Involved in fast mental calculations as he counted the months, Gio compressed his wide sensual mouth into a hard line of distaste. ‘So, it was some kind of rebound thing after me,’ he assumed.
‘Not everything in my life is about you!’ Billie snapped back defensively.
‘But obviously the kid’s father isn’t still around—’
‘Not all men are cut out to be fathers,’ she parried.
‘The least a man should do is stand by his own child,’ Gio pronounced, startling her with that opinion. ‘It’s his most basic duty.’
‘Well, mine didn’t...’ and she almost reminded him that his father hadn’t either but that felt like too sensitive a point to raise in the mood he was in.
‘Whatever.’ Gio shifted a broad shoulder sheathed in butter-soft leather in a Mediterranean shrug as he moved past her to the door, clearly eager to be gone this time around. ‘You should’ve told me about the child the minute I reappeared. It’s a game changer, not something I could accept.’
Once, Billie would have assumed that she would experience a certain bitter satisfaction from Gio, in his ignorance, rejecting his own child, but instead guilt bit deep into her uneasy conscience. The passage of time had softened her outlook. Nothing was as black and white as she had believed when she had given birth to Theo without Gio’s knowledge. Less emotional now than she had been then, she knew that Gio had wronged her but that Gio’s wrong did not necessarily make her decisions right. A child wasn’t a trophy or a payback for an adult’s unkindness. A child was only a small human being, who might well not appreciate the choice she had made when he was old enough to have an opinion.
* * *
For Gio the next morning started with a bang when the fax spewed out a document and kept on printing. He scooped up the first page on the way to the shower and froze when he realised that he was looking at a facsimile of a birth certificate.
Theon Giorgios, a little boy aged fifteen months, had been born to Billie Smith. Theon was his grandfather’s name and the child’s age left no doubt of when conception had occurred.
Gio swept up the other pages of the report that had come through. His hands were trembling with rage. He was so angry, so incredulous that he wanted to smash something. He had trusted Billie and yet self-evidently she had betrayed his trust. He struggled to cool down for long enough to take a rational appraisal of the facts. No method of birth control was fool proof. He knew that intellectually, but he had always been careful, determined never to be caught in that net by something as basic as biology.
Billie had been on the contraceptive pill but side effects had led to her trying several brands before finally choosing to have an implant put in her arm instead. In short he had allowed her to take contraceptive responsibility and it was very possible that she had simply fallen victim to the failure rate. He set down the report, strode into the shower and, below the pounding beat of the overhead power shower, he thought with an incredulous wonder that was entirely new to his experience, I have a son.
An illegitimate son. He didn’t like that; he didn’t like that aspect at all. Gio was rigid in his views in that line and was well aware that his half-sister had suffered from having neither a father nor the acceptance and support of her own family. Times had changed since then and the world in general was much less concerned about whether or not children were born within marriage. In the Letsos family, however, such formal acknowledgements of inheritance, status and honour still mattered a great deal.
That Billie had lied outright to him shocked Gio the most and by the time he had finished reading that report and had learned about his son’s surgery, Billie’s unacceptable childcare arrangements and the unsavoury character of the woman she was living with, he wasted no time in setting up a video-conference meeting with his legal team in London to get advice. That discussion concluded, Gio knew what his options were and they were very few and the fierce temper he usually kept under wraps was boiling up like lava below his calm surface. He was in a situation he would never have chosen and, worst of all, a situation he could not necessarily control. He would fight dirty if he had to, very dirty if need be. Billie might have taken him by surprise but Gio knew where his priorities lay.
That same morning, Billie felt washed out because she had tossed and turned through the night and she got up early and was sitting with a cup of tea when Dee came downstairs smothering a yawn and swearing she was going straight back to bed.
‘I’ve done something awful,’ she confided to her cousin, quickly filling in the details and wincing when Dee looked at her in surprise and dismay. ‘I know, it was totally wrong of me to tell Gio that Theo was another man’s child—’