Her husband’s lean powerful visage hardened from the reflective look he had worn. ‘And I so easily might never have known,’ he interrupted. ‘Had I married Calisto, you would never have told me—’
She was alert to the renewed tension in the atmosphere. Billie’s spine went rigid and a smidgeon of colour warmed her cheeks. ‘I don’t know what I would have done if you had married her,’ she contradicted.
An ebony brow quirked, for he was unimpressed by that claim. ‘Don’t you? You would have deprived me of my son, denied my son his father and disinherited him of his Drakos heritage,’ he condemned, taking her breath away with those hard-hitting charges. ‘Both he and I would have paid a very steep price for our ignorance of our bond. Were you planning to lie to him when he got old enough to ask who his father was?’
‘I hadn’t got that far, for goodness’ sake. I hadn’t even thought about stuff like that!’ Billie disclaimed in a tone of unconscious appeal. ‘Nicky’s only a baby—’
Alexei raised his head high, dark golden eyes hard with censure. ‘Nikolos is my son and you passed him off as someone else’s, even brought him into my home in that false guise. As a mother, you failed in your duty to him.’
Shaken by those accusations, Billie felt her cheeks grow hot. ‘And as a wife?’ she chipped in helplessly.
‘You leave more than a little to be desired,’ Alexei delivered without hesitation and he swung open the drawing-room door and stood back with contrasting courtesy for her exit. ‘Now I would like to see my son. At least you had the good sense to bring him here with you.’
Billie felt rather as if a whip had somehow contrived to lash her skin below her clothes. Anger sparking, she tried to defend herself. ‘In my position some women would have opted for a termination and your son would never have been born.’
‘Maybe you saw his existence as money in the bank for a future power-play. Certainly that is how your mother thinks and don’t try to tell me otherwise. Lauren is always out for what she can get.’
At that cruel taunt, her delicate facial bones tightened below her fair skin and her fingernails bit sharp crescents of restraint into her palms, because she truly wanted to shout and scream at him for daring to make that humiliating comparison. He had never in his life before compared her to her feckless and avaricious parent, and that he should do so now hurt like the sharp slice of a knife in already tender flesh. ‘I’m not like my mother and you know I’m not.’
; Crossing the big echoing hall on his passage to the grand staircase, Alexei skimmed a cool glance at her taut profile. ‘Once I would have agreed with that statement, but not any more. I don’t know you the way I thought I knew you.’
A lump formed in her throat. ‘I don’t feel I know you either just at this moment.’
‘I’m still very angry with you,’ Alexei responded with succinct bite. ‘Of course I am. I’ve already missed out on months of my child’s life and I’m a complete stranger to him.’
Mounting the stairs by his side, Billie murmured, ‘I thought you weren’t ready for a child.’
‘He’s here, ready or not!’ Alexei quipped with derision.
‘I didn’t realise you’d feel this way.’
‘Until I found out about Nikolos, neither did I,’ Alexei admitted in a raw undertone. ‘But he’s the next generation of my family and his beginnings couldn’t have been worse! He’s my responsibility and the buck stops here.’
Ouch, Billie thought at that far-reaching assumption of responsibility but she said nothing, recognising that he had to have a lot of conflicting feelings to work through and that in many ways he was probably still in shock at the result of the DNA test. All of a sudden he had been plunged into fatherhood and the smokescreen with which she had surrounded Nicky’s birth and paternity only complicated that state of affairs.
Kasma was playing with Nicky on the floor of the well-appointed nursery. Alexei told the nursemaid to take a break and the young Greek woman had barely crossed the threshold when he bent down to scoop his son up off the carpet. Taken by surprise, Nicky loosed a startled yell of complaint and scowled at his father.
‘He can be a bit strange at present; he’s not comfortable with anyone he doesn’t know,’ Billie warned him reluctantly, mentally willing Nicky to be compliant and friendly at this crucial first meeting with his father.
Alexei drew his son awkwardly closer and Nicky burst into noisy floods of tears and wrenched his little body dramatically sideways in his mother’s direction.
Billie reached out to take her distraught son into her arms. ‘Try playing with him first,’ she suggested.
‘I’ve never played with a kid in my life,’ Alexei said flatly. ‘Is he always this jumpy or is it just me?’
‘Babies can be very sensitive to atmosphere and we’re both fairly tense.’
Alexei studied his son’s truculent little face with intense interest. He scanned the baby’s tousled black hair, his olive skin tone, his big dark accusing eyes and the manner in which he was clinging to his mother. Alexei wondered how he hadn’t guessed that Nikolos was his child for, in his opinion, the physical resemblance was marked. How come some sixth-sense prompting hadn’t urged him to take a closer look at Billie’s supposed cousin? How come he hadn’t tied together the evidence of her unexplained sickness as reported by Anatalya and her months-long career break, which had come out of nowhere at him? But he knew exactly why he hadn’t put it all together.
He had had no recollection of their sexual encounter and he had trusted her absolutely while she had gone to extraordinary lengths to deceive him: there was no getting round that unpleasant truth.
Billie lifted up a picture book and pushed it into Alexei’s hand. ‘That’s Nicky’s favourite. I’ll put him in the baby seat and you can read it and show him the pictures.’
‘Surely he’s still too young for stories?’
‘He always looks interested and stays quiet while I read to him. Babies like familiar rituals.’