Marriage: To Claim His Twins

“That is how
you
feel, but what about how they might feel?” Sander pressed her. “A good mother would never behave so selfishly. She would put her children's interests first.”

How speedily Sander had turned the tables on her, Ruby recognized. What had begun at least on her part as a challenge to him, which she had been confident would make him back down, had turned into a double-edged sword that right now he was wielding very skillfully against her, cutting what she had thought was secure ground away from under her feet.

“I am…they need their moth—” she started.

“They are my sons,” Sander interrupted her angrily. “And I mean to have them. If I have to marry you to facilitate that, then so be it. But make no mistake, Ruby. I intend to have my sons.”

Bestselling Harlequin Presents
^®
author Penny Jordan brings you an exciting new trilogy

Three penniless sisters, pure and proud…but about to be purchased!

With bills that need to be paid, a house about to be repossessed and little twin boys to feed, sisters Lizzie, Charley and Ruby refuse to drown in their debts. They will hold their heads up high and fight to feed their family!

But three of the richest, most ruthless men in the world are about to enter their lives….

Pure, proud, but penniless, how far will the sisters go to save the ones they love?

Lizzie's story—
THE WEALTHY GREEK'S CONTRACT WIFE
Ilios Manos is Greek and ruthless. A dangerous combination! Lizzie owes him thousands, but he'll take her as his wife in payment.

Charley's story—
THE ITALIAN DUKE'S VIRGIN MISTRESS
When project manager Charley is hired by demanding Raphael Della Striozzi, he's adamant she must have a makeover! Now that the dowdy frump has been transformed, she's sexy enough for another role: his mistress!

Ruby's story—
MARRIAGE: TO CLAIM HIS TWINS
Out of the blue, Alexander Konstantinakos has turned up at Ruby's house to take his twin sons back to Greece. Ruby will do anything to keep her boys by her side—even marry Sander!

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

EPILOGUE

A
LEXANDER
K
ONSTANTINAKOS
, powerful, formidable, billionaire head of an internationally renowned container shipping line originally founded by his late grandfather, stood in the middle of the elegantly luxurious drawing room of his home on the Greek Ionian island of Theopolis, his gaze riveted on the faces of the twin boys in the photograph he was holding.

Two black-haired, olive-skinned and dark-eyed identical faces looked back at him, their mother kneeling down beside them. The three of them were shabbily dressed in cheap-looking clothes.

Tall, dark-haired, with the features of two thousand years of alpha-male warriors and victors sculpted into the bones of his handsome face the same way that their determination was sculpted into his psyche, he stood in the now silent room, the accusation his sister had just made was still echoing through his head.

‘They have to be your sons,' she had accused Nikos, their younger brother. ‘They have our family features
stamped on them, and you were at university in Manchester.'

Alexander—Sander to his family—didn't need to keep gazing at the photograph Elena had taken with her mobile phone on her way through Manchester Airport after visiting her husband's family to confirm her statement, or to memorise the boys' faces. They were already carved into his memory for all time.

‘I don't know anything about them,' his younger brother Nikos denied, breaking the silence. ‘They aren't mine, Sander, I promise you. Please believe me.'

‘Of course they're yours,' Elena corrected their younger brother. ‘Just look at those faces. Nikos is lying, Sander. Those children are of our blood.'

Sander looked at his younger sister and brother, on the verge of quarrelling just as they had always done as children. There were only two years between them, but he had been born five years before Elena and seven before Nikos, and after their grandfather's death as the only adult family member left in their lives he had naturally taken on the responsibility of acting as a father figure to them. That had often meant arbitrating between them when they argued.

This time, though, it wasn't arbitration that was called for.

Sander looked at the photograph again and then announced curtly, ‘Of our blood, but not of Nikos's making. Nikos is speaking the truth. The children are not his.'

Elena stared at him.

‘How can you know that?'

Sander turned towards the windows and looked beyond them to where the horizon met the deep blue of the Aegean Sea. Outwardly he might appear calm, but inside his chest his heart was thudding with fury. Inside his head images were forming, memories he had thought well buried surfacing.

‘I know it because they are mine,' he answered his sister, watching as her eyes widened with the shock of his disclosure.

She wasn't the only one who was shocked, Sander acknowledged. He had been shocked himself when he had looked at her phone and immediately recognised the young woman kneeling beside the two young boys who so undeniably bore the stamp of their fathering—
his
fathering. Oddly, she looked if anything younger now than she had the night he had met her in a Manchester club favoured by young footballers, and thus the haunt of the girls who chased after them. He had been taken there by a business acquaintance, who had left him to his own devices having picked up a girl himself, urging Sander to do the same.

Sander's mouth hardened. He had buried the memory of that night as deeply as he could. A one-night stand with an alcohol-fuelled girl dressed in overly tight and incredibly revealing clothes, wearing too much make-up, who had made such a deliberate play for him. At one point she had actually caught hold of his hand, as though about to drag him to bed with her. It wasn't something any real man with any pride or self-respect could ever be proud of—not even when there were the kind of ex
tenuating circumstances there had been that night. She had been one of a clutch of such girls, openly seeking the favours of the well-paid young footballers who favoured the place. Greedy, amoral young women, whose one desire was to find themselves a rich lover or better still a rich husband. The club, he had been told, was well known for attracting such young women.

He had had sex with her out of anger and resentment—against her for pushing him, and against his grandfather for trying to control his life. He'd been refusing to allow him a greater say in the running of the business which, in his stubborn determination not to move with the times, he had been slowly destroying. And against his parents—his father for dying, even though that had been over a decade ago, leaving him without his support, and his mother, who had married his father out of duty whilst continuing to love another man. All those things, all that anger had welled up inside him, and the result was now here in front of him.

His sons.

His.

A feeling like nothing he had ever experienced before seized hold of him. A feeling that, until it had struck him, he would have flatly denied he would ever experience. He was a modern man—a man of logic, not emotion, and certainly not the kind of emotion he was feeling right now. Gut wrenching, instinctive, tearing at him—an emotion born of a cultural inheritance that said that a man's children, especially his sons, belonged under his roof.

Those boys were his. Their place was here with him, not in England. Here they could learn what it meant to be his sons, a Konstantinakos of Theopolis, could grow into their heritage. He could father them and guide them as his sense of responsibility demanded that he should. How much damage had they already suffered through the woman who had borne them?

He had given them life without knowing it, but now that he did know he would stop at nothing to bring them home to Theopolis, where they belonged.