A Ring to Secure His Heir

‘Sorry about that,’ Alexius pronounced, reading the shock at the onslaught of the paps in her dazed expression after he had slotted her into a helicopter and Bas arrived in his pet carrier.

‘How often does that happen to you?’ Rosie whispered shakily, shooting a troubled glance his way.

‘Too often.’

‘Why were they so curious about me?’

‘You arrived in my private jet. I’m rarely seen travelling with a woman. Someone at the airport probably tipped them off.’ His voice was clipped, offhand, as if such incidents were so common in his daily life that he didn’t even think about them. But what his tone seemed to say was misleading because for the first time ever Alexius had been enraged by a press intrusion. Rosie had been frightened and she was pregnant and it shouldn’t have happened. He had felt like scooping her up into his arms to shield her but had known such behaviour would only serve to incite the paparazzi to even greater aggression.

‘Where are we going now?’ she asked on the back of a huge yawn as she idly stroked Bas’s ear through the bars of his carrier.

‘Somewhere private,’ Alexius breathed, flexing his big shoulders below his finely tailored jacket and relaxing visibly at the prospect, long powerful thighs spreading.

Rosie was so sleepy and overwhelmed by the events of the day that she would not have cared had he announced that he was taking her to the moon. He had turned her life upside down though: she was very much aware of that. She flexed her crushed toes in the designer shoes she wore, brushed the expensive fabric of her dress with a wondering hand and rested her head back drowsily. It was like being a princess for a day, she thought ruefully, but fine feathers did not make fine birds because underneath she was the exact same Rosie Gray and not at all the sort of woman normally associated with a billionaire. And while enumerating all the possible ways in which she did not fit that frame, Rosie fell asleep.

Alexius almost laughed when he realised that Rosie was dead to the world: a woman had never fallen asleep in his company before. After all, he never spent the night with a woman and while he was awake his normal style of lover was too hyped up with the desire to entertain and impress him to relax to that extent. But then Rosie didn’t fall into the normal category for him, he acknowledged absently. She was no star-struck groupie, ready to do anything to please, and he was discovering that he very much liked her ability to treat him as an equal and her lack of awe and subservience.

Rosie awakened only when the helicopter landed and she stumbled groggily onto solid ground again. It was dark but the moonlight illuminated a giant white house set against a dark backdrop. She blinked, not quite sure of what she was seeing, for it was so imposing a building that it looked vaguely like a film set to her. ‘Where on earth are we?’

‘We’re on Banos, the island where I spent my earliest years,’ Alexius supplied as outside lights came on to show her a uniformed older man trundling their luggage across an immaculate lawn towards the house.

‘An island … and a house like a palace,’ she mused, insanely aware of her tousled hair and crumpled dress and scolding herself for being so vain. Had she snored while she was asleep? A school friend had once told her that she had snored on a sleepover. Inwardly, she cringed.

‘Can I let him out?’ Alexius enquired because Bas was whining and scratching in his carrier.

In answer, Rosie grasped the carrier and undid the door. Bas lurched out like a little drunken dog, struggling to balance on his three good legs against the weight of the cast.

‘Thee mou, he could wring pity from a stone,’ Alexius groaned. ‘How long does he need the cast for?’

‘Another month …’ Rosie was endeavouring not to stare goggle-eyed at the magnificent house with its white weatherboarding and long gracious colonnaded verandah. ‘Any minute now I expect Scarlett O’Hara to appear on the front step,’ she admitted.

‘It was modelled on a Southern plantation house in the thirties for one of my grandmothers,’ Alexius conceded.

Nothing could have more adequately illustrated his illustrious, privileged background, Rosie thought dizzily, than the awe-inspiring sight of the marble hall, ornamented with a huge crystal chandelier, a superb wide staircase, bronze statues and more gilded furniture than Rosie had ever seen outside a museum. She just couldn’t imagine anyone actually living in such a grand setting and she swallowed hard when a small group of staff filed out of a rear doorway to greet them.

