‘This isn’t about us any more.’ His voice rang with certainty. ‘Max is my number-one priority.’
‘You haven’t even met him.’
Dimitrios’s expression barely shifted, yet a shiver ran down Annie’s spine. ‘A point I wouldn’t labour, if I were you.’
She bit down on her lip. ‘I only meant that he’s also my number-one priority. Don’t swoop in and act as if you’re the only one capable of prioritising him.’
‘With all due respect, Annabelle, when I look around this home I see someone who is proud—to a fault. You described me a moment ago as “richer than Croesus”, and yet you have been living here in abject poverty, barely making ends meet.’
‘That’s presumptuous of you.’
‘No, it’s not. Your credit rating is in dire straits, you’re weeks behind in the paltry rental payments, you don’t have private health insurance, you don’t have a car, you look as though you haven’t eaten in a week...’
She gasped. ‘Dimitrios...have you had me investigated?’
‘You kept my child from me. Don’t you think I had a right to find out how he’s been living?’
Annie tried to calm her racing heart but she felt as though she were drowning in the sea of his accusations.
‘You could have just asked me.’
His eyes held a silent challenge. He didn’t need to say what he was thinking—she could read it in his face. You might have lied. Inexplicably, tears filled her eyes. She blinked rapidly to clear them, but one escaped and slid slowly down her cheek, dripping on to the table top.
‘This is not the end of the world.’ His words were gentle.
She stood uneasily, running a hand through her hair as she moved into the kitchen. She wasn’t particularly thirsty but restlessness made her act. She pulled two glasses down and filled them from the tap, before returning to the table.
‘I can’t imagine how you must feel,’ she said softly, shaking her head. ‘You’re being so calm and reasonable, but you must feel...’
His eyes sparked with hers for a moment and her heart turned over in her chest.
‘Yes, I feel,’ he agreed gruffly. ‘I have missed six years of our son’s life—because of a decision you made.’ He mirrored her earlier gesture, pushing his chair back and standing, crossing his arms. ‘I feel everything you might expect,’ he said, his voice lowering, calming, his eyes showing anguish but not anger. ‘But what good can come of making you pay for that now?’
His eyes probed hers for several long seconds, as though he was scanning her innermost thoughts, assessing her piece by piece.
‘Should I punish you, Annabelle? Take our child away from you, like you took him away from me?’
A shiver ran the length of her spine and she lifted a hand, pressing it over her mouth.
‘Should I put you through a legal battle you definitely cannot afford, and which I will undoubtedly win? Should I make sure the press has all the gory details, so that you’re branded all over the Internet as the kind of woman who’d keep a child separated from his father?’
She wrapped her arms around her slender frame, her eyes huge in her delicate face.
‘Don’t think these options didn’t occur to me. I left last night because each and every one of them was running through my mind, begging to be thrown at you, hurled in a way that could cause the most damage. Surely you deserve that?’
Pain tore through her.
‘But then
I thought of the little boy, and how much he must love you. I thought of how, when he is a man, he will judge me for the decisions I make today. He will look at me as a hero or a villain based on how I treat you—his mother. And so I came here to extend an olive branch I’m not sure you deserve, but that I need you to accept. Because I will do whatever it takes to have him in my life.’
It was too much. Too kind, too reasonable, so full of love for their child—not his, not hers but theirs. Yet there was still the lurking undertone of a threat. She could tell he didn’t want to carry his threats out, yet he would. Of course he would! If she didn’t comply, he would take Max away from her.
She couldn’t let that happen, even when the idea of marrying Dimitrios terrified her.
‘Marriage is—’ She hesitated, thinking of all the childish fairy-tales Lewis had filled her head with. ‘It’s meant to be so much more than this.’
A muscle jerked in his jaw. ‘Meaning?’