Page 30 of The Maid's Pregnancy Bombshell

So, what am I, then?Alana questioned herself anxiously.

Atrialwife? A wife only until she had given birth? Was that the date that Ares was truly awaiting? Once their child was born, would he then be counting on a divorce? What else could she be expected to think after such a careful statement? Her heart sank to the level of her shoe soles.

Ares strode into the portrait gallery, a space optimised to show his ancestors, including his father.

‘That has to be your dad,’ Alana guessed, scanning the silvery blond male in the modern suit. ‘You’re better looking...he’s got a weak chin. It figures, a guy who couldn’t cope with hard reality—’

‘Yes,’ Ares conceded, struggling to respond in English, disconcerted by that blunt appraisal that fitted the man surprisingly well. A man who couldn’t deal with an unexpected pregnancy or a little boy, of whom he was the father, a man set on denying the truth until the day he died. For the first time, it struck Ares that that sperm donor of his hadn’t been much of a man at all. He had been a coward, a total wimp when decency demanded that he should step forward. It had taken the lawyers to remind his father that Ares could not be ignored, that it would be too dangerous to leave an heir to the Sarris trust uneducated and unpresentable.

He had been taught at boarding school how to speak, how to dress, how to behave in polite company. It had been shell shock of the strongest kind for a street kid brought up simply to worry about his next meal and survival. His IQ count had been his saviour, allowing him to fly in every subject while the less fortunate floundered. But he knew, indeed, he fully recognised that had he been less clever he would’ve failed and sunk like a stone in such a challenging environment where even the language and the culture were unfamiliar.

‘It must’ve killed them,’ Alana whispered, scanning the line of portraits. ‘What did your half-brothers look like? Were they blond like you?’

‘No, dark-haired like their mother.’

‘So, it would have annoyed them even more that you were an almost exact copy of your father, of the family Sarris trait of that very fair hair and dark eyes.’ Alana’s tone was celebratory. ‘They denied you, but you were so much a Sarris from birth—’

‘Never thought of my colouring quite that way,’ Ares admitted, once again taken aback, gazing down at her, so little and so cute and so very much herself even in the medieval Sarris palace of sophistication and dignity. Ironically, she was very much more comfortable than he was.

‘Of course, you didn’t. You would’ve been far too busy concentrating on all the negative aspects, never looking for the positive ones,’ Alana condemned with conviction. ‘You never ever look on the bright side, Ares—’

‘Except when I’m with you,’ Ares allowed tightly.

‘Did you inherit money with this place?’

‘Not a drachma. There wasn’t much left of the Sarris wealth. They lived high, earned small and this house needs a lot of money spent on it and the upkeep is costly. What little money there was after Katarina’s death went to charity.’

‘Such idiots to ignore you when you could have saved them all as a money-maker,’ Alana pronounced with huge satisfaction. ‘You were exactly what this family needed when their fortunes were on the wane, but they were too snobby and precious to recognise your worth as a tycoon. You were well rid of the lot of them.’

‘How do you make that out?’ Ares demanded, shocked by such a declaration when all his life all he had thought about was his rejection, his humiliation, the knowledge that he was only an embarrassment to his late father and family.

Alana viewed him in surprise. ‘Well, if they’d been friendly, they’d have hung on your sleeve for sure because they undoubtedly needed your money and drive. You had the brain and the get up and go which they clearly lacked. I don’t know what your father was like in business but, I assume, nothing to write home about if your grandmother died without leaving much money. They probably resented you going from strength to strength while they fell by the wayside,yesterday’snews,’ she framed with emphatic satisfaction.

Before Ares even knew it, he had wrapped his arms around his wife and backed her up against a bare stretch of wall.

‘What?’she said in astonishment.

‘Sometimes you’re the slow one,’ Ares growled, ravishing her parted pink lips without further ado.

‘Ares...?’

‘I never wanted you so bad as I do right now,’ Artes hissed, wrenching up her elegant narrow sheath dress with a ruthlessness that led to the sound of ripping fabric, because it had surely not been designed with the possibility of receiving such brutal treatment.

‘Is that so?’ Alana couldn’t have cared less had he stripped her naked because her heart was racing and her whole skin surface was tingling with sensual awareness.

Ares had that molten golden glow in his gaze and it melted her from inside out like heated honey. He was a very sexual male with a high libido, her perfect match. She liked to be wanted, sheneededto be wanted when it was the guy she loved. It might be the lowest common aspect of a relationship but she would settle for what she could get while she built on other things. No, she didn’t expect everything offered upfront like some women, yes, she was willing to work for a stronger bond.

Everything she wore below the dress was ripped, shredded, cast aside. Ares in a certain mood blazed with passion. He kissed her breathless, his seething hunger setting her alight like a flame on dry straw. To be desired to that degree was an aphrodisiac. It fired her up like a blazing star flaming through the heavens. She was yanking at that silvery hair, hauling at his shirt, clawing at his smoothly tailored shoulders, fully on board for every electrifying moment of that sexual connection.

Ares lifted her up against the wall and sank into her slick depths in one single, utterly thrilling moment and she shrieked his name in ecstasy as he stretched her to the limit. She needed him as much as he needed her and that was all right as far as she was concerned. Powerful pleasure consumed her from her pelvis up through her entire body as he pounded into her at a crazy rhythm. It was wild and exciting and she climaxed in a rush of sheer joy that wiped her out.

Swallowing a curse as the best sex of his life still rippled through his shuddering frame, Ares lifted up his wife and carried her into the nearest bedroom—that mental floor plan really did come in handy at that moment. He laid her with apologetic care down onto a gilded four-poster bed and studied the tatters of the dress he had ripped, wondering where the lingerie had gone. Recalling in a surge of X-rated imagery, he stalked back out to the portrait gallery to retrieve the evidence. His pregnant wife, and he had gone at her...like a ruttinganimal, he conceded in shock and shame, unable to explain that behaviour, appalled by it. There had been just that instant where everything inside him got to be too much and nothing would do him but he possessed her again.

‘Theos...I am soverysorry,’ Ares framed raggedly, staring down at her in shattered disquiet.

‘Why are you saying sorry?’ Alana looked up at him with tranquil green eyes bright as stars, blonde hair wildly tousled round her lovely face. ‘That was absolutely freakingamazing!’

Ares stared down at his wife, his incredible sex fantasy of a wife, in wonderment. No, she was the amazing one. Every time he was with her, he was reminded of that fact, that she was totally unlike any other woman he had ever been with, and it blew him away. With her, he was the kind of mindless he had never been.

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