‘Let me have my say first,’ Alexei urged her as if he perfectly understood her bewilderment. ‘I’m bored of casual sex.’
‘Well, it took you a long time to get to that point, but that you did get there finally is in your favour,’ Billie informed him cheerfully to cover up her embarrassment at that blunt admission.
‘If you don’t keep quiet for five minutes, I may well strangle you!’ Alexei groaned in exasperation. ‘Right now, I’m ready to settle down and get married and you are the only woman I can see in that role. I want to marry you.’
Billie froze in shock and stared at him, unable to believe that he could mean what he had just said. The silence that followed came down like a crushing weight on her nerves.
‘I have more faith in you than in any woman I’ve ever met and our relationship is not based purely on sex, or on your love of my wealth. I’m convinced that the talents that have made you a dependable and trustworthy employee will make you an even better wife,’ he concluded grimly. ‘So, I’m asking you the question I never got as far as asking Calisto…Will you be my wife?’
‘You can’t ask me that only a week after you’ve broken up with another woman!’ Billie suddenly launched at him in helpless condemnation. ‘You’re on the rebound. You don’t know what you’re doing!’
‘Of course I know what I’m doing,’ Alexei fielded in dry exasperation.
Although he was offering Billie what she had most wanted in the world for several years, it was in terms that she found horribly humiliating. In addition, words like ‘dependable’ and ‘trustworthy’ tore her up inside when she recalled the game of deception she had become engaged in over a year earlier—and in which she was still up to her throat. He probably thought he knew the worst of her as well, but he didn’t. Nor was his proposal of marriage of the type that had ever featured in her dreams. He didn’t love her. He was simply fed up dating and, having been disappointed by Calisto, he had decided to settle for a woman he believed he knew inside out. A sensible woman with a good work ethic who knew him well: Billie. It was a very logical decision and very much Alexei who, for all his passion and volatility, was now focusing his remarkably practical and shrewd business brain on the institution of matrimony. Was he choosing her as the low-risk, low-maintenance option in the bridal stakes?
‘You haven’t even explained why you broke up with Calisto yet.’
His aggressive jaw line squared. ‘Nor do I intend to. Why pick over the past? There is no comparison between you and Calisto. Our marriage would have much firmer foundations.’
Of course there could be no comparison between ordinary Billie Foster and the gorgeous model, Calisto Bethune. A shard of bitter anger and pain pierced Billie at his unhesitating candour. Alexei, Billie suspected, thought that there would be no ups and downs with her, that she would be so quiet and eager to please that waves would be non-existent. But he was thinking that way because he wasn’t allowing for the reality that how Billie behaved as an employee would scarcely be the same as she behaved as a wife. It burned a smoking hole in her heart that he should ask her to marry him because he respected her as a person and admired what he saw as her sterling character. How much would he respect her if he knew the truth of what she was capable of? If she told him the truth about Nicky, if she told him she had conceived his child and concealed the birth from him, he would hold her lies against her and he would no longer want to marry her.
‘I don’t want to talk abo
ut this any more,’ Billie announced, planting her hands down on the table surface and forcing her slim body upright in a move that patently took him by surprise. ‘I need to think about this.’
‘Why?’ Alexei thrust his chair back and sprang up. Bronzed eyes gleaming like polished metal, he gazed down into her troubled heart-shaped face and breathed in a raw growling undertone, ‘What’s to think about, moraki mou? I know you’ve always cared about me.’
Sparks of rage lit up inside Billie and fuelled the angry step she took back from the table. So that was the true deal, she reflected in raging pain. She was to supply the love in this sensible marriage of minds—only until now he had been too modest and polite to say so. He might not love her but he had no objection to being loved. At least he would make no objection as long as she made no demands. Indeed, Billie was under few illusions as to the exact nature of the marriage she was being offered: a matter-of-fact partnership based on mutual respect and sexual attraction.
‘It’s a very insulting proposal,’ Billie told him flatly.
‘Insulting?’ Alexei repeated in thunderous disbelief. ‘How have I insulted you?’
