The Greek's Pregnant Bride

He shook his head, distaste pouring off him. ‘She worked so hard but we were so poor she couldn’t afford to pay for my school books. We had food in our belly from Mikolaj—whatever was left over from the day before—but there was no money for anything—not birthdays, not Christmas, not anything.’

Alessandra swallowed, the familiar ache forming in her belly that always came when she thought of his childhood. She hated imagining what he’d lived through.

His gaze bore into her. ‘I was obsessed with people like you.’

‘Me?’ she queried faintly.

‘I would see men and women like you, people who were clean and wore beautiful clothes, and wonder why we were so different, why the clothes my mother and I wore were falling into rags. Then I realised what the difference was: money. They had it and we didn’t. So that became my obsession. Money. I was determined to learn everything about it: how to earn it, how to make it grow and how to keep it so that my mother and I too could be clean and wear beautiful clothes.’

‘You certainly realised your dreams,’ she said quietly. ‘Did you have to study hard for it or did it come naturally to you?’

to pay attention or do homework until it had become likely she would fail all her exams. If she’d applied herself a bit more, her grandfather would never have felt the need to employ a private

she have stayed a virgin until

ready for sex with Javier but with hindsight it was because she’d known, even without being aware of his wife and children, that a sexual affair between them was wrong. The balance of power had been

would have stayed a virgin until the age of twenty-five if she

said, adopting the same quiet tone as she. ‘I must have

she said softly after

‘For what?’

she could articulate the shame churning within her. She recalled the little rant she’d had in Mikolaj’s taverna when she’d put Christian in his place about him

everything she could have wished for; the things she’d been denied were to