by Lynne Graham
In consternation, Billie watched him stride towards the door. ‘Where are you going?’
‘London. I’ll see you at Hazlehurst in forty-eight hours,’ he spelt out grimly.
He didn’t even have to pack, Billie acknowledged limply, because Alexei kept capsule wardrobes all over the world at the properties he used the most. He was walking out on her again. After a night that had filled her with a crazy burst of hope for the future, he was leaving and she was devastated by that development.
It was the work of an instant to run to the door and shout furiously down the corridor after him, ‘You’re a total coward, Alexei Drakos!’
She knew that hurling that accusation at a proud Greek male was like waving a red flag in front of a maddened bull and, sure enough, her tall, muscular husband wheeled straight round in his tracks to throw her an outraged look of incredulity from fierce golden eyes.
‘I mean it…every word!’ she flung in provocative addition, only belatedly becoming conscious that she was stark naked, and closing the door hurriedly to seek something to wear.
And true to the arrogant Drakos tradition of fearless confrontation, Alexei powered back down the corridor again and thrust the bedroom door back open so violently that it crashed back against the wall. Halfway into his discarded shirt, Billie faltered. She had never seen him so irate, his eyes blazing above the patrician cheekbones showing prominent and pale beneath his bronzed skin, his lean hands clenched into fists. ‘How dare you accuse me of such behaviour?’
‘Because you’ve been running away ever since I told you the truth about our child. You left the yacht on our wedding night and you’re leaving me now, walking out all over again,’ she condemned bitterly. ‘How does that solve anything? Last night you wouldn’t even talk. You won’t discuss anything with me!’
‘What the hell is there to discuss?’ Alexei raked back at her in a lion’s roar of intimidation that made her tremble, his powerful stance as aggressive as it was dogmatic. ‘You’ve told me nothing but stupid stories that a child could tear apart.’
‘Those were not stupid stories!’
Alexei came several steps closer. ‘You’ve lied and lied and lied again to me,’ he derided. ‘Why do you think I would want to listen to more of the same?’
‘I had to lie…I didn’t know what else to do,’ she shot back at him shrilly. ‘Why does everything have to be about you? What do you think it was like for me when you took up with Calisto and told me you were thinking about marrying her?’
Alexei stretched out his arms and then dropped them again in a volatile gesture of frustration and impatience. ‘I’m not listening to this nonsense again. Nothing you have told me justifies your behaviour. You’ve got nothing left to say. Lies are lies, no matter what the circumstances. I won’t live with them or forgive them.’
White with anger, he studied her standing there in his half-buttoned shirt, her tangle of colourful red hair spread round her shoulders. He dealt her a bitter look of cynicism. ‘We’re over, we’ve got to be. Sizzling sex isn’t enough to keep me with you,’ he delivered with harsh emphasis, and this time when he turned to leave she said nothing and she made no attempt to bring him back.
That evening after Billie had tucked Nicky up for the night in her own home, she found herself engaged in a bitter debate with her mother.
‘Your marriage is already over bar the shouting,’ Lauren told her daughter sourly.
‘Of course it isn’t,’ Billie reasoned. ‘Once Alexei realises that Nicky is his son…’
‘He’s not like his father who was desperate for an heir,’ the older woman pointed out bluntly. ‘You’re so naïve, Billie. Men aren’t driven to be fathers the same way women are driven to be mothers. It’s different for them, so wise up. Alexei has already told you that the marriage is over and in my opinion the discovery that he has a kid isn’t going to change that.’
‘You’re such a pessimist,’ Hilary scolded her sister from the lamp-lit corner where she had been trying to read a book.
‘Billie has to look out for her own interests now,’ Lauren argued forcefully. ‘Alexei consulted his lawyers when he organised that DNA test. Billie should see a good divorce lawyer while she’s in the UK. Hilary, stop looking at me like I just took an axe to Santa Claus! Alexei is a Drakos—let’s face it, her marriage was always going to end in tears. His father only finally settled down because he was getting too old to stray and you can’t hope for that with a guy who’s only thirty-one.’
