A Stormy Greek Marriage (7 page)

Alexei dealt her a gleaming look of contempt. ‘Just another forgettable shag, was I?’

‘I wouldn’t know about that—I don’t have anyone to compare you to!’ Billie snapped back at him furiously. ‘I was a virgin.’

Alexei nodded acceptance of that fact. ‘Okay, so talk…’

Billie wandered restively over to the window and turned her narrow back to him in self-defence. In truth she had near-perfect recall of their time together and she repeated snatches of conversation and mentioned the sharing of the shower and the reason for his departure. ‘I think you fell down the steps because you tripped over my handbag…I’d dropped it on the floor by the door on the way in,’ she completed woodenly.

The silence stretched and gnawed at her nerves. Throwing back her head, vivid coppery hair falling back from her pale cheeks and brow, Billie straightened her stiff shoulders and spun back to him. ‘So, now you know that Nicky is your son—’

Her husband’s lean powerful visage hardened from the reflective look he had worn. ‘And I so easily might never have known,’ he interrupted. ‘Had I married Calisto, you would
never
have told me—’

She was alert to the renewed tension in the atmosphere. Billie’s spine went rigid and a smidgeon of colour warmed her cheeks. ‘I don’t know what I would have done if you had married her,’ she contradicted.

An ebony brow quirked, for he was unimpressed by that claim. ‘Don’t you? You would have deprived me of my son, denied my son his father and disinherited him of
his Drakos heritage,’ he condemned, taking her breath away with those hard-hitting charges. ‘Both he and I would have paid a very steep price for our ignorance of our bond. Were you planning to lie to him when he got old enough to ask who his father was?’

‘I hadn’t got that far, for goodness’ sake. I hadn’t even thought about stuff like that!’ Billie disclaimed in a tone of unconscious appeal. ‘Nicky’s only a baby—’

Alexei raised his head high, dark golden eyes hard with censure. ‘Nikolos is my son and you passed him off as someone else’s, even brought him into my home in that false guise. As a mother, you failed in your duty to him.’

Shaken by those accusations, Billie felt her cheeks grow hot. ‘And as a wife?’ she chipped in helplessly.

‘You leave more than a little to be desired,’ Alexei delivered without hesitation and he swung open the drawing-room door and stood back with contrasting courtesy for her exit. ‘Now I would like to see my son. At least you had the good sense to bring him here with you.’

Billie felt rather as if a whip had somehow contrived to lash her skin below her clothes. Anger sparking, she tried to defend herself. ‘In my position some women would have opted for a termination and your son would never have been born.’

‘Maybe you saw his existence as money in the bank for a future power-play. Certainly that is how your mother thinks and don’t try to tell me otherwise. Lauren is always out for what she can get.’

At that cruel taunt, her delicate facial bones tightened below her fair skin and her fingernails bit sharp crescents of restraint into her palms, because she truly
wanted to shout and scream at him for daring to make that humiliating comparison. He had never in his life before compared her to her feckless and avaricious parent, and that he should do so now hurt like the sharp slice of a knife in already tender flesh. ‘I’m not like my mother and you know I’m not.’

Crossing the big echoing hall on his passage to the grand staircase, Alexei skimmed a cool glance at her taut profile. ‘Once I would have agreed with that statement, but not any more. I don’t know you the way I thought I knew you.’

A lump formed in her throat. ‘I don’t feel I know you either just at this moment.’

‘I’m still very angry with you,’ Alexei responded with succinct bite. ‘Of course I am. I’ve already missed out on months of my child’s life and I’m a complete stranger to him.’

Mounting the stairs by his side, Billie murmured, ‘I thought you weren’t ready for a child.’

‘He’s
here
, ready or not!’ Alexei quipped with derision.

‘I didn’t realise you’d feel this way.’

‘Until I found out about Nikolos, neither did I,’ Alexei admitted in a raw undertone. ‘But he’s the next generation of my family and his beginnings couldn’t have been worse! He’s my responsibility and the buck stops here.’

