CHAPTER EIGHT
‘THECHILDISMINE? You’re absolutely sure?’ Adoni planted a hand on the gleaming desktop, the phone clamped to his ear.
‘Yes. It’s yours.’ The voice kept talking about DNA and percentages but Adoni didn’t take the words in. ‘Yes’ was all he needed.
His heart hit an unfamiliar rhythm. Quick and—could it be—triumphant?
It didn’t seem possible. His life was meticulously planned. An unexpected child hadn’t been in his schedule.
That changed now. Everything changed now.
He’d thought he’d prepared himself for the possibility that Alice carried his child. But nothing could have prepared him for the deeply visceral response welling in his taut body.
His child.
His flesh and blood.
His family.
The words thrummed with each pulse of blood in his arteries. They carved themselves into his bones and shuddered through his cramped lungs.
‘Thank you—’ he cut across the speaker ‘—and yes, I want the report in writing.’
Adoni hung up and stared across his office at the view of central London, the sky a mix of pale blue and grey cloud that still felt alien, even after years using this country as his base.
Suddenly, unaccountably, he found himself longing for the endless bright skies of his childhood summers in Greece. The scent of wild herbs crushed underfoot, the salt tang of the sea, sharp and beckoning as he clambered down the track to the coast. The freedom to run wild whenever they left Athens for their country estate.
Abruptly Adoni shoved his chair back and strode to the window.
Was that what he wanted for this baby?
He had a country retreat there, in the final stages of completion. But it was a retreat, not a permanent home. His business was in the city.
Yet even as he thought it, Adoni acknowledged he could run his business from wherever he wanted.
What came first was his child—what was best for it. One thing was certain. His child wouldn’t live in a dismal bedsit. It would have the best of care, as of now.
His baby would be protected and nurtured. Loved as Adoni had never been, with his mother intent on pleasure and his supposed father engrossed in money-making.
Adoni picked up his phone.
* * *
‘Greece? You can’t be serious!’
‘It’s an excellent idea.’
Alice digested the cool certainty in Adoni’s voice and stifled a bubble of hysteria.
Her? Go to Greece?
She took a slow breath, then another. She stood hunched in the overhang of a shop roof, sheltering from the persistent rain that had already soaked the bottom of her trousers as she walked to work.
She’d got a passport years ago but never had a chance to use it. Never gone further than London.
An image she’d once seen filled her mind. Brightly coloured boats bobbing in the crystal waters of a sun-drenched harbour. In the foreground, under the shade of a spreading tree, were tables and rush-bottomed chairs of vibrant blue. The elegant townhouses crammed around the cove were a wash of pastel colours that invited you to forget your cares and drink in the scene.
A cold, fat drop of rain hit her cheek and slithered down her neck. Alice rubbed her chilled flesh.