Page 21 of Christmas Baby with Her Ultra-Rich Boss

‘I didn’t think you meant that quickly.’ She finally plucked up the courage to look him in the eye. Her heart flipped over to see the blaze roaring from them, completely belying his external aloofness, making it even harder for her to concentrate and get her words out. ‘I don’t have anywhere to go. My parents only have a sofa I can sleep on, which was fine when I wasn’t pregnant, and my grandmother’s cabin near Trollarudden isn’t habitable. There’s nowhere else for me to go.’

Konstantinos sounded out the unfamiliar word. ‘Trollarudden?’

‘Near Borlange?’

He shook his head. He’d never heard of it.

‘It’s hundreds of miles south from here.’

Everything was hundreds of miles south of here. ‘In Sweden?’

‘Yes. My mother’s Swedish.’

‘Ah.’ That explained a lot.

‘We spent our childhood summers at my grandmother’s cabin here. My parents are teachers so had the same long holidays we had. Mormor—my grandmother—died when I was sixteen. My parents sold her house but we kept the cabin.’ She grimaced. ‘We always meant to make good use of it but the accident changed everything. I went to check it all over a couple of years ago and it’s falling into ruin.’

‘The accident...do you mean the one that paralysed your sister?’

She nodded.

‘Do they know you’re pregnant?’

‘No.’

‘Why not? I got the impression from your video call that you are a close family.’

‘We are.’ She sighed. ‘I was going to tell them on my next visit home—I don’t imagine I’ll be able to hide it by then.’

‘Why would you want to hide it from them?’

‘I don’t, I just thought it better to wait until nearer the birth. They’re in no position to help me and they have enough to worry about with Heidi. She needs twenty-four-hour care. The last thing they needed was to spend nine months worrying about me, too.’

Though he would prefer not to look too closely at Lena’s face and have to deal with the accompanying violent roll in his guts and the deepening of the awareness tormenting him just to share four walls with her, Konstantinos needed to see for himself if she was telling the truth or simply feeding him a line to make herself sound more in need of help than she actually was. He couldn’t shake the nagging voice in the back of his mind that she’d deliberately seduced him for the sole reason of conceiving his child.

There was no need for her to play games. Deliberate conception or not, it made no difference to him if she had an army of family and friends offering their help; her child was his child. His responsibility. That made Lena’s comfort and safety his responsibility, too.

Allowing himself to fully gaze into the dark brown eyes made his heart clench tightly. Too tightly. Made him remember the look on her flushed face last night when she’d suddenly pressed her lips to his.

Theos, she’d backed off as if she’d been scalded.He’dbeen the one to lose control of the situation. Him. What the hell had he been thinking, pulling her into his arms like that when he damned well knew to keep a physical distance between them?

He gritted his teeth in an ineffectual attempt to counter the throbs of awareness burning beneath his skin and lowered his stare to her desk. Lena had placed a miniature Christmas tree on it and wrapped tinsel around the framed photograph next to her monitor. He’d seen the photo before, only yesterday morning when he’d sat where Lena now sat, plotting his quick escape from this freezing hellhole. Those last minutes before he’d learned the secret she’d been hiding from him.

Twisting the photo round, he looked again at the two small girls—Lena and her sister—playing in the snow, and suddenly it came to him why the watercolour painting on her cabin wall had seemed so familiar. ‘This is the photograph used to create the painting in your cabin?’

‘Yes. My mother painted it. She often used photos as inspiration for her art.’

‘Does she still paint?’

‘Rarely.’

The sadness in her voice made him look back at her.

‘Heidi’s health issues are incredibly complex. She sustained such damage...’ She trailed off with another deep sigh before her shoulders rose briskly and a note entered her voice to match. ‘Mum and Dad share her care. They both reduced their work to part-time so one of them is always around for her. It doesn’t leave much time for anything else.’

‘Then why have you spent years here, thousands of miles from them, and not with them, helping with their burden?’

The anger that darkened and pinched her face was instantaneous. Pushing herself forward on the desk, she spoke with quiet venom. ‘Heidi is not aburden.She is my sister and their daughter and we love her and would do anything for her, and I would thank you not to cast judgement on choices made that you knownothingabout.’

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