Ouch
, Billie thought at that far-reaching assumption of responsibility but she said nothing, recognising that he had to have a lot of conflicting feelings to work through and that in many ways he was probably still in shock at the result of the DNA test. All of a sudden he had been plunged into fatherhood and the smokescreen
with which she had surrounded Nicky’s birth and paternity only complicated that state of affairs.

Kasma was playing with Nicky on the floor of the well-appointed nursery. Alexei told the nursemaid to take a break and the young Greek woman had barely crossed the threshold when he bent down to scoop his son up off the carpet. Taken by surprise, Nicky loosed a startled yell of complaint and scowled at his father.

‘He can be a bit strange at present; he’s not comfortable with anyone he doesn’t know,’ Billie warned him reluctantly, mentally willing Nicky to be compliant and friendly at this crucial first meeting with his father.

Alexei drew his son awkwardly closer and Nicky burst into noisy floods of tears and wrenched his little body dramatically sideways in his mother’s direction.

Billie reached out to take her distraught son into her arms. ‘Try playing with him first,’ she suggested.

‘I’ve never played with a kid in my life,’ Alexei said flatly. ‘Is he always this jumpy or is it just me?’

‘Babies can be very sensitive to atmosphere and we’re both fairly tense.’

Alexei studied his son’s truculent little face with intense interest. He scanned the baby’s tousled black hair, his olive skin tone, his big dark accusing eyes and the manner in which he was clinging to his mother. Alexei wondered how he hadn’t guessed that Nikolos was his child for, in his opinion, the physical resemblance was marked. How come some sixth-sense prompting hadn’t urged him to take a closer look at Billie’s supposed cousin? How come he hadn’t tied together the evidence of her unexplained sickness as reported by Anatalya and her months-long career break, which had come out of
nowhere at him? But he knew exactly why he hadn’t put it all together.

He had had no recollection of their sexual encounter and he had trusted her absolutely while she had gone to extraordinary lengths to deceive him: there was no getting round that unpleasant truth.

Billie lifted up a picture book and pushed it into Alexei’s hand. ‘That’s Nicky’s favourite. I’ll put him in the baby seat and you can read it and show him the pictures.’

‘Surely he’s still too young for stories?’

‘He always looks interested and stays quiet while I read to him. Babies like familiar rituals.’

With a strong air of reluctance, his lean dark features tense, Alexei sank down in the armchair beside the baby seat and leant down to Nicky’s level. ‘You don’t have to stay,’ Alexei told Billie. ‘I don’t need an audience for this.’

Billie would have preferred to stay to act as a buffer and a source of advice, but then Alexei had always been very self-sufficient in the face of a challenge. She walked out of the door and closed it, listened outside as her son started to sob at her departure and heaved a sigh as she moved away again. If there was a lesson to be learned, Alexei would only learn it the hard way and at his own pace.

Alexei had never had to entertain a child before, but his quick intelligence soon came to his aid. In no time he had the box full of toys by the wall emptied and he was demonstrating the different items for his son’s amusement. The tears dried on the little boy’s face as he slowly responded to that stimulation. He smiled when Alexei got him out of the baby seat and sat him on the carpet
instead. He gurgled with pleasure when Alexei showed him the different noises one toy made and stretched out his hand for it, pummelling it with a chubby fist, only to start complaining when he couldn’t get the same sound to emerge. Alexei showed him again and took a little fist and showed him where to press. Nikolos chortled with satisfaction, thumped the toy energetically several times with his clenched hand and then suddenly held out his arms to Alexei to be lifted.

Kneeling on the carpet in front of his son, absently wondering when he would be old enough to appreciate mechanical toys, Alexei froze at that unexpected invitation. The baby gave him a huge grin and, ending his hesitation, Alexei moved forward and lifted him. Nikolos grabbed his father’s tie and yanked it, and then put it in his mouth to chew. Alexei deprived him of the tie, sprang up to find a source of distraction and found it in the view from the window. While he was showing his son the trees, the tractor and the sheep that were visible, the little boy laughed and tried to copy him and point his own fingers, brown eyes full of life and fun.

