‘And what about me?’ Her voice was high with anxiety. ‘You can’t keep him away from me. That would be beyond cruel.’
His lips curved into a sneer but he shook his head. ‘Do not hold me to your own low standards. You will be taken there in the morning to wait for him.’
Not even in the darkest recess of his mind had he entertained the thought of keeping them apart—not even before he’d spoken to Dimitris and been given the hard facts about what having a child here would mean...not just for him but for Jo too.
For a moment his throat thickened as he saw the despair in her eyes.
She’d lied to him about being on the pill, he reminded himself angrily, whilst images of leaving Illya rained down in his mind.
He’d stood at the back of the ferry, staring at the woman who had helped him through one of the worst nights of his life. Jo had sat on the beach, hugging her legs and watching him leave. He’d kissed her goodbye before boarding, had tasted her sweetness for what he had thought would be the last time.
Why had he strung her along as he had? He’d never made false promises to a woman before. He’d known even as he’d stored her number in his phone that he would never call her. He’d never done that to a woman before. If he had no intention of calling, he never pretended that he would.
But she had really lied to him. He might have broken a minor promise to call but she had lied about being on the pill. If she hadn’t told such a wicked lie...
He wouldn’t have a son.
She’d hit a nerve when she’d asked why he wasn’t going to collect him personally. Theos, he wanted to. If he had superhuman powers he would have already flown to him. And yet...
Trepidation had taken root.
He wasn’t ready for this—wasn’t ready to be an instant father. These few hours while his son was being brought to him would allow him to prepare himself and get his villa made suitable for a small boy.
‘I’ll give you twenty minutes to get the paperwork complete,’ he said.
He’d left Dimitris in the palace library, researching constitutional matters, and he needed to check in with him. He could also do without Jo’s accusatory stare following his every move. She had no right to look at him as if he were the bad guy.
If she thought things were bad for her now, she was in for a nasty shock when he told her the rest of it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
JO HAD LONG given up trying to sleep.
It had been three hours since she’d completed those forms. She’d left them on Theseus’s bureau and returned to her own apartment, locking the door behind her.
She wanted to be alone, was too mentally exhausted to cope with anything else.
Padding over to the kitchen, she poured herself a glass of water and then rummaged in her handbag for some headache tablets. Just as she popped them into her mouth there was a soft rap on the door, followed by the sound of the handle being turned.
She swallowed the tablets down, more pathetic tears swimming in her eyes. It could only be Theseus.
She didn’t want to see him. Not right now, when she was so angry and heartsick that she could punch him in the face. She ignored the knock.
Her numb shock had gone...had been replaced with a burning anger that he could be so cruel. Whatever wrong she’d done—and she’d always known what a terrible wrong it was—this was infinitely worse.
All those years of searching, all those years of raising her child as a single parent, and he thought he could sweep in and turn it all upside down with no consideration for Toby’s emotional state.
And there was nothing she could do about it.
Every scratch of the pen on those forms had felt like a scratch on her heart.
But what choice had she had but to sign them? Theseus was fully prepared to keep her a prisoner until Toby was brought to him. She’d seen the threat in his eyes.
What this meant for her future she didn’t know. His power was too much for her to fight—more than she could ever have appreciated. She was fighting from a power base of zero.
Her head pounded. And her eyes... They’d never felt so gritty—not even when she’d spent a whole day sobbing in fear over how her mother would react to her unexpected pregnancy. The fact that her mother’s only comment had been, ‘For God’s sake, girl, I thought you had more sense than that,’ had been rather anticlimactic after all the angst she’d put herself through.
She should have known her mother wouldn’t be angry. For her to be angry would mean she cared, and if there was one thing Joanne had grown up knowing it was that her mother didn’t care. Harriet Brookes had done her duty. She had fed her and clothed her. But that was the extent of any mothering she’d extended towards her daughter.