by Lynne Graham
Razor-sharp dark golden eyes scanned her angry resentful expression. ‘I didn’t come here to argue with you.’
‘No?’ Elevating a brow and standing her ground, Lindy looked unimpressed by that claim.
‘No,’ Atreus framed flatly. ‘But I am very angry that such an outrageous account of our relationship has been published and I intend to sue.’
‘Good for you,’ Lindy pronounced, tongue in cheek. ‘No doubt you’ll win, and six months from now, when everyone has long since forgotten the original article, the newspaper will print a retraction low down on some boring page where virtually no one will even notice it or read it. Is it really worth all that hassle?’
Her mockery made his black brows draw together. ‘It’s not quite that simple. My family in Greece will be very much shocked by that item…’ He cloaked his stunning eyes with dense black lashes. ‘You may not be aware of it, but I have been thinking of getting engaged…’
Lindy wrinkled her nose. ‘Too much information, Atreus,’ she said, very drily.
Atreus threw back his wide powerful shoulders as if he was bracing himself to continue. ‘What I intended to say, if you had not interrupted me, is that this story is a source of embarrassment for Krista, the woman I’m currently seeing, and to her family and friends as well. We are not the only people affected by what appeared in the newspaper today.’
Lindy was feeling sick with tension, and listening to Atreus talk about the effect of that article on Krista only made her feel worse than ever. Had he ever cared about her that way? For even a moment? Had he even thought of how performing this knight on a white horse act on Krista’s behalf might make Lindy feel? But then why should he think or even care now? His indifference was like a knife twisting inside her, and she was defenceless against the pain of it.
She shook her head, the shiny strands of rich brown hair rippling across her slim shoulders. ‘I really don’t know what you’re doing here.’
‘I want you to agree to make a statement that the child you are carrying is not mine. Just to set the record straight for us all,’ Atreus completed, smooth as silk. ‘I have brought one of my company lawyers here with me. He’s waiting in the helicopter and will advise you on the correct wording.’
Astonished by his request, Lindy stared back into level dark golden eyes and felt her heart breaking inside her. All of a sudden she was wondering if everyone had been right when they’d advised her to set aside her own feelings and tell Atreus that she was pregnant as soon as possible. She had waited, kept silent, and now an awful lot of water had passed under the proverbial bridge. His life had moved on to a fresh chapter that had no place for her in any capacity.
‘You’re so organised,’ Lindy remarked stiffly, moving away from him to stare out of the window. Far from impervious to her tension, the dogs nudged against her legs and Sausage released an anxious whine. ‘It’s all right,’ she told the elderly dog, reaching down somewhat awkwardly to pat his shaggy head. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Lindy…’ Atreus let her name trail off. ‘The rumours set off by that article will be repeated again in the future if action isn’t taken against them now.’
Colour flaring over her cheekbones, Lindy spun back—or at least she tried. But she had moved too fast, and her sense of balance was no longer reliable. As her head swam she clutched at the back of the chair next to her, to steady legs that felt as safe and dependable as bendy twigs.
It came as a complete shock when Atreus strode forward to close a supportive arm round her. ‘Are you all right?’
‘No,’ she said a little shrilly, in growing distress at the situation in which she found herself. ’Anything but.’
The disturbingly familiar scent of his skin, his hair and his cologne was washing over her and arousing agonisingly acute slivers of intimate memory. She remembered him too well, and she stiffened in consternation when her body reacted accordingly. Her breasts swelled and tightened inside her bra, while a sliding sensation of warm awareness stirred between her thighs. She drove out that humiliating sexual awareness with an image of Krista Perris, with her long blonde hair, tiny designer-clad body and cute smile: the woman he was thinking of marrying. The effort of it almost broke her in two. Pulling away from him in an abrupt movement, she slid a seeking hand down to the arm of the chair and sank heavily down into it.
‘You’ve wasted your time coming down here with your lawyer in tow,’ she murmured between compressed lips. ‘I can’t help you.’
