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His Pregnant
Bride
PREGNANT BY THE
GREEK TYCOON
by
Kim Lawrence
HIS PREGNANT PRINCESS
by
Robyn Donald
PREGNANT:
FATHER NEEDED
by
Barbara McMahon
PREGNANT BY THE
GREEK TYCOON
by
Kim Lawrence
Kim Lawrence lives on a farm in rural Anglesey. She runs two miles daily and finds this an excellent opportunity to unwind and seek inspiration for her writing! It also helps her keep up with her husband, two active sons, and the various stray animals which have adopted them. Always a fanatical consumer of fiction, she is now equally enthusiastic about writing. She loves a happy ending!
Don’t miss Kim Lawrence’s exciting new novel, Mistress: Pregnant by the Spanish Billionaire available in August 2009 from Mills & Boon® Modern™.
CHAPTER ONE
‘OF COURSE I knew it would never last.’
The words brought Georgie to an abrupt halt as she was dragged back four years in time without warning.
For most people it had been the summer of the heatwave, when cold, damp Britain had basked in tropical temperatures. For Georgie it had been the summer her life had changed.
She had been just twenty-one then, a fairly typical student enjoying the summer break before returning to college for her final year. Her only plans had revolved around the teaching career she’d wanted and the car she’d been saving up to buy.
The previous term she had been stopped in the street by a clipboard-wielding woman doing a survey for a television programme.
‘Do you believe in marriage?’
‘I don’t disbelieve in it.’
‘So you would get married?’ the interviewer pressed.
‘Me…? Oh, I’m far too young to be even thinking about it.’ Georgie laughed. ‘I want to have some fun before I settle down.’
Barely three months later she had been exchanging vows with a man she had known less than a month.
And yes, her grandmother had told her it would never last, but this had hardly put her in an exclusive category! It would have been hard to find someone who had thought the marriage was a good idea!
Georgie, floating several feet off the ground, had smiled serenely through the lectures and totally ignored the predictions of disaster. If anything the opposition had stiffened her resolve, made it seem somehow more romantic to her.
Her lips twisted in a self-derisive grimace as she recalled the idyllic future she had seen stretching ahead of her.
‘Mummy…!’
Georgie pushed aside the memories crowding in on her and turned to the little boy who was holding up some treasure in his chubby hand for her to admire. Long, curling lashes as black as the glossy curls that covered his head lifted from his rosy cheeks as he raised his cherubic, smiling face to hers.
Not everything that had come from her ill-judged marriage had been negative. She had Nicky; she had her baby. Not that he was such a baby any longer, she thought ruefully as she made the appropriate admiring noises.
As Nicky went back to his game—he really was an extraordinarily contented, sunny child—Georgie banged the sandals she was carrying loudly against the wrought-iron table set on the patio.
It didn’t have the desired effect. Too engrossed in their conversation, the women inside remained oblivious to her presence.
This is just what I need! A front-row seat to the dissection of the marriage from hell. Georgie could have saved them the bother; bad idea about summed it up.
‘Were they together long?’ Georgie recognised the distinctive Yorkshire accent of Ruth Simmons, a retired headmistress and keen bird-watcher who had rented the cottage next door to theirs for the summer.
‘Six months.’
The way her grandmother said it made it sound like a jail sentence.
‘Do you think there’s any possibility of reconciliation?’ the other woman probed. ‘Perhaps if they had given it more time…tried a little harder…?’
‘Tried harder…what would be the point?’
Georgie leaned her forehead against the frame of the door and absently rubbed a flake of peeling paint with her thumb. She was rarely in tune with her grandmother, but on this occasion she agreed totally with the older woman’s reading of the situation. She could have spent half her life trying to be what Angolos wanted and she wouldn’t have succeeded.
In the end, however, the choice to call it quits had not been hers.
Angolos had ended it. He had done so with brutal efficiency, but then, she reflected, Angolos didn’t like to leave loose ends, and he was not sentimental.
‘They could,’ she heard her grandmother, Ann, reveal authoritatively, ‘have tried until doomsday and the result would have been the same.’
‘But six months…poor Georgie…’
The genuine sadness in the other woman’s voice brought a lump of emotion to Georgie’s throat. There hadn’t been much sympathy going begging when she had swallowed her pride and turned up on her dad’s doorstep. Plenty of, ‘I told you so,’ and a truck-load of, ‘You’ve made your own bed,’ but sympathy had been thin on the ground.
