by Olivia Gates
“He’s no longer scary to hold.” She decided to let Alex steer them both in this since she was totally lost, and Aristedes looked as out of his depth as she felt. She loosened her grasp on Alex, felt she was letting her heart go, trusting it to Aristedes.
Aristedes received the eager Alex with hands that visibly shook. As soon as the tiny yet strong body filled his large hands, they convulsed. Alex gave a squeak of protest.
Selene snapped a soothing hand to Alex, another to one of Aristedes’s hands. “You don’t need to hold on tight. He holds himself up perfectly now. You just cradle him, let him lean into your hold.”
Aristedes nodded, looking poleaxed as he cautiously loosened his hold, as if he was still afraid Alex would spill out or come apart. Alex wriggled, made himself comfortable in Aristedes’s power and started to explore him with avid glances and hands all over his father’s face and chest.
“Hello, Alex.” He transferred his gaze from Alex to her, shell-shocked traces still glittering in the eyes she could now see would be Alex’s almost four decades into the future. “Shall I introduce myself, or will you do the honors?”
She couldn’t have spoken if someone had demanded it of her at gunpoint. She gestured for him to go ahead.
Aristedes expanded his expansive chest on a huge breath. The movement raised and lowered Alex, which he found extremely entertaining, giggling and slamming both hands on Aristedes’s chest, demanding he do it again.
Aristedes understood and did it again, before he began simulating the movement without breathing deep. Alex deciphered the difference and made his objections known with a sharp yelp, slapping Aristedes’s chest as if commanding he move it once more.
Aristedes placed a hand on top of both of Alex’s, holding them over his heart. “I’m not hyperventilating just because you think it’s a fun game. Not a good start to our…acquaintance, for me to be dizzy and to be doing your bidding already.”
Alex stilled, listening to Aristedes’s deep, modulated voice, looking as if hypnotized into those eyes that Selene knew firsthand wielded mind-controlling powers. She was sure that if Alex knew how to say “yes, sir,” he would have said it.
“Now that I have your attention, let me tell you who I am. I’m your father, Alex.”
Selene’s heart almost exploded from her ribs.
She had never thought she’d hear Aristedes say those words, let alone like this. And Alex…she could swear he understood. Why else did he give this sudden squee of delight?
“Your mother calls me Aristedes, or Sarantos.” Aristedes went on. “Or both, if she’s really mad at me. I want to be Aris to her. And Papa to you. How about you try this out for today?”
“He hasn’t said anything yet.” Selene heard her voice trembling. “Not real words, anyway.”
Aristedes eyes moved to hers distractedly. “Too early?”
She coughed her incredulity. “You know nothing about kids for real, do you?”
He gave a tight shrug. “Right up till this moment, nothing at all, apart from the fact that they are scary and fragile and noisy and they take over a person’s life.”
She found a chuckle bursting on her lips. “That’s all true. And how.” She sobered a bit, looking her love at Alex. “They’re also priceless and worth every bit of sacrifice and suffering.”
“Not everyone thinks so.”
She stilled at the darkness that came over Aristedes’s face like an eclipse. Was he talking about himself?
Before she could wonder, question him, Alex turned to her, whimpering, eyes imploring.
She exhaled a ragged breath. “He wants breakfast. He always wakes up hungry.”
“I do, too.”
A wave of goose bumps stormed through her. She remembered how he woke up. Ravenous. For her, for food, then for her again…
She tamped down the urge to press against him, feel that vast hunger his body contained, the instant ignition she was capable of unleashing.
That wasn’t why he was here, wasn’t how it should be.
To bypass the moment of madness, she tried to take Alex from him. Both man and baby overrode her, Aristedes turning away a fraction while Alex nestled more securely into his arms, declaring his preference of vehicles.
“Turncoat!” she muttered as she pivoted, her heart sputtering with a crazy mixture of disappointment and delight.
Aristedes’s sonorous, satisfied chuckles followed her all the way to the kitchen.
