by Lynne Graham
Thankfully, however, Pixie was now able to work and contribute to the household bills, but the larger she got, the harder she was finding it to work a twelve-hour shift. Her exhaustion had been another factor that had persuaded her that she needed help and that she had to approach Tor for it even if it was the very last thing she wanted to do.
After all, it wasn’t as though she had even been a one-night stand who had fallen inconveniently pregnant. Tor hadn’t sought her out, hadn’t personally selected her from any crowd of available women, he had simply kissed her and ended up having sex with her because he had fallen asleep in the wrong kitchen. Proximity had been their downfall and every step of the way she had encouraged him with her willingness. She should have said no, she should have called a halt but, controlled by that crazy excitement, she had been greedy, immature and selfish.
Pixie was still convinced that Tor would not have chosen to have sex with her had he been in full control of himself. But alcohol, grief and a nasty blow to the head had made him vulnerable and she, who should have known better, had urged him on.
Even worse, she didn’t want to be another problem in his life. She didn’t want to upset him. But once she’d realised that false pride was keeping her from reaching out for the assistance she needed, she had finally seen common sense. Unhappily, getting a personal meeting with Tor was probably as easy as getting to have tea with the Queen.
‘Miss Miller, I’ve called Security to show you the way out,’ the receptionist informed her with a fixed, unnatural smile. ‘There’s no point in you sitting here waiting when Mr Sarantos is unavailable.’
And that was when Pixie appreciated that by following the rules she had got as close to Tor as she was ever likely to get. As soon as the receptionist returned to her desk, Pixie rose and began walking down the wide corridor that led to the imposing double doors, behind which she had estimated lay Tor’s office.
A shout hastened her steps. ‘Hey! You can’t go in there! Security... Security!’ The receptionist was screeching at the top of her voice.
Pixie thrust down the door handle and stalked right in. Tor swung round with a phone gripped in one hand. Impossibly elegant and tall, he wore a dark pinstriped suit teamed with a white shirt and a snazzy red tie. He looked indescribably sophisticated and intimidating, not remotely like the man who had sat at the kitchen island and eaten a cheese toasted sandwich with every evidence of normal enjoyment.
‘What is the meaning of this interruption?’ Tor demanded imperiously, studying her with frowning intensity.
And Pixie held her breath and waited...and waited...for recognition to colour that cool, distant stare. It didn’t happen, and that absence of recognition flustered her even more.
‘Don’t you remember me, Tor?’ she murmured almost pleadingly, cringing inwardly from that note in her own voice.
‘I don’t know who you are. How could I remember you?’ he enquired cuttingly, his attention lowering to the prominent swell of her abdomen, his wide sensual mouth tightening when he registered that she was pregnant.
‘That night you were with me last year,’ she whispered uncertainly, tears involuntarily stinging her eyes at having to voice that lowering reminder. ‘I came to tell you that I’m pregnant.’
Derision hardened his lean, darkly handsome features. ‘I’ve never seen you before and if you want to make fanciful allegations of that nature, I suggest you approach my lawyers in the usual fashion.’
‘Sorry about this, sir. She wouldn’t listen to reason!’ the receptionist snapped, a hand closing over Pixie’s forearm to prevent her from moving deeper into the office. ‘Security are on their way.’
Pixie had never felt so humiliated in her life.
I don’t know who you are... I’ve never seen you before.
Perhaps it had been naïve of her not to expect that sort of rejection. Perhaps it had been ridiculously optimistic, even vain, for her to expect Tor Sarantos to remember her after a casual sexual encounter. To be strictly fair though, she supposed her appearance had changed since her green hair had faded and eventually washed out entirely.
Even so, she just hadn’t been prepared for him to look through her as if she didn’t exist, and then perceptibly wince when the tears her pregnancy hormones couldn’t hold back flooded down her cheeks and a noisy sob was wrenched from her.
An older man began easing her back out of the office again and by then she was crying so hard, she could hardly see to walk. And what a terrible irony it was for her to hear Tor intervene loudly with the words, ‘Be careful with her...she’s pregnant!’ As if he were the only person who might have noticed the vast swell of her once-flat stomach.
‘Well?’ Jordan had demanded expectantly, when he’d come home from his barista job that evening. ‘What did he say?’
And for the first time she had told her brother a little more of the truth of how very fleeting her intimacy with Tor had been. Jordan had simply shrugged and said that such facts were irrelevant and that the father of her child still had obligations to meet.
‘Not until the baby is born,’ Pixie had protested, cutting through Jordan’s insistence that she needed a solicitor to fight for her rights.
Jordan generally got aggressive and argumentative in difficult situations but that wasn’t Pixie’s way. It took her weeks to get over that distressing encounter in Tor’s office, when he had denied all knowledge of her. She had wondered if Tor was telling the truth, or if indeed he remembered her perfectly well but just didn’t want to be bothered or embarrassed or reminded of what had happened between them that night. And that wounding suspicion had cut her to the quick.
Admittedly, she wasn’t a beauty like the women she had seen him with in the media. She wasn’t a socialite, a model or an actress who swanned around in designer clothing and posed for photos. She was a very ordinary young woman. A handful of small, unexpected events and coincidences had put her on intimate terms with Tor and resulted in her ending up in bed with him.
