Harlequin Presents--July 2021--Box Set 1 of 2 by Natalie Anderson

Author:Natalie Anderson [Anderson, Natalie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

IT SHOULD’VE BEEN EASY.

He’d been on an emotionally destructive path, and he’d course-corrected. The same way he’d hardened his heart to his father’s stumbling apology, even though a traitorous part of him had urged him to allow it, should’ve been the way he dismissed Alexis’s audacity to tell him there was another way forward.

He didn’t deal in hope. Or require his father’s regret to heal.

Why couldn’t he stop thinking about Alexis’s words? Or forget the pain in his father’s eyes as he’d walked away from him? Why had he spent the last two weeks with the growing sensation that he’d made the worst mistake of his life?

We can make it work together, Christos.

The sweet promise of those words had terrified him more than anything else she’d flung at him, perhaps with the exception of the shocking flame of pure terrifying joy that had lit his soul at the possibility that he might be a father, even though he knew he lacked the basic tools of success.

The conviction of that lack was what had propelled him onto his helicopter and off Drakonisos. It had lasted through the court hearing that finally granted Demitri custody of one son and through the meeting that secured a custody arrangement for the other.

He tried to remain removed as he observed father and sons reunited. But he couldn’t stop the clamouring in his heart that’d started the moment Alexis had confessed that she might be pregnant.

The wild panic had dulled. There’d been a peculiar kind of serendipity in setting eyes on his father on the same day he’d learned that he might become a father too. He’d taken it as a timely reminder of his past. What he’d overcome.

But the truth was, he’d never felt as exposed, as vulnerable as he had in the hours after he’d parted ways with his father, when he’d walked the dark landscape of the only true home he’d known. He’d felt he was every inch the abomination he’d named himself, incapable of giving Alexis what she sorely needed—love. Besides that, every imaginable scenario for success required he open his heart, risk more pain. Because if he’d wanted love as a child, wouldn’t his own child demand it? Wouldn’t the woman who’d counter-dared him to be brave, then watched him leave with disappointment and pain in her eyes?

He’d been right to accuse her of seeing too much.

He passed his hand over his jaw, encountered the stubble and inwardly grimaced. He was supposed to be his own man, yet a simple thing such as shaving off the stubble Alexis had found so sexy had become impossible.

As impossible as the raw chasm inside him that grew wider with every minute she was absent from his life.

Two weeks. A lifetime.

She hadn’t answered his emails or texts in the last five days. And before that, her responses had been perfunctory. The only reason he hadn’t already hunted her down was because he was...terrified. At first because of the possibility she might be carrying his child.

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