Cinderella's Baby Confession: An Uplifting International Romance

By Julia James

Cinderella has a shock in store for the Greek billionaire in this surprise-baby story by USA TODAY bestselling author Julia James…

A shock proposal

For his Cinderella!

After years of hardship, Alys Fairford wanted just one taste of freedom. Swept away by the charm of a charismatic stranger, she allowed herself a night of blazing passion! But months later, a pregnancy test confirms that night changed her life forever…

Despite their unforgettable encounter, Nikos Drakis knew he couldn’t let Alys into his bulletproof heart. Until her unexpected letter confessing the consequences has him reconsidering his priorities. He’ll bring Alys to his Greek villa, where he will claim his heir. By first unraveling the truth…and then her!

From Harlequin Presents: Escape to exotic locations where passion knows no bounds.   

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harlequin Presents
• Release date: Dec 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9780369707413

Julia James

Mills & Boon novels were Julia James’ first “grown up” books she read as a teenager, and she's been reading them ever since. She adores the Mediterranean and the English countryside in all its seasons, and is fascinated by all things historical, from castles to cottages. In between writing she enjoys walking, gardening, needlework and baking “extremely gooey chocolate cakes” and trying to stay fit! Julia lives in England with her family.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

ALYS STARED AT the little white stick in her hand, blue line clearly visible. The blue line telling her that she was pregnant.

Pregnant.

The word tolled in her head, and she tightened her hand on the edge of the basin in the bathroom, as if to give herself strength.

How am I going to cope?

She dragged her gaze up to her reflection in the mirror over the basin. Her face was white with shock, eyes distended. Thoughts started to race through her head, urgent and fearful.

I can’t be pregnant! I can’t! Because I can’t afford to be! Not now!

She felt a stab of fear claw at her. Downstairs on the kitchen table the letter that had fallen onto the doormat the previous morning still sat, its dread message stark in her head. She took a ragged breath, still staring at her stricken reflection.

Dear God, hadn’t the last four years been hard enough? Ever since that nightmare day just before her finals, when she’d been phoned by one of her mother’s colleagues to tell her that her mother was in the A&E department of the very hospital she worked in as a nurse. That she was being taken into emergency surgery after having been knocked down by a hit-and-run driver. That she might not survive surgery...

It was a phone call that had changed her mother’s life—and hers.

Her mother had been made bedridden, almost entirely helpless, and had needed twenty-four-seven care—care that her daughter had given dedicatedly, devotedly, until complications from her horrendous injuries had finally led to her protracted death little more than six months ago.

Alys shut her eyes, head bowed, as if bearing too great a weight.

She had loved her mother, had willingly devoted herself to her care—but, oh, it had been hard! Hard to give up her own life, her own dreams, to care for her frail, broken-bodied mother—the mother who had devoted her life to the care of others suddenly needing total care herself. There had been times when Alys had longed to escape, to seize life with her own hands—but she had known she couldn’t abandon her mother...

And when the end had come it had devastated her. Her mother, the only person in the world who had existed for her, who had loved her, was gone...

I’ve got no one—no one at all.

The bleak words that had been echoing in her head since her mother had died echoed again now.

Then without conscious thought she let the white stick with its fateful blue stripe fall into the basin. Let her hand drop and fold across the still completely slender curve of her midriff. She felt emotion well up within her. Her fingers splayed out, encompassing. Protective. Cherishing.

She did have someone—someone to love and be loved by. Invisible, intangible, beneath her splayed fingers. And suddenly, out of nowhere, it was not just a blue line on a stick, changing her life for ever, but something hugely, powerfully real.

My baby.

Emotion poured through her.

Whatever it takes, I’ll do it! My baby will be safe and loved! I’ll make a good home for it—somehow...

But she knew, with a hollow feeling inside her, just what that ‘whatever it takes’ would have to be.

And then memory came, vivid and unforgettable...

CHAPTER ONE

THE MUSIC FROM the DJ’s deck pounded as Alys danced unenthusiastically with whoever it was she was dancing with—a friend of Suze, who was a friend of Maisey, whom Alys knew from uni days.

Maisey had urged her to come and stay with her in London for a weekend break—a break from the grim reality of probate, mortgage arrears and piercing grief—to come to this party tonight.

‘It’s some kind of flash bash at a luxury West End hotel that Suze has got invites for through her modelling contacts. It’ll do you good! After all you’ve been through, a fabulous party is just what you need, hon!’

But now, having let Maisey lend her an outfit, do her hair and face, Alys was not so sure. Maybe she’d been out of circulation for too long, or maybe this kind of party was just not her thing. But she could feel male eyes on her, taking in the short tight dress, the wildly flowing long blonde hair, her eyes huge with make-up, her mouth made a rich scarlet with lipstick. And instead of enjoying herself she just wanted to cut and run, feeling totally out of it.

When the track finally ended, she headed back towards the cocktail lounge, intent on finding Suze, or Maisey, to tell them she was leaving. Her gaze threaded the room, searching for them...

And stopped dead.

As did the breath in her lungs.