‘You mean, you won’t help me?’ Atreus gritted, his exasperation unhidden.
Lindy lifted her head. ‘Just whose baby do you think this is?’
Atreus shrugged. ‘That’s none of my business. I merely want a statement from you to tidy this up, so that neither I nor my family will be haunted by unsavoury rumours of an illegitimate child for years into the future,’ he completed impatiently.
Lindy threaded slim fingers unsteadily through the hair tumbling over her warm brow. A little more stable in body now that she was seated, she was fumbling for the right words but already regretting the fact that she had remained silent about her pregnancy for so many months. Her secrecy had left him horribly unprepared for the announcement she now had to make.
‘I can’t agree to make that statement for you because I would be telling a lie,’ Lindy explained with care. ‘I know you don’t want to hear this right now, Atreus…but this is your baby.’
His eyes narrowed, his lean strong face tightening, his jawline taking on an aggressive slant. ‘That’s not possible.’
‘There’s no such thing as one hundred per cent reliable birth control,’ Lindy countered. ‘Somehow it went wrong for us.’
‘I don’t believe this. You staged this vulgar press exposure to try and con me into believing that this is my child?’
Lindy’s hands closed tight on the chair-arms so that she could lever herself upright again. ‘That’s the end of our little talk, Atreus. I want you to leave now.’ She walked briskly to the front door and yanked it open with the suggestion of suppressed violence.
‘This is ridiculous. You can’t throw a bombshell like that at me and then demand that I leave without explaining yourself,’ Atreus ground out, dark golden eyes censorious and hot as molten metal.
‘The first point I would like to make is that I don’t have anything to explain. The second is that I will not tolerate being accused of trying to con you or anyone else. You got me pregnant—deal with it!’ Lindy slung back at him in furious challenge.
Brilliant dark eyes fringed by inky lashes fiercely focused on her, Atreus closed his hands over hers. ‘I don’t want to set my lawyers on you, Lindy—I only want to know why you’re doing this…’
Lindy forcefully wrenched her fingers free of his hold. ‘How dare you? You hounded me out of my home, you disrupted my whole life, and you got me pregnant! Now you’re threatening me with your lawyers?’
‘Nobody’s going to threaten you,’ another voice cut in, with rasping bite.
Atreus and Lindy swung round. Sergei Antonovich was poised several feet away. ‘Alissa has been worried about you and it seems she had good cause.’
When he saw the other man, Atreus became so tense he might have been chipped out of solid granite. ‘Sergei,’ he acknowledged grittily. ‘I appreciate your concern, but we don’t need an audience right now.’
The Russian tycoon sent Lindy a questioning glance. ‘If legal advice is required, you will have full access to any assistance you need.’
‘Thank you,’ Lindy breathed, tears prickling behind her eyes, because Sergei and Alissa had been so very kind and supportive when she was at her lowest ebb, and she really appreciated that. ‘But you don’t need to stay.’
Lindy stepped back indoors and wished she had controlled her temper enough to have stayed there in the first instance. Fighting with Atreus or letting other people get involved in what was a hugely private issue would only exacerbate the tensions between them. Leaving Atreus to follow her, Lindy m
oved back into the living room and resisted a provocative urge to ask him if Krista Perris knew where he was. ‘Would you like coffee?’
‘Yes. Exactly when did you get so friendly with Antonovich?’
‘He owns this place. My friendship is with his wife, Alissa. I have mentioned her to you several times. Alissa and I shared a flat a few years ago.’
‘I didn’t make the correct connection.’
Atreus watched her switch on the kettle in the light-filled kitchen. He breathed in slow and deep, studying her taut profile and the unfamiliar shape of her pregnant body. His baby? The thought struck him hard. Accidents happened. He knew that—of course he did. But how could any man know whose baby it was inside a woman? And, having been burned more than once by allegations, he was more suspicious and cynical than other men.
‘Is it my baby?’ he prompted, in a driven undertone.
‘Yes. It’s your baby,’ Lindy confirmed heavily. ‘And you don’t have any excuse that I know of to even ask me that question.’