‘With those two, it was never a matter of if, just when they would split up. When he got bored or when she woke up to the fact they came from different worlds. Far better that they cut their losses. He was only ever playing.’
It had felt pretty real to her at the time, but maybe Gran was right. Were you playing, Angolos? Sometimes she just wished she could have him in the same room for five minutes so that she could make him tell her why. Why had he done what he did?
‘By all accounts his first wife led him quite a dance…beautiful, spirited, fiery…apparently she could have had a successful career as a concert pianist if she had dedicated as much energy to that as she did partying.
‘In my opinion after the divorce he was looking for a new wife who could give him a quiet life…unfortunately he picked Georgie. Inevitably the novelty wore off when he got bored with quiet and biddable.’
It was not an ego-enhancing experience to hear yourself described as what was basically a doormat. Sadly Georgie couldn’t dispute the analysis. She had been pathetically eager to please, and it was awfully hard to relax and be yourself around someone you worshipped, and she had worshipped Angolos.
‘I think you’re doing Georgie an injustice,’ Ruth protested. ‘She’s a bright, intelligent girl.’
Georgie leaned her shoulders against the wall, smiling to herself. Thank you, Ruth.
‘Of course she is, but…look, let me show you this.’
Georgie could hear the sound of rustling and knew immediately what her grandmother was doing.
‘This was in last week’s Sunday supplement. That is Angolos Constantine.’
Georgie knew what the other woman was being shown; she had seen the magazine before her grandmother had hidden it under the cushions on the sofa. A double-page glossy picture showing Angolos stepping out of a chauffeur-driven car onto the red carpet of a film première. At his side was Sonia, his glamorous ex-wife. Were they back together…? Good luck to them, Georgie thought viciously. They deserved one another.
‘Oh, my…!’ she heard the older woman gasp. ‘He really is quite…yes, very…! They do say opposites attract…’ she tacked on weakly.
Nice try, Ruth, thought Georgie.
‘There are opposites, and then there is Angolos Constantine and my granddaughter.’
Georgie’s lips curved in a wry smile. You could always rely on her grandmother to introduce a touch of realism.
‘It was always an absurd idea. She was never going to fit into his world, and they had nothing in common whatsoever except possibly…’ Ann Kemp lowered her voice to a confidential whisper. It had a carrying quality that only someone who was a leading light of amateur dramatics could achieve.
‘Sex! Or love, as my granddaughter preferred to call it. Personally I blame it all on those romances she read in her teens,’ she confided.
‘I’m partial to a good romance myself,’ the other woman inserted mildly.
‘Yes, but you’re not a foolish, impressionable young girl who expects a knight in shining armour to come riding to the rescue.’
‘Young, no, but I haven’t totally given up hope.’
Georgie missed the dry retort.
A distracted expression stole over her soft features as she rubbed her bare upper arms, which, despite the heat, had broken out in a rash of goose bumps. Low in her pelvis the muscles tightened. She blinked hard to banish the image that had flashed into her head, but like the man it involved it didn’t respond to her wishes, or even, she thought, her soft mouth hardening, her entreaties.
In the end, bewildered and scared, she had lost all dignity and begged him to reconsider. He couldn’t want her to go away. They were happy; they were going to have a baby. ‘Tell me what’s wrong,’ she had pleaded.
Angolos had not said anything, he’d just looked down at her, his midnight eyes as hard as diamonds.
Strange how one decision could alter the course of your life.
In her case, if she hadn’t caved in to her stepbrother’s nagging and taken him down to the beach, when she had actually planned to curl up in an armchair and finish the last chapter in her book, she would never have met Angolos. Not that there was any point speculating about what might have been.
You just had to live with what was, and Georgie thought in all modesty that she wasn’t making such a bad job of it. She had good career, rented her own flat, a gorgeous son. A single friend had remarked recently that she didn’t know how Georgie managed to cope being a single parent with a young child and a full-time, demanding job.
‘I couldn’t imagine my life without Nicky; he’s the reason I do cope,’ Georgie explained. It was true—not that her friend had believed a word of it.
The fact there was no man in her life was a matter of choice. Not that she had ruled out the possibility of meeting someone; she just couldn’t imagine it.
