Rhianna
could see Alexis’s face darken at Nicky’s innocent depiction of the kind of environment he’d been brought up in.
‘But if there was a nice daddy for you, who didn’t yell, would you like that?’
‘Would he be sick, like Grandpa?’
There was a note of fear in Nicky’s voice, and
Rhianna
could see Alexis’s mouth tighten,
then
deliberately relax again.
‘No. He would be quite well. He could play football with you. And go swimming. Throw stones that bounce.’
Nicky’s eyes widened.
‘Like you can!’
Rhianna
could see the set of Alexis’s jaw tense.
‘Yes, like I can. In fact…’ The pause was minute, and for a second
Rhianna
caught the unbearable tension in his voice, his face. ‘Maybe I would make a good daddy.’
He sat still.
Very, very still.
‘Would I do, Nicky, for a daddy?
If you wanted that?’
And suddenly, quite suddenly, out of nowhere,
Rhianna
felt tears prick in her eyes. She didn’t want them there. Tried to stop them welling. But she couldn’t stop them. Before her eyes, Nicky blurred.
‘Just for on holidays? Like now?’ There was caution in his voice.
‘For as long as you’d want, Nicky. But we could start with now, couldn’t we?’
For a long moment Nicky just stared. Then suddenly he had jumped to his feet. He came rushing round to
Rhianna
.
‘Mummy!
Can we? Can we have a daddy?’
His little hands clutched her arms; his face was alight.
With eagerness, with questioning.
With hope.
Rhianna
swallowed. Her eyes squeezed.
‘If that’s what you want, muffin, of course you can. Of course you…you can…’
Her voice choked. She didn’t want to cry.
Didn’t want to cry because Alexis Petrakis was offering to be their son’s father.
‘Oh, Mummy!’
Nicky’s eyes were huge. ‘We’ve got a daddy now! I’ve got a daddy!’ He turned to the man who had made him so wonderful an offer. ‘Can we start now? Please?’
Alexis nodded. ‘Yes, we can start now.’
For a moment
Rhianna
saw through her blurred vision his mouth press tightly, his throat constrict.
Somehow it just made her vision blur even more.
‘D
ADDY
—come and
see
!’
‘Daddy—
look—
look at me!’
‘Daddy—
watch
!
Daddy, watch!’
The refrains were constant, endless.
Rhianna
heard them all afternoon—Nicky’s piping, excited voice, calling for his father. She lay on her day bed on the
terrace,
cool in the shade, propped up on pillows, completely inert. But, despite her physical inertia, mentally and emotionally she was a complete wreck. Tears kept filling her eyes, however much she tried to stop them, blink and brush them away.
Just watching Nicky down on the beach, splashing in the sea, building a sandcastle, kicking a football around, the whole time his face a picture of ecstasy.
Once, during his play, he had suddenly stopped and rushed up to her, clambering up and hugging her so tightly that she could not breathe.
‘Mummy!
We’ve got a
daddy
! We’ve got a
daddy
!’
Before rushing away again.
Back to his Daddy.
Alexis Petrakis.
The man she had more cause to loathe in
all the
world than anyone else alive.
And yet…
How could she hate him now? How could she hate him now Nicky knew he was his
father.
Because if she did it would show.
Nicky would find out. He’d feel her hatred, and it would be a poison for him…
Her thoughts were going round and round and round in her head as she sat and watched her son and his father playing, their figures blurring in and out of her vision.
But
could
she stop hating Alexis Petrakis? She’d hated him for five long draining, exhausting,
gruelling
years, when keeping going had been the only thing she could do—trying to keep her father alive, trying to give her baby the best she could, despite all the weight dragging her down, down, down…
Until she had finally collapsed.
And now her life had changed—changed completely.
Because of Alexis Petrakis.
What am I going to do?
she
thought. Her emotions felt as battered as if they had been shipwrecked, tossed in a tempestuous sea. But on what shore would they be cast up?
Tiredness seeped through her. She was too tired to think, too tired to feel. It was all too difficult, too confusing.
She would just go on
lying
here, in the warm sun, getting used to the fact that her son now knew he had a father—a father who wanted to be a permanent part of his life. For whose sake he was even prepared to be civil to his son’s mother.
Her eyes rested on the pair of them, kicking a football back and forth towards makeshift goals marked by battered sand towers. Nicky was laughing and calling out, and Alexis—
There was a hollowing feeling inside her stomach. Out of nowhere it came, making her breath catch.
