Greek’s Shotgun Wedding

The Diamandis Heirs, book #1

Greek’s Shotgun Wedding book cover

November 7, 2024

Greek’s Shotgun Wedding book cover

November 26, 2024

Greek's Shotgun Wedding

January 16, 2025

Greek's Shotgun Wedding

January 16, 2025

Preview

Marry him? Her pregnancy dilemma!

Beautiful women usually fall at Greek billionaire Jace Diamandis’s feet. But diamonds and champagne fail to impress veterinary surgeon Gigi Campbell. So Jace’s legendary Diamandis charm works overtime to persuade Gigi into one unforgettable date aboard his luxury yacht.

Sensible Gigi warily disregards Jace’s playboy reputation, until she discovers how susceptible she is to his potent alpha magnetism. Now she faces the repercussions of surrendering to risky temptation. She’s expecting—and powerless to resist as Jace ruthlessly brokers a deal—to claim Gigi as his pregnant bride!

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Excerpt

‘I THOUGHT YOU were planning to be a no-show,’ Jace’s uncle Evander told his six-foot-four-inch-tall nephew.

Jace strode away from the helicopter with the silver logo flash that announced that the billionaire owner of Diamandis Industries had finally arrived for the funeral proceedings.

Apologising for his late arrival, Jace dealt the older man a regretful smile in which resentment, respect and fondness were all contained. Evander and his British husband, Marcus, had, after all, raised Jace when his own father refused to do so. Of course, both Jace and his uncle had been the outsiders in the Diamandis circle, Evander because he was gay and refused to pretend otherwise and Jace because his father, Argus, had refused to act as a parent and had abandoned his son at the tender age of six.

In actuality, Jace had lost both his parents on the same day. His mother had been an internationally acclaimed and famously glamorous opera singer, who had walked out on Argus for another man that day, leaving her son behind. When she and her lover crashed their car and died a few hours afterwards, Jace’s father had burst into gales of hysterical laughter. And then he had looked only once at the little boy staring at him with his late wife’s bright green eyes and her mop of curls before tucking Jace and his nanny into a limousine to be taken to his parents’ estate, thereby repudiating his firstborn son.

It was a decision that Argus had never revisited over the twenty-two years that had followed…and now he was dead. Jace had indelibly remained a reminder of his father’s lowest moment, a moment when not all the money in the world could compensate a man’s hurt pride or save his shiny public image from malicious gossip about cuckolds. Even though he quickly remarried and had a second son, Argus had continued to reject Jace as his child. At one stage he had also attempted to cut Jace out of the family inheritance and give it instead to Jace’s half-brother, Domenico, only to be prevented by their grandfather’s lawyers.

Jace hadn’t wanted to play the hypocrite and attend his reluctant father’s funeral. Evander, however, had taken a very different stance. Evander had argued vehemently with Jace, pointing out that his nephew might be only twenty-eight years old and single but he was now the de facto head of the Diamandis family, and that it was a matter of good taste and common sense to accept his rightful place. Before Jace could think too much about it, he was engulfed in an embrace by his grandmother, Electra Diamandis. And if she could comfortably attend her son’s funeral when the two of them had lived at daggers drawn, he believed that he had even less to complain about.

Jace was currently the cynosure of all eyes. ‘Why are they all staring at me?’ he murmured as they emerged from the church.

‘You’re worth billions and they don’t know you,’ his uncle reminded him wryly. ‘Bet they are now wincing for all the times they cut you dead.’

‘None of them wanted to know me while I was growing up, apart from you and Marcus,’ Jace agreed grimly. ‘You took in the poisoned chalice and didn’t care about keeping Argus sweet.’

‘All your little nubile cousins have got wedding rings gleaming in their eyes,’ Evander warned him, half under his breath.

Jace laughed with sudden intense amusement. ‘I learned my lesson well with Seraphina.’

An unexpected smile curved his uncle’s mouth. ‘Yes, I did very much enjoy that visit from my brother Adonis when he demanded you marry my niece for stealing her virtue. You see, you can’t go tantalising them all with the headlines you make and not expect to become a target for the gold-diggers in the family.’

‘I’m all grown up now and rather more staid—’

‘Absolute lies,’ Marcus interrupted from his other side. ‘Ain’t nothing staid about your playboy lifestyle.’

‘I’m only going to be young once,’ Jace countered with raw assurance. Yet he remained grateful to the couple who had raised him with love, loyalty and care. A more conventional set of parentals might have given up on him when he went through an extended wild period as a teenager. Marcus and Evander, however, had stuck by him through thick and thin and he would never forget the debt he owed them for the security and stability they had given him.

‘But you’re heading towards thirty and you’ve never had a relationship with a woman,’ Evander quipped. ‘Maybe you need to think about that—’

‘I don’t do relationships.’ Hell, no! Jace thought in horror. He did sex, not relationships. He kept his private life simple and straightforward. Since he had attained adulthood, no dates, no serious discussions with women and no boundaries had ever featured in his world. He did as he liked, when he liked and with whom he liked. And in truth, he honestly believed that he was happier embracing his freedom that way.

