driving forward. Pulling him inside her deeply, she increased her speed, going faster and faster. Her full breasts swayed as she rocked back and forward, sliding hot and wet against him, until, gripping her fingernails into his shoulders, she hit another sharp peak, even higher and more devastating than the one before, and she screamed.
He exploded, pouring himself into her with a guttural roar.
She collapsed forward against him, sweaty and spent. He cradled her gently into his arms, kissing her temple.
“Daisy—agape mou—”
It had been his old nickname for her, and at that, her heart finally could take no more.
How could she have ever thought she couldn’t love him again? How could she have imagined she could ever protect her heart?
Daisy’s eyes flew open in the darkness.
She was in love with him. She always had been, even in the depths of her hatred and hurt. She’d never stopped loving him.
Turning to face him on the bed, she looked at his handsome face beneath a beam of silvery moonlight pouring like rain through the window. She whispered, “Yes.”
Leonidas grew very still. “Yes?”
Tears filled her eyes, tears Daisy didn’t understand. Were they tears of grief—or joy?
Twining her fingers in his dark hair, she tried to believe it was joy.
“I’ll marry you, Leo,” she said.
They were wed four days later.
The ceremony was small and quiet, held in the ballroom of Leonidas’s house—“Your house now,” he’d told her with a shy smile. A home wedding was perfect. The last thing Daisy wanted was more attention.
After all the pictures paparazzi took of them together at the charity ball, the story that Leonidas Niarxos had impregnated the daughter of the man he’d put into prison had exploded across New York media. For a few days, photographers stalked their quiet West Village lane. Daisy felt almost like a prisoner, afraid to go outside.
Even after they’d decided to have the wedding ceremony at home, Daisy had nervously wondered how her friends would be able to get through the media barricades.
Then a miracle happened.
The day before their wedding, a scandal broke about a movie star having a secret family in New York, a longtime mistress and two children, while he also had a famous actress wife and four children at his mansion in Beverly Hills. The national scandal trumped a local one, and all the paparazzi and news crews and social media promoters left Leonidas and Daisy’s street to stalk the movie star and his two beleaguered wives instead.
Daisy spent her last day before the ceremony finalizing the details with the wedding planner, who’d been provided by Liontari’s PR department, and then going to a lawyer’s office to sign a prenuptial agreement which, in her opinion, was far too generous. “I’m not looking to get more money,” she’d protested to her fiancé. “You’ve already given me a million dollars.”
“That money means nothing to me. I always want you and the baby to feel safe,” Leonidas said.
“But the prenuptial agreement would give me millions more. It just doesn’t seem fair.”
“To who?”
“To you.”
Smiling, he’d taken her in his arms. “I’m fine with it. Because I never intend for us to get divorced.” Lowering his head to hers, he’d whispered, “You’ve made me so happy, Daisy...”
They spent the last night before their wedding in bed. Daisy never wanted him to let her go.
And now he never would.
On the morning of their wedding, as she got ready, Daisy was overjoyed to see the spring sun shining warmly, with almost no paparazzi left on the street to bother them.
She invited only about twenty friends to the ceremony. She’d been too cowardly to call Franck in California and tell him she was getting married. She’d decided to tell him after the honeymoon. She told herself she didn’t want to have to refuse him, if he offered to walk her down the aisle in lieu of her father. No one could replace her father.
Daisy already felt disloyal enough, marrying the man who’d killed him.
No, she told herself. Leonidas didn’t kill my father. He just accused him of forgery.
If only she could believe her father really had been guilty. Because if her father had knowingly tried to sell a forged painting, how could she blame Leonidas for refusing to be swindled?
But her father had sworn he was innocent. How could Daisy doubt his word, now that he was dead? Even now, she felt guilty, wondering if her father was spinning in his grave at her disloyalty.
She would walk down the aisle alone.
Coming down the stairs, Daisy paused in