Once there, she gestured to Alex’s high chair. Aristedes placed him there with all the care one might use to defuse a bomb.
He pulled back after he’d buckled Alex in and put his tray in place, all relieved triumph at this unprecedented achievement.
She smirked at him. “Since he wants you to hold him, you can do the rest of the morning ‘honors.’”
Aristedes’s eyes widened on something close to terror. “You mean you want me to feed him?”
She almost laughed at Aristedes’s totally incongruous expression of helplessness and shock. “A scary new experience every second, eh? That’s what everyday life with a baby is.”
Aristedes shook his head, nodded, then his eyes moved down to her breasts, a mixture of hunger and bemusement entering the silver of his eyes. “You don’t nurse him?” Images of his head at her breasts, his lips suckling her nipples, exploded in her mind, flooded her body, her core.
She shook them off, handed him two of the food jars she’d prepared before she’d gone to bed. “You think I need to do that in the kitchen? But to answer your question, not anymore. He weaned himself, adamantly, at six months. He wants to eat.”
Aristedes said nothing as Alex’s impatient prodding made him concentrate on the alien chore. He dipped the small spoon into the pureed fruit mix, offered it tentatively to Alex. Alex lunged and inhaled the spoon’s contents.
A laugh of surprise and delight rumbled deep in Aristedes’s chest as he offered him more then more spoonfuls, all which met the same fate. “He certainly does want to eat.”
She resisted the urge to run her fingers through the deep mahogany mane bent before her. “Remind you of someone?”
He turned his head to her, eyes crinkled with the first real smile she’d ever seen there. “We Sarantos men need our food.”
“Alex is not a Sarantos.”
Selene’s heart convulsed with instant regret over her vehemence, at the deep, still darkness that crept into his eyes dousing the second-ago merriment.
“I meant biologically speaking,” he finally acknowledged. “In all other ways, he’s yours. A Louvardis.”
She wondered how deep the need to make Alex a Sarantos had insinuated itself inside Aristedes. At this stage she could only believe he was too Greek, too male, that not being able to lay claim to what was his, “biologically speaking,” hurt.
Nothing more was said as Alex polished off his food. In his enjoyment of the new experience of having Aristedes serving him, he hadn’t picked up on the sudden tension between his parents. Still silent, Selene gestured for Aristedes to take him out of his high chair and follow her to another cross section of the everyday reality he’d wanted to witness and share.
Once in Selene’s sunny, child-friendly sitting room, he placed Alex in his playpen. Alex made a beeline for his favorite toys, tackling playtime with the same determination his father attacked business projects.
Her Turkish Van cat, Apollo, woke up at their entry. Instead of dashing away at the sight of strangers as he usually did, he rose, stretched leisurely, and jumped off the couch and approached Aris in avid curiosity.
Aris purred encouragements to him and in moments had the unfriendly-but-to-her-and-Alex cat purring back in his hold.
After moments of fondling an ecstatic cat, Aristedes put Apollo down. As the cat rushed to join Alex in play, Aristedes straightened and the vast space that she’d furnished in bright blues and greens seemed to shrink.
“Is Alex his real name or is it short for something else?”
&nbs
p; She gulped a knot of emotion. “Alexandros.”
Aristedes nodded, clearly approving. “He’s nine months.”
“Ten.” He raised his eyes at that. “His doctor said developmentally, I should count him as a month less until after he passes the one-year mark. But so far he’s actually ahead of the average curve.”
Aristedes frowned. “He should be nine months.”
She squared her shoulders, met his scowl with narrowing eyes. “Are you thinking he’s not yours, after all?”
There was no hesitation. “I know he’s mine. Not just because I felt it the moment I laid eyes on him, but because you would have told me, and delighted in telling me, if he wasn’t.”
She pulled herself to her full height. “I wouldn’t have ‘delighted’ in doing any such thing. I’m not vindictive. And then, why should I have thought it would matter to you? It didn’t occur to me you’d want to have anything to do with him.”
