And suddenly—she had no idea what caused it—the perfect scene before her began to disintegrate. It was like tugging at a tiny nick on a delicate piece of fabric which suddenly ripped open. It all seemed so false. There was Alek—looking ruggedly handsome in an open-necked white shirt and dark trousers, his blue eyes gleaming like jewels. Yet his polite distance made her feel as if she were just another item to be ticked off on his agenda. His smile seemed more automatic than genuine and she found herself resenting his control and his inbuilt detachment. This has nothing to do with reality, she thought, as a feeling of rebellion began to bubble up inside her.
She sat down and looked at him. ‘Actually, I’d like to talk about the baby.’
He stilled. ‘The baby?’
‘That’s right. Our baby. You know. The one we never talk about.’ She paused and laid her hand over her stomach. ‘Because although it’s growing inside me, we never discuss it, do we? We always seem to skirt around the subject. I mean, I go to the doctor and report back with a clean bill of health—and you manage to look pleased. And once or twice you’ve even come with me and you nod your head in all the right places, but you still act like nothing’s happening, or as if it’s happening to someone else. As if none of this is real.’
A shuttered look came over his face and he shrugged. ‘I suppose we could sit around having hypothetical discussions about what we’re going to do and how we’re going to react when the baby arrives, but why bother when it’s impossible to predict?’
‘So you just want to ignore it until it happens?’
His eyes became hooded and suddenly he didn’t look quite so detached. ‘Isn’t that what I’ve just said?’
And Ellie heard the distortion in his words—the crack of bitterness he couldn’t quite hide. She saw the way his body had grown hard and tense and wondered what had caused it. And she wondered why she didn’t have the guts to come right out and ask him, and keep on asking him until he finally gave her an answer. What was she so afraid of? Scared that if she unlocked his secrets, she’d discover something to kill off the dormant hope which lingered so foolishly in her heart? Surely it was better to know and to face up to the truth, no matter how grim it was... Better that than building dreams which were never going to materialise.
‘You know, through all the time we’ve been together, you’ve never spoken about your childhood,’ she said. ‘Apart from a throwaway comment about never having used public transport because your father owned an island.’
‘And why do you think that is?’ he questioned. ‘If somebody doesn’t want to talk about something, there’s usually a reason why.’
‘You’ve never told me anything about your family,’ she continued stubbornly. ‘Not a single thing. I don’t even know if you’ve got any brothers or sisters—’
‘I don’t.’
‘And you’ve never mentioned your parents.’
Unsmilingly, he looked into her eyes. ‘Maybe that’s because I don’t want to.’
‘Alek.’ She leant forward. ‘You need to tell me.’
‘Why?’ he snapped.
‘Because this baby is going to share your parents’ genes. Your father—’
‘Is dead,’ he said flatly. ‘And believe me, you’d better hope that our baby doesn’t share many of his genes.’
A shiver ran down her spine. ‘And what about your mother?’
For a moment there was silence. ‘What about her?’
Ellie was unprepared for the savage note in his voice or the bunching of his powerful shoulders. Everything about his reaction told her she was entering dangerous territory—but she knew she couldn’t let up. Not this time. If she backtracked now she might win his temporary approval, but then what? She would simply be signing up to a life of half-truths. Bringing up a baby in a world of ignorance, where nothing was what it really seemed. Because knowledge was power. And wasn’t the balance of power in this relationship already hopelessly unequal?
‘Is she still alive?’
‘I don’t know,’ he snapped, his voice as cold as ice. ‘I don’t know a damned thing about her. Do you want me to spell it out for you in words of one syllable, Ellie? She walked out on me when I was a baby. And while I’m known for my amazing sense of recall—not even I can remember that. Are you satisfied now?’
Ellie’s head was spinning. His mother had walked out on him. Wasn’t that the worst thing that could happen to someone? Hadn’t she read somewhere that it was better to be abused than abandoned, and wondered at the time if that was true? She supposed you could always challenge your abuser—but if you were deserted, wouldn’t that leave you with no choice except to feel empty and bewildered? She imagined a tiny baby waking up one morning crying for his mother—only that mother never came. How would that feel, to miss the comfort of a maternal embrace and never know it again? Even if the bond wasn’t strong, a cuddle would still feel like safety to a helpless infant. On some primitive and subliminal level—would that make it impossible for you to put your trust in a woman afterwards? Would that explain his coldness and his lack of real intimacy, no matter how many times they had sex?
‘What...what happened?’
‘I just told you.’
‘But you didn’t.’ She met his gaze, determined not to be cowed by the fury sparking from those cold blue depths. ‘You only gave me the bare facts.’
‘And didn’t it occur to you that maybe that’s all I wanted to give you?’ Pushing back his chair, he got up from the table and began to pace around the veranda like a man in a cell. ‘Why don’t you learn when enough is enough?’
She’d never seen him so angry and a few weeks ago Ellie might have backed down, but not any more. She wasn’t someone who was trying to win his affection or keep the peace, no matter what. She was a mother-to-be and she wanted to be the best mother she possibly could be—and that meant decoding her baby’s father, even if he didn’t want her to. Even if it pushed them further apart, it was a risk she had to take.
