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It was her turn to experience a quiet astonishment. ‘No one has ever given you something without wanting something in return, have they?’ she asked in a hushed wonder. ‘Is that why you end all your liaisons with lavish gifts? Because you think it’s expected of you?’ She pointed to the necklace she’d placed on her bedside table. ‘Is that what the diamonds are for? Because you think once you pay me off I’ll have no right to make any further demands of you?’
He stared at her for a frozen moment before he turned away. ‘I’m not sure when you think I signed up for psychoanalysis but, I assure you, it’s becoming exceedingly boring.’
Her reply was halted by a knock on the door. Alexis snatched the robe draped at the foot of the bed, avoiding his gaze as she secured the belt.
Then he was opening the door, instructing his staff to take his cases down.
Alexis stood frozen as he turned back. ‘Alexis—’
‘If you’re going to tell me again that I’m boring you, I don’t want to hear it. I think we’ve said everything that needs saying, don’t you?’ She held on to her anger, because it kept her upright. Kept her from crumbling.
His lips moved, as if to contradict her. But after a moment, he gave a terse nod.
Then he just...walked out.
Alexis staggered to the bed, sank on it, numb. After long minutes, she heard the helicopter take off and didn’t move. A knock on the door didn’t stir her. When whoever it was went away, she crawled beneath the sheets once more, her eyes on the ceiling.
The sense of loss seemed unsurmountable, the swiftness with which her world had come crushing down making her nauseous. But had it even been her world in the first place?
What did it matter now?
She’d gambled with her heart and she’d lost. Again.
* * *
The numbness remained over the next few days, the only times she roused herself the times she spent with Costas.
She sensed his gaze on her intermittently, but he never commented on his grandson’s absence. And she never volunteered information.
Before she knew it a week had passed and she was still in the dark as to whether she carried Christos’s child or not. Not that it dimmed the yearning in her heart.
And when the morning came ten days later that she accepted Christos wasn’t coming back, and that she might possibly need to face single motherhood alone, she packed her bags, summoned Christos’s jet. And said goodbye to Drakonisos.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IT SHOULD’VE BEEN EASY.
He’d been on an emotionally destructive path, and he’d course-corrected. The same way he’d hardened his heart to his father’s stumbling apology, even though a traitorous part of him had urged him to allow it, should’ve been the way he dismissed Alexis’s audacity to tell him there was another way forward.
He didn’t deal in hope. Or require his father’s regret to heal.
Why couldn’t he stop thinking about Alexis’s words? Or forget the pain in his father’s eyes as he’d walked away from him? Why had he spent the last two weeks with the growing sensation that he’d made the worst mistake of his life?
We can make it work together, Christos.
The sweet promise of those words had terrified him more than anything else she’d flung at him, perhaps with the exception of the shocking flame of pure terrifying joy that had lit his soul at the possibility that he might be a father, even though he knew he lacked the basic tools of success.
The conviction of that lack was what had propelled him onto his helicopter and off Drakonisos. It had lasted through the court hearing that finally granted Demitri custody of one son and through the meeting that secured a custody arrangement for the other.
He tried to remain removed as he observed father and sons reunited. But he couldn’t stop the clamouring in his heart that’d started the moment Alexis had confessed that she might be pregnant.
The wild panic had dulled. There’d been a peculiar kind of serendipity in setting eyes on his father on the same day he’d learned that he might become a father too. He’d taken it as a timely reminder of his past. What he’d overcome.
But the truth was, he’d never felt as exposed, as vulnerable as he had in the hours after he’d parted ways with his father, when he’d walked the dark landscape of the only true home he’d known. He’d felt he was every inch the abomination he’d named himself, incapable of giving Alexis what she sorely needed—love. Besides that, every imaginable scenario for success required he open his heart, risk more pain. Because if he’d wanted love as a child, wouldn’t his own child demand it? Wouldn’t the woman who’d counter-dared him to be brave, then watched him leave with disappointment and pain in her eyes?
He’d been right to accuse her of seeing too much.
He passed his hand over his jaw, encountered the stubble and inwardly grimaced. He was supposed to be his own man, yet a simple thing such as shaving off the stubble Alexis had found so sexy had become impossible.
