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She blinks. Her full lips part. I shove away the brief flash of disappointment and steel myself for her demands.

“I don’t want you around my child. I don’t want to ever see you again.”

I stare at her, waiting for the punchline. But it doesn’t come. No, instead her words stab into me. The conviction in her voice, the certainty that she would be perfectly content to banish me from her life and our child’s, is a hit I never saw coming.

“Our last two encounters haven’t been cordial,” I finally say, “but for good reason.”

A harsh laugh escapes her lips. The brittleness of it crawls over my skin.

“Cordial? No, cruel. Petty. Hurtful.”

She spits the words out like machine gun fire.

“I had a right—”

“To be suspicious. To ask questions. To request a meeting with me, even with my bosses. Not to accuse me of being a conniving seductress or your father’s lackey.”

Her voice darkens on the wordfather. My eyes narrow as an uncomfortable suspicion forms. One I never suspected because I had been too fixated on my own anger.

“Did he force you into this? Hurt you?”

She blinks, surprised by the change in conversation. “Why would you care?”

I run a frustrated hand through my hair. “I’m not a monster, Alessandra. Yes, I’m angry. But that doesn’t mean I want harm to come to you.”

Her shoulders slowly drop down. “No,” she says softly. “He didn’t hurt me. He didn’t pressure me. Intoanything,” she adds with such ferocity I almost believe her. “But as a client, he wasn’t kind.”

Perhaps the nicest way I’ve heard him described as the bastard he is. The man emotionally and mentally abused my mother for the first ten years of my life. On his death, instead ofrighting the wrongs he did to her, he tied the one thing he left her in his will to my fulfilling his wish of getting married.

“Why work for him?”

“Because he requested me. It was the biggest account I’d ever been assigned to, and I wasn’t going to turn down an opportunity like that. And while he wasn’t the kindest of men in the beginning, I didn’t get to see his true face until the morning after I met you.”

My fingers curl into fists. “What did he do?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

I stalk forward and plant my hands on her desk. “Tell me, Alessandra.”

“Attorney-client privilege,” she fires back. “And even if I did tell you, you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Try me.”

She stands slowly, defiance and confidence written in the determined set of her chin and the thin line of her lips.

“I owe you nothing, Mr. Sullivan. Now, I’m tired. It’s late.”

I want to argue. I want to demand that we stay as late as we need to and sort this mess out. Starting with why she was in Santorini and how she came to be in that cliffside bar.

But my current tactics aren’t working. I switch my approach. “How are you getting home?”

“The same way I always do.”

I ran plenty of calls in New York’s metro system during my first years on patrol as a police officer. There’s no way in hell I’m letting the pregnant mother of my child hop a subway train this late at night.

“I’ll drive you.”

“No. Thank you.”