‘Because it’s not enough,’ she said stubbornly.
‘What difference does it make that a woman walked out of a house on a Greek island over thirty years ago?’
‘It makes all kinds of difference. I want to know about her. I want to know whether she was artistic, or good at math. I’m trying to join up all the dots, Alek—to imagine what kind of characteristics our baby might inherit. Maybe it’s extra important to me because I don’t know much about my own father. If things were different, I’d have learnt the answers to some of these questions already.’
Alek stared at her as her passionate words broke into the quiet Italian morning. Her own upbringing hadn’t been much of a picnic but, despite all that, her mother had stuck by her, hadn’t she? Ellie hadn’t been rejected by the one person you were supposed to be able to rely on. Behind her the jasmine and miniature lemon trees made her look like a character in a painting. In her silky robe she looked fresh and young, and nothing could disguise the flicker of hope in her eyes. Did she think there was going to be some fairy-tale ending, that he could soothe everything over and make everything okay with a few carefully chosen words?
His jaw tightened. Maybe he should tell her the truth. Let her understand the kind of man he really was—and why. Let her know that his emotional coldness wasn’t something he’d just invented to pass the time. It had been ground into him from the start—embedded too deeply for him to be any other way. Maybe knowing that would nip any rosy dreams she was in danger of nurturing. Show her why the barriers he’d erected around himself were impenetrable. And why he wouldn’t want them any other way.
‘There were no custody visits or vacations,’ he said. ‘For a long time, I knew nothing about my mother. Or indeed, any mother. When you grow up without something, you don’t even realise you’re missing it. Her name was never mentioned in front of me, and the only women I knew we
re my father’s whores.’
She flinched at his use of the word and he saw her compose her face into an expression of understanding. ‘It’s perfectly reasonable not to like the women who supplanted your mother—’
‘Oh, please. Quit the amateur psychology,’ he interrupted, pushing his fingers impatiently through his hair. ‘I’m not making a prudish judgement because it makes me feel better. They were whores. They looked like whores and acted like whores. He paid them for sex. They were the only women I came in contact with. I grew up thinking that all females caked their face in make-up and wore skirts short enough for you to see their knickers.’ And one in particular who had invited a boy of twelve to take her knickers down so that she could show him a good time.
Did she believe him now? Was that why she was biting her lip? He could almost see her mind working overtime as she searched for something to say—as if trying to find a positive spin to put on what he’d just told her. He could have saved her the trouble and told her there was none.
‘But...you must have had friends,’ she said, a touch of desperation in her voice now. ‘You must have looked at their mothers, and wondered what had happened to yours.’
‘I had no friends,’ he said flatly. ‘My life was carefully controlled. I might as well have had a prison as a house. I saw no one except for the servants—my father liked childless, unmarried servants who could devote all their time to him. And if you have nothing with which to compare, then no comparisons can be made. His island was remote and inaccessible. He ran everything and owned everything. I lived in a vast complex which was more like a palace and I was tutored at home. I didn’t find out anything about my mother until I was seven years old and when I did—the boy who told me was beaten.’
He stared into space. Should he tell her that the boy’s injuries had been so bad that he’d been airlifted to the hospital on the mainland and had never returned? And that the boy’s parents—even though they had been extremely poor—had threatened to go to the police? Alek had only been young but he remembered the panic which had swirled around the complex as a result. He remembered the fearful faces of his father’s aides, as if the old man really had overstepped the mark this time. But he’d wriggled out of it, just as he always did. Money had been offered, and accepted. Money got you whatever it was you wanted. It bought silence as well as sex—and another catastrophe had been averted. And hadn’t he done that, too? Hadn’t he paid off Ellie’s contract with the Irishwoman with the same ruthlessness which his father would have employed?
He saw the distress on her face and tried to imagine how this must sound through her ears. Incredible, probably. Like one of those porn films his father’s bodyguards used to watch, late into the night. He wondered if he stopped the story now, whether it would be enough to make her understand why he was not like other men. But she had demanded the truth and perhaps she would continue to demand it. To niggle away at it, as women invariably did. He realised that for the first time in his life he couldn’t just block her out, or refuse to take her calls. To fade her into the background as if she had never existed, which was what he’d always done before. Whether he liked it or not, he was stuck with Ellie Brooks, or Ellie Sarantos as she was now. And maybe she ought to learn that it was better not to ask questions in case you didn’t like the answers.
‘Anything else you want to know?’ he demanded. ‘Any other stone you’ve left unturned?’
‘What did the boy tell you about your mother?’
‘He told me the truth. That she’d left in the middle of the night with one of the island’s fishermen.’ He leant back against the intricate wrought-iron tracings of the balustrade. Somewhere in the distance he could hear a woman call out in Italian and a child answered. ‘It was convenient that she chose a lover with his own boat, for there would have been no other way of her leaving the island without my father knowing about it. But I guess her main achievement was in managing to conduct an affair right under his nose, without the old man finding out. And the fact that she was prepared to risk his rage.’ His mouth twisted. ‘She must have been quite some woman.’
