Her face flamed and then slowly paled as his response sank in and trampled her pride into the dust. She wished with all her heart that she had said no, pushed him away, stuck to the business of confession and blame. But what was done was done and she could not change it. In spite of that sophisticated façade, Alexei had a primal streak that ran through him like tempered steel and powered his volatility and his ruthlessness. He was a Drakos through and through. His father, Constantine had not hesitated to divorce the blameless third wife who’d adored him, and replace her with his pregnant mistress. Alexei, it seemed, would be equally quick to discard her now that she had disappointed his expectations.
‘Nicky is your son,’ she swore one last time, desperate to convince him of that crucial fact before he could tear their marriage apart.
‘Nothing can excuse your lies and trickery,’ Alexei drawled in a tone of finality. ‘You cheated your way into our marriage and deserve nothing but my contempt. Naturally I’ll order DNA tests, but only to ensure that you can’t continue to allege that I fathered your baby.’
Humiliated by the threat of such testing being carried out on her child, Billie flung him a seething glance of condemnation. ‘That’s an insult! You’re the only man I’ve ever slept with.’
Alexei rested forbidding dark golden eyes on her. ‘I can’t believe a word that comes out of your mouth and whose fault is that?’
He strode out of the room. Billie lingered in the shadowy office and struggled to cope with her unwieldy emotions. Their marriage had barely begun and she had wrecked it by keeping secrets from him, a little voice warned inside her aching head. She had lost his trust and it would not be easily regained. He was angry with her, very angry, but she had known he would be, she reminded herself dully. She heard the racket of rotor blades and unfroze to rush over to the desk and snatch up the phone. Captain McGregor informed her that Alexei had filed a flight plan for Monaco and had taken off in the helicopter with his security team. She thanked him for the information and replaced the receiver with a trembling hand and a heart racing like an overworked piston.
Alexei had just left her, walking out on her and their marriage. That realisation was a body blow that hit Billie very hard. She felt sick with the pain and trauma of that bold move and knew she had seriously underestimated his reaction to the secrets she had kept. It would be virtually impossible to influence a man who was determined to put an ocean between them. Few brides, however, were abandoned within hours of the wedding and Alexei’s activities never passed under the media radar. The press would pick up the story of his unbridegroomlike behaviour and run with it for weeks.
Tears choking her and stinging her heavy eyes, Billie went back to the opulent stateroom in order to get dressed. It might not be dawn yet but the wedding night was well and truly over. She would take the motor launch back to Speros and go home to look after Nicky. What else could she do? Her presence on Sea Queen had driven Alexei off his beloved yacht.
Was this it? Was their marriage over as well? Over even before it got past the beginning? She tried and failed to imagine Alexei giving her a second chance. Why would he do that when he had never loved her? Without love, what hold did she have over him? She had screwed up so badly that she hated herself at that moment. It seemed just then that keeping quiet about her pregnancy had cost her any hope of a happy future.
CHAPTER FOUR
DURING the longest two weeks of her life, Billie followed Alexei’s every move across the globe, for the pursuit of the paparazzi ensured that everything he did was reported in the tabloid press.
So, Billie got to know that Alexei stayed up two nights in succession at a Monaco casino gaming with a bunch of male friends. Then, after he went out to a fashionable nightclub in London she lay awake wondering whether, even though he had arrived and left alone, he had been with other women inside? Or indeed if at some more discreet location a woman had waited patiently for his visit. For the sake of her own sanity she tried not to read any more of the humiliating articles that speculated about the state and nature of the Drakos marriage.
All too many gossip columnists decided that Alexei had married his PA only because he would retain his sexual freedom with a wife who would appreciate her good fortune in marrying him too much to make unreasonable demands; a practical wife who didn’t expect her gorgeous predatory tycoon to become as domesticated as a tabby cat. And, as another columnist quipped, Alexei Drakos was not the sort of guy likely to welcome rules. Alexei had always done what he wanted when he wanted without apology.
Old Drakos history was also dredged up, with Constantine’s worst womanising exploits, even while married, spicily presented to entertain the readers even more. Billie felt doubly humiliated when far from f
lattering wedding photos of her, evidently taken with one of their guest’s phones, appeared in print. Looking mousey and squat as she did in those horrible snaps she had felt that she was being shown up as the bride any self-respecting Greek tycoon and modern-day sex-symbol would desert.