Billie breathed in deep. In truth she was finding her mother’s ominous predictions more than she could comfortably cope with just at that moment. She offered to make some supper and went out to the kitchen, for she had already learned that the only way to keep a grip on her worries was to physically do something. Idleness while she had nothing but anxious thoughts whirling inside her head had become a torment. Much as she loved Nicky, she missed the buzz of working.
She was taking Nicky to Hazlehurst with her and had already arranged for Anatalya’s daughter, Kasma, to travel with her and help her look after her son. After all, unlike Alexei, Billie already knew the results of the DNA test and she was convinced that she and Alexei would have a lot to talk about. She was praying that Alexei would find himself more interested in being a parent than her sceptical mother had forecast. A child could bring them together again, couldn’t it? Unfortunately she remembered reading somewhere that a child only made matters worse in a failing relationship and she could only hope that Nicky would have a more positive effect on their marriage. Surely Alexei would not divorce her for being the mother of his only child?
The following day while she was engaged in packing for their trip to England, Anatalya brought her a letter, addressed to her as Alexei’s wife but heavily marked private and confidential. Opening the missive, she sank down on the bed to read it after her eyes flew wide on the first shocking sentence, ‘I believe it is possible that I may be your father…’
Slowly and carefully, Billie read the letter. For all its startling opening, it was a remarkably sensible and far from dramatic communication in which its writer, Desmond Bury, explained that he had fallen in love with her mother, Lauren, when she’d come to work as a teenage receptionist at his father’s vehicle-repair garage. An engagement had followed during which Lauren had fallen pregnant. Sadly, by then, Lauren had decided that she no longer wanted to marry Desmond and, having told him that she intended to seek a termination, she had dumped him for another man. He’d had no further contact with Lauren until he’d come upon a newspaper article about Billie’s engagement to Alexei, which had also featured a picture of her with Lauren. Ever since he had been wondering if Billie could be his daughter, for her age and colouring fitted that scenario. The letter concluded with a small paragraph on Desmond’s history. He had eventually married and was now the widowed owner of a flourishing chain of garages. If Billie believed that she might be his daughter, he would like the opportunity to meet and get to know her.
Five minutes after her third reading of the missive, Billie drove down to the village with Nicky to see her mother and handed her the letter. ‘Is there any truth in this? Is it possible that this man could be my father? Were you once engaged to him?’
Lauren grimaced and rolled her eyes theatrically several times while she read the letter. ‘Yes to all those questions,’ she said grudgingly. ‘But he’s got no right telling you that I considered a termination while I was carrying you…’
‘I think he may only have mentioned that because he wanted me to know that he would have taken an interest in me sooner had he known I existed,’ Billie responded mildly. ‘And I don’t blame you for considering it…’
‘Well, you can thank Hilary for the fact I didn’t go ahead with it!’ Lauren fielded tight-mouthed. ‘But I’ve got no regrets where Desmond was concerned. He was a bore, middle aged at twenty-five, a pipe-and-slippers man, not my type at all.’
‘So why, when I was a teenager, did you tell me that I was the
result of a one-night stand?’ Billie asked painfully. ‘That upset me and I honestly thought you didn’t know who my father was.’
Lauren laughed heartily at that candid admission. ‘I thought you would blame me for not marrying Desmond and giving you a more conventional childhood.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t marry him just for the sake of it,’ Billie told the older woman truthfully. ‘It would never have worked out if you were so different.’
‘Will you get in touch with Desmond?’ Lauren prompted with a frown. ‘You know, he’s really not an exciting person.’
‘If he is my father, I would like to meet him.’
‘Oh, he is definitely your father,’ Lauren confirmed with a sigh, as if she was more embarrassed than anything else by that.