---

Nikos stood by the bar, martini glass in hand, surveying the crowded room with displeasure. His mood was not good. He’d flown in from Brussels late that afternoon, having had to give Irinia her congé over lunch. It wasn’t convenient to part with her—he had no replacement lined up as yet—but her increasingly blatant hints as to how their relationship could progress to their becoming engaged had passed the limit of his endurance. So he’d wished her well in her glittering career at one of Europe’s international banks, and told her marriage was not on his agenda.

His dark eyes were shadowed in his strongly planed face. It hadn’t always been so. Ten years ago he’d been engaged, desperate to marry. He’d been a gullible, trusting, eager-to-love twenty-two-year-old who’d naively believed the woman he’d fallen for loved him only for himself...

His sensual mouth twisted. It had been his father who’d saved him from making the worst mistake of his life. He could hear his words now.

‘I had to threaten to disinherit you to get you to realise that Miriam Kapoulou only wanted to marry you so that Drakis money could stop her father going bankrupt!’

Miriam handing back his ring had proved his father right. As ever. He heard his father’s words again.

‘I won’t let what happened to me happen to you! No gold-digging harpy will get her claws into you—whatever tricks she pulls!’

Nikos dragged his mind away. He’d grown up with the sorry saga of his own existence drummed into him all his life. Grown up with his father’s perpetually resentful gaze on him...

Wishing to hell that I was any woman’s son but the one who trapped him into marriage.

No, he wouldn’t let his mood worsen by going over ground that was as painful as it was tediously familiar. He’d spent his boyhood trying to dispel that resentful gaze, spent his adulthood proving that he was a true Drakis. Doing what a Drakis did best in life. Making money.

And he was good at it—even his father had to acknowledge that. Deals came naturally to him and he could negotiate down to the wire. Thanks to his efforts, the Drakis coffers were overflowing. It was how he spent his life—on the move, with little time for leisure or relaxing. And when he did relax, it was not at hectic parties like this.

He was only here because he’d been expecting to meet up with a City acquaintance who’d seen him checking in and casually invited him along this evening to a party he was hosting—something to do with the fashion industry, it would seem, given the preponderance of over-made-up model-types and fashionistas swanning around extravagantly.

Nikos’s gaze swept over them disparagingly. Too many of them were here to pull, he suspected cynically—as were, concomitantly, the males as well, of course. Well, he wasn’t going to be one of them. Not tonight. Not his style.

He surveyed the room, impatient to spot his City acquaintance and sound him out briefly, decide whether to follow up any potentially lucrative ventures with him.

And out of nowhere all thoughts of Not tonight. Not my style evaporated totally.

---

Alys stood, her gaze fastened as though pulled by a magnet to the man sitting at the bar on the far side of the crowded cocktail lounge. Tall, lean-bodied, dark-haired, thirtyish, with a tanned skin tone that spoke of Mediterranean climes and sculpted features that somehow made her think that she had never, in all her life, ever seen a man so lethally good-looking...

And he was looking right at her.

It was electrifying.

Unconsciously, she felt her lips part, her pulse quicken, as her eyes met his gaze across the room. Then, distractingly, her former dance partner was helping himself to her wrist.

‘Hey, babe, come on back!’

She turned, trying to tug herself free. ‘No! Thank you—no!’

She got no further. Another voice—deep, accented and commanding—interjected. ‘She said no.’

Alys’s head spun round. It was the man from the bar, suddenly there, eyeballing her wannabe dance partner.

The restraining hand dropped from her wrist. ‘OK, pal, I didn’t know she was with you.’

‘Well, now you do,’ came the dismissive reply.

Alys felt her elbow lightly cupped, and then the man whose lethal good looks had stopped her totally in her tracks was guiding her towards the bar. She tried to pull her ragged thoughts together and failed totally. Instead, she let herself be helped onto a bar stool as the man settled himself back on his in a lithe movement.

‘You look like you could do with a drink,’ he said to her.

There was amusement in his voice now, the note of implacable command gone. She looked across at him, conscious that her heart was thumping, her pulse throbbing. Dear God, he really was the most fantastic-looking man she had seen in her life...

It was the eyes—incredibly dark, long-lashed, looking at her with a glint of amusement in them—and also something much more. Something that told Alys, with an instinct as old as time, that he had not just intervened out of masculine chivalry.

That something else had motivated him.

That he was liking what he was seeing...liking it a lot...

She felt heat flare in her cheeks again, beneath the make-up Maisey had cheerfully slapped on her, and was grateful it was helping to subdue the colouring of her face under his gaze.

‘So what would you like to drink?’

The accented voice came again, and she was glad of the enquiry.

‘Um...a Sea Breeze?’ she heard herself say, her voice somehow breathy, which it never normally was. But her breathing was too rapid, too shallow, her pulse-rate too hectic, for it to be anything else.

I was going to leave. Find Maisey and head off. And instead—

Instead she was perched on a bar stool, while a man who was like no other she’d ever set eyes on in her life was coolly presenting her with a just-mixed Sea Breeze, lifting his martini glass to her.

‘Yammas,’ he murmured.