‘You need to try it…at least once,’ his uncle said.

Jace gritted his even white teeth. ‘How much longer do I need to stay?’ he breathed, feeling like a teenager again, but he hated it all so much: all the fawning attention from people who had ignored him all his life to meet Argus’s expectations and curry his father’s favour and now? The constant sidewise glances, the supposedly friendly grieving comments. As if he cared an atom for the father he had hardly known, who had hurt him beyond belief as a child when he’d chosen to punish him for his mother’s sins!

‘Speak to your brother before you leave. You don’t need to do drinks and chat with the rest of them. You don’t owe them anything,’ his uncle told him.

‘Why should I speak to Domenico?’ Jace queried in a tone of literal disbelief.

‘He had nothing to do with any of it and you’re the big brother,’ Evander reminded him drily. ‘You’ve never even met him. Five minutes, Jace. He’s the closest relative you have left alive. Make us proud…please—’

Jace breathed in slow and deep, rage hurtling through his big powerful frame at that piece of advice. But then he thought it through for the first time in many years and his temper receded because as always there was a lot of logic in Evander’s words. Their father was dead now. Maybe there was room for him to look again at that particular relationship. It wasn’t his brother’s fault that Jace had been rejected, ignored and threatened with disinheritance. For all he knew, Argus had been a lousy parent to Domenico as well.

And affecting not to hear the remarks or see the languishing glances cast in his direction, Jace went off to meet his half-brother for the first time…

‘What in the world…?’ Gigi marvelled out loud as she stood at her front window and glimpsed the large animal dancing through the traffic with a dangling lead still attached to its collar.

Snowy, the ragged cockatoo in the corner cage in the sitting room, tried to mimic her voice—not very well. Humphrey the tortoise ambled in, munching a lettuce leaf. Hoppy, the terrier dozing on the sofa, didn’t stir as much as a whisker. At the other end of the same seat, however, a big white and orange cat sat up, because Tilly was a knowing cat awake to her mistress’s rising tension.

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ Gigi gasped because nobody appeared to be chasing the foolish dog and, on that acknowledgement, she was already racing out of her front door to stage a rescue bid.

Well, you are a veterinary surgeon, she excused herself and, without hesitation, she plunged into the busy street where the animal was capering about, seemingly quite clueless as to the danger it was in from the car wheels, the shouts out of windows for it to move and the squealing horns. Not a street dog, no, someone’s pet and more like a baby than a child with some common sense. Others might have turned their backs on such a view but not Gigi, who valued animals more than people.

Gigi had spent eighteen months living on the Greek island of Rhodes. She worked there at an animal rescue centre but had primarily come to Rhodes in the hope of actually getting to know the Greek half of her family. Basically, it hadn’t worked out like that and her hopes and dreams had slowly withered. That ambition had, seemingly, been naïve. But then Gigi was accustomed to disillusionment when it came to family members. If her own mother hadn’t had any time for her, why had she expected her father and her half-brothers to feel any different? Even so, she had got to know her Greek grandmother, Helene, and although Helene had passed away three months earlier, Gigi had got on well with the older woman and had also learned to speak fluent Greek. Two pluses, she told herself, but more negatives than pluses had featured in her family experiences.

As she filtered through traffic suddenly come to a standstill after two cars collided trying to avoid the dog, she realised that the foolish animal had got its long fragile tail locked between the cars. As a spate of furious Greek male voices broke out over the accident, Gigi pointed out the dog’s predicament but, evidently, nobody cared enough to help her free the dog. She pushed at the cars, trying to move them even an inch to free the animal and then both male drivers started to shout at her about daring to try and intervene on behalf of the dog. Meanwhile the dog started frantically licking her bare legs as if he knew she was striving to save him and a woman got out of one of the stalled vehicles to help her. But Gigi had managed to get that tiny bit of trapped tail released even if, in doing so, she had scraped her knee painfully and hurt her wrist. Thanking the woman for coming to assist her, she smiled even though blood was running down her calf, and hastened back to the house to treat the dog’s injury.

‘Oh, you’re just gorgeous and a total pet,’ she told the dog cheerfully and he bounced up on his hind legs like an acrobat, a couple of feet taller than she was because now she could see that he was an Irish wolfhound about three feet tall when on four legs. Huge but a fine specimen of an animal, pedigreed and wearing what looked like an expensive collar. She’d bet he was microchipped, which she would check out at the rescue shelter first thing in the morning, so that she could restore him to his probably very grateful owner. But first, he needed his tail treated before the wound turned into something more serious.

