As they rounded the corner into the street where Vi’s house was it was Joey who spoke first, pointing.
‘Big car!’
Clare followed the direction of his pointing, and slowly her heart stopped in her chest. Outside Vi’s house was parked a long, lean, brilliant scarlet monster of a car.
And out of it Xander Anaketos was emerging.
Why? That was the first weird thought in Clare’s stricken brain. Why was he here? What for? What else could he possibly have to say to her, now he’d vented his spleen at her for daring not to be disposed of in exactly the way he liked to get rid of discarded mistresses?
Then, like an explosion in slow motion, she realised that it didn’t matter why he had come here, or how he had found out where she lived.
Because as he started to walk towards them she realised he was not looking at her. His eyes were entirely, terrifyingly, on Joey.
Her breath was crushed from her lungs. She gave a silent, inaudible, breathless scream inside her head.
Desperately her brain worked feverishly. If she could just bundle Joey inside, without him getting close enough to make out his features…
But it was too late. She could see it. See it in the change of expression in Xander’s face. See the shock—the disbelief—jagging across his features.
He stopped. Just halted where he was, in the middle of the pavement, some yards from them.
Greek came from him. Hollow. Rasping.
Then slowly, very slowly, his eyes lifted from his son and went to her.
There was murder in his face.
CHAPTER THREE
XANDER got them indoors. He had no memory of how he’d done it, or of what house they’d gone into. No awareness of anything other than the raw, boiling rage thundering through him. His mind had gone into a white-out.
Somehow, and he had no conscious thought of how, he had got her away from the old woman and the boy.
My son. Theos—my son!
There was no doubt about it—could not be! He could see his own features in the child’s face.
And in hers—oh, he could see completely, absolutely, that she knew the toddler she was pushing along was his. She’d given birth to his son!
An iron will clamped down over the raging voice in his head. Control. That was what he needed now—absolute, total control. He was good at control. He had practised it all his life, from childhood with his stern uncle, who had required silence while he worked, and carrying the same discipline into his business dealings—never letting his rivals see his hand, always concealing his thoughts and aims from them.
And control, too, had been his watchword when it came to his dealings with women. It was the reason he changed them so frequently. A rule he had bent only once…
The irony of it savaged him.
Emotion surged in him like a terrifying monster, but he slammed it back down as he marched Clare down through the house, out through a door at the back, yanking it open and thrusting her outside. There was a garden there, narrow and quite long, with a plastic sand tray and a miniature slide. There were children’s toys, a ball, a push-along dog and some big colourful bricks, on the small stone-paved patio before the lawn started.
He grabbed her elbows and hauled her round.
‘Talk,’ he said.
His eyes bored down into hers like drills.
Her face had gone white. He was not surprised. Guilt was blazoned across it. Rage spurted through him again. The vicious, vengeful bitch! To keep his son from him! Deliberately, knowingly…
‘Talk!’ he snarled again.
Her face seemed to work, but not well. Slowly, faintly, she spoke.
‘What do you want me to say? There’s nothing to say.’
He shook her like a rag, and she was boneless in his grip.
‘You keep my son from me and say there’s nothing to say?’ he demanded, fury icing through his words, his features. ‘Just what kind of a vengeful bitch are you?’
Her expression changed. Blanked.
‘What?’ she said. There was complete incomprehension in her voice.
He shook her again. Emotion was ravening in him, like a wolf.
‘To keep my son from me as some kind of sick revenge!’
Her mouth opened, then closed. Then suddenly she tore free.
‘What the hell do you think you’re saying to me?’
His eyes darkened like night.
‘You kept my son from me because you were angry that I finished with you!’
Her face worked again, but this time there was a different emotion in it. Her features contorted.
‘You conceited oaf!’ she gasped at him. ‘Just who do you think you are? First you think I played some stupid manipulative game by walking out the way I did! Now you think, you really think, that I didn’t tell you I was pregnant so I could get some kind of revenge on you?’
