by Julia James
That will not be…
Resolution steeled inside him. His son would have a father, and memories of a father, starting right now.
‘Hello, Joey,’ said Xander. ‘I am your father. I’ve come to see you.’
Clare felt the knife go through her throat, and she gasped aloud. Xander ignored her. So did Joey. Joey tilted his head and subjected Xander to an intense look.
‘Fathers are daddies,’ he announced.
Xander nodded. ‘Quite right. You’re a clever boy.’
Joey looked pleased with himself.
‘Clare, give Joey his tea. He’s a growing boy.’ Vi beckoned to her, and cleared some space on the table by her chair. Shakily, Clare crossed and put down the tray.
‘Soldiers!’ shouted Joey, pleased. ‘Eggy soldiers.’ He seized one of the fingers of toast and plunged it into one of the two eggs with the end sliced off, starting to eat with relish. Around his neck, Vi was deftly attaching a bib.
It was all, thought Clare, with a sick, hollow feeling inside her, intensely normal.
Except for one thing.
She rubbed a hand over her brow, her eyes going to the man sitting on Vi’s old sofa. The man who was her son’s father. This couldn’t be happening. It just couldn’t. Wave after wave of disbelief was eddying through her. So much shock. Last night had been bad enough, but now this… This was a nightmare. She couldn’t think, couldn’t feel. Could only watch, with a strange unnatural calm, how Xander Anaketos was watching his son—her son—eat his tea.
He stayed for another half an hour. Time for Joey to finish his tea and start playing with his toys. Clare washed up, trying to do anything to bring back normality—to pretend that her life hadn’t just crashed all around her. She started to get her and Vi’s supper ready, taking a cup of tea in to the other woman. Silently, she placed a mug of instant coffee—black, as she knew he liked his coffee—beside Xander. He gave her a long, level look that was quite expressionless. Then he returned his attention to his son, asking him about the car he was pushing around on the carpet.
‘I like cars,’ said Joey.
‘So do I,’ she heard Xander say. ‘When you’re bigger you can ride in my car.’
‘The big red one?’ asked Joey interestedly.
‘Yes, that one.’
‘Does it go fast?’ Joey enquired, making ‘vrooming’ noises with his own toy car.
‘Very fast,’ said Xander.
‘I like fast,’ said Joey.
‘Me too,’ agreed his father.
‘Can we see it now, outside?’
‘Next time. Today it’s too late,’
‘All right. Next time.’ Joey was contented. He went on chatting to his father.
All the while Vi sat and did her knitting, the needles clicking away rhythmically.
Xander did not speak to Clare until just before he left.
‘I must go now, Joey,’ he said. ‘But I’ll come back tomorrow.’
‘OK,’ said Joey. ‘Then I’ll see your car. Bye.’
Xander looked down at him, one long last look, drinking in every detail, then turned to go. Clare followed him down the narrow hallway to the front door. As he opened it he turned to her.
‘If you try and run again,’ he said, and the way he spoke made the hairs rise on the back of her neck, ‘I will hunt you down. Tomorrow—’ he looked at her, his eyes like weights, pressing into her ‘—we talk.’
Then he was gone.
‘Vi—what am I going to do? What am I going to do?’ Clare’s voice was anguished. Upstairs, Joey slept peacefully, though it had taken him longer to go down than usual. He’d started talking about ‘the man who said he was my father’. It was more curiosity, Clare thought, than reality. But she had been as evasive as she could without arousing suspicion.
A spurt of anger went through her—another one. They’d been coming and going with vicious ferocity ever since she’d shut the door on Xander.
How could he have said that to Joey? Right out—bald. Undeniable. Unqualifiable!
At just gone three, Joey was still feeling his way in using language, and Clare was never entirely sure how much he understood, how much he took in.
Now she sat, her hands wringing together, gazing hopelessly across at Vi.