‘Halliwell’s bow-tie was lying on your bedroom floor the last time we slept together,’ Atreus shared flatly.
Taken aback, Lindy studied him. ‘That was the night Ben and I went to a wedding party at Headby Hall. I let him have the bed and I slept on the sofa,’ she explained slowly. ‘You never mentioned the bow-tie at the time…’
His lean dark features hardened. ‘I didn’t see the point.’
‘I’m carrying your child. I expect you to trust me when I tell you something.’
‘That’s a tall order for me,’ Atreus admitted.
‘You expected me to trust you when you were photographed in the company of other women in London during our relationship,’ Lindy reminded him darkly.
Challenged, Atreus shrugged a magnificent shoulder and sipped his black coffee. ‘I’ve never lied to you.’
‘DNA tests can be dangerous during pregnancy.’ Lindy spoke in a curt, harried tone. ‘I won’t risk a miscarriage just to satisfy your lack of faith in my word.’
Atreus set his even white teeth together and said nothing.
In the uneasy silence Lindy began talking quickly and quietly. ‘I was ten weeks pregnant before I found out. We’d already broken up. Right from the start I knew I wanted this baby, but that you wouldn’t.’
‘You had no right to make such assumptions.’
‘Assumptions based on fact. You had already told me that you didn’t want a baby with me, and that you would only want one when you were married,’ Lindy pointed out doggedly. ‘So, based on those comments, I naturally made the assumption that you would want me to either have a termination or hand over my child for adoption.’
‘Never!’ Atreus bit out rawly. ‘Never would I have suggested such a solution!’
‘Well, I wasn’t drawn to those options either, and I couldn’t see any point in lowering myself to tell you that I had conceived,’ she admitted tautly.
His dark golden eyes were bleak. ‘In what way would you have been lowering yourself?’
Lindy recalled how she had felt when they broke up, and how much worse she had felt after that final time when they had shared the same bed. She swallowed hard. ‘You hurt me a lot. That Notice to Quit I received was the last straw. I just couldn’t face having anything more to do with you.’
Incensed with her version of womanly logic, Atreus swore in Greek under his breath. ‘Even though you knew I wasn’t behind that debacle over you staying on at The Lodge?’
‘No, but you wanted me gone—out of sight, out of mind. I saw that in you,’ Lindy condemned quietly. ‘I didn’t feel that I could afford to depend on you.’
Atreus almost groaned aloud. She saw all that was worst in him and concentrated on that. He knew he was not perfect. He knew he was not a saint. But he would never have walked away had he known that she needed him, and he was insulted that she could have thought otherwise. Suddenly he felt confined in the small room. He had a deep craving for the energising light and burn of a hotter sun on his body, for the timeless beat of the Aegean waves on the shore on his private island of Thrazos, where he could be himself.
‘You weren’t fair to me,’ he told her boldly. ‘You didn’t give me a chance.’
‘Well, it doesn’t matter now. Life has moved on for both of us.’ Lindy forced a determined smile onto her strained face. ‘Look, all this has been a shock to you. Why don’t you leave so that you can work out how you feel about the situation? Then we can talk.’
‘Some things I already know. If your baby is mine, I cannot possibly consider marrying another woman.’ Pale and taut beneath his bronzed complexion, Atreus settled glittering dark, steady eyes on Lindy’s startled expression. ‘What sort of a man do you think I am? I could not turn my back on you or my child. In those circumstances both of you would have first claim on my loyalty and support.’
Rocked by his confirmation of the fact that he had been thinking of marrying Krista Perris, Lindy folded her arms in a defensive movement. ‘I don’t want any sort of a claim on you. I don’t want to mess up anyone else’s life—yours or your girlfriend’s.’
His lean strong face had a stern aspect. ‘There’s nothing you can do. Things are already messed up and we can’t change that, but we can do what has to be done for the child’s sake.’
‘My life is fine just the way it is at the minute,’ Lindy protested. ‘I have a business, a healthy income, and somewhere secure to live. I don’t need anything else. I don’t need your loyalty or your support—it’s too late for all that.’
