Argh! Why couldn’t the number seven be lucky for her like everyone else? For seven long years she’d waited for a proposal. It had got so bad that every time her ex had bent down on one knee to pick something up off the floor she would get all excited thinking this was it—the moment she’d been waiting for.

  It had never happened.

  What had happened instead was she’d got cheated on. The ignominy of being betrayed was bad enough, but to be left for a male lover was a whole new level of humiliation. How could she have been the last to know Daniel was gay?

  But it wasn’t the betrayal that hurt her the most. It was the loss of being a part of a couple; the shock of being single for the first time in so long she had forgotten how to be single. Going out at night without a partner by her side felt weird, like going out with only one shoe on. Or eating in a restaurant on her own, working her way through a meal, wondering if everyone was speculating if she’d been stood up or
something.

  She used to love going out to dinner with Daniel, who was a bit of a food and wine connoisseur. They would try different restaurants and cuisines and sit for hours over a meal, discussing the food, the presentation, the wine and even the other diners. She used to love coming home from work knowing she had someone to talk to about her day. Daniel had been her ‘guess what happened to me today’ person, her sounding board, her back-up, her anchor. The person who’d provided the stability she’d craved since she was a child.

  She hadn’t had much luck since with dating. Her New Age relationship-therapist mother said it was because she was subconsciously sabotaging her male relationships because of her father issues. Father issues. And whose fault was it she didn’t have a father? Her mother hadn’t managed to get his name and number when she’d had sex with him under a rain-soaked tarpaulin at a music festival.

  Emily looked at the pregnancy test again. No. She wasn’t having a nightmare. Well, she was. A living nightmare. A nightmare that involved fronting up to commitment-phobe Loukas Kyprianos and telling him he was going to be a father.

  Oh, joy.

  Such a task would be a whole lot easier if he had called her in the month since their night of bed-wrecking, pulse-throbbing sex. Or sent a text message. Or an email. A carrier pigeon, even. Given her some tiny thread of hope he might want to see her again.

  Although, come to think of it, she hadn’t exactly done herself any favours in that department. She could write a book on how to get a guy to lose interest in one date. When she was nervous she talked too much. Way too much. When she gushed like that, she didn’t just wear her heart on her sleeve but on every visible part of her body. A couple of drinks down and she’d mentioned her dream of marriage, four kids and a dog—an Irish Retriever, no less. To a man who had a reputation as an easy come, easy go playboy.

  What was wrong with her?

  Emily walked out of the bathroom and picked up her phone. No missed calls. No text messages...apart from four from her mother with links to her prescribed daily meditation and yoga practices. It was easier to let her mother think she used the links than to argue why she didn’t. She had learned a long time ago that arguing with her mother was a pointless and energy draining exercise.

  Emily didn’t have Loukas’s number even if she could summon up the courage to call it. She could get it from her friend Allegra, who was married to Loukas’s best friend, Draco Papandreou, but somehow telling Loukas over the phone didn’t seem quite the way to go. Hey, guess what? We made a baby! would probably not be such a great opening gambit.

  No. This called for a face-to-face conversation. She needed to gauge his reaction. Not that he was an easy person to read. He had one of those faces that gave little away in terms of expression. His facial muscles were into energy saving or something. It was like trying to see what was behind a curtained stage. But he had an aura of quiet authority she’d found overwhelmingly attractive. His aloofness had intrigued her at the wedding. He didn’t seem to need people the way she did. She was like a too-friendly puppy at a garden party, moving from group to group, trying to win approval.

  He, on the other hand, was like a statue.

  Emily’s phone rang and she almost dropped it in surprise. She didn’t recognise the number and answered it in her best legal secretary voice. ‘Emily Seymour speaking.’

  ‘It’s Loukas Kyprianos.’

  Her heart kicked her ribcage out of the way, leapt to her throat and clung there with hooked claws.

  He’d called her. He’d called her. He’d called her.

  The words were beating in time with her panicked pulse. She needed more time. She wasn’t ready for this conversation. She needed to rehearse in front of the mirror or something, like she used to do as a kid with a hairbrush as a pretend microphone. She tried to calm herself but her breathing was so choppy it felt as though she was having an asthma attack.

  Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

  She could do with some of her mother’s mindfulness techniques right about now. ‘Erm...hi. How are you?’

  ‘Fine. You?’

  ‘Erm...good, thank you. Great. Super. Fantastic.’

  Apart from a little morning sickness.

  There was a tick-tock of silence.

  ‘Are you free this evening?’

  Emily swallowed. Free for what? Hook-up sex? She didn’t want to sound too available. A girl had her pride and all that. But she had to tell him about the baby. Maybe over dinner would be the best way to do it. No. No. No. Not in a public place. She would have to do it in private. Private was best. ‘I’ll have to check my diary. I seem to remember I have something...’

