* *
Georgia didn’t sleep well. She woke when it was still dark, her room icy cold, but she was so hot she couldn’t breathe. She kicked the covers back from her legs, her nightgown sticking to her damp skin. She shivered, chilled and pulled the covers back.
She’d had the old dream, although dream was an inaccurate description. It was more of a nightmare. Losing her family. Chasing through the trees for Savannah, trying to save her sister from the rebels, certain any minute she’d be killed, too. She was crying as she ran and then someone was there with a huge machete and she was begging for her life because she was pregnant...
That was when she woke up.
She was having the old dreams again, but this time she was pregnant.
Maybe because she was pregnant.
Lying in bed, Georgia drew great gulps of air, feeling overwhelmed and suffocated by grief and despair.
This was not going how it was supposed to go. She was beginning to panic, and it was too late for that. She’d signed contracts and agreements and beyond the contracts and agreements, she was in med school, studying to become a doctor.
She didn’t want to become a mother. She couldn’t become a mother.
Georgia turned on her lamp and checked her watch. Four thirty in the morning. She wasn’t going to be able to sleep again. She wondered if she could maybe go to the kitchen and make a pot of tea. The activity would be good. It’d distract her, help push the vividness of the dream away.
She pulled a thin cashmere sweater over her nightgown and then added a thicker button-down cardigan over that. After stepping into slippers, she headed for the kitchen on the ground floor.
She’d never been all the way inside the kitchen, and there was no microwave, so it was a bit of a game trying to find everything she needed. But at least the kettle was on the stove and she had a box of loose tea, a teapot and a tea strainer.
Georgia hovered over the stove as she waited for the kettle to boil, and her thoughts returned to the bad dream. And it was such a bad dream. But at least it was only a dream. What happened to her family wasn’t.
For the past six months she’d told herself that the pregnancy wasn’t a bad thing, either, because she was bringing life and light into the world.
She’d convinced herself that she was doing something good; she was giving Nikos Panos a gift. And, no, her mother and father wouldn’t have approved, but they were gone. Her baby sister Charlie was gone. Her grandparents, who’d been visiting in Africa at the time of the assault, were gone, too. Georgia and Savannah were the only ones left, and in view of such darkness and tragedy, wasn’t creating life a good thing?
Wasn’t a new baby a miracle?
And since she was not going to ever be a mother, wasn’t this a chance to do something good while providing for Savannah?
“Everything all right?” A deep voice spoke from the kitchen doorway.
Georgia jumped and turned around just as the kettle whistled. She startled again. Swearing—or it sounded as if he swore, she didn’t know as it was a stream of muttered Greek—Nikos crossed the kitchen, pushed her away from the stove and turned off the burner.
“Sit down,” he said sharply. “You’re about to get burned.”
“You scared me,” she said, but she was happy to sit in one of the blue-painted chairs with the woven straw seats. She watched him use a pot holder to lift the copper kettle and fill her mug. Steam swirled up, shrouding his hand. “I had a bad dream, so I came here for tea. But I was trying to be quiet. I’m sorry to wake you up.”
“I’m a light sleeper.”
“Then I’m definitely sorry to wake you.”
He flashed her a rare smile, and her heart did a strange, funny beat.
He was devastatingly attractive when he smiled. And right now, watching him make her tea, his black hair thick and tousled, his long black lashes shadowing his cheekbones, his full lips slightly curved, she felt her pulse drum faster.
She shouldn’t want to know him. She shouldn’t care at all, but she found him fascinating, and his scars just made her want to know more. They added an air of mystery. How did he get them? And why had he exiled himself to this rock of an island?
He’d virtually cut himself off from the world, and now he planned on raising his son here. Why?
“How did you get burned?”
He shot her a swift glance over his big shoulder, black brows flattening. He didn’t look angry as much as surprised. “It’s an old story. Not very interesting.”
She didn’t believe it for a minute. “I have a feeling it’s very interesting.”
“Not to me,” he answered flatly, bringing the pot and cup to the table. “Do you drink it with milk or sugar?”
“Honey?”
He went to one of the painted cabinets and dug through bottles and jars but came up empty.
“Don’t worry,” she told him as he went to look in a basket of jars and bottles next to the stove.
“It’s here,” he said, bringing a small ceramic bowl with a lid to the table. “Why do you have nightmares?”
So that was what they were doing. Tit for tat. “I’ve told you about losing my family in Africa.”
“Not really. You just say you lost them. I’m interested in the details.” And then his piercing dark eyes met hers. “I’d find it interesting.”
“So if I tell you about my nightmares, you’ll tell me about how you were burned?”
“If you tell me about your nightmares, I’ll tell you about the burns...sometime, soon. Just not now.”
“Why?”
“You have to trust me on that.”
An interesting choice of words, she thought, stirring in the honey. You have to trust me...
The word trust had come up several times now.
“Okay,” she said, not sure she was entirely comfortable with their agreement but thinking they had to start somewhere, building this trust, and she did want to trust him. She needed to trust him, otherwise how could she live with herself after she’d delivered the baby and returned to Atlanta? “But maybe you could tell me something else—”
“You’re the one with the nightmares, not me.”
She drew a deep breath. “The nightmares started a little over four years ago, after the assault. It happened when I was twenty, and in my final year at university. My sister Savannah had come to visit me, and we were looking at colleges together, so she wasn’t at the mission when the attack happened. Thank God. She escaped.”
Georgia looked down into her steaming tea, and for a long moment she battled the awful pain
