The mirror in the sitting room was hung in a position you couldn’t avoid, unless you walked into the room with your eyes shut, which was never a good idea with such uneven floorboards. The healthy tan she’d acquired while working in the garden restaurant of The Hog had long since faded. Her face was pasty, her breasts were swollen and her skin seemed too loose for her body. And she’d lost weight. She couldn’t eat anything before midday because she kept throwing up. She hadn’t needed to see the double blue stripes on the little plastic stick to confirm what she already knew.
That she was pregnant with Alek Sarantos’s baby and didn’t know what she was going to do about it.
Slumping down in one of the overstuffed armchairs, she stared blankly into space. Actually, that wasn’t quite true. There was only one thing she could do. She had to tell him.
She had to.
It didn’t matter what her personal feelings were, or that fact that there had been a deafening silence ever since the Greek billionaire had walked out of her bedroom, leaving her naked in bed. This was about more than her. She knew what it was like not to have a father and no real identity. To feel invisible—as if she were only half a person. And that wasn’t going to happen to her baby. She hugged her arms tightly around her chest. She wouldn’t allow it to happen.
But how did you tell someone you were having his baby when he had withdrawn from you in more ways than one as soon as he’d had his orgasm?
Her mind drifted back to that awful moment when she’d opened her eyes to find Alek Sarantos lying on top of her in the narrow bed in the staff hostel. His warm skin had been sticking to hers and his breathing sounded as if he’d been in a race. On a purely physical level, her own body was glowing with the aftermath of the most incredible sexual experience of her life—although she didn’t exactly have a lot to compare it with. Her body felt as if she were floating and she wanted to stay exactly where she was—to capture and hold on to the moment, so that it would never end.
But unfortunately, life wasn’t like that.
She wasn’t sure what changed everything. They were lying there so close and so quiet while the rain bashed hard against the windows. It felt as if their entire lives were cocooned in that little room. She could feel the slowing beat of his heart and the warmth of his breath as it fanned against the side of her neck. She wanted to fizz over with sheer joy. She’d had a relationship before—of course she had—but she had never known such a feeling of completeness. Did he feel it, too? She remembered reaching up to whisper her fingertips over his hair with soft and rhythmical strokes. And that was the moment when she read something unmistakable on his face. The sense that he’d just made the biggest mistake of his life. She could see it in his eyes—those compelling blue eyes, which went from smoky satisfaction through to ice-cold disbelief as he realised just where he was. And with whom.
With a wince he didn’t even bother disguising, he carefully eased himself away from her, making sure the condom was still intact as he withdrew. She remembered the burning of her cheeks and feeling completely out of her depth. Her mind was racing as she thought how best to handle the situation, but her experience of men was scant and of Greek billionaires, even scanter. She decided that coolness would be the way to go. She needed to reassure him that she wasn’t fantasising about walking up the aisle wearing a big white dress, just because they’d had sex. To act as if making love to a man who was little more than a stranger was no big deal.
She reminded herself that what they’d done had been driven by anger and perhaps it might have been better if it had stayed that way. Because if it hadn’t suddenly morphed into a disconcerting whoosh of passion, then she might not be lying there wishing he would stay and never leave. She might not be starting to understand her own mother a bit more and to wonder if this was what she had felt. Had she lain beside her married lover like this, and lost a little bit of her heart to him, even though she must have known that he was the wrong man?
She remembered feigning sleepiness. Letting her lashes flutter down over her eyes as if the lids were too heavy to stay open. She could hear him moving around as he picked up his clothes from the floor and began pulling them on and she risked a little peep from between her lashes, to find him looking anywhere except at her. As if he couldn’t bear to look at her. But she guessed it was a measure of how skewed her thinking was that she was still prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.
‘Alek?’ she said—casual enough to let him know she wouldn’t mind seeing him again, but not so friendly that it could be interpreted as pushy.