All Chapters of Keeping a secret from the Greek Tycoon: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

JUSTINAI'd decided on the drive up, and now that I was standing over this stove, that I'd give him nothing, let him sit in the discomfort of his own overstep. But the apology sat too plainly in his face, and I felt the resolve crumble before I could stop it."My sister's name isn't Paris," I said instead.He blinked, caught off guard by the turn. "I am sorry… What?""Adonis got it wrong. He's young, he misheard it once, and it stuck, and I never did have the courage to correct him properly." I kept my eyes on the pan. "Her name was Charis. She's dead."He nodded slowly, and even without looking at him directly, I could feel him wondering why I was telling him this now, of all moments.I let out a short laugh, humorless. "Part of the reason I kept the pregnancy," I said, "was because it was yours."The silence behind me went very still."You'd made it," I went on. "You had everything. And I thought, stupidly, that having your kid wouldn't be the worst thing that ever happened to me. I

JUSTINAHe kissed me like he had already decided how this was going to end.There was no preamble, no hesitation, no room left for negotiation. One moment I was staring at him, and the next his mouth was on mine, immediate and consuming.The problem was that my body responded before my brain could file a single objection. His hands framed my face, slid along my jaw, then settled at the back of my neck, holding me with a certainty that should have made me pull away.But instead, heat spilled through me.It raced from my mouth to my chest and lower still, gathering somewhere deep in my belly until I could barely think around it. My lips were already beginning to ache from the force of his kiss, tender and swollen beneath his mouth, but I kissed him back anyway. My hands found the front of his shirt and gripped the fabric, tugging with an urgency that embarrassed some distant, rational part of me.The buttons gave beneath my fingers.His shirt fell open, and I pressed my palms against hi

JUSTINAI gave up on sleep around six, worn out from lying still and pretending I wasn't.My body still felt unfamiliar, wrong in places I wished it didn't, and I needed to keep my hands busy before my mind wandered back to that territory.Breakfast!Yes. Something ordinary. Anything that would keep my thoughts far from Gregor Vallis and the memory of his mouth.My usual sleep shirt hung damp and wrung out over the shower rod, a casualty of last night's frantic scrubbing. I rummaged through the dresser for something clean and unearthed the nightdress from the boutique trip, tags still curled and forgotten in a drawer I rarely touched. It was short, soft, the sort of thing meant for a woman unafraid of her own dreams. I had never worn it. I told myself it didn't matter. At six in the morning, no one would see me.I was wrong about that too.The kitchen light was already glowing when I padded in, and instead of Gregor, my first thought was the nightdress’s hem and how much of my thighs

JUSTINA"I'm having fun. This is my fun face.""That's your interrogation face.""Same thing, depending on the day."He laughed, and I hated how much I liked the sound of it out here, loose and easy, nothing like the clipped boardroom voice he used often.The dragon coaster was, mercifully, too tall a requirement for Adonis, who sulked about it for exactly ninety seconds before Gregor produced a fistful of tickets from somewhere and pointed him toward the strength game instead. The one with the oversized mallet and the bell nobody ever actually hit."Watch this," Gregor said, rolling up his sleeves like he was walking into a boardroom instead of a carnival stall."You're going to embarrass yourself.""I'm going to win my son a lion."He did not win the lion on the first try. Or the second. By the third, a small crowd of strangers had gathered, and Adonis was chanting Dad like he was ringside at a title fight, and when the bell finally cracked against its little metal roof, Gregor turn

CHARISSAThirty thousand euros. That was what it took to get me standing under a rented, candy-cane-shaped gazebo, wearing a dress the color of bubblegum, waiting for a man named Petros to tell me I looked like a doll.I kept doing the math in my head anyway. Thirty thousand for a day's work, for smiling at strangers' children and pretending a theme park mascot costume wasn't standing four feet away breathing through a mesh mouth hole. I used to turn down half that for print work that actually meant something, campaigns that landed in magazines people still bought on paper. Now I was the face of a theme park's summer relaunch, and I was supposed to be grateful for it.I was an editorial model. I'd walked for houses that didn't return calls to influencers with a million followers and nothing else. I'd been flown to Milan twice in one season. And here I was, in a gazebo, in bubblegum pink, because my agent said the offer came in fast and the money was good and I didn't say no fast enoug