Sometimes she tried to. She tried to imagine another man touching her the way Angolos had. She did now, and it was a mistake. Her nerve endings started to ache as she thought of his long, cool fingers on her skin.
Angolos had made her ache a lot.
When she wasn’t thinking about Angolos’s ability to make her ache, she occasionally wondered what sort of person she might have been if she had never met him. Would she still be as naïve and trusting as she had been that summer?
Such speculation was pointless, because she had met him, and every detail of that fateful occasion, the moment she had laid eyes on Angolos Constantine, the moment her life had changed for ever, was burnt into her brain.
She had been sitting on a blanket, one eye on the paperback she had been trying to finish and the other on her stepbrother, who had been playing with a group of boys farther down the beach. His shoes had been the first thing she had seen, shiny, hand-tooled leather, and then the exquisitely tailored legs of his dark trousers, expensive, tasteful, and wildly inappropriate for a beach.
She’d just had to see who would be stupid enough to venture onto the beach in a get-up like that! Georgie had lifted a hand to shade her eyes, squinting against the sun as her glance had travelled upwards.
Oh, my goodness…!
The owner of the shoes had had long legs, very long legs; the rest of him had been a lot better than OK too. In fact, if you went for lean and hard—and what woman wouldn’t, given half the chance?—he was as close to perfect as damn it.
By the time she had reached his face the last shreds of amused mockery had vanished from her amber eyes—the eyes he had professed to love—and she had been smitten and had stayed that way until the day he had told her he wanted her to go away.
‘Go away…?’ Uneasy, but sure this was all a silly mistake, she had asked, ‘How long for?’
‘For ever,’ he had replied and walked away.
But on that first summer’s afternoon there had been no hint of the casual cruelty he was capable of. She had been totally overwhelmed and too inexperienced to hide it as she’d stared back into those dark eyes shaded by preposterously long lashes that had thrown a shadow across the prominent angle of his chiselled cheekbones.
Those seductive, velvety depths had held a cynical world-weariness that her impressionable self had found fascinating, but then she’d found everything about him fascinating, she reflected grimly, from his sable-smooth hair to the mobile curve of his sensual lips.
Tall and lean, darkly arresting, his olive-skinned face an arrangement of strong angles and fascinating bone structure, he was the essence of male beauty.
‘Hello,’ he said, flashing her a seriously gorgeous smile. Like his appearance his voice with its faint accent marked this most rampantly male of males out as fascinatingly different.
She was hot, her face was sticky, her skin was glossed with a film of sweat and the salty dampness had gathered in the valley between her breasts. The jacket casually slung over one shoulder was the only concession this stranger made to the heat, which appeared not to affect him.
She lifted a self-conscious hand to her hair and discovered it was full of salt from an earlier dip in the sea. She wanted desperately to be cool and say something intelligent but all she could manage was a breathless, ‘Hello.’ Her heart was beating so fast she could barely hear her own voice.
She knew she was staring, but she couldn’t help it. She simply couldn’t tear her eyes off this incredible man. Men like this did not walk down the beach of an old-fashioned family resort…She hadn’t actually believed they existed outside the pages of popular fiction!
Did wondering what a total stranger looked like naked make her depraved? This had never happened to her before; maybe it was the weather? Hadn’t she read somewhere that heat had an effect on the libido? But her libido had never given her any problems; in fact she had occasionally wondered if it wasn’t a little underdeveloped.
‘I’m not familiar with the area.’
‘I know…’
One darkly defined brow lifted and she rushed on in hot-faced explanation.
‘This is a small place and strangers…well, they stand out.’ In the most fashionable and glamorous watering holes on the planet he would have stood out! She couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to walk into a room and have heads turn and conversations stop. What would he feel like?
She lowered her gaze. Stop this, Georgie!
‘Then you live here?’
He’s talking to me. This incredible man is actually talking to me. What did he say…?
‘Sorry?’
‘Do you live locally?’
‘Yes…no.’
The creases around his stupendous eyes deepened. ‘Which?’
Oh, no, he was going to go back to whatever planet he came from—clearly he was too gorgeous to be earthbound— and laugh about the mentally challenged locals. She made a supreme effort to act as though her IQ reached double figures.
