The Greek Claims His Shock Heir

The billionaire’s discovered her secret...

She’s had his son!

After learning of tycoon Eros Nevrakis’s betrayal, personal chef Winnie Mardas walks out of his life, determined to never look back—or reveal the child she’s carrying... A year later, she’s shocked when Eros arrives to legitimize his heir! Swept away to his lavish Mediterranean villa, Winnie is overwhelmed by the fire still burning between them. But can she accept her new role as his convenient wife?

Lose yourself in this dramatic secret baby story!

LYNNE GRAHAM was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen romance reader since her teens. She is very happily married, to an understanding husband who has learned to cook since she started to write! Her five children keep her on her toes. She has a very large dog who knocks everything over, a very small terrier who barks a lot, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.

Also by Lynne Graham

His Queen by Desert Decree

The Greek’s Blackmailed Mistress

The Italian’s Inherited Mistress

Brides for the Taking miniseries

The Desert King’s Blackmailed Bride

The Italian’s One-Night Baby

Sold for the Greek’s Heir

Vows for Billionaires miniseries

The Secret Valtinos Baby

Castiglione’s Pregnant Princess

Da Rocha’s Convenient Heir

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.

The Greek Claims His Shock Heir

Lynne Graham

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-08736-0

THE GREEK CLAIMS HIS SHOCK HEIR

© 2019 Lynne Graham

Published in Great Britain 2019

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

Extract

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

STAMBOULAS FOTAKIS, KNOWN as Bull—but only behind his back, because nobody wanted to offend one of the richest men in the world—studied the new photograph on his desk. It featured his three granddaughters and his great-grandson, none of whom he had even known existed until a few weeks earlier. His competitors would have been shocked by the softness of the older man’s gaze as he looked with pride and satisfaction at his only living relatives. Three beautiful girls and a handsome little boy...

At the same time—and it had to be faced—those three girls’ lives and that little boy’s life were in an almighty mess, Stam acknowledged with bristling annoyance. If only he had known they were out there, orphaned and growing up in state care, he would’ve given them a home and raised them. Sadly, he had not been given that choice and his granddaughters had suffered accordingly. But he didn’t blame them for their chaotic lives, he blamed himself for throwing his youngest son, Cy, out of the family for defying him. Of course, twenty-odd years ago, Stam had been a very different man, he conceded wryly, an impatient, autocratic and inflexible man. Possibly, he had learned a thing or two since then. His late wife had never forgiven him for disowning Cy. In the end, all of them had paid too high a price for Stam’s act of idiocy.

But that was then and this was now, Stam reminded himself, and it was time he sorted out his granddaughters’ lives. He would begin by righting the wrongs done to his new family members. He had the power and the wealth to do that and for that reality he was grateful. He wasn’t seeking revenge, he assured himself assiduously, he would only be doing what was best for his grandchildren. First he would sort out Winnie, tiny dark-eyed Winnie, who bore such a very strong resemblance to Stam’s late wife, an Arabian princess called Azra.

At least Winnie already spoke a little Greek, only a handful of words admittedly, but that was a promising start. Her problems would be the most easily solved, he reasoned, although how he would hold on to his temper and deal civilly with the adulterous cheat who had made Winnie a mistress and Stam’s grandson a bastard, he didn’t yet know, for Eros Nevrakis was an infuriatingly powerful man in his own right.

CHAPTER ONE

‘MR FOTAKIS WILL be free in just a few minutes,’ the PA informed Eros Nevrakis as he stood at the window overlooking the bay while she regarded him with far more appreciation than the magnificent view could ever have roused in her. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man in his early thirties, and his legendary good looks had not been exaggerated, the young woman conceded admiringly. He had a shock of black glossy curls and brilliant green eyes that more than one appreciative woman had been heard to compare to emeralds.

The view from the small island of Trilis would not be half as impressive as that from Bull Fotakis’s private estate, Eros was thinking with rueful amusement. On this particular morning Eros was in the very best of moods. After all, he had made several offers through intermediaries to buy back Trilis from Stam Fotakis and those offers had been royally ignored. That he had finally been awarded a meeting with the reclusive old curmudgeon was a very healthy hint that Bull was finally willing to sell the island back to Eros.

Trilis, however, was greener and rather less developed than the extensive estate that Fotakis owned outside Athens and maintained as his headquarters, complete with office blocks and employees on-site. Of course, Fotakis had always been a famous workaholic. When Eros’s father had gone bust in the nineties and had been forced into selling his family home, everyone had assumed that Fotakis was planning to build a new base on the private island, only that hadn’t happened. Should he ever contrive to regain ownership of the island, Eros planned to open an upmarket resort on the coast that would generate jobs and rejuvenate the local economy. The old man, however, had done nothing with Trilis but hadn’t seemed interested in selling it either.

