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He assured himself he was overreacting. Sidonie would be back this afternoon and they would talk again. When he’d regained some sense of being in control. He was still shaking with rage at the insinuation that she would have slept with any willing red-blooded man last night because she’d just been horny.
‘My car and driver are outside if you want to use them.’
Sidonie said a quiet, ‘Okay.’ And then she opened the door and left. Alexio had the awful sensation that even while he was so intent on retaining control he was losing it anyway.
* * *
Alexio spent the morning and early afternoon on the phone to his offices in London and Athens. But he couldn’t get his poisonous words to Sidonie out of his head: Millions of other women around the world haven’t had the sense to fall pregnant by a billionaire. Or how stricken she had looked after he’d said them. She’d looked that stricken on Santorini.
A cold fist seemed to be squeezing his heart.
His solicitor Demetrius rang and asked him, ‘When are you going to stop playing nursemaid and come back to work?’
A volcanic rage erupted deep inside Alexio as he recalled how this man, his friend, had unwittingly fed Alexio’s deeply cynical suspicions four months ago, and he slammed the phone down before he could say or do something he might regret. Like fire him. Alexio had no one to blame but himself.
He looked at the phone belligerently. The fact was that he had no desire for work. He had desire only for one thing and he was very much afraid that he had just let that one thing slip out of his grasp.
He picked up the phone again and dialled. After a few seconds a recording of Sidonie’s voice sounded in his ear: ‘I’m sorry I can’t take your call. Leave me a message and I’ll get back to you.
Short, economical. Up-front. Alexio felt sick, and the back of his neck prickled. He didn’t leave a message. He made another call and asked Tante Josephine if Sidonie had left her yet.
Tante Josephine answered him and the panic rose high enough in his throat to strangle him.
He forced himself to sound calm. ‘When did she leave?’
She told him and Alexio did rapid calculations in his head. Somehow he managed to get out something vaguely coherent and then he put down the phone and stood up. And then he sat down again abruptly. Alexio didn’t know what to do, and he was filled with a sense that for the first time in his largely charmed life he couldn’t predict the outcome with his usual arrogance.
An image of his brother Rafaele came into his mind’s eye, and he recalled how turbulent his emotions had been at seeing his brother embrace love and a family. Alexio realised now that he’d been poisonously jealous of his brother. Jealous of what he’d reached out for when everything in his life should have told him it wasn’t possible.
Something was swelling inside Alexio’s chest now—something bigger than the past. And with it came the fear that had held him back that morning. But for the first time Alexio didn’t fight it. And then he felt another very fledgling feeling take hold: hope. Did he dare to think that he too could reach out and take hold of something he’d once believed in? Even if there might be nothing on the other side?
With a grim sense of resolve, and knowing that he just didn’t have a choice any more, Alexio made the first of a series of calls and then instructed his driver to have the car ready.
CHAPTER TEN
SIDONIE SAT IN her seat, legs tucked up beneath her, and looked out of the small oval window of the plane. A faint heat haze shimmered off the tarmac outside. She felt bad about leaving her aunt behind, even if she had assured Sidonie she was fine. She was going to Dublin to enquire about getting back onto the college programme for her final year.
But then she felt the flutters in her belly and panic gripped her. How could she be thinking of going back to college when she was due to have her baby before Christmas? Tears pricked her eyes. She cursed her impetuousness. She hadn’t really thought this through at all. She’d just wanted to get far away from Paris and Alexio’s ongoing mistrust before he reduced her to rubble.
She couldn’t believe she’d left herself wide open to his cynicism again.
She heard the sound of the air hostess saying, ‘Your seat, sir.’
Sidonie’s heart stopped for a moment and she looked around. An incredible sense of disappointment lanced her when she saw a small, very rotund man, sweating profusely, taking off his jacket before he sat down. She looked away, cursing herself again. What had she been hoping for? For history to repeat itself and Alexio to turn up when she wasn’t even on one of his planes?
Sidonie choked back the tears and told herself that she was the biggest idiot on earth for letting her defences down so spectacularly. She bundled up her sweatshirt and put it under her head against the window, hoping to block everything out—including the take-off and landing and disturbing images of a cynical expression that softened only in passion.
* * *
‘I’m sorry, sir, I’m afraid we’ve made a mistake with your seat. I’ll have to move you.’
Sidonie woke up and blinked, surprised to see that they were in the air and she’d missed the take-off. Then she recalled why she was so tired and scowled at the memory. The air hostess was helping the man beside her out of his seat and apologising profusely while he complained vociferously.
Sidonie didn’t mind. His elbow had been digging into her, and if no one else sat down she could—
‘Is this seat taken?’
Sidonie stopped dead in the act of laying out her sweatshirt on the seat beside her as a pillow. She went hot and then cold. She looked up.