‘We spend the summer holidays here. My…’ Her eyelashes lowered, as she repressed the embarrassing impulse to give him her life story. Even if that life could be summed up in a paragraph, his stupendous eyes would have glazed over with boredom before she got to the end.
One noteworthy thing had happened in her life and she didn’t even remember it! She had been a baby when her mother had run away with a Greek waiter. Since then her deserted father had refused to travel abroad, hence the house here where she had spent every summer she could remember, firstly with just her father and grandmother, latterly with her stepmother and stepbrother.
‘But you know the area well? You know all the places to go?’
‘Places to go…?’ Her puzzled expression cleared. ‘I suppose I do.’ She was delighted to be able to be of use to this most amazing man. ‘Well, actually, it depends,’ she told him seriously.
‘On what?’
‘If you have a head for heights.’
‘I do.’
‘Not me,’ she admitted regretfully. ‘The headland walk along the nature reserve is apparently marvellous, but if you prefer something a little gentler the trail across the marsh is very well marked and there are hides where you can…Are you interested in birds?’ The area drew a lot of people who were; they arrived with their binoculars in their droves. ‘It’s not the breeding season, but there are still some—’
‘I am not a bird-watcher; I prefer more…active pursuits.’
Now that he said it she had no problem seeing him fitting into the mould of those tough, reckless individuals who indulged in extreme sports…Extreme as in those extremely likely to result in injury or worse!
The thought of him breaking his beautiful neck made her unthinkingly blurt out, ‘You should be careful.’
‘At the moment I’m under strict instructions to relax.’ A slow smile that made her tummy flip spread across his lean features. ‘And suddenly,’ he confided in a husky drawl that made Georgie’s skin prickle, ‘that doesn’t seem such a bad idea.’
Was he flirting with her…? Georgie dismissed the thought even before it was fully formed.
‘I was actually wondering about the night-life…?’ he went on.
‘Night-life?’ she parroted. The distracting shadow of dark body hair visible through the fine fabric of his shirt was making it hard for her to concentrate on what he was saying.
‘As in nightclubs.’
‘Nightclubs?’ she echoed as though he were talking a foreign language. ‘Here?’
His beautifully moulded lips quirked. ‘No nightclubs.’ She shook her head. ‘Restaurants…?’
Georgie’s eyes had got even wider. ‘I think you might have got the wrong place. There’s the teashop next to the post office—they do a great cream tea—and the fish and chip shop, but…Are you laughing at me?’
‘You’re delightful.’
Even though she realised he probably meant delightful in a cutesie, cuddly, clumsy puppy sort of way, she couldn’t stop smiling.
‘And this feels like the first time I’ve laughed in a very long time.’
Georgie was pondering this enigmatic statement when a football landed in her lap, spraying sand all over her. There was the sound of laughter as she sprawled inelegantly backwards onto the sand.
‘Jack Kemp!’ she yelled, spitting out a mouthful of sand as her stepbrother approached. She struggled into an upright position and glared at the guilty figure.
‘What’s got into you?’ asked the freckle-faced twelve-year-old. ‘It wasn’t hard,’ he added scornfully.
Clicking her tongue, she threw the ball back, with an admonition to be careful. ‘And five minutes only,’ she cautioned, glancing at her watch. ‘I promised I’d get dinner tonight,’ she reminded him.
‘Sure…sure, Georgie,’ Jack called back before loping off down the sand.
‘Georgie…?’
‘Georgette,’ she said with a grimace. ‘My family call me Georgie. That’s my stepbrother,’ she explained, nodding to the skinny running figure.
She turned as she spoke and found he wasn’t looking at the distant figure of the fair-headed boy, but at her. There was a sensual quality in his dark-eyed scrutiny that sent a secret shiver through her body; the condition of her nipples was less a secret as they pressed against the stretchy fabric of her bikini top.
She looked around red-cheeked and mortified for the shirt she had discarded. She found it in a crumpled heap under the sun cream; hastily she fought her way into it.
‘I will call you Georgette,’ he pronounced.
She was never going to see him again, but as far as Georgie was concerned this man could call her anything.
CHAPTER TWO
‘HOW old are you, Georgette?’
Georgie flirted briefly with the notion of coming back with a cool, Old enough, but she knew she’d never carry it off. Besides, how mortifying would it be if he laughed?
‘Twenty-one,’ she responded more conventionally.
