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‘You…know,’ Billie guessed immediately, her voice emerging strangely squeaky and insubstantial from her lips. Even when he intimidated her, he could still take her breath away with his stark male beauty and high-voltage sexual magnetism. No matter what thoughts ran through her anxious mind, at the back of those thoughts she was recalling the hard driving rhythm of his lean powerful body on and inside hers and the ecstasy of release that had allowed her, for such a brief time, to feel close to him. Was it any wonder that her throat was dry and her lungs reluctant to give her more oxygen?
‘I received the DNA results early this morning. At first I couldn’t credit it,’ Alexei imparted between compressed lips, more than a hint of ferocious self-discipline still etched in his tense stance and forbidding aspect.
‘You should have known I wouldn’t lie about something that was so easily proven one way or other,’ Billie dared, lifting her chin in challenge. ‘Of course, Nicky is your child.’
‘But I remember nothing,’ Alexei growled in a driven undertone, his incapacity in that field evidently now a source of deep resentment. ‘Although I now know it obviously happened, it’s still a challenge for me to accept that I slept with you that night and that I was so careless that I got you pregnant.’
Dismayed by that punishing choice of wording, Billie flinched. ‘All I can say is that we were both upset and vulnerable that evening and when we were together it didn’t feel wrong or out of place.’
His intense stare made her feel as though he would like to get inside her memory of that evening and take it from her rather than simply share it with her. She sensed his duality in the strong current of aggression that still ran beneath his self-disciplined surface and wondered at it. He was not reacting to the revelation of Nicky’s paternity as she had hoped or expected and yet she could not have said precisely what was wrong with his attitude.
‘I don’t want platitudes from you. I want to know exactly what happened between us…’
Unsure as to what he meant by that statement, Billie worried at her lower lip with her teeth. ‘The obvious happened—’
She collided with unrelenting dark golden eyes. ‘I want to know what I did, what I said, what you did—every detail,’ Alexei told her flatly.
Embarrassment swallowed Billie whole and glued her tongue to the roof of her mouth. ‘I don’t remember much,’ she fibbed in desperation.
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.