‘Just you think about what you’ve said to me and then ask yourself how many women would want to marry you on those terms!’ Billie flung back at him furiously as she stalked out of the room, headed straight to the front door and out into the fresh air.
Her hasty steps only slowing as she reached the concealment of the garden hidden behind manicured hedges, Billie pressed the heel of her hand to the thunderous pounding at her temples and trembled at the force of the emotions she was striving to rein back. A jumble of mortifying phrases were still assailing her and making her cringe. A major kind of promotion. Dependable? Trustworthy? I’m bored of casual sex. No comparison between you and Calisto. She was the safe alternative to his capricious ex-fiancée, as cosy and insipid as hot milk when compared to such a spicy cocktail. Calisto’s high jinks and the memory of his father’s three very costly divorces had made Alexei cautious in the matrimonial stakes. He didn’t want a wife who would rock the boat with emotional outbursts and petulant demands. He wanted a wife who would do as she was told just like an employee, a wife who was grateful enough for her position to let him live his life without interference. No, such a marriage was not the stuff of which dreams were made and it never would be.
Billie sank down heavily on a bench overlooking a still circular pond that reflected the smooth green surrounding lawn. Only in a fantastic dream would Alexei Drakos ever have proposed to her in any other terms, she told herself in exasperation. Of course he wasn’t in love with her. She wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous or even a sensational challenge to his masculinity. She was his social secretary who had long been in love with him.
And just how long had he been aware of that crucial fact? Her face stung with shamed heat. No doubt she had betrayed her true feelings for him long ago, because he was a man who knew and understood women all too well. Never by word or by gesture, however, had he revealed his knowledge until now when, in the act of honouring her with a marriage proposal, he had joined up all the dots to point out how well she would suit him.
She had no doubt whatsoever that he saw his proposal as an honour he conferred upon her. After all, what did she have to offer a young, handsome billionaire but her very ordinariness? Yet, astonishingly, that ordinariness was suddenly what he had decided would best suit his requirements. A humble, grateful, loving wife would, of course, be far easier to live with than a diva like Calisto Bethune. You had to hand it to Alexei—even marriage had to be one hundred per cent on his terms. For, really, what would be in it for her?
Billie breathed in deep as she reached the crux of the matter. It was all very well storming off in a passion of hurt pride and wounded feelings, but was she really going to say no to her one and only chance to become Alexei’s wife? So, as proposals went, it had been a patronizing, humiliating insult. But he had been honest with her about his expectations and he had evidently never got as far as actually asking Calisto to marry him, which could only please Billie. But then had Alexei even loved Calisto? Indeed had he ever been in love? Billie had never even heard him mention the word. Alexei had always had a detached quality with women.
Billie thought about Alexei’s own background and acknowledged that it was scarcely the stuff of dreams either. His parents’ shotgun marriage had been, on the face of it, a successful relationship, but Natasha Drakos had deferred very much to her older husband in every field. It had been a very traditional and conservative Greek union in which Constantine had travelled while Natasha had stayed home, dutifully fulfilling the roles of wife, hostess and mother. That kind of controlled unemotional relationship, Billie finally registered, was the blueprint that Alexei—whether he realised it or not—was applying to his own marital plans.
‘The big flare-up and walk out isn’t like you,’ Alexei breathed coolly from several feet away. ‘I expected you to be sensible.’
For a male who knew women, he was being appallingly tactless. Billie lifted her lashes to look at him, smitten to the heart by his dark male beauty. ‘I am being sensible. I’m thinking over what you said.’
‘What is there to think over?’ Alexei fielded drily.
Billie tilted her chin, green eyes sparkling. ‘You don’t love me. You’ll be difficult to live with. You’ll always want your own way. You may not be faithful. I think there’s plenty there for me to think about.’
As she spoke dark blood had coloured his high cheekbones and his sleek bone structure tightened defensively below his tawny skin. She knew it was a struggle for him not to snap back at her and cut her off at the knees for her cheek. ‘I’ll give you my answer tomorrow.’
‘I trust you to make the right decision,’ Alexei retorted.