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?’

her own single-sex education and how she had resented the strictness, rebelling by refusing 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 tutor to help her catch up. Javier would never have entered her life. Who knew how different her life would have been if she’d never met

have stayed a virgin until the

with hindsight it was because she’d known, even without being aware of his wife and

Javier was her reality. She didn’t know if she would have stayed a virgin until the age of twenty-five if she hadn’t met him because that would have been a different Alessandra, not the Alessandra she was

I could,’ Christian said, adopting the same quiet tone as she. ‘I must have been ten when I realised education was the only way either I

she said softly after a long silence had formed

‘For what?’

recalled the little rant she’d had in Mikolaj’s taverna when she’d put Christian in his place about him not having

wished for; the things she’d been denied were to stop her being spoiled and not due to a lack