He had been special to her, but she hadn’t been special to him. They had both walked away afterwards, both of them probably feeling the same: that it shouldn’t have happened. So, it didn’t really matter whether Tor genuinely didn’t remember her, she told herself, or whether he was simply pretending not to remember her. At the end of it, his distaste and derision that day in his office stayed with her and understandably coloured her attitude to him. After that experience, she was pretty convinced that even though she was pregnant by him, Tor would prefer not to know, and her conscience quietened. She decided that she didn’t need his help and that she didn’t want his financial assistance either, no matter what arguments her aggrieved brother put up!
Present day
Pixie wakened and revelled in the quietness of the house, smothering a yawn as she sat up and wondered if Jordan had taken Alfie out to the park.
She smiled as she thought of her son. He was nine months old, big and strong for his age, hitting every developmental target ahead of time and already trying to walk.
Coco slunk up the stairs to greet her with delighted purrs and she petted the cat with a warm smile. Steph had begun leaving Coco with Pixie whenever she went abroad, and weeks would pass before she finally reappeared to collect the little animal again. In the end, she had asked if Pixie would like to keep the Siamese because she was finding pet ownership too much of a tie.
Pixie crossed the landing to the bathroom and went for a quick shower before dressing. Everything she did was done by rote because she had been working night shifts since Alfie was born. In the morning she came home, fed and dressed her son and then went immediately to bed while Jordan took charge of Alfie for a few hours.
Working nights as a nurse, combined with Jordan’s freedom to choose his shifts as a barista, meant that she didn’t have to pay for childcare. Considering the amount of debt that her brother seemed to have acquired since he had lost his in
surance job, that was fortunate. Clad in cropped jeans and a long-sleeved cotton top in raspberry pink and white stripes, she descended the creaking narrow staircase.
The terraced house was small, but she had managed to squeeze a cot into her bedroom and there was a little backyard she was currently cleaning up to serve as a play area for Alfie once he became more mobile. She was taken aback to find her brother sitting at the tiny breakfast bar with a beer.
‘Where’s Alfie?’ she asked. ‘And why are you drinking at this time of day?’
Jordan shot her a defiant look. ‘I’ve sorted things out for you,’ he said, compressing his lips.
As she took after her mother in looks, Jordan took after their father. He was tall with dark hair and a beard and spectacles, which gave him a slightly nerdy look.
‘What things?’ she questioned with a frown as she glanced into the cramped lounge, expecting to see her son playing on the floor with his toys. The room, however, was empty and the toy box sat untouched by the wall.
‘Your situation, the mess you made having that child...against all my advice!’ her brother complained loudly.
‘Jordan...where’s Alfie?’ Pixie exclaimed, cutting across his words.
And then he told her, and she couldn’t believe her ears, was already snatching up her coat and her bag in sheer panic at the danger he had put her son in. ‘Were you out of your mind?’ she demanded in disbelief.
‘Alfie’s his kid. He should be looking after him and taking care of all his needs!’ Jordan countered heatedly.
‘You abandoned my son in the street, where anything could have happened to him?’ Pixie yelled at him full blast.
‘No, I stood out of sight and watched to see that he was taken into the house before I walked away. I’m not an idiot and he is my nephew. He may be a nuisance, but I do care about the little tyke!’
‘What house?’ she demanded in sudden sincere bewilderment.
There was another wildly frustrating hiatus while Jordan explained how he had paid some man he met in a pub to find out Tor’s London address. By the time she’d dug that information out of her sibling she’d already ordered a taxi—because no way, no how, when her baby boy was in danger, was she heading out on a bus or a train to reclaim him!
Jordan pursued her right out onto the street, heatedly arguing his point of view, which was that her attitude towards caring for Alfie had been wrong from the start.
‘You could’ve made a killing out of having that child and now you will,’ Jordan declared, striking horror into her bones. ‘And it’ll be all thanks to me for looking out for your interests.’
‘Not everything is about money, Jordan,’ Pixie breathed in disgust. ‘And I did not have Alfie to feather anyone’s nest!’
She slumped in the taxi, sick to her stomach. When had money come to mean more to Jordan than his own flesh and blood? Had she always been blind to that side of her brother? How had she contrived to ignore the fact that Jordan had only begun supporting her desire to have her baby after he had grasped that Alfie’s father was a very rich man? Even back then, had Jordan been viewing her little boy as a potential source of profit? As the ticket towards an easier life? Her stomach shifted queasily. And what on earth was her brother expecting to happen now that he had confronted Tor Sarantos with the child he didn’t want to know about?
Was Jordan hoping that Tor would pay handsomely for her and Alfie to go away and not bother him again? What other scenario could he be picturing? And how could she continue living with and entrusting Alfie’s care to a man who could behave as he had done and put an innocent child at risk?
Still in a panic, Pixie leapt out of the taxi and rushed up the steps of the imposing town house. It was a three-storey Georgian building in a grand city square with a private park in the centre. She rang the bell and thumped the door knocker as well, so desperate was she to reach her son.
