Slowly and carefully, Billie read the letter. For all its startling opening, it was a remarkably sensible and far from dramatic communication in which its writer, Desmond Bury, explained that he had fallen in love with her mother, Lauren, when she’d come to work as a teenage receptionist at his father’s vehicle-repair garage. An engagement had followed during which Lauren had fallen pregnant. Sadly, by then, Lauren had decided that she no longer wanted to marry Desmond and, having told him that she intended to seek a termination, she had dumped him for another man. He’d had no further contact with Lauren until he’d come upon a newspaper article about Billie’s engagement to Alexei, which had also featured a picture of her with Lauren. Ever since he had been wondering if Billie could be his daughter, for her age and colouring fitted that scenario. The letter concluded with a small paragraph on Desmond’s history. He had eventually married and was now the widowed owner of a flourishing chain of garages. If Billie believed that she might be his daughter, he would like the opportunity to meet and get to know her.
Five minutes after her third reading of the missive, Billie drove down to the village with Nicky to see her mother and handed her the letter. ‘Is there any truth in this? Is it possible that this man could be my father? Were you once engaged to him?’
Lauren grimaced and rolled her eyes theatrically several times while she read the letter. ‘Yes to all those questions,’ she said grudgingly. ‘But he’s got no right telling you that I considered a termination while I was carrying you…’
‘I think he may only have mentioned that because he wanted me to know that he would have taken an interest in me sooner had he known I existed,’ Billie responded mildly. ‘And I don’t blame you for considering it…’
‘Well, you can thank Hilary for the fact I didn’t go ahead with it!’ Lauren fielded tight-mouthed. ‘But I’ve got no regrets where Desmond was concerned. He was a bore, middle aged at twenty-five, a pipe-and-slippers man, not my type at all.’
‘So why, when I was a teenager, did you tell me that I was the
result of a one-night stand?’ Billie asked painfully. ‘That upset me and I honestly thought you didn’t know who my father was.’
Lauren laughed heartily at that candid admission. ‘I thought you would blame me for not marrying Desmond and giving you a more conventional childhood.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t marry him just for the sake of it,’ Billie told the older woman truthfully. ‘It would never have worked out if you were so different.’
‘Will you get in touch with Desmond?’ Lauren prompted with a frown. ‘You know, he’s really not an exciting person.’
‘If he is my father, I would like to meet him.’
‘Oh, he is definitely your father,’ Lauren confirmed with a sigh, as if she was more embarrassed than anything else by that.
The next day Billie arrived in London and climbed into the limo that would waft her, Nicky and Kasma to Hazlehurst. She had dressed with care in a beautifully elegant dark purple suit, rescued from looking like office apparel by a short skirt, high heels and snappy accessories. Kasma, who had only been abroad once before, was excited by everything she saw while Nicky looked adorable in a practical blue-striped playsuit and little jacket. The closer they came to their final destination, the more nervous Billie became.
Basking in early summer sunlight, Hazlehurst looked idyllic. The house wore its Georgian beginnings with style and elegance. The redoubtable housekeeper looked surprised when Billie arrived with a child in tow but wasted no time in calling another member of staff to escort Kasma and her charge upstairs to the nursery floor. Even before Billie was directed into the drawing room to see Alexei, her tummy was rolling and her skin dampening with nervous perspiration.
The tall front windows had a wonderful view of the lawns that ran below beech trees clad in the fresh green of their seasonal finery. Poised to one side of that view, Alexei looked formidable, sheathed in a dark pinstripe business suit of flawless cut and tailoring. His lean, darkly handsome face was taut and unrevealing, but his brilliant eyes glittered with a light that warned her that appearances could be deceptive, and that he was by no means as calm as he might seem on the surface. Alexei was, after all, studying her as if he had never quite seen her before.
‘You…know,’ Billie guessed immediately, her voice emerging strangely squeaky and insubstantial from her lips. Even when he intimidated her, he could still take her breath away with his stark male beauty and high-voltage sexual magnetism. No matter what thoughts ran through her anxious mind, at the back of those thoughts she was recalling the hard driving rhythm of his lean powerful body on and inside hers and the ecstasy of release that had allowed her, for such a brief time, to feel close to him. Was it any wonder that her throat was dry and her lungs reluctant to give her more oxygen?
‘I received the DNA results early this morning. At first I couldn’t credit it,’ Alexei imparted between compressed lips, more than a hint of ferocious self-discipline still etched in his tense stance and forbidding aspect.
‘You should have known I wouldn’t lie about something that was so easily proven one way or other,’ Billie dared, lifting her chin in challenge. ‘Of course, Nicky is your child.’
‘But I remember nothing,’ Alexei growled in a driven undertone, his incapacity in that field evidently now a source of deep resentment. ‘Although I now know it obviously happened, it’s still a challenge for me to accept that I slept with you that night and that I was so careless that I got you pregnant.’
Dismayed by that punishing choice of wording, Billie flinched. ‘All I can say is that we were both upset and vulnerable that evening and when we were together it didn’t feel wrong or out of place.’
His intense stare made her feel as though he would like to get inside her memory of that evening and take it from her rather than simply share it with her. She sensed his duality in the strong current of aggression that still ran beneath his self-disciplined surface and wondered at it. He was not reacting to the revelation of Nicky’s paternity as she had hoped or expected and yet she could not have said precisely what was wrong with his attitude.
‘I don’t want platitudes from you. I want to know exactly what happened between us…’
Unsure as to what he meant by that statement, Billie worried at her lower lip with her teeth. ‘The obvious happened—’
She collided with unrelenting dark golden eyes. ‘I want to know what I did, what I said, what you did—every detail,’ Alexei told her flatly.
Embarrassment swallowed Billie whole and glued her tongue to the roof of her mouth. ‘I don’t remember much,’ she fibbed in desperation.
Alexei dealt her a gleaming look of contempt. ‘Just another forgettable shag, was I?’
‘I wouldn’t know about that—I don’t have anyone to compare you to!’ Billie snapped back at him furiously. ‘I was a virgin.’
Alexei nodded acceptance of that fact. ‘Okay, so talk…’
Billie wandered restively over to the window and turned her narrow back to him in self-defence. In truth she had near-perfect recall of their time together and she repeated snatches of conversation and mentioned the sharing of the shower and the reason for his departure. ‘I think you fell down the steps because you tripped over my handbag…I’d dropped it on the floor by the door on the way in,’ she completed woodenly.
The silence stretched and gnawed at her nerves. Throwing back her head, vivid coppery hair falling back from her pale cheeks and brow, Billie straightened her stiff shoulders and spun back to him. ‘So, now you know that Nicky is your son—’