For a moment Vi did not reply, concentrating on a tricky bit in her knitting. Then, without looking up, she said, ‘You know, Clare, love, I’ve never been one to give advice when it’s not asked for. But…’ her old shrewd eyes glanced at the younger woman ‘…whatever you do, it has to be what’s best for Joey. Not for you. I know that’s hard. I know you came here to me when you were very unhappy, and I know you told me that Joey’s dad wasn’t ever going to be someone who would care about him or you, that he’d just pay money and nothing more, and wish Joey to perdition, and that wouldn’t be good for any child. But—’ her voice changed a little, taking on the very slightest reproving note, while still staying sympathetic ‘—that man doesn’t seem like the one you told me about when you came here. That’s an angry man, love—and not because he’s found out about having a son. If he was angry for that reason, why did he stay here and tell Joey he was his dad? He wants to be Joey’s dad, that’s what.’
Clare just stared. ‘Vi, you don’t understand. He’s not an ordinary man—he isn’t a “dad” as you call it! He lives a life you can’t imagine—’
She fell silent. In her mind she felt time collapse, and saw again the gilded, expensive world that Xander Anaketos moved in—where she had once moved at his side, gowned in dresses costing thousands of pounds, jewels even more—a world as unreal to her now, when her horizons were bounded by finding the best bargains in supermarkets, by ceaseless careful budgeting and never splashing out on anything, as if he came from a different planet.
Vi shook her head. ‘If he wants to be Joey’s dad you can’t stop him, love.’
Clare’s expression hardened. ‘The fathers of illegitimate children in this country have no legal rights over them,’ she exclaimed harshly.
Vi gave her a long look over her knitting needles.
‘We’re not talking law and rights—we’re talking about being a dad to a little lad.’
‘I won’t have Joey hurt.’ Clare’s voice was passionate. ‘I won’t have him thinking he’s got a father, and then he hasn’t. I won’t have Xander swanning in here, upsetting him! Joey’s got me!’
Vi put her knitting down. ‘Oh, love,’ she said, her voice sorrowful. ‘He’ll always have you. But you can’t stop him from knowing his dad—it wouldn’t be right.’
‘But why does Xander care about Joey? He doesn’t care. That’s the point! Vi—you don’t know him. He’s not a man who can feel for others—I know that. Dear God, I know that. He’s just angry because… Because…’
She felt silent again, her chest painful. Why was he so angry? She didn’t understand—she just didn’t. Xander hadn’t wanted her, had thrown her out like last year’s model, chucked and discarded, paid off with a diamond necklace. So why, why had it angered him that she’d disappeared just as he had wanted her to?
Anger warred with anguish.
Vi sighed. A long, heavy sigh, from one who had seen a lot of sorrows in life and knew there wasn’t always anything that could be done about them.
‘Why not just see what happens, pet?’ she said. ‘You’ll always do what’s best for Joey. You always have, you always will.’
The hard, painful knot in Clare’s breast eased, just a fraction. But she still looked at Vi with fear in her eyes. Her heart was squeezed tight, as if in a vice, painful and crushed. Emotion was inside her like a huge, swelling balloon, filling her up, terrifying her. How, how could it be that a bare twenty-four hours ago her life had been normal…safe? Her stomach churned again—it had been doing that over and over, making her feel sick and disbelieving. Hadn’t it been bad enough setting eyes on Xander again like that last night, having the past leap out of nowhere and slam her into the ground like that?
; But that had been nothing to what she had gone through—was still going through—when he had found out about Joey.
The sick feeling intensified. Oh, dear God, what was she going to do?
And even more frightening, more unthinkable, what was Xander Anaketos going to do now that he knew he had a son…?
CHAPTER FOUR
XANDER stood at the window of the reception room in his London apartment, the morning sunshine streaming in. There were no memories of Clare here. He’d moved on since then, and this apartment must be the second or even third he occupied when he was in the UK on business. It was the same with his places in Paris, New York, Rome and Athens. He didn’t keep things long. He changed his cars every year or so, whenever a new model of his favourite marque came out. He changed his watches just as often, whenever a newer and better one was launched. Similarly the yachts he kept at Piraeus and the South of France.