So, what had changed? Eros ruminated, irritated that he was unable to answer that question. He preferred to know what motivated his competitors and opponents because ignorance of such revealing details was always risky. Going in blind wasn’t smart, especially when Fotakis was too rich to be tempted by money. Eros turned the question around, considering it shrewdly from another angle. What did he currently have that Fotakis wanted? Eros asked himself then, reckoning that that was likely to be a far more accurate reading of the situation. Bull Fotakis was notoriously crafty and devious.

At the same time, Eros was uncomfortably aware that he would pay just about any price to regain the island of Trilis because it was the sole possession his father had truly regretted losing.

‘It is our family place and if you lose family, you lose everything. I learned that the hard way,’ his father had rasped painfully on his deathbed. ‘Promise me that if you do well in the future, you’ll do everything you can to buy Trilis back. It’s the Nevrakis home and your ancestors and mine are buried there.’

Eros compressed his sensual mouth, shying away from such sentimental recollections from the past. He had learned from his father’s mistakes. A man had to be hard in business and in his private life, not soft, not easily led or seduced. And a man forced to deal with a Greek icon of achievement like Bull Fotakis had to be even tougher.

‘Mr Fotakis will see you now...’

Stam’s gaze was hard when it zeroed in on Eros Nevrakis. A good-looking louse, he conceded grudgingly, exactly the type calculated to turn a young and naive woman’s head. Nevrakis hadn’t told Winnie that he was married. Stam had drilled every relevant fact out of his reluctant granddaughter. He had recognised her shame, gasping in relief that, despite his initial troubling assumptions about her character, her morals were in the right place. Winnie would never have knowingly slept with another woman’s husband. Nevrakis had lied to her, conning her into a demeaning living arrangement before hanging her out to dry without a single regret.

Eros saw a small stocky bearded man with eyes as sharp as tacks set in a weathered face. His hair and his neat little beard were white as snow but there was no suggestion of Santa Claus about him. Eros took a seat and refused refreshment, keen to get down to business once the usual pleasantries had been aired.

‘You want Trilis back,’ Stam remarked, startling Eros with that candid opening and the complete lack of any social chit-chat. ‘But I want something else.’

Eros leant back in his chair, long powerful legs carefully relaxed in pose. ‘I assumed as much,’ he quipped.

‘I believe that you’re divorced now.’

So random did that remark seem that Eros was disconcerted. He blinked, lashes longer than a girl’s, Stam noted in disgust, while wondering simultaneously how he was going to tolerate the lying rat as a grandson-in-law. Unfortunately, little Teddy couldn’t get his father’s name without his mother also getting a wedding ring, so choice didn’t come into it. Stam refused to stand back and allow his sole great-grandchild to remain illegitimate. He knew that was an old-fashioned outlook, but he didn’t care because he hadn’t got to the top of the ladder by bending his principles to suit other people’s and he had no plans to change.

‘I can’t imagine why you would remark on that fact,’ Eros drawled softly. ‘But it is true. I was divorced last year.’

Stam gritted his teeth. ‘Was that because you were thinking of marrying your mistress?’

‘I have no idea where this strange conversation is heading,’ Eros retorted crisply, lifting his strong chin in a challenging move of quiet strength. ‘However, I can tell you that I’ve never had a mistress, but if I did have one, I seriously doubt that I would marry her.’

Stam went rigid with offence until he reminded himself that Nevrakis had no idea that he could be causing offence because he was not aware that Winnie was Stam’s granddaughter and would undoubtedly never have dared to lay a single finger on her had he known that salient fact. He then chose to entertain himself by approaching his goal in a roundabout manner.

‘My granddaughter is a single parent who needs a husband. That is my price for the island of Trilis. If you agree to marry her, no cash need change hands.’

Stunned by that bald assurance, Eros straightened in his seat. ‘You want me to marry your granddaughter?’ he exclaimed, so taken aback by the idea that he could not even hide his consternation. ‘I didn’t know you had one. I’m sure I read somewhere that you had no relatives left alive...’

‘Until recently, I thought that too,’ Stam admitted equably. ‘But then, surprises are the joy of life, don’t you think?’

