Page 20 of Christmas Baby with Her Ultra-Rich Boss

‘Please don’t tell me that was a mistake,’ she whispered, resting her head back against the wall.

His swollen heart clenched. ‘That might have been my biggest mistake.’

She shook her head. ‘Don’t.’

With a groan, he rested his forehead to hers. ‘Lena, I don’t want there to be lies between us. There have been too many already.’

‘I know. And I’m sorry.’

To his surprise, he believed her. He disentangled his arms so he could run his fingers through her hair and clasp the back of her head. ‘I have spent all this time trying to forget our night together and now I learn you are having my baby, and I have to navigate a future where you are going to be in my life for the rest of my life and I don’t even know how the hell to begin navigating it.’

She gave a wobbly smile. ‘I don’t know how to navigate it, either.’

He stared into her beautiful eyes and felt another clenching of his heart. ‘I promise I will support you financially and in any other way I can, and be a father to our child as best I can, but that is as much as I can promise.’

She gave another wobbly smile and nodded. ‘The only promise I want from you is the promise to always put our child first.’

The clenching in his chest tightened to a point. Resisting the growing urge to kiss her again, he bowed his head and stepped away from her completely, making his way to the cupboard he’d stored his outdoor clothing in. It was time to get out of this suffocating cabin and Lena’s overwhelming presence. ‘I give you my word.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

THENEXTMORNINGLena ski-walked past Father Christmas ski-walking to his newly opened grotto, and grinned. The Siopis Ice Hotel didn’t cater to children, but in December the snow and the atmosphere of the place turned many of their guests into big kids.

At the lodge she carefully removed her skis and placed them in the staff rack, then shook off the layer of snow that had fallen thick and fast during the slow journey from her cabin, and stepped inside. The warmth was welcome as was the brightness of the internal daylight-mimicking lights. She hoped the forecast of blizzards the next day proved wrong. There was nothing worse than making your way around the complex with zero visibility. Occasionally, the blizzards became bad enough that planes at the local airport couldn’t land or take off.

As usual, the first thing she did once settled in her office was check their incoming and outgoing guests’ flight status. No flights tomorrow, so if the predicted blizzard did hit, they wouldn’t have to scramble for extra accommodation if those supposed to leave were trapped.

Busying herself firing off emails and messages to all the various teams involved in getting guests wherever they needed to be and ensuring everyone was prepared with the necessary bad weather contingency plans, it was the sudden plummet of Lena’s stomach that alerted her to her office door being pushed open. She lifted her gaze to find Konstantinos stepping over the threshold.

The long, lean frame wrapped in the usual dapper dark suit and the darkly unattractive freshly shaved face that made her heart swell so greatly loomed over her desk before he sank into the visitor chair opposite her.

The greeting she’d found for everyone else she’d seen that morning refused to form for him. Her throat had closed too tightly.

His strong throat moved before he broke the silence. ‘All okay?’

She nodded the lie she couldn’t form verbally. Truth was, Lena was far from okay. Her emotions were all over the place. She couldn’t make sense of any of it. Couldn’t make sense of why, when Konstantinos had left her cabin so soon after the passion between them had erupted, she’d had to clamp her lips together to stop herself begging him to stay. Or make sense of why, during the long, dark night, she’d spent the many lonely hours fighting the yearning to call him, just to hear his voice.

She must be a masochist. That was the only explanation. Or her hormones were more bonkers than she’d given them credit for. Probably a combination of the two and all aggravated by that stupid, heavenly, passionate kiss, a kiss her cheeks kept flaming to remember thatshe’dinstigated.

She was definitely a masochist. How else to explain why her reaction to a man angrily reeling off the reasons why sleeping with her had been a mistake was to stop him talking with a kiss?

It didn’t matter that he’d pulled her back to him or that he’d been the one to envelop her in his arms and hold her so tightly while devouring her mouth. Compounding his mistake. If she hadn’t made the first move, he wouldn’t have made the second.

What waswrongwith her? She’d made all the running the night they’d shared together, inviting him into her cabin, being openly dismayed when he said he should leave, angling her body closer to his, kissing him... It had all beenher. She’d started it! He’d responded but she’d been the instigator, and she had no doubt that if she hadn’t, nothing would have happened. Konstantinos would never have made the first move. And now she knew she couldn’t even partially blame her actions that night on all the wine because she’d done it all again stone-cold sober.

For whatever reason, being close to Konstantinos seemed to cast a spell on her and make her act like a teenager with a crush. She accepted that she did have a crush on him—be a bit silly to deny something so obvious—but she wasn’t a teenager, she was an adult, and it beggared belief that she could be mooning over a man who’d treated her like dirt after their one night together and might as well have spelt it out in neon lights that he wasn’t interested in a relationship.

Sheshouldn’t be interested in a relationship, either. She wasn’t! She’d had no interest in relationships since the accident and chances were, if not for the baby, she wouldn’t be entertaining any of these thoughts. But shewashaving his baby. A part of Konstantinos Siopis was growing inside her, so surely it would be more worrying if she wasn’t entertaining relationship thoughts about the father of her child? Because didn’t it make sense to at least try and see, for their baby’s sake, if a relationship between them could work?

Oh, this was all so confusing.

It would be easier if he felt nothing for her. Even simple hate would be easier to deal with. It was his desire for her that added such toxicity to her confusion. Konstantinos had such detachment over his emotions that he found it easy to separate his desire from his head. Lena could only hope time would make that same detachment easy for her to find, too.

‘I have rearranged my schedule,’ he told her with that hateful vocal detachment. ‘We shall stay here for another week. That will give us time to find a temporary replacement for you and get things in motion for a permanent replacement. I think Sven is well qualified to take the role temporarily—do you agree?’

‘You want me to leave in a week?’

‘We have already agreed that it is best you leave sooner rather than later.’

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