Joltingly, her fingers closed around the icy column of her own glass, her scarlet-painted nails vivid against it, matching the cranberry-red of her cocktail.

‘Yammas?’ she heard herself say, glancing up at him.

A half-smile tugged at his mouth—one that did yet more damage to Alys’s frail hold on normality.

‘Greek for cheers,’ he replied, and took a mouthful of his martini.

His eyes washed over her almost casually, as if mentally assessing her. Cataloguing her features.

Alys was burningly conscious of what he was seeing. Her mane of artfully tussled blonde hair rippled over her shoulders, her eyes were deep with shadow, lashes thick with mascara, mouth lush with lipstick. The dress Maisey had smoothed over her was tight, almost a size too small, and her breasts were crushed beneath it, exposing a curve of decolletage that she’d never exposed even in her uni days. The hem she was suddenly so conscious of was riding on her thighs, moulding them and the curve of her hip.

Instinctively she crossed her legs, hoping it would make the dress less tight. All it achieved, she realised, with a little frisson, was making that dark gaze flicker to her legs...

‘Greek?’ she heard herself say, as if that might draw the too-attentive flicker away from the short hem.

It succeeded, and his gaze returned to her face, veiled slightly beneath lashes that were surely too long for a mere male...

She saw him relax his stance, lay a casually placed forearm on the surface of the bar as he took another ruminative mouthful of his martini. Then he placed his glass back on the bar, holding out his hand instead.

‘Nikos,’ he said. ‘Nikos Drakis.’

Giving his name made his accent more pronounced. There was something about the way he said it that for a second made Alys think he was expecting some response to his name. But what it was she had no idea.

‘Alys,’ she said, sliding her hand into his. ‘Alys Fairford.’

It was the briefest contact, but she felt her cheeks flare again, her eyes going to him, meeting his. Mingling.

‘Good to meet you, Alys. The evening was looking very tedious. But now...’

The low murmured voice was still infused with that faint amusement...and something more.

Something that banished, as if they had never existed, the four long, anguished years she had spent looking after her mother, locked away from the world, turning her back on anything else, denying herself everything the world might offer, feeling her youth slipping by...

Something that made her want, with a fierce longing, all that she had been denied. All that she was not going to deny any longer, with this incredible man looking at her the way he was, with those dark, irresistible eyes, as no man had ever looked at her before.

And the certainty was suddenly searing within her.

She was not going to deny it tonight.

---

There was a voice trying to make itself heard inside Nikos’s head. Demanding what the hell he was thinking of, picking up one of this gilded flock of party girls thronging the place.

Responding to whatever it was that had drawn him to his feet, to remove her from the oaf pestering her, had been an impulse he couldn’t explain. Didn’t want to. He wanted only to let his eyes run over her, from that silken mane of artfully tousled hair, to the short hem of her dress, exposing those long slender legs.

Yet there was something about her that was more than her looks...

Maybe it was in the eyes. They were blue-grey and widened now, fastening on him with something in them that just for a moment gave him pause, that was somehow at odds with the rest of the packaging. Not that he objected to the packaging. Not in the least...

He resumed his full-on appreciation of her stunning physical charms. Male response as old as time started to purr within him as he went back to appreciating all that was on display. Though blatantly picking up an unknown female like the way he was doing now was not his habit, for a woman like this one he’d make an exception...

Unwelcome memory flickered in him. The all too familiar saga of his father’s resentment-fuelled youth, and the woman who had so fatefully—so disastrously—caught his eye.

Nikos shook it from him. He wouldn’t be making the same mistake his father had. Forewarned was forearmed.

He made himself relax, take another mouthful of his martini. This knock-out female had walked into his vision, so why not enjoy it? Enjoy the evening and, if she were like-minded, the night ahead too...

Would she be like-minded?

Dressed as she was, she looked as if he might have little doubt of it, and yet once again he felt that sense of contradiction, difference. He put it down to the wide-eyed expression with which she was so openly gazing at him. As if she just could not stop looking.

She dropped her gaze back to her cocktail tumbler, two spots of colour suddenly burning in her cheeks beneath a layer of make-up. That, too, didn’t quite go with the glitzy packaging...

He set down his martini glass with a click. Time to make the next move. He smiled across at her. Warm and inviting. Gaze lambent. Lids half drooping.

‘Have dinner with me, Alys,’ he said.

---

The hotel restaurant was quiet, and Alys was glad of it. After the crowded cocktail lounge and the thudding dance floor, the hushed ambience of the Michelin-starred restaurant was welcome.

Am I really here?

That sense of dazed disbelief that had washed over her ever since she’d set eyes on the man who was now wining and dining her came over her again. But it was a disbelief that was becoming more and more real with every moment. Her other self, so long buried, so long suppressed, was riding higher and higher. A sense of recklessness—of being unleashed, of seizing everything that life had denied her for four long years—was taking her over. And she was welcoming it, embracing it, with every passing moment in the company of this fabulous man.

Is this really happening?

But the exquisite gourmet meal was deliciously real enough, and the way Nikos’s dark, long-lashed gaze flickered over her was even more real, making her shiver