Still in the dark as to why Bull Fotakis should offer him such a staggering proposition, Eros could only think that he had always hated surprises. Surprises had, after all, marked some of the worst moments of his life since childhood, starting with the one when his father had killed Christmas by dropping in with his youthful girlfriend on his arm to announce that he was divorcing Eros’s mother for making him feel old. Eros might have been only eight years of age at the time, but he had been old enough to feel every ounce of his mother’s agonised pain and humiliation that the man she loved had fallen out of love with her. That experience had given him an inbuilt hatred of broken marriages and divorce, most especially because he could date the origins of his father’s financial downfall from that same moment.

‘I’m not sure I agree,’ Eros sidestepped quietly. ‘I’m certain you could offer your granddaughter to any one of a dozen wealthy, successful men and create an enthusiastic stampede... Why me?’

‘You’re not a fool,’ Stam conceded, his weathered face grim at that grudging acknowledgement because he wasn’t sure he wanted a grandson-in-law strong enough to stand up to him.

‘I hope not,’ Eros said in a calmer tone, but his brain was working at supersonic speed in an effort to work out the mystery of Fotakis’s interest in him as a potential grandson-in-law. ‘A single parent, you said...’ he added, playing for time.

‘Ne... Yes, a handsome little boy, my great-grandson.’ Stam could not hide the possessive note in his voice or the pride because both his sons were dead and the sight of that little boy had softened his tough old heart. ‘He needs a father figure, for who can tell how many years I have left?’

‘You seem hale and hearty to me,’ Eros murmured drily. ‘But you still haven’t explained why you have chosen me for this role.’

‘And you still haven’t explained how much you’re willing to sacrifice to regain that island,’ Stam countered smoothly. ‘But I can assure you that if you fail to marry my granddaughter, I will ensure that you never reclaim Trilis.’

‘Then we would appear to have reached the end of our meeting,’ Eros retorted levelly, vaulting upright with the fluid grace of an athlete. ‘I have no desire to remarry, and while I would like to reclaim Trilis, the loss of my freedom would be too high a price to pay.’

Stam loosed a sardonic laugh. ‘Even if my great-grandson is also...your son?’

Those two words halted Eros in his tracks. His handsome dark head turned back, an expression of sheer incredulity etched in his lean bronzed features. ‘Impossible!’ he grated. ‘I have no children!’

Stam surveyed him with loathing, as yet unconvinced that Eros was entirely unaware that Winnie had been pregnant when she had left his country house. ‘Two more words: Winnie Mardas... Of course, you may not remember her?’

‘Winnie?’ Eros Nevrakis echoed in raw disbelief. ‘She’s your granddaughter?’

‘Surprise...surprise,’ Stam said meanly.

Eros hovered, his big powerful physique screaming with tension and scantily leashed energy. ‘And you say...she has had my child? My son?’

‘I do,’ Stam confirmed. ‘Of course, you’re fully able to carry out your own DNA testing if you so wish. That’s your business. All I care about is that you marry her without telling her that I interfered. Is that clear?’

Nothing was clear to Eros in that moment. He was in a severe state of shock laced with outrage. Two years back when he had last seen her, Winnie hadn’t told him that she was pregnant, hadn’t even hinted at such a possibility. She had just walked out of his life and never got back in touch. He was instantaneously enraged and equally appalled. A man had a right to know that he was a father, didn’t he? The days when a man was routinely left in ignorance of paternity were long gone. These days a man’s importance in the parenting stakes was supposed to be valued and acknowledged. Eros knew that the first person he would be consulting would be a lawyer.

‘Eros...’ Stam prompted. ‘Did you hear what I said?’

‘Is she here? Is she in Greece?’ Eros demanded wrathfully.

‘Sadly not, she’s still in London living with her sisters. I can give you the address.’

‘Please do.’ Eros’s clipped tone denoted savage impatience.

‘You are not to tell her that I gave you the address,’ Stam warned him as he tossed him a piece of paper already prepared with the relevant details. ‘You do not tell her that you have met me and discussed her personal affairs.’

‘You like to be the ringmaster without the applause?’ Eros said derisively. ‘Not sure I can deliver that.’

For all his seventy-odd years, Stam reared out of his chair like a coiled spring bouncing back into shape. ‘If you let out one word of my role in this mess, I will destroy you!’ he raked back at the younger man in threat. ‘And you know I can do it!’

‘But you don’t know me,’ Eros tossed back with perfect indifference to how Stam Fotakis felt about anything he did. He reckoned that Bull Fotakis could do many things to make business more challenging, but Eros was a billionaire in his own right with equally powerful friends and he was confident that the older man could not destroy him.