  He gave a soft sound that could have passed for an amused chuckle. ‘You don’t have to play hard to get with me, Emily.’

  Yes, well, it was a little late for that, she had to admit. The way he said her name with that subtle Greek accent made the base of her spine go all squishy. Em-il-ee. It wasn’t a name when he said it. It was a seductive caress, as if he had circled each and every bump of her vertebrae with a slow-moving fingertip. ‘Look, I think you should know, I’m not usually like that...like I was the night of the wedding. I don’t normally drink so much—’

  ‘Have dinner with me.’

  Emily took umbrage at the way he said it, like a command instead of an invitation. Did he think she’d been sitting by her phone waiting for him to call? Well, she had, but that was beside the point. She wasn’t going to let him think he could call her out of the blue and get her to drop everything to have dinner with him—even if she had nothing to drop. ‘I’m not free this evening so—’

  ‘Cancel.’

  Cancel?

  What the hell? Why should she cancel something at his say-so? ‘I don’t think so.’

  She was quite proud of the haughty I-haven’t-been-Superglued-to-my-phone-waiting-for-you-to-call tone in her voice.

  ‘Please?’

  Emily let a small silence pass. Let him sweat it out, as she’d been doing for the last month.

  ‘Why do you want to have dinner with me?’ she finally asked.

  ‘I want to see you again.’ His voice was rough and smooth. Gravel dipped in honey.

  He wanted to see her again? Why? He had a reputation as a playboy, perhaps not as wild and loose-living as some rich men, but he hadn’t had a relationship lasting longer than a few days.

  Or, at least, none the press knew about. Since his best friend’s marriage, the media interest had shifted from Draco to Loukas. Before that, Loukas had been able to fly below the radar but now everyone was speculating on whom he would date next. Emily privately had been dreading seeing him with another woman in the weeks since the wedding. If he were involved with someone else then the task of telling him he was to be a father would be even more difficult.

  ‘Is that code for “sleeping with me”?’ she asked. ‘Because, if so, I think you should know I’m not that sort of girl. I’ve never had a one-night stand before and I—’

  ‘It wouldn’t be a one-night stand if we did it again.’

  It was a good point. But she couldn’t sleep with him before she told him the result of their last encounter. Even thinking about that night in his arms made her insides do cartwheels of excitement. Listening to his voice was as good as foreplay. If he kept talking to her, who knew what might happen? ‘Just dinner, okay?’

  ‘Just dinner.’

  ‘Will I meet you somewhere?’

  ‘I’ll pick you up. What’s your address?’

  Emily gave it to him while part of her mind was worrying about what to wear. Little black dress or colour? No. Not too much colour. Not red. Definitely not red. Red was too ‘come and get me’. Pink was too girl-next-door. Did she have time to do her hair? Should she wash and blow-dry it or just scoop it up and hope for the best? Not too much make-up.
Subtle and classy was best. Which heels? She needed heels because he was tall—a pair of stilts, even. A night of craning her neck to maintain eye contact would send her muscles into spasm.

  ‘I would’ve called you before this but I was away on business.’

  You still could have called me.

  Was his ‘business’ a svelte blonde like the one she’d seen hanging off his arm when she’d searched him online? ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Really.’

  Emily chewed at one side of her lower lip. Why had he called her? Hadn’t she put him off with her ‘marriage and kids’ manifesto? Why had she blurted that out anyway? It was a first date no-no. Although, strictly speaking, it hadn’t been a date at all. It had been a chance hook-up. An impulsive act she still couldn’t explain. ‘Why? I mean, it’s not as if I’m your type.’

  ‘Given your relationship with Allegra and mine with Draco, I wanted to make sure there wasn’t any uncomfortableness about that night, in case we run into each other again because of our connection with them.’

  There was going to be a whole heap of uncomfortableness when Emily told him what had resulted from that night. ‘Right...good thinking.’

  ‘I’ll see you at seven.’

  Emily didn’t get a chance to say anything in reply for he ended the call. She stared at her phone, wondering if she should press redial, but then she realised he had a withheld number.

  Her mother would say it was a sign.

  * * *

  Loukas clicked off his phone, placed it on his desk and leaned back in his office chair. He was breaking a rule by contacting Emily Seymour but he hadn’t been able to get her out of his mind, or the memory of her touch out of his body.

  One-night stands were meant to be exactly that.

  One night.

  He had occasional relationships but he always kept things casual. Casual worked for him. Casual meant no emotional investment. Casual meant no promises he couldn’t keep. He kept his relationships short, simple and based on sex.