Alexis Petrakis—in casual chinos and polo shirt, his sable hair breeze-ruffled, his saturnine face animated with laughter.
The hollowing came again, making her feel suddenly weak and breathless.
She shut her eyes.
Quite deliberately.
Alexis Petrakis existed only as Nicky’s father.
Nothing else.
Nothing else.
She had to remember that. She had to.
‘Today,’ announced Alexis, ‘we are going on a boat.
To a secret beach on the island.’
Nicky’s eyes shone like stars as he lifted his head from his breakfast.
‘A boat?’ he echoed excitedly.
Alexis glanced at
Rhianna
. She had gone stark white, fear in her face.
‘It is quite safe, and we will all wear lifejackets.’
‘Mummy!
Please!’
Every maternal instinct urged her to refuse. Boats went on the sea—the sea could drown children. But Nicky was looking so thrilled.
She took an uncertain breath. ‘Well—I—I—’
‘Yes, yes, yes!’ Nicky bounced up and down in his seat.
‘I am surprised you are so nervous about the sea,’ Alexis commented. ‘Considering your father designed yachts. Did you never go sailing with him as a child yourself?’
‘I didn’t see much of my father when I was growing up,’ she answered shortly. ‘My mother divorced him for desertion when I was not much older than Nicky. She lived in
Oxfordshire
, which is pretty far from the sea.’
She didn’t want to talk about her childhood.
And certainly not to Alexis Petrakis.
But then she didn’t want to talk to him at all.
About anything.
Even though he kept on talking to her.
He’d done it the previous day, with Nicky present, talking to her in a casual, conversational way—as if he had never thrown such vicious accusations at her, had never made her the target of his fury, his rage.
At least Nicky had been there as well, thankfully oblivious to the stiffness and undercurrents between the two people who had so unintentionally but so irrevocably brought him into existence. He had accepted his father’s arrival in his life with a childish mix of unquestioning acceptance and thrilled excitement, as if Father Christmas had arrived.
She was less accepting. And in place of excitement was tension.
Fraught, pulling tension, webbing her round.
She could not cope with Alexis being, as he had said he would be, ‘civil’ to her.
Talking to her as if she were a normal human being, not excrement beneath his feet.
She could see it was an effort for him, though. That he was quite deliberately involving her in his conversation with Nicky, drawing her in.
But I don’t want to be drawn in. I don’t want to have anything to do with him.
Even as the words formed in her head she knew she could not indulge them. Loath as she was to acknowledge it, she knew that he was right. For Nicky’s sake she must try and put aside her hostility—as he was doing.
But it was difficult to do so.
Difficult to let go of something that had been there for five long years, like a caged beast—a beast that had been let terrifyingly loose when Alexis had turned up at her hospital bedside, and here, in his villa, when he had thrown his vileness at her.
Yet here she was, responding to his questions as if those vicious exchanges had never taken place.
A faint frown creased Alexis’s brow.
‘Your mother didn’t like you spending time with your father?’
Was there something in his voice that had an edge to it?
‘The other way round,’ she replied defensively, not liking to hear her mother
criticised
. ‘My father didn’t have much time for me.
Or for her.
Or for anything, really, except his boats.
So, no, I didn’t sail as a child. I did a basic course on a reservoir, when I was a student, because I thought it would be something that would please my father, but—’
She fell silent. Why on earth was she telling this to Alexis Petrakis?
Her pathetic attempts to get her father to take an interest in her.
‘But?’
His voice prompted her.
She gave a dismissive shrug of her shoulder.
‘He didn’t reply to my letter telling him I’d got my Level One dinghy certificate. So I never went any further with getting qualified.’
‘What did you study as a student?’
Her eyes flickered to him. Why did he want to know?
‘Accountancy.
Very boring.
But I knew it would make me employable. Mum never had much money—Dad was always late with his maintenance payments—so—’
‘You are an accountant?’
There was surprise in his voice. She stared at him.
‘Yes. After my mother died I sought out my father and went to work for him, to help keep his company going. I
realised
how bad the situation was financially, and knew the only way to save it was to find an investor or a buyer, or a part-owner. That’s why I approached MML. I told you that.’
‘You never told me you were an accountant.’
There was accusation in his voice. Her face hardened.
‘What difference does it make what my professional qualifications were or are?’ she retorted.
‘Do you really need to ask?’ he replied.
He was looking at her strangely.
With that same assessing look she caught on his face sometimes.
It disturbed her.
She got to her feet and held her hand out for Nicky.
‘Time for teeth-brushing.’