And, for Alexei, that unstudied moment of shared relaxation suddenly became one of the most important and emotionally gripping of his life. Only a few hours earlier he had decided that he was still too young and selfish to be a parent. At the speed of light he had worked out all the drawbacks of parenthood, swiftly recognising the boundaries that would now be imposed on his once free and untrammelled lifestyle. He might have had no experience of young children but he certainly knew enough to know that a child was major baggage.

But now memories were surfacing of his own father and with them a rich appreciation of the fact that
he
was
still young enough to fully understand what his child would enjoy and to actually play with him. Constantine Drakos had never, ever played with his son and had treated him like a miniature adult. Their relationship had always been sedate and a little detached with Alexei’s mother cheerfully supplying the glue of family affection and all the fun.

Ten minutes later Alexei was sitting with Nikolos on his lap and he was reading the few words in the picture book and, what was more, he was bringing an excitement to that familiar pastime, for Alexei mimicked the noises the different animals made when Billie had merely read them.

When Billie reappeared an hour after her departure, all was quiet in the nursery. Alexei moved a silencing finger to his mouth; their son was fast asleep in his arms, as relaxed as if he had known his father from the day of his birth. Both surprised and pleased by that discovery, Billie smiled warmly, relief uppermost. She had no idea what Alexei had done to win the little boy’s trust but, whatever it was, he had clearly done it well.

‘I am grateful you had him,’ Alexei admitted outside the door and as she gazed up at him, a vulnerable light in her emerald-green eyes, his handsome mouth compressed. ‘But he deserved that you should have told me the truth right at the beginning of your pregnancy.’

Her eyes veiled. ‘Maybe so.’

His lean, strong face clenched hard. ‘You know better than that. I have work to catch up on before dinner,’ he responded, heading for the stairs, making no attempt to hide his exasperation with her.

Grovelling didn’t come naturally to her, Billie recognised ruefully as she entered the master bedroom to
decide what to wear for their evening meal. He remained angry with her, while refusing to accept that she had grounds for being angry with him as well. There were two sides to every story. He needed to acknowledge that his partial amnesia had put her in an untenable and humiliating position and then Calisto’s arrival on the scene had proved to be the last straw. She had given birth to their child without his support and the deep unhappiness and loneliness that she had endured during the long months of her pregnancy still haunted her. Hilary had been marvellous but her company had also made Billie feel that she had to act as if she were a good deal happier and more positive than she actually was. For months she had lived behind a false face and had maintained that she was feeling fine.

Desperate to escape the circuitous anxiety of her thoughts, Billie took out her father’s letter and read it again. She decided to phone Desmond Bury there and then, have a chat and see how she felt about him without making a major production out of establishing contact. After all, Desmond might be her father but he was also a stranger with whom she might have nothing whatsoever in common. At the same time, however, she and her mother were so different that she could not help hoping that she might find something of her own nature reflected in her other parent.

Her heart was in her mouth when she made the call and a crisp businesslike male voice answered on the fourth ring. She heard his surprise when he realised who she was and then, with an endearing warmth and enthusiasm that touched her, he aimed a flurry of eager questions at her. He was surprised when she told him that she had a son and marvelled that there had been no
mention of Nicky’s existence in the newspaper article he had read. When she admitted that she was actually in England, rather than Greece, he asked if she would like to meet him and in receipt of a positive response immediately offered to get together with her in London. She arranged to meet him the very next day for lunch.

Proud that she had had the courage to make that phone call, Billie showered and set out black silk trousers and a sapphire-blue evening top to wear, before lifting a magazine she had bought at the airport to read. She frowned with distaste when she came on a little newsy segment on Calisto, photographed looking every inch a top model dressed in the latest fashion and talking about how much she loved living in Paris. Billie stilled and studied the building in the backdrop of the photo, which struck her as familiar. It dawned on her that she knew that street, knew it really well because she had on several occasions visited the splendid town house that Alexei owned there. Just as suddenly she was recalling that photo of Alexei with Calisto in Paris and appreciating that the pavement café they had been patronising could well be the one she recalled being just round the corner from the town house.

Could Calisto currently be living in Alexei’s Parisian home?