Page 35 of Christmas Baby with Her Ultra-Rich Boss

She tried to take in air. Afraid she would cry if she spoke, she bit her bottom lip.

His smile was crooked. It beamed straight into her swelling heart. ‘Come back to my cabin with me.’

Now she wanted to wail like a child. ‘I can’t. I’ve got to work.’

‘You need to sleep. Sven can cover for you—he’ll be doing it for real in a few days. If need be, he can make any rearrangements to the rota.’ Straightening her hat for her, he kissed the tip of her nose.

After a night spent in such confinement, the sheer size of Konstantinos’s cabin was a stark relief to Lena. She rarely needed to enter the guest cabins and the last time she’d been in here, things had been so fraught between them that she hadn’t appreciated how luxurious and inviting it was. The bed at the far end, behind the proper living area and proper dining area, was so large and filled with such plump pillows she took one look at it and felt the exhaustion of a night without sleep hit her.

He smoothed her hair off her face and cradled her cheeks. ‘Shower and sleep?’

She nodded. Lethargy had gripped her so tightly her tongue felt too thick to speak.

Taking her hand, he led her into the bathroom. She gazed with longing at the huge rolltop bath but he shook his head. ‘You’ll fall asleep in it. Another time.’

Another time. She liked the sound of that.

She liked even more when he stripped all his clothes off then helped her strip off, too, liked more than that when he stood under the spray of the walk-in shower with her, and liked even more than that when he massaged shower gel over every inch of her skin and lathered shampoo into her hair. By the time he was finished, she was so relaxed she could have fallen asleep on her feet. Once they were dry and their teeth brushed, he got a huge, dry, fluffy towel, wrapped it around her, lifted her into his arms and carried her to bed.

The last thing she felt as she slipped into oblivion was Konstantinos’s arms wrapping around her.

‘Come on,’ Lena cajoled. ‘It’s our last night here.’

‘I’m not going outside,’ Konstantinos said firmly. ‘It’s freezing out there.’

‘It’s always freezing out there.’

‘And I only go out in it when it’s strictly necessary.’

She didn’t argue with him. No, she did better than that. Lena simply folded her arms under her breasts and stared at him with that look he was coming to recognise. It was the same look she’d given when they’d argued over which house would be more suitable for her and their child. He’d wanted the one in a plush gated community. She’d wanted the one in the middle of nowhere. Both were a ten-minute drive from her parents’ home town. Lena, he was coming to understand, loved the unpolluted night sky, which is what their latest standoff was about. The night sky—yes, he knew, it was currently always a night sky here—was cloudless, and Lena wanted them to leave the warmth of his cabin and stand in conditions colder than a freezer to look at it.

She’d won the standoff over the house, and, with a resigned sigh, he admitted defeat over getting frostbite. If he didn’t know better he would think Lena had him eating out of her hands.

Climbing off the bed he’d been trying to entice her into joining him on so he could make love to her again, Konstantinos hooked an arm around her waist and pulled her to him. ‘If I do this, you will owe me.’

Her amazing dark brown eyes gleamed. ‘If you stay outside with me for more than an hour, I will owe youbigtime.’

Gripping her bottom so he could press his arousal against her, he murmured, ‘Can I take part payment now?’

She rose onto her toes, a hand sliding down his naked abdomen to take his throbbing excitement into her hand. With a gentle squeeze, she whispered into his ear, ‘Nope. A full hour, Mr Siopis, and then we can come back in here and I will strip naked for you and let you do whatever you want.’

He groaned, then groaned even louder when she dropped his erection and skipped out of his hold and well out of arm’s reach. Her gaze drifted down to his jutting arousal and she gave a mischievous smile. ‘The cold outside will cure that for you.’

Okay, Konstantinos thought an hour later, huddled on one of the hotel’s viewing benches, a ten-minute trek away from the lights of the main complex, Lena might have a point about the beauty of the night sky here. The moonless vast sky was alight with stars, high above them a long streak of hazy light with a high concentration of what looked like cloud interspersed with thousands of massed stars which she authoritatively told him was the Milky Way, explaining how Earth was located on one of its spiral arms and that was what enabled them to see its centre so clearly.

‘See?’ she said happily. ‘That’swhy I dragged you out here. It’s only on nights like this that you can see it. There’s too much light pollution for me to see it in England, but here...’ She sighed.

‘You will miss it?’ Tomorrow they would fly to England. He’d further delayed his trip to Australia to help her settle into his London penthouse. The purchase of the house he was buying for her was set to be completed by the New Year.

‘Very much. But I’ll come back one day. When our baby’s old enough... Look...’ She pointed to their right, away from the Milky Way, to a cluster of stars shaped something like an hourglass. ‘That’s Orion.’

‘How do you know so much about all this?’ he marvelled.

‘I have a phone app that tells me where all the stars and planets and constellations are. I’ve gotten to know the sky so well I rarely need to use it anymore.’

‘What’s the fascination?’

She pondered this before answering. ‘Many things. Knowing I’m looking at the same stars humans have been looking at for millennia, wondering which stars still even exist, wondering where in the billions of stars in the Milky Way life exists...’ She looked at him and smiled. ‘For me, it’s endlessly fascinating. I’ve often said that if I make it to eighty, I want to be sent off in a spaceship and travel the universe.’

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