An older woman with an expressionless face answered the door.
‘My son was left here...accidentally,’ Pixie said with a shaky smile. ‘I’m here to collect him.’
In silence the door widened, allowing her to step into a cool, elegant hall. A fleeting glance was all it took for Pixie to feel shabby, poor and out of her comfort zone as she stood there clad in her cheap raincoat and scuffed trainers. The aromatic scent of beeswax polish lingered in the air, perfectly matching the gracious interior of polished antiques and a truly splendid classical marble sculpture that looked as though it should be in a museum.
‘I will ask if Mr Sarantos is free to see you,’ the woman said loftily.
As Pixie hovered, she saw two men in suits standing almost out of sight down a short side corridor, both men avidly studying her, and she flushed and turned her head away, relieved when the older woman reappeared and asked her to follow her.
A clammy feeling of disquiet engulfed Pixie’s body, quickening both her heartbeat and her breathing as she contemplated the unpleasant prospect of meeting Tor Sarantos again. A man who had utterly rejected her during her pregnancy, who insisted he didn’t recall ever even meeting her before? Of course, she didn’t want to see him again.
But, sadly for her, Jordan had made it impossible for her to continue sitting on the fence and avoiding the issue of Alfie’s existence and his father’s responsibility towards him. Now she had to come clean about events eighteen months earlier, regardless of how embarrassing or humiliating that might be. Pixie lifted her chin and reminded herself that all she should still feel guilty about was surrendering to a meaningless sexual encounter while neglecting to protect herself from the risk of a pregnancy.
That horrid little scene in Tor’s office had clawed away the finer feelings of guilt that he had once induced in her. Going through a pregnancy and the delivery of her child with only Eloise’s occasional support as a friend had made Pixie less self-critical. She had done all right alone; she might not have done brilliantly but there were many who would have coped worse and complained a great deal more. She had nothing to apologise for, she told herself bracingly.
Tor was in a very grim mood. He didn’t like mysteries or unexpected developments and the instant the same woman who had forced her way into his office the previous year appeared in his office doorway, a chill of foreboding slid down his rigid spine. Who the hell was she? Stymied by the lack of information about her that day, he had failed to establish her identity after the event and had waited impatiently to see if any claim for child support arrived with his lawyers. When no such claim had arrived, he had written off her visit to a possible mental-health issue. But if she was the child’s mother, who was the man surveillance had on tape who had left the child on the doorstep?
‘I’m here to pick up my son,’ Pixie announced stiffly, her slim shoulders rigid because being even the depth of a room away from Tor Sarantos was too close for comfort. ‘I’m sorry you’ve been dragged into this...er...situation.’
There he stood, tall, poised, predatory dark eyes locked to her like grappling hooks seeking purchase in her tender skin. He was angry, suspicious, everything she didn’t want to be forced to deal with but, even with him in that mood, she wasn’t impervious to how gorgeous he was, clad in an impossibly elegant dark grey designer suit, sharply tailored to his lean, powerful frame. And while still being that aware of his movie-star-hot looks annoyed her, it also reminded her of how very strange it was that she could ever have conceived a child with a man so far out of her league.
That night they had been together so briefly loomed like a distant and surreal fantasy in the back of her mind and her face heated with mortification because that night was the very last thing she wanted to think about in his presence.
‘You need to come in, take a seat and explain what you describe as a “situation” to me,’ Tor said coolly, watching her like a hawk.
She was incredibly tiny and curvy with a torrent of golden curls that framed her heart-shaped
face and enhanced her crystal-blue eyes. Something about her eyes struck him as weirdly familiar; there was something too about that soft, full, pink mouth and the stirring of that vague chord of familiarity spooked Tor as much as a gun held to his head. Because Pixie Miller, whoever she was, was not his type. He had always gone for tall brunettes and certainly not a tiny blonde, who from a distance could probably still be mistaken for a child.
‘I don’t want to talk to you... I just want to collect my son,’ Pixie told him truthfully.
‘I’m afraid it’s not that simple. I need to know what’s going on here and then I need to contact social services.’
‘Why would you need to contact them?’ Pixie gasped in dismay, the colour draining from her face.
‘Come in, sit down,’ Tor repeated steadily, wondering why she was so skittish and reluctant to speak up when presumably the baby had been dropped as a most effective way of grabbing his attention and forcing such a meeting. ‘And then we can talk.’
Pixie clenched her teeth together hard and steeled herself to walk into the book-lined room. He planted a seat down in front of his desk and tapped it.
Pixie slung him a mutinous glance. ‘I’m not sitting down while you stand over me,’ she warned him. ‘Where’s my son?’
‘In a safe environment being cared for by a nanny. If it makes you feel more secure, I will sit down as well,’ Tor breathed impatiently, stepping back behind his desk and dropping down into the leather office chair there.
‘You mentioned social services,’ Pixie reminded him tautly. ‘Why?’
Tor ignored the question. First, he wanted some facts. ‘Who was the man who left the baby outside this house?’
Pixie stiffened. ‘My half-brother, Jordan. We had an argument...er...a misunderstanding,’ she corrected uncomfortably.