‘It’s not too late for the baby.’
‘You don’t even want the baby!’ Lindy hurled at him in bewilderment. ‘For goodness’ sake, you’ve already admitted that you’re on the brink of asking another woman to marry you!’
Atreus gave her a grim look. ‘But I want my baby to have everything I didn’t have. A normal home, loving parents, a solid knowledge of who he or she is, and security. If I marry another woman the child won’t have those essentials, and I owe my own flesh and blood more than that.’
Oxygen feathered in Lindy’s dry throat as she finally appreciated that he no longer doubted her. ‘So you accept that I’m telling the truth and that this is your baby?’
His rare charismatic smile momentarily lightened the hard set of his wide sensual mouth. ‘When did you ever lie to me?’
It was a small confirmation of the trust they had once shared, and it almost brought tears to her eyes. It was a relief that he did not still doubt her claim that he had fathered her child. She twisted her head away and dropped it to stare at her linked hands. It was news to her that Atreus had not benefited from a secure home with loving parents. He never mentioned his childhood, but she was aware that both his father and mother had been dead for a good number of years.
‘So you really want to play a role in this child’s life?’ Lindy prompted uncertainly.
His lean strong face clenched. ‘I want more than that. But we can discuss that some other time, when you look less tired.’
Lindy did not appreciate his assurance that she looked tired. Unfortunately emotional stress and tension always exhausted her, and although the nausea she had suffered no longer bothered her, she was still waiting to enjoy the reputed ‘glow’ of pregnancy. ‘I don’t want us to be enemies.’
‘You don’t need to worry about that. This pregnancy may be an unforeseen development,’ Atreus drawled softly, ‘but, as you’ll discover, I can roll with the punches.’
‘Not perhaps the most tactful euphemism you could have used to reassure me,’ Lindy quipped wryly, looking up at him and noting how the sunshine gleamed over his black hair, warming his bronzed skin and accentuating the stunning gold of his eyes. For a split second, before she got her control back in place, she craved his touch with every fibre of her being.
‘I’m in shock,’ Atreus confided ruefully. ‘I’ll get over it, though. This baby will change everything.’
Lindy appreciated his honesty, but it hurt. She d
idn’t know what she expected from him any more. In his swift acceptance of her condition and his paternity he had exceeded her expectations, but nothing could stop her reflecting that her revelation was already threatening to turn his life upside down. He insisted that he wanted a role in their child’s life. He had said that he couldn’t marry Krista now…
Was that because he knew his gorgeous girlfriend would not accept a husband who came with the baggage of an acknowledged illegitimate child? How did he really feel inside? Was he in love with Krista? And would their relationship continue even though they didn’t marry? Recognising that she wanted answers to questions that were really no longer any of her business, Lindy suppressed her teeming thoughts. One problem that she did fully acknowledge was that she was still too vulnerable to Atreus. She needed to guard against that weakness and learn how to keep her distance—mentally and physically.
CHAPTER EIGHT
FORTY-EIGHT hours later, Atreus was shown out of Krista’s apartment by her maid. His lean, darkly handsome face was grim with suppressed emotion. He was angry with everything and everyone, himself included. He thought he was very probably angry with the whole world, and it was not a mood he wanted to inflict on Lindy. Drawing out his mobile phone, he rearranged their meeting for the following morning.
‘Are you all right?’ Lindy heard herself ask, catching an odd note in his deep voice that disturbed her.
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ Atreus suppressed a groan at that query and compressed his handsome mouth hard. ‘I’m sorry for the last-minute change of plan.’
Grimacing at her slip in asking such a personal question, and with her cheeks burning, Lindy hastened to say as casually as she could, ‘It’s not a problem.’
At her end of the phone she glanced in the hall mirror and winced. Hair tamed within an inch of its life: check. Full make-up: check. New outfit calculated to make the most of what shape she retained: check. Did she never learn? Why was she doing this to herself?