The Greek's Pregnant Bride

‘Our lives have been very different,’ he said, choosing his words with care. ‘It’s pointless comparing them. You have lived yours and I have lived mine.’

‘How has it been different?’ she pressed, leaning forward.

‘It just was.’

‘But how?’ A troubled look flitted over her face. ‘Christian, we are marrying in five days. I don’t want to marry a stranger.’

He reached for his wine and took a swallow. ‘You, agapi mou, come from a world of glamour and money. You have no comprehension what it was like for us. We were so poor that for a whole year I went without shoelaces—trivial in the scheme of things but imagine it for a minute. I arrived at university with only one change of clothes. I was the child people like you pretended not to see.’

Alessandra was like one of those mythical creatures he had watched swish past this very taverna’s front while he’d swept the floor. Unobtainable. Better than him. Better than he could ever be no matter how much money was held in his bank account.

herself. The outrage that had sparked in her eyes softened. ‘Maybe

the deprivation and misery that had sucked his mother down a black pit, turning her into a bitter woman who, even if presented with a glass three-quarters full would still regard it as being a quarter empty. All the riches and

Mikolaj assured him she had once been. Love that had turned sour had soured her, marking her with such blackness that nothing he’d done had

for Alessandra. Never for

from it before it

good response from all the wedding invitations,’ he said, deliberately

and fifty invites had been couriered across the world. It seemed even heads of state could drop commitments when it suited them and, with all the hype already surrounding their ‘whirlwind courtship,’ as the press was dubbing it, their wedding was shaping up to rival Rocco and Olivia’s as Wedding of the Century. One of the British glossies had offered one million pounds for exclusive rights. They had, politely,

no danger they could ever develop anything like a healthy—or unhealthy, depending on your point of view—attachment to him? He

eyes sparked again before she sank back into her seat, gazing at him with