He knew. Finally.
It was over.
No more secrets and lies—at least, not to Max.
‘Yes.’
He flinched, his cheeks darkening. Perhaps she’d been wrong about him; maybe he hadn’t already known? His jaw tightened, as though he was grinding his teeth together. She looked down at her knees because she couldn’t bear to look at him a moment longer. ‘He’s six and his name is Max. I have photos—’
‘Photos?’ His voice made thick with emotion. ‘Give me one reason why I shouldn’t go into his room right now and take him away with me!’
Her heart skipped several beats; her lungs failed to inflate. She reached for the arm of the sofa in shock, gripping it hard, feeling as though her eyes were filling with darkness again. She stood up quickly, shaky legs or not, needing to feel more physically prepared for that kind of challenge.
‘I’ve already seen a photo. The journalist had one.’
That stopped Annie in her tracks. Despite the shock, her rational brain began to assert itself. He’d mentioned a journalist earlier, only she’d been so blindsided by seeing him here she hadn’t registered that point. ‘What journalist?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘No one can know about this. It’s impossible.’
Dimitrios’s eyes narrowed. ‘You made sure of that?’
She swallowed, hearing the silver blade to his voice, the undercurrent of displeasure that he had every right to feel. ‘Yes.’ She had; she was sure of it.
‘Not well enough, apparently.’
‘It’s just not possible.’ She shook her head. ‘He doesn’t share your surname. No one ever knew about...’ She stumbled, biting down on her lip, as the traitorous word ‘us’ had been about to escape. There had never b
een an ‘us’. That implied togetherness. Friendship. A relationship, even. They’d had an ill-thought-out one-night stand. Nothing more meaningful than that. ‘What happened that night,’ she finished awkwardly.
‘You never mentioned it to anyone?’ he pushed, and his obvious doubts on that score raised her feminist hackles.
‘What’s the matter, Dimitrios? Does that hurt your pride? Did you think I would scream what we’d done from the rooftops?’
A muscle jerked in his jaw and she had a sense he was trying very hard not to give into his anger. Only she found she wanted his anger—it felt appropriate, given what they’d been through and were now discussing.
He spoke calmly, but she could see how that cost him. ‘I thought you were a decent person; I believed you to be like Lewis.’ She recoiled at the invocation of her brother’s name, at Dimitrios using Lewis against her like that. ‘But a decent person would never have kept something like this from me.’
‘A decent person wouldn’t have said all the things you did to me that night,’ she responded in kind, carefully keeping her voice soft, though it shook with the effort. ‘A decent person wouldn’t have shown up drunk on my doorstep—days after my brother’s funeral, might I add—and spent the night making love to me only to throw in my face the next morning how little that—I—meant to you.’
His expression was inscrutable, but his body was wound tighter than a coil. ‘And so this is retaliation? You wanted to hurt me?’
She shook her head. ‘No, never.’ Her reaction was instant. ‘It wasn’t about that.’
Silence fell, barbed. No, not silence. There was breathing: heavy, fast...his, hers...it filled the room like a tornado of emotions.
‘You told me you would forget about me in days, do you remember that?’
Somehow, the only shift in his features was a tightening about his mouth.
‘You told me you were so drunk I could have been any woman—you’d found your way to my door but that was just happenstance.’
‘You don’t need to repeat what I said. I remember.’
Something sharp moved in the region of her heart. She was glad he remembered.
‘You told me you had a girlfriend,’ she reminded him anyway, her hands on her hips, her chin jutting forward. She’d hated him then, for taking what had been an incredible night for her—her first sexual experience with a man she’d already been halfway to loving, the comfort and sense of unity she’d felt—and turning it into something so tawdry and wrong. She would never have slept with him if she’d known he was with someone else!