CHAPTER SIX
HEHADTOgive his flight crew credit. They acted as though seeing him arrive hauling a very cross woman over one shoulder was a totally everyday occurrence, running through all the normal pre-flight checks without batting an eyelid. For his part, Ares was grateful for their professionalism, and only slightly shocked by his own behaviour towards Bea.
It hadn’t been about wanting to kidnap her and drag her to his home, even though such thoughts had been tormenting him all evening, so that he’d imagined her against the sheets of his bed, her languorous hazel eyes staring up at him, begging him to make love to her.
This had been a question of practicality alone.
The call from his housekeeper, Xanthia, had pushed all other considerations aside. Cassandra, the nanny, had walked out after hours of the baby’s screaming. Xanthia, herself a grandmother, had sounded beside herself. What choice did Ares have but to go straight home and assess the situation?
His eyes drifted to Bea, who was sitting opposite him, a belligerent expression on her face that—at any other time—he would have been very tempted to erase from her pretty features using far from respectable methods. As if to torment him even further, his fingers tingled with the memory of her silky-smooth thigh beneath his palm, the way she’d juddered at the contact, her body begging him for more.
He’d held back, telling himself they had all night, that the pleasure was better savoured than rushed, but now he wished he’d ignored that impulse and let his hand drift higher, finding her sweet femininity and brushing her there, feeling her heat and watching as she exploded in his arms.
‘I wish you’d tell me what’s happened,’ she said quietly. ‘It seems like the least you could do.’
It was the first time she’d spoken all flight, and they were almost in Athens. He stared at her, the words locked deep inside. But he had to say something. She was about to walk into a scene that would make it perfectly obvious he’d been left—literally—holding the baby.
‘Five months ago, my brother’s wife died.’ He spoke clinically, no sign of the ensuing trauma in his words. ‘It was a complete shock—something went wrong during childbirth. Ingrid was delivered of their baby, a little girl, but then wouldn’t stop bleeding, and the doctors could do nothing to save her.’
Bea gasped in that way she had, lifting her fine-boned hand to cover her lips.
‘Now my brother is...not well...’ he glossed over the nature of Matthaios’s illness out of instinct to protect him ‘...and has left me with the care of his child while he seeks treatment.’
The sympathy in her eyes was unmistakable. Ares hated it. As a teenager he’d seen that look on countless faces and he’d sworn he’d show them. He was not an object of pity. Strengthening his spine, he infused ice into his bones. ‘Naturally, I hired an exceptional nanny. My workload is hardly conducive to the care of a child, and young children particularly need a lot of care. Unfortunately, the woman I hired has been almost as much work as my niece since day one. My housekeeper just called to inform me that the nanny had walked out.’
‘Cassandra,’ Bea prompted thoughtfully.
‘How did you—?’
‘She called while you were in Clare’s office.’ Pink bloomed in Bea’s cheeks. He looked away, controlling his body’s response to the betraying gesture with difficulty.
‘Yes, Cassandra.’ He spat the name with derision, almost missing the way Bea’s lips lifted a little at the corners. She was smiling at him? Trying not to laugh at him? It didn’t make sense and Ares liked things to make sense.
‘I have to get back there, to see what’s going on,’ he snapped.
Her eyes, clear pools of burnt butter, appraised him for several seconds and then she nodded slowly. ‘If you’d explained this sooner I wouldn’t have fought you at the airport.’
His lips tugged downwards. ‘It didn’t occur to me. I was too preoccupied.’
Again, sympathy crossed her face. It took Ares a moment to realise it wasn’t sympathy for him so much as for the unknown baby, and the entire situation.
‘Naturally, I’ll arrange for you to fly back to London tomorrow.’
She barely reacted, yet in the depths of her eyes he was sure he saw something unexpected—something akin to disappointment? Or maybe that was wishful thinking: ego?
‘Don’t worry about me,’ she insisted quietly. ‘I can take care of myself.’
Bea’s adoptive parents owned a grand old country home in the English countryside, the kind of place with rolling green lawns, a stream filled with trout, stables that had been empty for many years until the twins asserted a desire to learn to ride, and horses were therefore acquired from top breeders. The desire had lasted three weeks, the horses longer—they were now given free rein of the western paddocks and, from time to time, found their way into the orchard and ate their body weight in fruit, much to Alice Jones’s displeasure. As an organic-only fruitarian, the orchard represented almost her sole source of food, so the horses’ act had been seen as a declaration of war.
The house itself dated to the early Tudor period, though much modernisation had occurred in recent years, and now boasted ten bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, three swimming pools—one for diving, courtesy of Amarie’s insistence that she was going to be an Olympic diver. The pool had been completed about a week too late—she’d moved onto playing the drums by then and, despite the fact that Ronnie had a full studio in the basement of the house, a separate drums studio was built for Amarie, perhaps to save Ronnie from the torture of listening to her murder the tempo of any more classic rock music.
So it wasn’t as though Beatrice hadn’t been surrounded by wealth. But ever since arriving at the airport in London and being ushered into Ares’s private jet she’d felt as though she’d been exposed to a whole other level of extravagance. Upon touching down in Athens they were ushered to a limousine which drove them a very short distance to a gleaming black helicopter with darkly tinted windows. The upholstery was brown leather and the details oak. Her companion was as silent as a tree himself and his manner became colder, more intimidating with every minute that passed.
Bea distracted herself by staring out of the window, trying not to compare him to the way he’d been on the gondola. Then, she’d almost felt as though she could say anything to him, tell him anything, but now he was so distant it was impossible to think of him as anything except an incredibly successful self-made businessman who was also a very important client—a man whose business the London Connection needed to retain.
And, for some reason, all she could think about was the time she’d been sent home from school with suspected chickenpox and somehow the message had never reached her parents. The doors to the house had been locked—Bea never had a key of her own—and so she’d walked around to the drawing room, peering in through the windows. The sight of her parents and sisters having dinner together had made her heart ache in an unforgettable way. It had been easy to lie to herself until that night, to make excuses for why she was treated one way and her sisters another, but seeing them enveloped in the warmth of their home, the focus of such obvious parental love, had made the literal point to Bea that she was an outsider.
It had made her see that she had never had that. Not from her biological parents, and not from the parents who’d adopted her. No one had ever wrapped her into their warm embrace and made her feel as though she was special and irreplaceable.