‘Will you come to dinner with me?’ he asked without skipping a beat.
Her eyes, round with astonishment, flew to his. ‘Me…you…?’
‘That was the general idea.’
Georgie swallowed before running her tongue over her dry lips—they tasted salty—and she looked at him suspiciously. ‘You’re not serious.’ She tried to laugh but her vocal muscles didn’t co-operate.
‘Why would I not be?’ She shook her head, flushing as his gaze became ironic. ‘You are the most attractive woman on the beach.’
‘I’m the only one under sixty without a husband and children,’ she rebutted huskily, ‘so I’ll try not to get carried away with the compliment.’
Who was she kidding? Her entire life she had thought of herself as an average sort of girl—hidden depths, sure, but was anybody ever going to bother looking? Now totally out of left field there came this incredible man who was looking at her as though she were a desirable woman.
Carried away…? She was quite frankly blown away!
She tried to adopt an amused expression and failed miserably as the screen of ebony lashes swept up from his cheekbones. Combustible best described his smoky-eyed stare.
‘I don’t even know your name,’ she protested weakly.
His smile had been confident, tinged with the arrogance that came naturally to someone like him. And why shouldn’t it be? she mused, four years down the line. Angolos Constantine was used to getting what he wanted; a little bit of complacence was understandable when women had been falling at his feet since the day he’d hit puberty!
‘Not an insuperable barrier and I already know yours, Georgette.’ The way he said her name had a tactile quality. It made the hairs on her nape stand on end and intensified the unspecified ache low in her belly.
She stared back at him dreamily.
It was just dinner.
‘It’s just dinner,’ he said as if he could read her thoughts.
What was she doing, hesitating? All the girls she knew wouldn’t have needed coaxing. They saw what they wanted and went for it. Georgie applauded them, but privately wondered if in secret they weren’t just as insecure as she was.
When she opened her mouth she intended to say yes, but her dad hadn’t raised a reckless child. Caution had been drilled into her from her infancy, and at the last second her conditioning kicked in.
‘Thank you, but I couldn’t.’ He was a total, a total stranger who could, for all she knew, be a psycho or even a married psycho. She shook her head; she was out of her depth and she knew it. ‘Thank you, but I’m afraid I can’t. My boyfriend wouldn’t like it.’
Under other circumstances the look of baffled frustration on his lean face would have been laughable.
Georgie didn’t feel like laughing; she didn’t even feel like smiling. She was actually pretty ambivalent about the entire ‘done the right thing’ situation.
His dark brows lifted. ‘Are you saying no?’
She could hear the astonishment in his voice and she realised that being knocked back had never crossed his mind. No was obviously not a word this man was used to hearing.
She nodded.
This time there was a hint of annoyance in his appraisal. ‘As you wish.’
His irritation made her feel slightly better. Her normal nature, the one she had when she wasn’t turned into a brainless bimbo by the sexual aura this man radiated, briefly reasserted itself. Why should he assume she was a sure thing? She might have been a bit obvious, but a girl could look without necessarily wanting to touch…
She flashed a quick semi-apologetic smile in his general direction. She wasn’t trying to strike a blow for female equality here—better and braver women had already done that—she just wanted to get the hell out of there without making herself look any more a fool than she already had!
Aware that his disturbing eyes were following her actions as she crammed her possessions in her canvas bag made her clumsy.
‘Jack!’ she bellowed, zipping up the bag with a sigh of relief.
‘You forgot this.’
She half turned and saw he was holding out a tube of sunblock.
She extended her hand. ‘Thank you.’ The fingertip contact lasted barely a heartbeat but it was enough to send an electrical tingle through her body. Her wide, startled eyes lifted momentarily to his and she knew without him saying a word that he knew exactly what she was feeling.
Well, at least someone did!
Without waiting to see if her aggravating stepbrother was following her, Georgie stumbled and ran across the sand to the pebbly foreshore, all the time fighting an insane impulse to turn back.
A childish shout jolted Georgie back to the present. She made admiring noises as her son proudly showed her a small pile of stones he had placed on the patio.
She could remember doing the same thing as a child herself; continuity was important. Her own childhood had been a long way from deprived, but there was a gap—questions that remained unanswered because her mother hadn’t been there to answer them. Now Nicky had an absent father… Continuity strikes again!