‘I just can’t believe the way you’re behaving!’ Lauren snapped with angry irritation, studying her daughter, who was playing with her son and Skye, the puppy. ‘What were you thinking of when you moved back into this stupid little house? You’re a Drakos now, you belong at the big swanky mansion next door! Of course people are talking when you’re trying to act like the marriage never happened.’
Billie prevented the little black terrier from sinking her teeth into one of Nicky’s toys, setting the item aside to be washed. ‘I have no intention of moving Nicky into Alexei’s house until he acknowledges that he is his son—’
‘Oh, don’t be more stupid than you can help!’ Lauren hissed, her attractive face unattractively lined by her annoyance. As her shrill voice rose in volume the puppy fled behind the sofa. ‘Leave the brat here with us and take possession of what’s yours. You have the right to live in that villa—you’re Alexei’s wife!’
Billie glanced coolly at her mother. ‘Don’t call my son a brat!’
‘You know I didn’t mean it nastily,’ her mother argued. ‘After all, Nicky—bless his little heart—is your golden goose. I mean, good grief, getting yourself pregnant was the only thing you did right! Alexei can do and say what he likes, but at the end of the day you will still be the mother of his son and heir and nothing can change that!’
‘That kind of offensive talk isn’t helping anyone, Lauren,’ Hilary interposed, sending her a sister a reproachful look while she soothed and petted the puppy who had crept over to her feet. ‘Billie is more interested in saving her marriage than in making a profit. I think she’s right to stay here rather than up at the villa, particularly while Alexei believes that Nicky is not his child.’
At that moment, Nicky gave a chuckle of satisfaction. His big brown eyes looked up to his mother for approval and she told him what a beautiful boy he was. Anatalya, having firmly placed herself in Billie’s support camp, arrived with the day’s newspapers. While the housekeeper bent down to give Nicky her attention, Billie spread the papers across the dining table.
‘You shouldn’t look at them,’ Hilary warned her in the tone of a woman who knew her advice would be ignored. ‘They twist the truth and print lies, and it upsets you.’
‘I’m not upset and I won’t get upset,’ Billie vowed, only for the blood to drain from her features while she studied the latest photo of Alexei. There was no chance that what she was looking at was a lie, she reflected wretchedly. If only it had been. With a stunning lack of discretion for a married man, Alexei was seated at a fashionable pavement café on an elegant Parisian boulevard with a very beautiful blonde companion, a woman whom Billie had never expected to see in his company any more. ‘Alexei’s meeting up with Calisto again!’ she cried strickenly before she could think better of that revealing outburst.
‘I don’t believe you,’ Hilary breathed in disbelief, only to stare in dismay at the newspaper pages that her niece spread across her lap.
‘I told you that you should have chased after him when he left the yacht,’ Lauren sniped, staring over her sister’s shoulder, unmoved by that shocking photo. It was obvious that her cynical expectations of her son-in-law had just been fully vindicated. ‘Never let an angry man go if you want him back. Left to their own devices, they get up to all sorts of mischief!’
Billie was incapable of response. Just then, looking at Calisto with Alexei in Paris and thinking of them being together, she was living her every nightmare come true. Who had contacted whom first? Who had made that crucial first move? After being disillusioned by Billie, had Alexei turned straight back to the glamorous Greek divorcee for consolation? Was he already thinking that breaking off his relationship with Calisto had been a mistake?
A smart rata-tat-tat on the rarely used front door of her home made Billie jerk in surprise. ‘Who on earth is that?’ she muttered.
‘I’ll go and see.’ Hilary was already out of her seat, keen to bury any further discussion about Alexei and Calisto Bethune in Paris. A minute later, however, Billie’s attractive blonde aunt stuck her head back round the door and asked Billie to join her.
Billie was taken aback to find a trio of men standing in her hallway. Two of them were known to her and their appearance dismayed her a good deal: Baccus Klonis, the head of Alexei’s legal team, and his second-in-command. Her face coloured with embarrassment. The third man was the doctor entrusted with the task of taking a DNA swab from the mouth of Nicky. Billie was stunned by their arrival without prior notice and the clear expectation that she would agree to the testing being carried out. While Hilary moved ahead of her to shepherd Anatalya, Lauren and the dog into the small seating area off the kitchen, Billie showed her visitors into the spacious lounge.