‘I will never forgive you for going behind my back and prying into my life. You had no right to judge me on the basis of something my mother did years ago. She paid that due, I paid that due, and so did my father. I want nothing to do with you and I wish I’d never laid eyes on you.’
She turned and went to the door, opened it.
Without looking at Alexio she said, ‘I have to be up in five hours. Get out or I’ll call the police and tell them you’re harassing me.’
Alexio made some sort of sound—half anger, half frustration. To Sidonie’s everlasting relief, though, he came to the door. She didn’t look at him.
He said, with deadly precision, ‘This isn’t over, Sidonie. We need to talk.’
‘Get out, Alexio.’ Sidonie’s voice had an edge of pleading to it that she hated. But finally he left.
* * *
For three days Sidonie had refused to talk to Alexio. She stonewalled him if he was waiting for her to come out of the hotel. She walked in the opposite direction if he was there when she emerged from the café. And at night she was tight-lipped if he offered her a lift for the short distance to the apartment after finishing her shift in the Moroccan restaurant.
Alexio seethed with frustration. He was getting her message loud and clear. She wanted nothing to do with him. She preferred working herself into a lather doing menial jobs rather than turn to him for help. But Alexio had had enough. He’d already set things in motion. Sidonie was pregnant with his child and that changed everything. As he’d watched her for the past three days the knowledge had sunk in more and more.
He needed to talk to her, though. And even though she looked half dead with exhaustion Alexio’s body burned for her. Even now, from his car, where he was parked outside the restaurant, he let his gaze rake her up and down, taking in the black skirt, sheer tights and black top. The apron that barely disguised the growing swell of her belly. His baby.
In the past few days he’d had time for the news of the baby to sink in, and much to his surprise he’d found himself not feeling as trapped as he might have expected. Instead he felt a fledgling sense of excitement, wonder.
He thought of his nephew Milo and wondered if he’d have a son too—precocious and cute like him. Or a daughter, like Sidonie, with golden hair? When he imagined that he felt a tightening sensation in his chest so strong he had to take deep breaths to ease it.
She was serving a big table of men now, and she plucked the pen out from where she’d stuck it into the bun on the top of her head. She looked tired and harassed. Pale.
Alexio saw one of the men put a fleshy hand on her arm and a red mist came over his vision. Before he’d even realised what he was doing he was out of the car and pushing open the door of the small tatty restaurant.
* * *
‘Sir,’ Sidonie gritted out, ‘please take your hand off me.’
‘Don’t tell me what to do. You’re serving me.’
Sidonie felt a frisson of fear cutting through her hazy exhaustion, but even that didn’t give her enough adrenalin to pull free. Just then a blast of warm evening air hit Sidonie’s back and she looked around automatically to see Alexio, bearing down on her, his face tight with anger, his eyes fixed on where the man still held her.
Her heart thumped unevenly. For three days he’d dogged her heels and she’d ignored him. She’d seen his car outside and had hated to admit to herself that a part of her liked knowing he was there. She’d told herself stoutly that she hoped he was bored to tears and that she’d irritate him so much that he’d leave and never come back.
Alexio was right behind her now, and treacherously she wanted to lean back, to sink against him. That kept her rigid, fighting the waves of weariness which seemed to be gathering force.
His voice came low and threatening over her head.
‘Let her go.’
The heavyset man was drunk and belligerent. He tightened his grip on Sidonie’s arm, making her gasp out loud. Alexio reached around her and prised the man’s fingers off her arm. He drew her back against him, his other hand going around her midriff, where her belly was round.
It was his touch that did it. It burned like a physical brand. It was too much. Alexio was turning her around now, looking down at her, asking something, but she couldn’t hear it because a white noise was making her head fuzzy.
As if standing apart from herself, observing, Sidonie saw herself looking utterly fragile and helpless, with Alexio’s hands huge on her arms, and she felt a moment of disgust at herself before everything went black.
* * *
Sidonie was in a dark, peaceful place with a soft regular beep-beep sound coming from somewhere nearby. Slowly, though, as her consciousness returned so did her memory, and she remembered looking up into Alexio’s face and seeing him frown.
Alexio.
The baby.
Tante Josephine.