The next day Billie arrived in London and climbed into the limo that would waft her, Nicky and Kasma to Hazlehurst. She had dressed with care in a beautifully elegant dark purple suit, rescued from looking like office apparel by a short skirt, high heels and snappy accessories. Kasma, who had only been abroad once before, was excited by everything she saw while Nicky looked adorable in a practical blue-striped playsuit and little jacket. The closer they came to their final destination, the more nervous Billie became.
Basking in early summer sunlight, Hazlehurst looked idyllic. The house wore its Georgian beginnings with style and elegance. The redoubtable housekeeper looked surprised when Billie arrived with a child in tow but wasted no time in calling another member of staff to escort Kasma and her charge upstairs to the nursery floor. Even before Billie was directed into the drawing room to see Alexei, her tummy was rolling and her skin dampening with nervous perspiration.
The tall front windows had a wonderful view of the lawns that ran below beech trees clad in the fresh green of their seasonal finery. Poised to one side of that view, Alexei looked formidable, sheathed in a dark pinstripe business suit of flawless cut and tailoring. His lean, darkly handsome face was taut and unrevealing, but his brilliant eyes glittered with a light that warned her that appearances could be deceptive, and that he was by no means as calm as he might seem on the surface. Alexei was, after all, studying her as if he had never quite seen her before.
‘You…know,’ Billie guessed immediately, her voice emerging strangely squeaky and insubstantial from her lips. Even when he intimidated her, he could still take her breath away with his stark male beauty and high-voltage sexual magnetism. No matter what thoughts ran through her anxious mind, at the back of those thoughts she was recalling the hard driving rhythm of his lean powerful body on and inside hers and the ecstasy of release that had allowed her, for such a brief time, to feel close to him. Was it any wonder that her throat was dry and her lungs reluctant to give her more oxygen?
‘I received the DNA results early this morning. At first I couldn’t credit it,’ Alexei imparted between compressed lips, more than a hint of ferocious self-discipline still etched in his tense stance and forbidding aspect.
‘You should have known I wouldn’t lie about something that was so easily proven one way or other,’ Billie dared, lifting her chin in challenge. ‘Of course, Nicky is your child.’
‘But I remember nothing,’ Alexei growled in a driven undertone, his incapacity in that field evidently now a source of deep resentment. ‘Although I now know it obviously happened, it’s still a challenge for me to accept that I slept with you that night and that I was so careless that I got you pregnant.’
Dismayed by that punishing choice of wording, Billie flinched. ‘All I can say is that we were both upset and vulnerable that evening and when we were together it didn’t feel wrong or out of place.’
His intense stare made her feel as though he would like to get inside her memory of that evening and take it from her rather than simply share it with her. She sensed his duality in the strong current of aggression that still ran beneath his self-disciplined surface and wondered at it. He was not reacting to the revelation of Nicky’s paternity as she had hoped or expected and yet she could not have said precisely what was wrong with his attitude.
‘I don’t want platitudes from you. I want to know exactly what happened between us…’
Unsure as to what he meant by that statement, Billie worried at her lower lip with her teeth. ‘The obvious happened—’
She collided with unrelenting dark golden eyes. ‘I want to know what I did, what I said, what you did—every detail,’ Alexei told her flatly.
Embarrassment swallowed Billie whole and glued her tongue to the roof of her mouth. ‘I don’t remember much,’ she fibbed in desperation.
Alexei dealt her a gleaming look of contempt. ‘Just another forgettable shag, was I?’
‘I wouldn’t know about that—I don’t have anyone to compare you to!’ Billie snapped back at him furiously. ‘I was a virgin.’
Alexei nodded acceptance of that fact. ‘Okay, so talk…’
Billie wandered restively over to the window and turned her narrow back to him in self-defence. In truth she had near-perfect recall of their time together and she repeated snatches of conversation and mentioned the sharing of the shower and the reason for his departure. ‘I think you fell down the steps because you tripped over my handbag…I’d dropped it on the floor by the door on the way in,’ she completed woodenly.
