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‘Hmm…’ He shifted position and found her, a hand splaying across her stomach and then rising to cup a small, firm breast with a drowsy sound of masculine contentment. ‘Ella…’
‘I’m not pregnant!’ Ella just blurted it out, keen to get the news out, mortified by the idea that he was secretly dreading the possibility that she might have conceived.
Spiky black lashes lifted on startled dark-golden eyes. He was as instantly awake as if she had doused him with a bucket of cold water. ‘Are you sure?’
‘One hundred percent,’ she declared.
His lean, strong face clenched. ‘I would have taken care of you. You needn’t have worried on that score.’
‘We have enough problems without that particular one.’
‘You still don’t want children?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Just not children with me?’ His expression sardonic, Aristandros released her and vaulted out of bed.
‘I need a shower.’
Ella was bewildered by his behaviour. ‘I assumed you would regard a pregnancy as a disaster and that you’d ask me to have a termination. You did tell me you didn’t want a child.’
A bronzed vision of pagan masculinity, he surveyed her with brooding force from the bathroom doorway, and shrugged a broad shoulder. ‘Then I thought about it and I reckoned I could live with it. Callie would probably enjoy having a playmate,’ he murmured lazily. ‘I wouldn’t have suggested a termination. The main reason my father divorced my mother was that she tried to have me aborted—he stopped her on the way to the clinic. That kind of knowledge gives you a different take on an accidental pregnancy.’
Shocked by the content of that entire speech, Ella nodded slowly. ‘I suppose it would.’
She tried to get her thoughts in order. Every time she thought she had Ari pigeon-holed, he confounded her expectations again. Think of him casually commenting that Callie would enjoy a playmate, admitting that, at the very least, he was uncomfortable with the idea of terminating a pregnancy that was merely inconvenient! I reckoned I could live with it—he could live with her having his baby. Well, she was still relieved that she wasn’t about to face that challenge. He would have needed to be a good deal more enthusiastic and they would have had to have discussed the idea in advance before she could have allowed herself to regret the fact that she hadn’t conceived.
Swallowing hard, she got back into bed. She had on several occasions in recent years gone through the experience of feeling broody, when the very sight of a baby or tiny clothes brought a lump to her throat and a powerful craving, but she would never have admitted anything so personal to him. Indeed her longing to see and hold her biological daughter had almost broken her heart for eighteen months. But, now fully aware of how incredibly lucky she was to have a loving healthy child like Callie in her life, she expected nothing more from Mother Nature.
Ella prowled round the modern building housing the doctor’s surgery and emergency facilities which Aristandros had funded on the outskirts of town. It was a rural doctor’s dream, but apparently two doctors had already come and gone, bored with the lack of a social life on a small island and the inconvenience of having to step on a ferry to visit friends and family. Currently the position was vacant. Having checked out the patient numbers, Ella reckoned there was really only enough work for a part-time doctor, and she very much would have liked to put her name forward.
‘We would be honoured to have you here,’ the town mayor, Yannis Mitropoulos, assured her, having intercepted her and offered her a tour after she had been seen peering wistfully through a window.
‘Unfortunately, I’m not looking for a job at present,’ Ella advanced uncomfortably.
Had she been, she was convinced she would have been in harness within five minutes of accepting the job. Aristandros had devoted two days to showing her round the island, and had introduced her to many of the locals. But he had not, offered her an inspection of the unoccupied state-of-the-art medical building he had built, or admitted that Lykos lacked a doctor’s services. Ella had only found out those facts for herself when she’d taken Callie into town. Whilst enjoying cold drinks at the taverna overlooking the picturesque harbour, she had found herself slowly and steadily being surrounded by hopeful people in search of off-the-cuff medical advice. Aristandros, however, appeared to have no conscience about keeping the only doctor on the island confined to home, hearth and bedroom.
In spite of that truth, over the past three weeks Ella had settled happily into life on Lykos. Aristandros had twice flown off on business trips without her, and she had been dismayed by the discovery that she missed him when he was out of reach. He was, however, surprisingly sexy and amazingly addictive during late-night phone conversations, she conceded with a covert smile.
