‘When I saw her in Paris. She said you wouldn’t leave me with custody of Nicky, that you would take him off me and that she was willing to help you bring him up!’
Alexei stared at her in frank disbelief. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that before? How could you listen to such ridiculous lies?’ he demanded accusingly. ‘I know how much you and my son mean to each other. No matter what happens between us, I would never part you from him—’
‘You parted us a month ago,’ Billie reminded him.
‘For a matter of hours, and only to get you here in order to give our marriage a fighting chance!’ Alexei protested in heated disagreement. ‘You’re a wonderful mother and our son will always need you. How could you have listened to Calisto’s poisonous claims?’
‘How could you put her in your house in Paris and expect me to accept it?’
His dark gaze gleaming golden, Alexei flung up lean brown hands in a furious show of frustration. ‘Because I owed her! I was the one who changed my mind about our relationship. She didn’t change, I did. In the name of God, Billie, how could you not have told me about what happened between us after the funeral? Didn’t it occur to you that I might have forgotten but that I might feel that I had lost something, even if I didn’t know what that something was?’
Wide-eyed and shaken by that counter charge, Billie watched him stride closer. ‘Lost something?’ she repeated uncertainly. ‘I’m not sure I know what you mean—’
‘We forged a connection that night deep enough to haunt me when I lost it again,’ Alexei argued. ‘But I had to remember how I felt that night to realise why I’d ended up charging into a rebound affair with Calisto.’
‘You’re saying you remember being with me that night now?’ Billie questioned weakly. ‘If that’s true, why didn’t you tell me?’
Alexei released a shaken laugh that carried more bitterness than amusement. ‘Why did it never occur to you that I would be ashamed of what I would remember of that night?’
Her brow indented. Ashamed? She almost bleated out the word again in dismay, but she was fed up of trying and failing to guess what he meant and this time she said nothing.
‘Of course, I was ashamed,’ Alexei grated in a low driven voice. ‘I took advantage of you.’
Tenderness touched her frantic thoughts, slowing the flow of them. ‘No, you didn’t. You were lonely, shaken up, vulnerable…’
‘And I took advantage of you just like your mother has accused me of doing,’ Alexei completed resolutely. ‘But on the same night while I was with you I realised that I was very probably in love with you and that I had been for some time.’
Blinking rapidly, Billie gazed back at him with frowning force. ‘But that’s not possible!’
‘You got under my skin…you infiltrated me and I didn’t even know it was happening to me,’ Alexei bit out with annoyance at his lack of self-knowledge on that score. ‘Suddenly I was always comparing other women to you and you were winning hands down in every comparison—sex was just the next natural step that night but that shouldn’t have been how it happened between us.’
‘You weren’t in love with me,’ Billie told him flatly. ‘And how else should we have become intimate? One doesn’t always plan these things.’
‘You deserved more from me than what you got that night when I was drunk and confused and more than a little spooked by the weird way I was feeling,’ Alexei extended wryly. ‘When I was willing to wait until we were married—that respect and patience was a better demonstration of how I should have treated you from the first, agapi mou.’
My love, he’d called her, and Billie co
uld hardly get her head around the staggering declaration engrained in that endearment. Her attention locked to his lean darkly handsome features, she breathed uncertainly. ‘I just don’t believe what I’m hearing from you!’
‘When I fell down the steps and hit my head outside the guest suite, I forgot more than what we shared in your bed that night,’ Alexei continued vehemently. ‘I forgot how happy I was, how convinced I’d become that I had finally found the right woman for me. Why the hell do you think that I took the risk of making love to you without contraception? That was so out of character for me, it should have screamed at you and convinced you that I was planning a lot more than a brief sexual encounter with you!’
And there was so much truth in that contention that Billie finally allowed herself to listen. In truth, she had noticed that he was not quite himself that night and some of the stuff he had said to her had seemed to indicate a greater degree of involvement with her than she might have expected. But she had been quick to dismiss any such hopes, even quicker to assume the worst of a male who had apparently so often treated sex like a takeaway meal—cheap and disposable and forgettable. Her own cynicism and low expectations, she recognised ruefully, had combined to ensure that she was reluctant to confront him with the facts of their intimacy. In the expectation of disillusionment, she had ironically ensured that disillusionment was exactly what she had received.
‘I just assumed it would mean nothing to you and that maybe you forgot because you didn’t want to remember it.’
Alexei compressed his lips. ‘There may be some truth in that angle, but not on the score of what happened between us. A few weeks ago, I did consult a psychiatrist about those hours I couldn’t remember and he suggested that my mind could be reluctant to recall my grief for my parents that night. He was of the opinion, however, that since I had already contrived to recall one moment of those missing hours, I would eventually remember more. I did consider having hypnotherapy…’
‘I had no idea you were that bothered about not having those memories,’ Billie confided.
‘Of course I was bothered. That encounter was central to our marriage and your attitude of distrust. I had to remember what I did that night to understand how horrific the experience must have been for you. One minute we were together and then the next, it was like it had never happened—’
‘Yes, it was very painful,’ Billie acknowledged unhappily, grateful he understood and astonished that he had seen a psychiatrist in an effort to deal with the issue and find a solution. ‘But I really didn’t know what to do about it. Staying quiet seemed the most sensible move on every count—of course I didn’t think of what might happen if I fell pregnant. When did you remember it all?’
‘I had a couple of small flashes and then, one morning, I woke up and the whole recollection was just there,’ he revealed. ‘I was shattered when I realised how I’d felt that night with you.’
‘And you truly think you got involved with Calisto because you were on the rebound from me?’ Billie whispered doubtfully.
‘Didn’t it ever cross your mind that Calisto and I had as much in common as a dog and a cat?’ Alexei enquired drily. ‘What drew me back to her was familiarity—my recollection of how I felt about her as a teenager and the fact I couldn’t have her. Of course what I wanted then from a woman is not at all what I want now. It took me a while to appreciate that Calisto only married Bethune because at that time he was a better financial bet than I was, as a son still dependent on a father for support.’