He felt a pain he hadn’t felt in a long time. A hot, unwelcome pain which excluded everything else. It stabbed at his heart like a rusty knife and he wished he’d told her to mind her own business, but now he was on a roll and somehow he couldn’t stop—pain or no pain. ‘My father was completely humiliated by her desertion and determined to wipe away all traces of her. Something he found surprisingly easy to accomplish.’ He looked into her bright eyes and then he said it. He’d never admitted it before. Never told anyone. Not the therapist he’d half-heartedly consulted when he’d been living in New York, not any of his friends, nor the women who’d shared his bed in the intervening years and tried to dig away to get at the truth. No one. Not until now. He swallowed as the bitterness rose up inside him like a dark tide. ‘I never even saw a photo of her. He destroyed them all. My mother is a stranger to me. I don’t even know what she looks like.’
She didn’t gasp or utter some meaningless platitude. She just sat there and nodded—as if she was absorbing everything he’d told her. ‘But...didn’t you ever think about tracking her down and hearing her side of the story?’
He stared at her. ‘Why would I want to find a woman who left me behind?’
‘Oh, Alek. Because she’s your mum, that’s why.’ She got up and walked across the sun-dappled balcony until she’d reached him. And then she put her arms tightly around his back and held him, as if she never wanted to let him go.
He felt her fingers wrapping themselves around him—like one of those speeded-up documentaries of a fast-growing vine which covered everything in seconds. He tried to move away. He didn’t need her softness or her sympathy. He didn’t need a thing from her. He had learnt to live with pain and abandonment and to normalise them. He had pushed his memories into a place of restricted access and had slammed the door on them...what right did she have to make him open the door and stare at all those dark spectres? Did she get some kind of kick out of making him confront stuff that was dead and buried?
He wanted to push her away, but her soft body was melting against his. Her fingers were burying themselves in his hair and suddenly he was kissing her like a man who had finally lost control. Losing himself in a kiss as sweet as honey and being sucked into a sensation which was making him feel...
He jerked away from her, his heart pounding. He didn’t want to feel anything. She’d stirred up stuff which was better left alone and she needed to learn that he was not prepared to tolerate such an intrusion. She’d done it once, but it would not happen again. With an effort, he steadied his breath.
‘I don’t really want to provide some sort of erotic floor show for the surrounding apartments,’ he said, his voice cold as he walked over to the table and poured himself a glass of juice. ‘So why don’t you sit down and eat your breakfast, before we start sightseeing? You wanted to travel, didn’t you, Ellie? Better not waste this golden opportunity.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IT WAS NOT a successful honeymoon.
Yes, Lucca was completely gorgeous, and, with her brand-new sun hat crammed down over her hair, Ellie accompanied Alek to every iconic destination the beautiful city had to offer. She saw the tower with the trees growing from the top and drank cappuccino in the famous oval piazza. They visited so many churches that she lost count, and ate their meals in leafy squares and hidden courtyards. There were marble statues in beautiful gardens, where roses grew beside lemon trees. And when the sun became too fierce there were shady streets to walk down, with the rich smell of leather purses and handbags wafting out from the tiny shops which lined them.
But a new froideur had settled over Alek. It didn’t seem to matter that her first instincts on meeting him had been correct—and that on some level they were kindred spirits. They’d both known pretty awful childhoods but had just chosen to deal wit
h them in different ways. And yes, she’d managed at last to extract the truth about his past. She now knew him better...but at what price? It hadn’t made them closer, or brought them together in some magical kind of way.
It was as if the confidences she’d forced him to share had ruptured the tentative truce which had existed between them. As if he’d closed right down and shut her out—only this time she sensed there was no going back. No chink of light coming from behind the steely door he had retreated behind. The anger had gone and in its place was a consideration and cool courtesy which made him seem even further away. He spoke to her as if he were her doctor. Was she too hot? Too tired? A little hungry, perhaps? And she would assure him that she felt absolutely fine, because what was the alternative?
But she didn’t feel fine. She felt headachey and out of sorts—with a kind of heaviness which seemed to have entered her limbs and which she put down to the new tension which had sprung up between them. She understood now why he was emotionally distant, but she still didn’t know how to solve it.
Vasos called several times from London but instead of saying something like, sorry, but I’m on my honeymoon—Alek took every call and spent as much time as possible on it. Or so it seemed to Ellie. She would be left sitting on the terrace, her book stuck on the same page while he spoke in a torrent of Greek she couldn’t understand.
She stared at the unread pages of her novel. Had she thought this was going to be easy? Had she been naive enough to think that extracting information about his painful childhood might make him warm and open towards her? If she’d known that the opposite would be true, she might have thought twice before quizzing him about the mother who had deserted him. She slammed the book shut. No wonder he was so closed off. So lacklustre about their baby.
Feeling queasy, she glanced up to see him standing framed by the miniature orange trees which grew on their leafy terrace and frowning as he slid his cell phone back into his pocket.
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