He had no sentimental attachments to things.
Or to women. He changed those just as frequently. He always had. There was, after all, no reason not to…
But a child—a child could not be changed. A child was for ever.
Emotion knifed through him. It had been doing so regularly for the last thirty-six hours. Ever since he’d looked up in the cocktail lounge and seen, for the first time in four years, the woman who had got up from the table at the St John with a low murmur and walked out, vanishing into the night.
He saw again her blank, expressionless eyes as he told her, ‘It’s over.’
Christos—she was already pregnant. She sat there, carrying my son, and then walked out on me without a word. Taking my son with her.
Fury bit savagely. He turned abruptly away from the window and headed for the door. It was time to get this sorted. Time to get his son.
Tension racked through Clare like wire stringing her from the ceiling. She was standing rigid as a board in her bedroom, the upstairs room above Vi’s bedroom, because it was the only place they could be without Joey hearing them from the back sitting room, where he was with Vi, while opposite her Xander stood, his back to the window, silhouetted against the light. It made him look very tall and dark.
Clare felt again that sickening sense of unreality sweep over her.
And something else, too. Something that had nothing to do with the hideous fact that Xander had discovered Joey’s existence and everything to do with the way she was so stupidly, insanely aware of his devastating effect on her.
As she had always been…
No! Dear God, out of everything in this nightmare that was the last, the very last thing she must think about. Once, so fatally, she had been vulnerable to the man who stood looking grimly at her now. But that had been a lifetime ago. Once, so pathetically, she had thought she might mean something to him. But in one callous utterance he had ripped that pathetic hope from her…
He had started to speak, his voice harsh and clipped, his accent even more pronounced than usual. Clare forced herself to listen, however much her stomach was churning.
‘My lawyers are making the necessary arrangements,’ Xander was announcing. ‘There will need to be a prenuptial agreement, and for that reason the ceremony itself must be on a territory where it is legally binding—which is not, so I am informed, the case in the UK. Is, therefore, your passport up to date? And does my son have one of his own? If not, this will need to be expedited. You will also—’
‘What are you talking about?’ Clare’s voice was blank, cutting across his.
‘I am telling you what will need to be done for us to marry—quickly,’ Xander said. His mouth tightened automatically at her interruption—and her question.
‘What?’ Incomprehension, disbelief yawned through her.
His eyes flashed darkly. ‘Did you not realise that I would be prepared to marry you?’
Clare shook her head. ‘No.’
Her voice was hollow.
Xander looked down at her. Had she really not thought he would do so? His gaze narrowed. Was that why she had walked out on him that night four years ago? Had she not realised that he would marry her?
Of course he would have married a woman carrying his child.
Especially—
No. He slammed down the lid on the memory. That was then, this was now.
‘I would have married you four years ago if you had taken the trouble to tell me you were carrying my child,’ he said tersely.
‘Would you?’ Clare replied slowly. ‘Would you really?’
‘Of course.’ His voice was stiff.
For one terrible moment pain ripped through Clare. Oh, God, if she had taken that other road—the one she had refused to take, the one she had had to find all the strength she possessed not to take, not to go back to him, to seek him out, to risk telling him she was pregnant…to risk him rejecting her unborn child.
But she had assumed that he would never in a million years have thought to marry her. She would have been given an allowance, a gagging order so she could not babble to the press about any ‘love-child’ of Xander Anaketos, and then dumped in some expensive villa somewhere where she could raise her son as the unwanted bastard of a discarded mistress…
He would have married me!
Pain ripped again.
Agony.
Because that was what it would have been—just as much as if she had been kept as his discarded mistress bearing his bastard. The agony of being married to him for no reason other than that she had conceived his child. When all along she would have known—as she knew now, so bitterly, had known since that last, lacerating evening with him—just how nothing she was to him.
She looked at him now. Just as he had been able four years ago to stop the breath in her lungs, so he could still do now. The passage of four years had merely matured his features. The breathtaking impact of his masculinity still was as potent as ever.
