It wasn’t possible.
‘Rumour has it you two hooked up one night, about nine months before this little boy was born.’
Rumour? No. A source. There was no rumour about a child of his or he would have heard it much sooner. Somehow, this man had been given the information from someone who knew way too much.
Annabelle?
He rejected the idea immediately. If she’d wanted anyone to know, she would have come directly to him. Wouldn’t she?
‘Don’t you get it, Annabelle? I was drunk. I came here because I was thinking about Lewis, and I was missing him, and I wanted to talk to someone who would understand. That—’ he’d pointed to the bed ‘—was never meant to happen. I would never choose to go to bed with you. Surely you can see that?’
‘So?’ Ashton pushed. ‘Any confirmation? Have you met your son, Dimitrios?’
His son. It was as if the dynamite kept sparking and exploding, reigniting and exploding all over again. His arm took most of his body weight. His symmetrical face looked as though it had been sculpted with a blade. Tension radiated from his pulse points.
‘Look after her for me, Dim. Annie’s going to be devastated. She won’t cope with this. Please check in on her. Make sure she’s okay.’
Guilt nauseated him, as always. The sense that he’d failed his friend, and broken the death-bed promise Lewis had extracted from him, all because grief had driven his body to seek consolation in the one way he knew how. He’d failed Lewis and he’d never forgiven himself for that misstep.
And what about Annabelle? his brain demanded, reminding him that she had been grieving too. And he’d taken advantage of that, seeking solace in her arms, in her body, irrespective of the damage he might have been doing to her already tender heart.
‘Annie Hargreaves is a long-time friend of the family,’ he muttered, knowing it was the worst thing to say. It was feeding the flame with oxygen.
Ashton’s laugh made Dimitrios want to snap something in half. ‘A bit more than that, by the looks of it.’
Instincts took over, a ruthless streak turning his voice to stone. ‘You do realise you’re about to ruin a child’s life for the sake of circulation?’
‘And you claim to have a problem with that?’
Dimitrios couldn’t respond. Zach and he had seen their world-wide viewership and readership treble in the last decade. He couldn’t—wouldn’t—trivialise the work journalists did. He’d long since given up any hope that his life could be played out privately. Despite his personal wishes, he was considered to be someone of interest, a public figure, and his life—to some extent—was a free-for-all.
He ground his teeth together, the whole situation one that filled him with a sense of dark impatience.
‘Let me get back to you.’
He hung up the phone and jammed it into his pocket, pushing away from the window without taking a step back from the glass.
‘You must know how I feel about you, Dimitrios...’
‘How you feel? Christ, Annabelle, you’re little more than a child. I haven’t thought about you or your feelings except for the fact you’re Lewis’s little sister.’
The little sister he’d promised Lewis he’d look after.
She’d winced.
‘Then let me tell you now. I like you. I think I...no... I’m sure that I love you.’
It had been like having a gun pushed to his temple. Sheer panic flooded his nervous system. He’d made a mistake and it was going from bad to worse. He’d had to disabuse her of any idea that he could do this. He’d had to make a clean break, remove any hope she might have had that he could offer her more.
‘You’re deluding yourself. Nothing about this was “love”. It was sex, plain and simple. And you know what the worst of it is? I was so drunk I barely even remember what we did.’
Her face had scrunched in pain and he’d been glad. He was pushing her away to punish himself—she should hate him. He deserved that.
‘I have a life. A girlfriend.’
All the colour had drained from her face.
‘And you are a mistake I’ll always regret.’