Back in Dr. Xenakis' Arms

By Amalie Berlin

She can’t resist the doc from her past!

But do they have a future?

In this Hot Greek Docs story, obstetrician Erianthe Nikolaides is returning home to Mythelios and dreading seeing her sinfully hot ex, Dr. Ares Xenakis! She’s still haunted by the devastating circumstances of their breakup. To truly heal she must share her pain with Ares, but when a scorching kiss reignites their desire, dare Eri risk her heart a second time?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harlequin Medical Romance
• Release date: Jul 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781488079832

Amalie Berlin

Amalie lives with her family and critters in Southern Ohio, and she writes quirky, independent characters for Harlequin Medical Romance. Her favorite stories buck expectations with unusual settings and situations, and the belief that humor can powerfully illuminate truth—especially when juxtaposed against intense emotions. And that love is stronger and more satisfying when your partner can make you laugh through the times you don’t have the luxury of tears.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Ten years ago...

ARES’S TIRES SPUN gravel as he tore from the access road into the parking lot at Mythelios’s only airport, but they couldn’t compete with the churning of his stomach.

At the edge of the tarmac, he slammed into Park and launched himself from the car.

Please don’t let me be too late.

His heart, still beating hard enough to bruise, hadn’t slowed for a single second since his best friend, Theo, had called him twenty minutes earlier in a blind panic—Theo’s parents were sending his little sister away. Today. Right now. Or maybe a few minutes ago if time wasn’t on his side.

He’d thought he would have more time to spend with her before they took that step—the step he now couldn’t even imagine why he’d agreed to. Her father had said nothing about Erianthe leaving the next morning...

He burst through the chain-link gate along the back of the hangar where all the partners of Mopaxeni Shipping kept their private planes. Gravel became tarmac as he pounded through the baking waves rising from black pavement. Even as fast as he could move, he might as well have been running through quicksand; every yard of effort seemed to return an inch of sluggish distance.

The same threat had been lobbed at Erianthe by her parents when they’d reacted just to the myriad ways she had rebelled. The new millennium might be well underway, but they were still firmly rooted in the past—strict, traditional, image-obsessed Greek Orthodox billionaires, who’d decided that the best place to hide the shameful pregnancy of their teenage daughter was in a convent.

Theo had never believed they’d actually send her away, but Ares had known for nearly eighteen hours. He’d just thought there would be more time before she left. She wasn’t even showing yet.

It was something else Theo didn’t know about—like the yearlong secret relationship they’d carried out to protect the dynamic of their group, their real family—the neglected children of Mopaxeni. A fail-safe in case things went haywire between them.

Theo didn’t know it was Ares’s fault his little sister was basically being exiled to another country, hidden away, with the adoption of her child forced on her by their loving parents. He thought his parents were sending Eri away to boarding school, so she would avoid distractions and concentrate on her studies.

He rounded the hangar and saw the plane already pulled out, door open, stairs still attached. The long black sedan her father often drove sat between him and the plane, but the darkened windows on the car blocked him from seeing whether they were still inside or already onboard.

How had Dimitri Nikolaides talked him into agreeing to give her up? To give up his child?

It had seemed like the responsible decision when Ares had gone to her father, but now all he could feel was panic.

He pushed harder, his lungs burning, unable to keep up with the demands he was putting on them in the already sweltering morning sunshine.

You’re both too young to be parents.

You’ll hurt her worse if you’re married by the time you get bored with her.

She’s only sixteen.

Now, seeing it all so rapidly come to pass, it couldn’t be clearer that he’d been wrong. So wrong...so many mistakes. He was losing her—he was losing them both. And then he’d lose the rest of them too.

The door stood open—there was still time. He’d tell her father he wouldn’t give up his rights to his own child. And if that didn’t work, he’d knock Dimitri out and they’d run. They’d run away, just like she’d begged him to. There had to be somewhere they could go.

Rounding the sedan, he’d reached out for the stair rails when a blur of movement in his peripheral vision caused him to slow down. Something impacted on him before he could turn to look back, and sent him sprawling onto the sizzling pavement. Weight and heat.

The air blasted from his burning lungs. Large hands—more than one set—grabbed his upper arms and hauled him up before he could get enough air sucked in to say anything, to do anything. To shout for her.

Guards. Dimitri had brought guards.

Digging in his heels, Ares tried to twist free, but air was still an issue. They began dragging him roughly back around the car, away from her. She must be on the plane.

So close. He was so close.

The adrenaline that had kept him going could hold up for only so long. Eventually all he had left to keep fighting, to let the girl he loved know he was there, was his voice.

Erianthe! he shouted, over and over, his eyes locked on the darkened portal into the private jet.