Her jaw firmed. Rejection wasn’t hereditary, it was bad luck, and if she had anything to do with it Nicky was going to be a better judge of character than his mother.
It was strange—she had changed beyond recognition from that girl running away that day on the beach, but the beach house and the town hadn’t. It was as if the place were in some sort of time warp.
The town remained defiantly unfashionable. There were no trendy seafood restaurants and no big waves to attract the surfing fraternity, but despite everything Georgie had a soft spot for this place. She rubbed her sandy palms on the seat of her shorts and accepted the seashell Nicky gravely handed her.
This was the first time she’d been back here since that fateful summer. Partly she had come to lay the ghosts of the past and more practically there was no way she could afford a holiday for Nicky any other way.
The jury was still out on whether she had succeeded on the former!
She inhaled, enjoying the salty tang in the air. Memories sort of crept up on you, she reflected. The most unexpected things could trigger them: a smell…texture. As earlier, one second she had been trying to get the sand off her feet before putting on her sandals, the next—zap!
It had been incredibly vivid.
Her foot had been in Angolos’s lap, his dark head down-bent, gleaming blue-black in the sun as he’d brushed the sand from between her toes. The touch of his fingers had sent delicious little thrills of sensation through her body. He had felt her shiver and his head had lifted. Still holding her eyes, he’d lifted her foot to his mouth and sucked one toe.
Her hand had pressed into the sand as her body had arched. ‘You can’t do that!’ she gasped. Snatching her foot from his grasp, she lifted her knees to her chin.
Angolos’s expressive mouth quirked. ‘Why?’
‘Because you’re killing me,’ she confessed brokenly.
The way he looked at her, the hungry, predatory gleam in his glittering eyes, made her insides melt. ‘You won’t have long to wait, yineka mou,’ he reminded her. ‘Tomorrow we will be man and wife.’
Back in the present, Georgie opened her clenched fists. Her palms were damp and inscribed with small half-moons where her neatly trimmed fingernails had dug into the flesh. She sighed and rubbed her palms against the seat of her shorts. Would she ever be able to think about her husband without having a panic attack?
‘They could hardly keep their hands off one another.’
The salacious details…This I can really do without.
‘I’m no prude,’ the older woman continued, ‘but really…she couldn’t keep her hands off him…’
Mortifying though her grandmother’s comment was, Georgie, not a person given to self-delusion, had to admit that it was essentially true.
Always a little scornful of her contemporaries’ messy and, it seemed to her, painful love affairs, she had been totally unprepared for the primal emotions Angolos had awoken in her. She had been totally mesmerised by him.
‘My son and I disagree on most things, but on that occasion we were of one mind. Robert said to her, “Sleep with the man if you must, live with him even, but marry him…! Insanity.”’
‘But one we have all experienced, Ann,’ came the rueful response.
To imagine the two elderly women experiencing the insanity of blind lust that she had felt with Angolos made Georgie blink.
‘The girl has reaped the consequences of her stupidity.’
The scorn in her grandmother’s voice brought a flush of mortified colour to Georgie’s sun-warmed cheeks. She had made a big mistake and she was willing to own up to it, but she sometimes thought that if her family had their way she would still be eating humble pie when she was eighty!
‘She was very young.’
‘Young and she thought she knew it all.’
‘The young always do. He…the man in the magazine…he looked older?’
‘Thirty-two or something like that, I believe, at the time. You have to understand that Georgie was very young for her age…very naïve in many ways, and he had been around the block several times. Oh, a handsome devil, of course. I’m not surprised she fell for him.’
The admission amazed Georgie; to her face her grandmother had never offered any understanding.
‘You think he took advantage…?’
‘Well, what do you think? A man with one failed marriage to his credit already and Greek.’
From her grandmother’s tone it was hard to tell which fault she found harder to forgive in the man: the fact he had been married or the fact he was Greek.
‘I knew the moment I saw him he couldn’t be trusted. I told her, we all told her, but would she listen? No, she loved him.’
‘Still, you must be proud of the way she has rebuilt her life, and she has a lovely child.’
‘A child who has never even seen his father.’
‘Never? Surely not…?’
‘Refused point-blank. Angolos Constantine made it clear that he wanted nothing whatever to do with the child. And neither he or any member of his precious family have ever been near…a blessing, if you ask me.’