It would have been torment to have been married to him. And there could still be no greater torment…
‘So,’ he continued, his voice still clipped and harsh, ‘now that you have understood that, perhaps we can finally proceed? If you pack promptly, we can be at my apartment for lunch. Please ensure you have all the legal documents required, such as my son’s birth certificate, and—’
‘I’m not going to marry you!’ Clare’s voice rang out.
‘You will,’ he commanded.
She took a step backwards. She could not be hearing this. She could not be hearing Xander Anaketos calmly announcing that she would marry him. Was he mad?
‘Do not play games over this,’ Xander bit back angrily. ‘Of course we shall marry.’
She shook her head violently. ‘It’s insane to think so!’
Xander’s eyes darkened. ‘If it is the prenuptial agreement you object to—tough. That is not negotiable. You’ve hardly proved trustworthy’
She gave a laugh. It had a note of hysteria in it. It made Xander’s eyes focus on her even more narrowly. She rubbed a hand over her brow.
‘This is insane,’ she said heavily. ‘It’s mad that you should even think of marrying me like this.’ She lifted her eyes to him. ‘I never wanted you to know about Joey. Never!’ She saw his eyes darken malevolently at her words, but ploughed on, ignoring his reaction. ‘I wish you had never found out,’ she said bleakly. ‘I wish I had never set eyes on you again. But it’s too late now. Too late.’ Her voice was heavy. Then she looked at him, her shoulders squaring. ‘I won’t marry you—it’s insane even to think it!’
Something moved in his eyes. Something that made her feel faint. Then there was a caustic etching of lines around his mouth as he replied.
‘You are saying you prefer this—’he gestured with his hand, his eyes sweeping the room, which was furnished with old-fashioned furniture from Vi’s younger days, worn now, as were the carpet and the curtains ‘—to the life you would lead as my wife?’
‘Yes,’ said Clare. ‘If all I cared about was your money, Xander, don’t you think I’d have told you I was p
regnant—even if you had just thrown me out like garbage?’
His eyes flashed again. ‘I did not “throw you out like garbage”! I made suitable alternative arrangements for your accommodation. I gave you a suitable token of my apprec—’
‘Don’t say that word! If you say it one more time to me, I swear to God I will…I will…’
She sat down heavily on the bed, and the springs creaked. Her legs would not hold her up any more.
She looked across at him. He was standing stiffly, rigid.
‘Oh, go to hell,’ she mumbled. ‘Just go to hell, Xander. I know the law will let you have some visiting rights to Joey, and if you really insist on them I know I can’t stop you. But don’t ever think you’re going to get any more. I don’t want you in my life again.’
His face stilled. It sent a shiver of foreboding through her.
‘But I,’ he said, ‘have every intention of being in my son’s life. I have every intention of being his father.’
She gave a twisted laugh, cut short.
‘Father? You don’t know the slightest thing about being a father.’
For a moment there was a silence that could have been cut with a knife.
‘Thanks to you,’ said Xander, softly and sibilantly. ‘Because of you, I am a stranger to my own son. I did not even know his name when I spoke to him!’
Clare’s mouth tightened. She would not let him make her feel guilty. She would not. She stood up, forcing herself upright, folding her arms tightly across her chest. Her chin lifted.
‘Well, if you’re so keen to be a father, come and learn to be one. But listen to me—and listen to me well!’ Her expression grew fierce. ‘Fatherhood is for life, Xander! It’s not some novelty that you can amuse yourself with or get off on self-righteously because I dared to object to the way you treated me and never told you about Joey. Don’t think that being stinking rich means you can just have the easy bits and dump the rest on your paid minions! And above all—’ she bit each word out ‘—it is not something you do without committing to it for the rest of your life. Because if you hurt my son—if you cause a single tear to fall from his eyes because you get bored with him, or put yourself first, or put making money first or, God help you, play with your mistresses first!—then you won’t be fit to be his father!’