‘What other reason can there be?’ he snarled back at her.
A choking sound came from her.
‘How about the fact you’d just replaced me with a new model and had given me my pay-off of a diamond necklace, like I was some kind of whore?’ she spat at him.
Xander’s mouth whitened.
‘You knew you were pregnant that evening?’ His voice was a raw rasp. ‘You knew you were pregnant and you kept quiet about it! You walk out, carrying my baby, and you never say a word to me—in four years?’
She was staring at him. Staring at him as if he had spoken in Greek.
‘Well?’ he demanded. His jaw was gritted, fury still roiling inside him. Fury and another emotion, even more powerful, that he must not, must not yet yield to, but which was driving him—driving him onwards with impossible motion.
‘You’re not real,’ she said. Her voice had changed. ‘You’re just not real. You actually think I would tell a man who’d chucked me on the garbage pile, who’d paid me off with a diamond necklace, that I was pregnant by him?’
His expression stiffened. ‘I did not “pay you off”,’ he bit out. ‘It’s customary to give a token of appreciation to—’
‘Don’t say that word to me! Don’t ever say that word to me again! And don’t even think of trying to tell me that after you’d just flushed me down the pan I was supposed to announce I was carrying your child.’
Emotion was mounting in Xander’s chest.
‘If you had told me, obviously I would have rescinded my decision to—’
A look of incredulity passed across her contorted features.
‘Rescinded your decision?’ Her voice was high-pitched and hollow. ‘It wasn’t a bloody business meeting. You had made it clear—absolutely, killingly clear—that I was out. You had someone new to warm your bed and that was that.’
His face tightened. ‘Obviously, had you told me that you had got pregnant, then everything would have been very different.’
She turned away. The gesture angered him. He reached out for her again, his hand closing on her shoulder.
She froze at his touch. He could feel it, all her muscles tensing. Her reaction angered him even more. Why should she resist him?
She never resisted me—always yielded to me…eager for me. All that cool, English composure dissolved, like ice in heat…my heat…
He thrust the memory aside. It was irrelevant. All that was relevant now was to deal with this shattering discovery.
I have a son!
The impulse, overwhelming and overpowering, to go now, this instant, to find the child that was inside the house, find him and—
No, he could not do that either. Not yet. Not until—until…Christos, he could hardly think straight, his mind a storm of emotion.
His hand dropped from her.
‘As,’ he said heavily, ‘it will be different now.’
She was still half turned away from him. He could not see her face. He didn’t care. Providing she could hear, could understand, that was all that mattered. He fought the storm inside him for control. He had been iron-willed all day. Controlled enough to instruct his London PA, very calmly, to find out the address of Clare Williams from the hotel she had been working at. Detached enough to rearrange today’s schedule so that he could be free by late afternoon to drive and find her. She’d run out on him once before, vanished into the night—she was not going to do so a second time.
But the reason he had sought her out had evaporated—instantly, like water in a volcano—the moment he had realised just what Clare Williams had done to him…
Emotion whipped through him again, that white-hot disbelieving fury that had ripped through him the moment his eyes had gone to the child in the buggy she had been pushing.
That was all that concerned him. That was all that consumed him.
But he must control it. Giving vent to the storm inside him would achieve nothing. With Herculean effort, he hammered down his emotions.
‘I want to see him.’
His voice was flat. Very controlled.
She turned her head back towards him. Her eyes were quite blank.
She uttered a single word. A word that went into him like a knife.
‘Why?’ she said.
Carefully, very carefully, he layered icy control over his features.
‘Because he is my son,’ he enunciated. Then, before she could answer, he walked back indoors.
The elderly woman was in the small, drab sitting room. It looked ancient, and so did she. She was sitting in an armchair and the television was on, with a cartoon. His son was sitting on her lap, lolled back on her, all his attention on the screen.
As Xander walked in, the woman looked at him. She was old, but her eyes were sharp. They rested on him for a second, then went past him. Behind him, Xander could sense Clare. The child did not look round.