‘And you probably won’t like me so much by the time I’m finished,’ she warned him as she fetched her vet bag. ‘Oh, and you’ve scraped your poor leg too. Mo. Is that your name or your owner’s name?’ It was picked out in sparkly stones on the collar. ‘That’s a very girly collar, Mo, for a big boy like you.’

Mo was a pushover of a dog. He lay down for her, seeming to instantly recognise a sympathetic audience. He allowed her to clean his tail and even his leg, which required several stitches. He didn’t even object when she fitted a surgical collar on him to ensure that he left his injuries alone and didn’t lick at them and irritate them more.

‘Oh, I wish you were a street dog I could keep,’ she sighed as she fed and watered him and walked him until he eventually, tiring of his adventures, folded down at her feet and went to sleep like a total babe. ‘What a wonderful temperament you have!’

Some time during the night Mo padded upstairs, and Gigi shifted in the early hours and saw a pair of adoring brown eyes beside her on her bed. ‘Today we find your owner and take you home,’ she told him regretfully.

Not noticeably impressed by that announcement, Mo went back to sleep, taking up more space on the bed than Gigi had for herself. ‘You are a spoilt-rotten dog,’ she told him ruefully.

He stuck to her like glue while she fed and walked him. She was about to head to her car to take him straight to work with her when she recalled that she had left her vet bag in her house. Although it wasn’t her house, she reminded herself darkly, not with the big For Sale sign that had been fixed to it the week before. It was Helene’s house and now her father’s family were understandably keen to sell it, which was why she had decided to return to the UK with her pets as soon as she could make the arrangements. As she strolled back down the street, she noticed a crowd of men standing outside her door and banging the knocker as if someone’s life depended on it.

‘What on earth’s going on?’ she demanded, trudging through the clique of hovering men in dark suits.

‘Mo!’ a male voice cried with enthusiasm.

Mo reacted not at all. He licked Gigi’s thigh ingratiatingly and did not budge an inch.

‘What the hell have you done to him?’ the same voice demanded thunderously. ‘He’s been hurt…injured!’

Gigi stuck her key in the front door and moved inside, Mo accompanying her. ‘When I’ve checked out his microchip you can have him back…but not before. He hasn’t even greeted you, which is weird when you’re claiming to be his owner—’

‘How dare you?’ he demanded even louder.

‘No, how dare you when I rescued this poor dog from traffic and treated him?’ Gigi shot back at him without hesitation. ‘That does not give you the right to come here and shout at me, you ignorant pig!’

To say that Jace was unaccustomed to such cavalier treatment from a woman would not have been an exaggeration. His jaw literally dropped as he gazed down at her, having already noticed that she had not deigned to look at him even once. And there she was, some impossibly tiny woman with a long, messy mop of brownish blonde hair, wearing shorts and a camisole like a…well, not like a streetwalker, he adjusted, for there was nothing come-hitherish about that outfit, nothing decorative or sexy. But she had stunning legs, he had noticed as she’d sauntered down the street with his dog. Mo was the one soft spot in Jace’s hard heart. Hearing that Mo had broken free and run away while Jace was attending the funeral had sent him mad with worry.

‘Treated him? How could you treat him?’ Jace demanded, wishing that she would look up at him and behave more normally.

‘I’m a veterinary surgeon, you dummy, and I’m not handing this beautiful dog back to you until you prove that he belongs to you. If you must, you can come inside and I’ll explain what happened to him, but I should add that I have to be at work soon.’

‘I thought he’d been kidnapped. There’s a tracker on his collar—’

‘He should be microchipped,’ Gigi told him reprovingly as she stepped through her front door. ‘That would be safer. I mean, what happens if the collar falls off or is removed? You couldn’t find him then. Anyway, why would you stick a tracker on a dog, for goodness’ sake?’

Jace breathed in deep and slow, as if he was bracing himself. What a weird woman—what a thoroughly weird woman! And then she finally paid him the compliment of looking up at him and he saw her for the first time…and she was gorgeous in that strangely natural way only a very few women could match. No make-up, nothing enhanced. Just pale porcelain skin, huge cornflower-blue eyes and a mouth, a sultry pink full mouth that could only exist for sin.

‘Well. Come in if you’re coming,’ she told him impatiently. ‘And I’m sorry but your friends will have to stay outside because it is a very small house and one stranger at a time is quite enough for me at this time of day.’

Dark colour edged Jace’s cheekbones. A woman had never addressed him in that no-nonsense tone in his life. It felt exceedingly…wrong, he decided, wondering why she was reacting that way to him. Of course he had been rude, he reminded himself, attacking rather than pausing to first discover what had happened to his pet.

‘Sit down,’ Gigi urged. ‘I’d offer you a coffee but I haven’t got the time to entertain you right now—’

‘Of course not,’ Jace conceded, reeling back from her apparent indifference to him.

‘Well, sit!’ she shot at him. ‘I can’t abide someone so tall standing over me all the time and talking down to me like I’m a child!’

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