He analyzed her affront for a long moment. Then a slight smile tugged at his lips. “Two more things corrected, then. On my side and yours. So you had him early. Why?”
She cocked her head, trying to even out her breathing, which kept going haywire at the unexpected reactions he continued hitting her with. “Why do women have premature babies?”
“I’m sure each does for a reason. What was yours?”
“I had a condition called placenta previa.” His gaze sharpened, inviting her to elaborate. “The placenta was too low and started bleeding. A week later, I went into premature labor.”
“Was it painful, the…condition? The labor?”
“The condition, no, just painless bleeding. The labor was only bad in the last couple hours. Turned out I was in labor all day and dismissed the contractions, since it was too early.”
His gaze filled with too many things to decipher.
“I wish I could have been there.” Her heart lurched. Another silence stretched. Then that smile again softened the storms of his eyes. “But I’m here now.”
That made her go mute, then babble. The one thing that had any context was when she offered him breakfast. He only dealt her another surprise, showing her that he was as ingenious in the kitchen as he was in the boardroom and bedroom.
After they’d taken their trays back to the sitting room and he set about wiping his plate clean, he looked at her. “So how do you usually spend your weekends?”
She swallowed a mouthful of the delicious smoked salmon and vegetable crepe he’d made. “How do you?”
He shrugged. “I don’t have weekends.”
“Figures. But then neither did I, before Alex.”
“Did you work all through your pregnancy?”
“Yes.”
That made him raise his eyes from his plate. “You didn’t eat enough. You are thinner than you used to be.”
“You don’t approve?”
His eyes slid down her body, leaving her in no doubt how much he did approve and gasping with a sudden flare of the arousal he always had simmering inside her before he said, “Only that you’re not taking as good care of yourself as you should.”
She tore her gaze away from his, busied herself with swallowing without choking on the cocktail of explosive reactions he incited inside her. “I had a lot on my mind, and since I had Alex, far more to worry about and do.”
“What do you worry about?” His question was deceptively casual, but she felt the intensity of interest vibrating in it.
“Everything. That’s what being a mother is all about, it seems.”
“Tell me.”
His simple yet imperative demand made her realize how acutely she’d wanted to share these details. But there’d been no one to share them with. Now he was here. And he wanted, seemed to even need, to share. Floodgates opened inside her.
“I constantly worry about things that never crossed my mind before, or things I never thought were worrisome in the least. I invent worries, and each can become an obsession. When I left Alex to go back to work, I’d work myself up with imaginary scenarios, and if Eleni didn’t pick up after the first two rings, I was tearing down to my car. The first time she didn’t answer I drove like a maniac out of the building, left my car when I got caught in a traffic jam and ran here.”
He was sitting at the edge of her plush sofa by now. “Why didn’t she answer?”
“She was giving Alex a bath and he makes quite a racket. She didn’t think to check her phone afterward for missed calls. Since the…episode, she says she keeps her phone with her even if she’s in the shower in her own home.”
His compressed lips twitched. “I would have done something drastic, too.”
Conversation flowed after that. About every momentous and inconsequential thing that had happened once she’d discovered her pregnancy. Aristedes seemed insatiable in his need to know everything. And when there were silences, they were not tense and uncomfortable. They were companionable, content, communicative.
She couldn’t credit it. She’d never expected rapport to flow between them. But it did. And that was the part between them. What passed between Alex and Aristedes shook her even more. Alex was beside himself with delight to have him around. While Aristedes stunned her with his eagerness for Alex, with his handling of him with such instinctive insight and sensitivity, such patience, firmness and affection.
The day flowed. They puttered around the house doing whatever she and Alex did always alone, together. Aristedes brought new dimensions to their activities, turned playing with Alex, giving him a bath, dressing him, feeding him, putting him down for his nap into far more fun, not to mention more efficient endeavors.