‘Rosie, this is Olympia, my housekeeper,’ Alexius informed her. ‘Olympia will show you upstairs …’

The stout older woman led Rosie up the sweeping staircase and through double doors to the most massive room that Rosie had ever seen. The four-poster bed was draped in what appeared to be hand-painted silk and the rugs were so elegant and muted in tone that Rosie walked round them rather than across them to peer int

o the dressing room and bathroom that completed the accommodation. Wow and wow again, she reflected, feeling uniquely undeserving of such overpowering luxury. What had he thought when he saw her humble bedsit? It hadn’t frightened him off, she conceded with a sense of satisfaction that surprised her. Her cases arrived and with them a maid, who commenced unpacking them and hanging them up in the fancy dressing room. Feeling light years out of her depth at being waited on, Rosie grabbed up her wash bag and fled into the bathroom to take refuge there. Removing her makeup, which had streaked round her eyes enough to make her groan out loud, she stripped off to use the shower and freshen up. The warm flow of the water revived her somewhat and she made use of the towelling robe available to return to the bedroom. Mercifully, the maid had finished and Rosie finally had the time and the opportunity to more closely examine some of the clothes that had arrived only the day before, for she had had to pack them in a hurry. From a drawer she extracted a slinky pale blue nightdress and put it on, noting that excess fabric puddled round her feet. A knock on the door heralded the appearance of another maid with a tray of food.

Rosie fell on the meal like the original starving woman, not even having realised how hungry she was until the tantalising aromas of beautifully cooked food assailed her nose. Afterwards she looked at herself in the mirror, turned sideways and saw that there was still not the slightest sign that she was pregnant, aside of the noticeable swelling of her previously non-existent boobs, a development that fascinated her. She was still very tired, which she knew was common in early pregnancy, and she clambered into bed, thinking that she ought to rest for the blob’s … the baby’s sake. At least he didn’t fake things he didn’t feel or tell her only what she wanted to hear. And she didn’t need to feel guilty about landing him with her as a house guest either, not in such a giant building. Her mind rattled on and on and on, constantly reverting to thoughts of Alexius, which annoyed her. Was it an infatuation similar to something a teenager would experience? she wondered with a grimace while trying not to wonder what he was doing, what he was thinking and … who was Adrianna? Did she have the nerve to ask him? She certainly didn’t have the right. Her lack of self-discipline infuriated her: here she was worn-out with her brain buzzing like a bee and she seemed totally incapable of falling asleep.

At two in the morning, having leafed through several magazines to pass the time and even switched on the television to look in vain for an English channel, she got out of bed again. Once more she was hungry, didn’t know how, only knew that she was. Bas, who did snore like a little train, was sound asleep on top of a rug and she crept out, not wanting to lug him downstairs with her where he might bark at anything strange and wake people up.

The door at the back of the hall through which the staff had emerged led down a stair to a basement kitchen that would have been adequate for a big hotel. She wondered if Alexius entertained a lot, held fancy dinner parties or wild weekends. Strange, he seemed so reserved but in bed he had been anything but. In fact, he had been extraordinarily passionate. She lifted her hands and pressed them to her hot face. ‘Stop it, stop torturing me,’ she urged her mind.

‘Who’s torturing you?’ Alexius enquired lazily from the doorway.

CHAPTER EIGHT

AS ALEXIUS switched on the lights, Rosie whirled round in shock, pale blue silk clinging to her lithe body. ‘You couldn’t sleep either?’

‘No.’ Alexius studied her as she opened the doors of the giant double refrigerator to pull out cold meat, which she ate where she stood. ‘I gather you’re hungry.’

Rosie went red and nodded because her mouth was full. It gave her a most gratuitous opportunity to appraise the full impact of Alexius’s raw sexuality, his lean powerful physique sheathed in a pair of worn tight jeans and nothing else. Bare-chested, all that golden skin and rippling muscle on display, he took her breath away and desire swelled deep down inside her. He was badly in need of a shave, for dark stubble covered his lower jaw, framing his beautifully sensual mouth. As if she could sate her sensual response to him with food, she hurriedly helped herself to some cheese.

‘Didn’t you get a meal earlier?’ he enquired politely.