The silence stretched and gnawed at her nerves. Throwing back her head, vivid coppery hair falling back from her pale cheeks and brow, Billie straightened her stiff shoulders and spun back to him. ‘So, now you know that Nicky is your son—’
Her husband’s lean powerful visage hardened from the reflective look he had worn. ‘And I so easily might never have known,’ he interrupted. ‘Had I married Calisto, you would never have told me—’
She was alert to the renewed tension in the atmosphere. Billie’s spine went rigid and a smidgeon of colour warmed her cheeks. ‘I don’t know what I would have done if you had married her,’ she contradicted.
An ebony brow quirked, for he was unimpressed by that claim. ‘Don’t you? You would have deprived me of my son, denied my son his father and disinherited him of his Drakos heritage,’ he condemned, taking her breath away with those hard-hitting charges. ‘Both he and I would have paid a very steep price for our ignorance of our bond. Were you planning to lie to him when he got old enough to ask who his father was?’
‘I hadn’t got that far, for goodness’ sake. I hadn’t even thought about stuff like that!’ Billie disclaimed in a tone of unconscious appeal. ‘Nicky’s only a baby—’
Alexei raised his head high, dark golden eyes hard with censure. ‘Nikolos is my son and you passed him off as someone else’s, even brought him into my home in that false guise. As a mother, you failed in your duty to him.’
Shaken by those accusations, Billie felt her cheeks grow hot. ‘And as a wife?’ she chipped in helplessly.
‘You leave more than a little to be desired,’ Alexei delivered without hesitation and he swung open the drawing-room door and stood back with contrasting courtesy for her exit. ‘Now I would like to see my son. At least you had the good sense to bring him here with you.’
Billie felt rather as if a whip had somehow contrived to lash her skin below her clothes. Anger sparking, she tried to defend herself. ‘In my position some women would have opted for a termination and your son would never have been born.’
‘Maybe you saw his existence as money in the bank for a future power-play. Certainly that is how your mother thinks and don’t try to tell me otherwise. Lauren is always out for what she can get.’
At that cruel taunt, her delicate facial bones tightened below her fair skin and her fingernails bit sharp crescents of restraint into her palms, because she truly wanted to shout and scream at him for daring to make that humiliating comparison. He had never in his life before compared her to her feckless and avaricious parent, and that he should do so now hurt like the sharp slice of a knife in already tender flesh. ‘I’m not like my mother and you know I’m not.’
; Crossing the big echoing hall on his passage to the grand staircase, Alexei skimmed a cool glance at her taut profile. ‘Once I would have agreed with that statement, but not any more. I don’t know you the way I thought I knew you.’
A lump formed in her throat. ‘I don’t feel I know you either just at this moment.’
‘I’m still very angry with you,’ Alexei responded with succinct bite. ‘Of course I am. I’ve already missed out on months of my child’s life and I’m a complete stranger to him.’
Mounting the stairs by his side, Billie murmured, ‘I thought you weren’t ready for a child.’
‘He’s here, ready or not!’ Alexei quipped with derision.
‘I didn’t realise you’d feel this way.’
‘Until I found out about Nikolos, neither did I,’ Alexei admitted in a raw undertone. ‘But he’s the next generation of my family and his beginnings couldn’t have been worse! He’s my responsibility and the buck stops here.’
Ouch, Billie thought at that far-reaching assumption of responsibility but she said nothing, recognising that he had to have a lot of conflicting feelings to work through and that in many ways he was probably still in shock at the result of the DNA test. All of a sudden he had been plunged into fatherhood and the smokescreen with which she had surrounded Nicky’s birth and paternity only complicated that state of affairs.
Kasma was playing with Nicky on the floor of the well-appointed nursery. Alexei told the nursemaid to take a break and the young Greek woman had barely crossed the threshold when he bent down to scoop his son up off the carpet. Taken by surprise, Nicky loosed a startled yell of complaint and scowled at his father.
‘He can be a bit strange at present; he’s not comfortable with anyone he doesn’t know,’ Billie warned him reluctantly, mentally willing Nicky to be compliant and friendly at this crucial first meeting with his father.