blue of the Aegean Sea. Outwardly he might appear calm, but inside his chest his heart was thudding with fury. Inside his head images were forming, memories he had thought well buried surfacing.
‘I know it because they are mine,’ he answered his sister, watching as her eyes widened with the shock of his disclosure.
She wasn’t the only one who was shocked, Sander acknowledged. He had been shocked himself when he had looked at her phone and immediately recognised the young woman kneeling beside the two young boys who so undeniably bore the stamp of their fathering—his fathering. Oddly, she looked if anything younger now than she had the night he had met her in a Manchester club favoured by young footballers, and thus the haunt of the girls who chased after them. He had been taken there by a business acquaintance, who had left him to his own devices having picked up a girl himself, urging Sander to do the same.
Sander’s mouth hardened. He had buried the memory of that night as deeply as he could. A one-night stand with an alcohol-fuelled girl dressed in overly tight and incredibly revealing clothes, wearing too much make-up, who had made such a deliberate play for him. At one point she had actually caught hold of his hand, as though about to drag him to bed with her. It wasn’t something any real man with any pride or self-respect could ever be proud of—not even when there were the kind of extenuating circumstances there had been that night. She had been one of a clutch of such girls, openly seeking the favours of the well-paid young footballers who favoured the place. Greedy, amoral young women, whose one desire was to find themselves a rich lover or better still a rich husband. The club, he had been told, was well known for attracting such young women.
He had had sex with her out of anger and resentment—against her for pushing him, and against his grandfather for trying to control his life. He’d been refusing to allow him a greater say in the running of the business which, in his stubborn determination not to move with the times, he had been slowly destroying. And against his parents—his father for dying, even though that had been over a decade ago, leaving him without his support, and his mother, who had married his father out of duty whilst continuing to love another man. All those things, all that anger had welled up inside him, and the result was now here in front of him.
His sons.
His.
A feeling like nothing he had ever experienced before seized hold of him. A feeling that, until it had struck him, he would have flatly denied he would ever experience. He was a modern man—a man of logic, not emotion, and certainly not the kind of emotion he was feeling right now. Gut wrenching, instinctive, tearing at him—an emotion born of a cultural inheritance that said that a man’s children, especially his sons, belonged under his roof.
Those boys were his. Their place was here with him, not in England. Here they could learn what it meant to be his sons, a Konstantinakos of Theopolis, could grow into their heritage. He could father them and guide them as his sense of responsibility demanded that he should. How much damage had they already suffered through the woman who had borne them?
He had given them life without knowing it, but now that he did know he would stop at nothing to bring them home to Theopolis, where they belonged.
CHAPTER ONE
CURSING as she heard the doorbell ring, Ruby remained where she was, on her hands and knees, hoping that whoever it was would give up and go away, leaving her in peace to get on with her cleaning. However, the bell rang again, this time almost imperiously. Someone was pressing hard on the bell.
Cursing again under her breath, Ruby backed out of the downstairs cloakroom, feeling hot and sticky, and not in any mood to have her busy blitz on cleaning whilst her twin sons were at school interrupted. She got to her feet, pushing her soft blonde curls off her face as she did so, before marching towards the front door of the house she shared with two older sisters and her own twin sons. She yanked it open.
‘Look, I’m—’ Her sentence went unfinished, her voice suspended by shock as she stared at the man standing on the doorstep.
Shock, disbelief, fear, anger, panic, and a sharp spear of something else that she didn’t recognise exploded inside her like a fireball, with such powerful intensity that her body was drained of so much energy that she was left feeling shaky and weak, trembling inwardly beneath the onslaught of emotions.
Of course he would be dressed immaculately, in a dark business suit worn over a crisp blue shirt, whilst she was wearing her old jeans and a baggy tee shirt. Not that it really mattered how she looked. After all, she had no reason to want to impress him—had she? And she certainly had no reason to want him to think of her as a desirable woman, groomed and dressed for his approval. She had to clench her stomach muscles against the shudder of revulsion that threatened to betray her. The face that had haunted her dreams and then her night-mares hadn’t changed—or aged. If anything he looked even more devastatingly handsome and virile than she had remembered, the dark gold gaze that had mesmerised her so effectively every bit as compelling now as it had been then. Or was it because she was a woman now and not the girl she had been that she was so immediately and shockingly aware of what a very sexual man he was? Ruby didn’t know, and she didn’t want to know.
The disbelief that had frozen her into silence had turned like snow in the sun to a dangerous slush of fear and horror inside her head—and her heart? No! Whatever effect he had once had on her heart, Sander Konstantinakos had no power to touch it now.
But still the small betraying word, ‘You,’ slid from the fullness of the naturally warm-coloured lips that had caused her parents to name her Ruby, causing a look of mixed contempt and arrogance to flash from the intense gold of Sander’s eyes. Eyes the colour of the king of the jungle—as befitted a man who was in effect the ruler of the Mediterranean island that was his home.
Instinctively Ruby started to close the door on him, wanting to shut out not just Sander himself but everything he represented, but he was too quick for her, taking hold of the door and forcing it open so that he could step into the hall—and then close the door behind him, enclosing them both in the small domestic space, with its smell of cleaning fluid. Strong as it was, it still wasn’t strong enough to protect her from the scent of him. A rash of prickly sensation raised the hairs at the back of her neck and then ran down her spine. This was ridiculous. Sander meant nothing to her now, just as she had meant nothing to him that night…But she mustn’t think about that. She must concentrate instead on what she was now, not what she had been then, and she must remember the promise she had made to the twins when they had been born—she would put the past behind her.
What she had never expected was that that past would seek her out, and now it had…
‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded, determined to wrest control of the situation from Sander. ‘What do you want?’
His mouth might be aesthetically perfect, with that well-cut top lip balancing the promise of sensuality with his fuller bottom lip, but there was nothing sensual about the tight-lipped look he was giving her, and his words were as sharply cold as the air outside the Manchester hotel in which he had abandoned her that winter morning.
‘I think you know the answer to that,’ he said, his English as fluent and as accentless as she remembered. ‘What I want, what I have come for and what I mean to have, are my sons.’
‘Your sons?’ Fiercely proud of her twin sons, and equally fiercely maternally protective of them, there was nothing he could have said which would have been more guaranteed to arouse Ruby’s anger than his verbal claim on them. Angry colour burned in the smooth perfection of Ruby’s normally calm face, and her blue-green eyes were fiery with the fierce