He slid down from the table and went reluctantly with her.
The boat trip proved a huge thrill for Nicky. Wedged between his father’s splayed legs, he gleefully steered the wheel, his hands shadowed by Alexis’s. Seated in the stern,
Rhianna
hung on grimly, her body battered as the boat slapped over the waves.
But Nicky’s joy and excitement made it worthwhile.
So did their destination.
It was indeed, a secret beach. Out at sea it was scarcely visible between two miniature headlands. But nestled between the cliffs was a tiny jewel-like beach, with dazzling white sand and exquisite shallow turquoise water.
‘We’re going to snorkel!’ Nicky told her excitedly.
‘Daddy and me!’
Alexis dropped anchor and jumped lithely overboard into knee deep water. He scooped Nicky up and deposited him on the beach a few yards away. Then he returned to the boat. He held out his arms to her.
‘I can manage,’
Rhianna
said immediately. But as she got uncertainly to her feet the boat swung on its mooring. Instinctively she grasped the nearest solid object.
It was Alexis.
She clung, swaying, terrified. Then in a fluid movement he had scooped her up, as lightly as he had Nicky. For one fleeting moment she felt the protective strength of his arms.
Then she went completely rigid.
She’d frozen. As if she’d been turned into a block of wood.
Grimly, Alexis waded through the shallow water towards the tiny beach, the starkly rigid body immobile in his arms.
Thee
mou
,
she hadn’t been like this the night he had swept her up and carried her to his bed! Then she had been like warm honey in his arms, soft and pliant, yielding to him like sweetest velvet…
No—no point thinking of that.
Remembering that.
It was the last thing he wanted to recall to his mind.
And
Rhianna
Davies was the last woman on the planet he wanted to have the slightest sexual feeling about whatsoever. But for all that there was no reason for her freaking out whenever he touched her.
As if he
were
poison.
Anathema to her.
He set her down on the sand and she jerked away from him immediately.
He busied himself carrying what they needed to shore and setting up a camp in the shade of the cliff. Nicky bounced around excitedly.
‘Come on, Daddy!’ He started rummaging through the grip containing
snorkelling
equipment.
‘Steady,’ said Alexis.
‘Right—flippers first.’
Rhianna
watched them from her position on a soft rug laid out on the sand. Her heart-rate was slowing again now. She’d discarded her lifejacket, but Alexis and Nicky still kept theirs on. Her eyes kept going to Alexis. Somehow the extra bulk over his chest simply made his shoulders seem broader in their short-sleeved T-shirt, his hips in their swimming shorts narrower, his bare,
sinewed
legs longer.
She felt that long-ago tremor start within her again.
Felt, for just a second, the echo of his protective clasp around her as he carried her ashore.
She shut her eyes.
A strange, vast and completely illogical sense of loss went through her.
As though something very precious had gone from her life.
But that was stupid. She had never had Alexis Petrakis.
He had only had her—enjoyed her, and discarded her. He’d never intended anything more than a one-night stand. It had never meant more to him than that.
She must never forget that.
‘Is he too heavy?’
Alexis nodded at Nicky, who—exhausted from the excitement of the boat trip and the exertions of
snorkelling
, then made soporific by Maria’s lavish picnic lunch—was asleep on
Rhianna’s
lap.
She shook her head. Alexis was lounging at the far end of the rug with panther-like grace, his T-shirt
moulding
his physique, long bare legs extended, lithe and muscular,
his
feet bare.
She dragged her gaze away.
‘He’s never heavy.’ She smiled, looking down at her sleeping son, love-light in her gaze. Her hand smoothed over the silky hair.
Something flickered in Alexis’s eyes.
Her smile did something to her. It lightened her face.
Softened it.
He found himself studying her as she gazed down at Nicky. Not that it was haggard any more. That hollowed-out gauntness she’d had was completely gone. Now she simply looked fine-boned, not thin. Nor did her skin look like sickly sour cheese any more. The warmth of the Mediterranean sun had brought a honeyed tone to her face. The bright Aegean sky had made her eyes bluer, too, not washed-out.
In fact—
He halted his mental catalogue.
Rhianna
Davies’s physical appearance was completely irrelevant. She was his son’s mother.
Nothing more.
And an accountant?
His brows drew together in a frown. Had she really been her father’s accountant that night she’d said she’d wanted to talk to him privately?
I could check. There are records of those who have professional qualifications.
Because if she truly were, then maybe, just maybe, her claim of innocence of the accusation he’d charged her with was wrong.