They didn’t stop dragging him toward the rear of the car. They pulled, and he staggered backward still, toward the hangar.

He shouted again. He screamed for her. His vision wobbled from the forced locomotion, but it always returned to the only place of hope he could fixate on.

His heart stopped, then surged into the stratosphere as he finally saw her, there in the doorway. She’d heard him.

Shrugging out of her father’s hands, she launched herself down the stairs and ran straight for him. The shining curtain of her dark hair flew out behind her, and as she got closer he could see how pale she was but for the redness around her midnight eyes.

Closer.

The men stopped dragging him.

Closer.

They let go.

With newfound strength he lunged forward, running to meet her, arms outstretched. If he could just hold her...

With all these people, even the hope he’d clung to couldn’t convince him now that there was any chance they could get away today.

If he could apologize, he’d have that to hold in his heart until he could find a way to get to her.

As he neared, ready to grab her, her face contorted. The tears he’d guessed would be there became rivers down her cheeks and she skidded to a stop, drawing her right arm back in a full swing.

A sharp blast of pain radiated from his left cheek and his head snapped to the side, sending him back a step to maintain his balance.

She’d hit him?

It took a few seconds for the situation to make sense through the expanding hollow filling his chest.

Eri... He said her name, the words he’d practiced in the car evaporating in the heat of her stare.

I trusted you! She half sobbed, half screamed, smacking away his hand as he instinctively reached for her. "I thought you were different, but you’re just like him."

No... The word came out because it was the only one he could wrestle through his closing throat. He wasn’t like Dimitri Nikolaides, but he’d been tricked by him, his fears twisted, his weakness exposed. Made to doubt. We can go—

Her short, broken laugh stopped his words dead and ripped at his insides.

I hate you. The words, almost a whisper, hit him in the chest like a cannon blast.

She hated him.

Dimitri reached his daughter and began hauling her back toward the plane and onto the flight to a country Ares couldn’t name because they hadn’t told him. Somewhere far enough away that no one here would know about the baby—that was all he knew.

No hands grabbed him this time, but his feet still stayed glued to the ground.

I will never forgive you for this!

He wanted to say he loved her, but how could he say that now? Why would she believe him?

I’m sorry. He said the words, the only words he could find, and repeated them again and again.

I will come for you.

The words swam up—the words he meant to utter but couldn’t say to her. Not now, when the eyes that had always looked upon him with sweetness boiled over with such rage he could barely breathe.

The men who had been dragging him away now joined their boss in wrestling a struggling Erianthe back up the stairs.

The last words she screamed at him would still ring in his ears long after the plane departed. Because she was right.

This was all his fault.

CHAPTER ONE

THE LAST TIME Dr. Erianthe Nikolaides had set foot on the island of her birth she’d been barely sixteen, pregnant and betrayed by the boy she’d loved. Ten years on it had taken the earth actually moving and the request of her adoptive brother to pull her back.

Weeks before, Mythelios had been struck by a strong earthquake and Theo had sent up the beacon to call them home to staff the only medical facility on the island, which they were all tied to. But Theo had urged her to stay and finish her medical degree before she answered the call, so her arrival had been regrettably postponed.

The heat of the July sun baked her dark hair like coals on the back of her neck, sucking the strength from her so that every step toward the lovely three-story stucco building housing the Mythelios Free Clinic became a marathon. That was why her knees wobbled and she barely had her suitcases under control. Nothing else. Not the weight of her past and her secrets. Not the rock in her middle that came from knowing Theo Nikolaides wasn’t the only man she’d be seeing today.

Ares Xenakis had received the same call to come home that she had. Theo had summoned home the whole merry band of the pampered children of Mopaxeni Shipping, forgotten until they messed up—the men who funded and regularly staffed the clinic and Erianthe, who had nothing to offer but her skills. She’d cut all contact with her parents years ago, and that had included her trust fund.

Her training had been officially completed only last week, and she was late arriving to the disaster. She was that final piece of the family they’d forged when they’d still been counting their ages in single digits. The family that would be broken forever if the others ever found out how her seventeenth year had ended.

She clanged her way through the main entrance, her resolve to take her position at her brother’s side stronger than her ability to control the four-wheeled storage system erratically rolling behind her. One wheel caught at the door frame and her suitcase snagged just as the door swung closed on it. Perfection. It would be really great if one part of this journey could go smoothly.

She put some weight into a tug and the case snapped free, making her stagger backward into the clinic, an expletive bouncing off the teeth she’d clenched shut. By the time she turned around, every eye in the packed reception area had fixed on her with the kind of wariness that said they expected calamity to accompany such cacophony.