Stam dealt him a crushing appraisal in retribution for his disrespect. ‘A married man taking one of his domestic staff to bed? I understand you perfectly. You picked her because she was poor and powerless and unlikely to be indiscreet for fear of dismissal. You made her your mistress and shifted her down to your country house for sleazy weekends. Be assured that I know exactly what kind of a man you are! A cheating, manipulative bastard!’

Eros flung back his handsome head, black curls tumbling back from his brilliant green eyes. ‘And yet you want me to marry Winnie?’

‘I want my great-grandson legitimised,’ Stam ground out with finality. ‘You get your precious island back. I don’t expect you to live with Winnie or stay with her. In fact, I don’t want you to because she could do a hell of a lot better than you as a husband and that little boy will have me as a male role model! He doesn’t need you!’

Vexed way beyond the limit of expressing his explosive emotions, Eros swung on his heel and walked out, his wide shoulders and long back rigid while he mentally rained down the hellfire of revenge on Winnie and her offensive grandfather. How dared they?

How dared they?

Talk and behave as though he were powerless? Dismiss his rights as a father as though they did not exist? Suggest he could have no value as a parent? That, indeed, he would be a negative influence on his own child? They would pay for those slurs, one way or another they would both pay, Eros swore with inner vehemence.

Even worse, the implication that he was the sort of man who preyed on his domestic staff like some shady creep! Winnie had never been his mistress. Eros had never had one and certainly not during his marriage to Tasha. He had been celibate for years and then Winnie had appeared and somehow... His teeth gritted as he thrust the memory away, along with all his other memories of Winnie Mardas. The affair had been a mistake, a very human mistake but still a mistake. He knew that very well. Temptation had led to an error and then ultimately to freedom, he reminded himself, shelving that train of thought for something much more important.

He had a child... He had a son, whose name he didn’t even know! Engaged in frantic mathematical calculations, Eros worked out that his little boy had to be under two years of age, a mere toddler. A faint shard of relief touched him. That wasn’t too late for a child to meet his father for the first time. How much worse would it have been if he had never found out or if the child had been much older and embittered by his father’s long absence from his life?

Yeah, it could have been worse, he jeered at himself for such ruminations. But not much worse... Stam Fotakis threatening him, trying to stampede him into marriage when he had only just escaped an imprudent marriage, his first child estranged from him, the mother of his child equally estranged and her subsequent behaviour were inexcusable. Seriously, how could the situation have been worse?

And the whole chaotic fiasco stemmed from one mistake. Eros’s own mistake, he acknowledged grudgingly. He had naively agreed to marry a young woman he didn’t love and didn’t desire to soothe a dying man’s fears about his daughter’s future. But it had never been a real marriage. He had never shared a bed with Tasha, had never even shared a home with her. Throughout their marriage they had lived entirely separate lives. He had accepted all the restrictions of marriage without receiving any of the benefits. And then Winnie had come into his life and logic, honour and restraint had gone out of the window simultaneously.

* * *

Stam Fotakis surveyed his empty office with bemused eyes. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t sure how a business meeting had gone. It had been business, purely business, he told himself soothingly. But Nevrakis had gone up like a firework display, far more volatile in nature than Stam’s careful research had led him to expect. He had never seen a man in such a rage, particularly not one renowned for being cooler than ice. Suppose he let that rage out in little Winnie’s direction?

A new fear assailed Stam as he grabbed the phone to speak to his granddaughters’ bodyguards, the security detail the girls didn’t even know they had watching their every move in London. Possibly, security would have to be a little more visible in the near future, Stam reasoned worriedly. Nevrakis had left his office in violent haste...

* * *

‘So,’ Vivi summed up, copper hair as sleek as a swathe of silk framing her vivid face as she looked across the kitchen table at her sisters. ‘Our grandfather is as crazy as a loon. Where does that leave us?’

‘What we do is our choice.’ Winnie threw back her head so that her mass of brunette hair tumbled down her back, enabling her to gather it up and expertly twist it into a ponytail, ready for work. ‘Nobody can force us to do anything.’

‘Agreed, but Grandad is our only option for the money we need,’ Zoe piped up with innate practicality. ‘Nobody else is willing to give us money to save John and Liz’s home. We tried to get a loan and we failed.’

That unwelcome reminder fell like a brick into the tense silence.

Winnie tugged her little boy up onto her lap because he was drooping tiredly by her side. Teddy closed his eyes and relaxed, his little face drowsy below his crown of black curls. Talk was cheap and easy, but reality had just spoken in Zoe’s quiet little voice, Winnie reflected ruefully. In truth, none of the three sisters had an actual choice. In the kindest way possible for a very rich tyrant, Stam Fotakis had spelt out the truth that his assistance would be given and gladly, but that financial help would come at a price they might not be prepared to pay.