She let him treat her to a leisurely and delicious lunch like he had breakfast, then after Alex woke up from his afternoon nap ravenous again, they fed him and she served tea.
Two hours before what she’d told Aristedes was Alex’s bedtime, he suddenly stood up, said he had to go do something. Alex made a tearful, vocal protest when he realized Aristedes was leaving, but Aristedes soothed him, promising he’d be right back. Alex seemed to understand, to believe him, and got reengaged in crawling around, exploring the condo under her supervision.
After the first half hour passed, she began to think Aristedes wouldn’t return.
Maybe he’d put up with as much mundane normality as he could stomach for this lifetime, had decided he’d forgo being anything to either her or Alex, would call to tell her some business emergency had cropped up or something.
After an hour passed, she was certain he wouldn’t come back.
Then her doorbell rang.
She flew, hating herself for her uncontrollable eagerness, her dread of opening the door to find someone else there.
Her legs almost buckled when she found it was Aristedes.
This time he had flowers and two gift-wrapped boxes with him.
With an intense glance, he handed her the flowers. She took them, her mind spinning, watched him walk up to Alex, who met him with even more enthusiasm than the first time.
Aristedes went down on his haunches beside him and unwrapped the boxes, all the while explaining what he’d gotten him. One box contained an animated activity book. The second had a toy made of colorful, pliable plastic loops.
As Alex began pawing the activity book in captive fascination, Aristedes looked up at her, gesturing at the other toy. “These can be refrigerated for a soothing teether.”
He’d noticed. That Alex was chewing on everything. This was new, since his first teeth had come out with no discomfort. She’d just noticed it herself, had made a note to buy him some teethers. But Aristedes had noticed he had these missing from his toys. And judged what else he’d be interested in that he didn’t have.
He’d gotten her an incredible assortment of lilies, her absolute favorites. He’d realized that, too, from her mugs and trays and coasters.
The gifts weren’t expensive. But they were…just right.
She didn’t remember what she said, or what they did until Alex, who�
�d been playing contentedly at their feet, suddenly lay on his side and was asleep in seconds.
“That’s his new trick,” she said when Aristedes looked at her with surprise and a tinge of worry in his eyes. “After eight months of keeping me awake at night.”
His worry drained to be replaced by something so…soft. “A merciful trick. He’s enough of a handful during the day.”
She nodded and he rose, pulled her up to her feet, bent and picked up Alex then walked with her to the nursery to put him in his crib.
They were walking down the corridor afterward, feet away from her bedroom door, when he stopped, looked down at her.
To ameliorate the unbearable intensity of the moment, she said, “Thanks for the gifts again…Aris.” His eyes flared at hearing the name he’d expressed as his desire to hear on her lips. She forced the rest out. “You didn’t have to.”
“I wanted to. I’m glad you and Alex enjoyed my choices.”
“They were very…astute.”
“And I’m nothing if not astute, eh?”
She didn’t want him to think she was implying it was another manipulation, wanted to wipe that sardonic twist off his mouth. “That wasn’t a veiled dig.”
She succeeded. He smiled, all traces of disappointment evaporating. “No. You don’t do veiled anything. It’s all out there in the open, full blast, in my face with you.”
Before she could say any more, he caught her to him. She melted in his arms on the spot, like a candle in an inferno.
He swept her up, took her from gravity’s hold into his, took her lips, over and over, in clinging, will-draining kisses, then rumbled inside her trembling depths, “Thank you for the gift of today, Selene.”
Her head spun, her thoughts tangled, her heart splashed and spilled, her body ached, begged, wept.
When she thought he’d sweep her around, take her to her bedroom and end her torment, he raised his head, straightened.
“I think this means I’m granted another day,” he groaned as he let her slide down his body, put her on her feet. He held her for one last shuddering moment then turned and walked away.
Before he closed the condo’s door behind him, he smoldered at her over his shoulder. “Till tomorrow, kala mou.”