If the heat had left any extra air in her lungs, she would’ve laughed. The only harm she’d ever caused on Mythelios had been to herself, by trusting the wrong boy and not running away the first time her father had uttered the word convent.

The urge to laugh evaporated like water in the summer sun, but Erianthe tried to cover it with a smile, hoping to make a better impression on her future patients than that.

She’d had a week to prepare to see Ares again, to prepare for the first run-in with her treacherous parents, but she no longer had that wellspring of rage that had fueled her daydreams of vengeance in the first couple years. Now she had no idea what she should say to any of them, or even how she should feel. Ten years was a long time.

Focus on today.

The door swung shut, clamping off the blast furnace her years in England had made her weak to, and taking away the light her sun-blinded eyes needed to see.

She pinched the bridge of her nose and breathed slowly out.

No, today was too big. She had to focus on this minute, this second. Not one of her three betrayers was presently there. She didn’t have to know how to deal with them right at this second.

It wasn’t so much that she saw someone in front of her—her eyes were still closed and obstructed by her hand—but she felt a presence in her personal bubble and opened her eyes.

Dr. Nikolaides.

The woman standing before her smiled, not waiting for any answer, just relieving her of her cases with one hand and using the other to steer the visibly travel-bedraggled doctor somewhere that wouldn’t affect the clinic’s image.

Your brother is with a patient, so just have a seat in here and I’ll send him shortly.

She clicked on a light, allowing Erianthe to see the small office she’d been ushered to—and the woman herself. Friendly, but firm, with a touch of something motherly about her—not that Erianthe had much experience with what that was like—and just enough silver hair threaded through her ebony curls to give her gravitas. To make her somehow emanate comfort as she carried on speaking in a calm tone.

Maybe it was just that Erianthe was no longer a spectacle, disrupting the waiting room, but she felt a little better. Less as if the sky was trying to press her into the rocky dirt.

The woman added something about coffee and departed, leaving Erianthe to fold into the closest chair—which happened to be one that spun.

Petra. She’d said her name was Petra.

Goodness, she had to get it together. What kind of doctor took half a minute to process something simple like a person’s name? A name she’d expected to hear, no less. The wonder woman Theo often raved about. Petra. Who had gone to fetch the magical elixir that would sharpen her buzzing senses and keep her from appearing like a bigger catastrophe than the quake had been.

The cool, supple leather of the chair reached through her light linen trousers, giving another tactile wink of comfort, soothing against the heat she’d absorbed, enough for her to notice that her head ached in a way that said it had probably been throbbing for a while.

The office door stood open and she swiveled the chair to watch through the aperture, silently counting breaths until the roar of memories she’d been trying to ignore since Theo’s call faded back a little.

The will that had carried her through those first months after her banishment forced it into something closer to a buzz. No, not a buzz—though it was just as discordant. Like her head was a radio receiver.

She stood as if at the edge of the signal for two overlapping stations—oldies and current hits. Annoying. Distorting. Confusing. Impossible to ignore. Because she knew the old song better, and it broke through the new one just enough that she wasn’t quite sure which song she was actually listening to. She could walk around in the present—she’d learned the lyrics—but the old song she knew by heart.

During the first two years after she’d been gone, the balance had been different. Her days had been filled with the oldies station, but now and then something new had broken through. Eventually she’d forced herself to learn the new words, to sing the song of today, and the balance had gradually shifted. She’d studied harder, because a mind full of calculus and physics had less room to wallow in the terrible injustice and loss of what had happened to her.

A corridor of bright light opened across the floor of the reception area, broken by a lumbering, misshapen shadow as the door swung closed, followed by the sounds of exertion. A call for help came from a rusty voice, and those she could see sitting in Reception turned worried eyes to her through the office door.

No one was out there to help. And they did see her as a doctor, no matter her clumsy, inept, socially awkward arrival.

Strength she’d been faking the whole day appeared, and Erianthe launched herself from the chair and out of the office. A man crouched on the floor beside a pregnant woman who leaned heavily on her left hip as she pressed at the right side of her swollen belly with her other hand. Six months? Seven? Less if it was multiples.

She’d made her occupation treating and helping pregnant women in distress, but when childbirth came unnaturally there was another feeling—something that twisted her insides and made her second-guess her career choice. Just for a second.

Erianthe knelt beside her, introducing herself and asking the man, Did she fall onto the floor?

No. I put her down. You’re the baby doctor? the man asked, reaching for her arm as if touching her made her more real to him, more of a comfort, and that conveyed all the trust and hope he was putting into her by giving this woman into her care.

The baby doctor. Theo must have told them she was coming.

"Yes. I’m