And why did they need that financial help?

Their foster parents, John and Liz Brooke, whose care had transformed the sisters’ lives and reunited them as a family group, were in deep financial trouble. When Winnie had learned that John and Liz were within days of having their ramshackle farmhouse repossessed and losing the foster children currently in their care, she had disregarded her long-dead father’s warning and had approached her wealthy grandfather with a begging letter.

Stam Fotakis had cut off their late father, Cy, without a penny when he was barely more than a teenager. Cy had demonstrated his disdain for the family name by legally changing it to his grandmother’s maiden name of Mardas, which, of course, had meant that their grandfather had had no way of tracing either his son or the family he had eventually had.

At twenty-six, Winnie was old enough to remember their parents, who had died in a car crash when she was eight, but Vivi had only the barest recollection of them, and Zoe, a mere toddler at the time, had none at all.

But all three young women were very much aware that the Brooke family had saved them when they’d needed saving, giving them the care and support they had long lacked to rise above the tragic loss of their mum and dad and the disturbing consequences that had followed because they had all had bad experiences in state care. Winnie, extracted from a physically abusive foster home, had arrived with them first, and John and Liz’s caring enquiries and persistence had eventually led to the sisters being reunited within their home.

From that point on all their lives had improved beyond all recognition and gradually a happy, secure normality had enveloped the traumatised siblings. You couldn’t put a price on what John and Liz had done for them, Winnie conceded ruefully, because you couldn’t put a price on love. Without adopting them, John and Liz had become the girls’ forever family, treating them like daughters and encouraging and supporting them every step of the way into adulthood.

‘That’s true.’ Vivi spoke up again with a grimace at the reminder that they had failed to get a loan. ‘And we can only get that money if we agree to marry men hand-picked by our crazy grandad. Obviously getting his granddaughters married off to suitable men is hugely important to him.’

‘He did say they didn’t have to be real marriages...in-name-only stuff is rather different,’ Winnie muttered the reminder ruefully, because in truth she didn’t want to get married either, even if it did only mean a piece of legal paper and a ring on her finger.

When she had first contacted her grandfather, she had had to provide documents to prove her identity but, barely a week later, she and her sisters and her little boy had been flown out on a private jet to Greece for several days. They had been stunned by their grandfather’s wealth and his very big and opulent home and had been well on the road to liking him until he had mentioned his terms for giving them the money to save the roof over John’s and Liz’s heads.

Of the three of them, Winnie had been most shocked by those terms, particularly when it should’ve been obvious to a man who had bitterly lamented their unhappy childhood in foster care that he too owed John and Liz Brooke a moral debt for the care they had taken of his grandchildren. But evidently the concept of giving something for nothing was not one Stam Fotakis was willing to embrace. Yes, he had acknowledged he was delighted to learn of their existence and very grateful that John and Liz had given them such wonderful care...but still he had had to mention terms...

Winnie had immediately scolded herself for her sentimental expectations and unrealistic hopes of her grandfather. He was the same man who had thrown his younger son out of his home for refusing to study business at university and he had never looked back from that hard decision. Not necessarily a kind man, not even necessarily a nice man. He wanted them all married off to what he had referred to as ‘men of substance’ and restored to the society position he saw as their Fotakis birthright. Winnie, however, did suspect that she knew why Stam Fotakis had decided not to simply invite his grandchildren into his home to gift them that birthright as members of his household.

Stam Fotakis was ashamed of his granddaughters’ current status. He had adored her son, Teddy, on sight but had been appalled that Winnie was unmarried. He had been equally shocked by the dreadful scandal in which Vivi had become innocently embroiled. In fact, Stam Fotakis didn’t have a modern laid-back bone in his entire body. He believed women should be safely, decently married before they had children and that their names should only ever appear in a downmarket tabloid newspaper because they were beautifully dressed VIPs.

Winnie grimaced. She had always believed that she too would be married before she had a child but a crueller fate had tripped her up and she was a little wiser now. Falling in love with the wrong man could be a disaster and that was the crux of what had happened to Winnie and her once-fine ideals. Her only consolation was that she had not once suspected that Eros was a married man, and he had most definitely concealed that reality from her. Her wake-up call had come in the shape of a visit from Eros’s wife, Tasha, and she still broke out in a cold sweat just remembering that awful day. It had forced her to grow up fast though, she told herself bracingly, and she had needed that ‘short sharp shock’ treatment to get the strength to walk away from the man she loved.

‘I have to get ready for work.’ Winnie sighed, rising from her seat.