‘There was no point,’ he said blithely. ‘Why pay legal fees when we can talk for free?’
Her skin felt suddenly too tight. There was a long, steady silence as she stared at him incredulously. If she hadn’t been so stunned, she might have laughed. ‘Are you giving me advice?’
There was another long silence, and then he shrugged. ‘Somebody has to. Clearly whoever has been doing so up until now can’t have had your best interests at heart.’
He watched her green eyes widen, feeling childishly but intensely gratified that his words had clearly scored a direct hit. And then he caught sight of the two glasses and abruptly his mood changed, for clearly she hadn’t been planning on spending the evening alone.
Ever since she’d more or less fled from him, he’d been questioning her motives for doing so. Although he knew their relationship was purely professional, Edward Claiborne and Teddie had looked good together, and it had got to him—for, just like his mother, Teddie was not the kind of women to be alone. Despite her denial, he had no doubt that somewhere in the city there was a nameless, faceless man who had stepped into his shoes.
In fact that was why he’d found himself standing on her doorstep. Even just imagining it made a knot of rage form in his stomach, and that enraged him further—the fact that she still had the power to affect him after all these years.
His shoulders tensed. ‘Or perhaps they have their own agenda.’
Teddie felt a rush of anger spread over her skin like a heat rash. ‘Nobody has been giving me advice. I make my own decisions—although I wouldn’t expect you to understand that.’ Heart thumping, she lifted her gaze to his. ‘It was always a difficult concept for you, wasn’t it, Aristo? My being an independent woman?’
His eyes flickered, and she could almost see the fuse inside of him catch light.
‘If by “independent” you mean self-absorbed and unsupportive, then, yes, I suppose it was.’
She caught her breath. The room felt suddenly cramped and airless, as though it had shrunk in the face of his anger—an anger which fed the outrage that had been simmering inside her since meeting him earlier.
‘You’re calling me self-absorbed and unsupportive?’ She glared at him, the sheer injustice of his statement blowing her away. She could feel her grip on her temper starting to slip. How dare he turn up here, in her home, and start throwing accusations at her?
But even as she choked on her anger, she wasn’t really surprised. Back when she’d loved him, she’d known that he had a single-minded vision of the world—a world in which he was always in the right and always had the last word. Her refusing to talk to him now simply didn’t fit with that expectation.
Her motives, her needs, were irrelevant. As far as he was concerned she had merely issued him with a challenge that must instantly be confronted and crushed.
Queasily, she remembered his cold hostility when she’d refused to give up her job. Was that when their marriage had really ended? It was certainly the moment when she’d finally been forced to acknowledge the facts. That marrying Aristo had not been an act of impulse, driven by an undeniable love, but a mistake based on a misguided hope and longing to have a place in his life, and in his heart.
But Aristo didn’t have a heart, and he hadn’t come to her apartment to return a pack of cards. As usual, he just wanted to have the last word.
Crossing her arms to contain the ache in her chest, she lifted her chin. ‘If you believe that, then perhaps I should have given you the number for my doctor, as you’re clearly delusional,’ she snapped. ‘Wanting to carry on doing a job I loved didn’t make me self-absorbed, Aristo. It was an act of self-preservation.’
Aristo stared at her, his shoulders rigid with frustration. ‘Self-preservation!’ he scoffed. ‘You were living in a penthouse in Manhattan with a view of Central Park. You were hardly on Skid Row.’ He shook his dark head in disbelief. ‘That’s the trouble with you, Teddie—you’re so used to performing you turn every single part of your life into a stunt, even this conversation.’
They were both almost shouting now, their bodies braced against the incoming storm.
Her eyes narrowed. ‘You think this is a conversation?’ she snapped. ‘You didn’t come here to converse. I bruised your ego so you wanted—’
‘Mommy—Mommy!’
The child’s voice came from somewhere behind her, cutting through her angry tirade like a scythe through wheat. Turning instantly, instinctively, Teddie cleared her throat.
‘Oh, sweetheart, it’s all right.’
Her son, George, blinked up at her. He was wearing his pyjamas and holding his favourite toy boat and she felt a rush of pure, fierce love as she looked down into his huge, anxious dark eyes.
‘Mommy shouted...’
He bit his lip and, hearing the wobble in his voice, she reached down and curved her arm unsteadily around his stocky little waist and pulled him closer, pressing his body against hers. ‘I’m sorry, darling. Did Mommy wake you?’
Lifting him up, she held him tightly as he nodded his head against her shoulder.
Watching Teddie press her face against the little dark-haired boy’s cheek, Aristo felt his stomach turn to ice.
He felt winded by the discovery that she had a child. No, it was more than that: he felt wounded, even though he could come up with no rational explanation for why that should be the case.
His pulse was racing like a bolting horse, his thoughts firing off in every direction. He could hardly take it in, but there could be no mistake. This child was Teddie’s son. But why hadn’t she told him?