Baby of Shame (4 page)

‘Yes.’ Her voice was breathy, her throat tight with nerves, her eyes distended. ‘To persuade you to—’

Her voice broke off. A chill was starting through her. She could feel her skin contracting, tightening.

‘To persuade you…’ Her voice had husked to a low, breathy whisper. It was all she could manage. Her throat was stretched tight with nerves, with desperation, as she gazed up at him, her eyes wide with urgency.
‘To go ahead with the takeover.
It would be good for you—it really would. I promise. I can show you right now…’

Her voice trailed off, leaving unsaid the fact that she had a financial print-out in her handbag next door. There was something about his face that was frightening. Chilling her like ice.

Her heart started to thud as she stared up at Alexis
Petrakis’s
expressionless face. Slowly he slid the mobile phone back inside his jacket.

‘There is something you should know. You have made a mistake,’ he said. And though his voice was soft, it was a softness that was deathly.
‘A very bad mistake.
You see…’ He paused, and the eyes resting on her held, she
realised
, the same chill that was hollowing through her, were as expressionless as his face. ‘I do not do business in bed.
Ever.
So, although you were very good—very good indeed—’ his voice was a lacerating drawl, like a
razor being
drawn over her flesh ‘—you have used me for no purpose. Except, of course—’ and now his eyes washed over her suddenly, and the expression in them made her gorge rise ‘—to demonstrate
your…
expertise.
Exceptional expertise, in fact.’
Long lashes swept down over his eyes, and when they swept back up again the obsidian gaze cut like a scalpel into her.

‘You’re very
skilled,
Rhianna
, but you should have contented yourself with a cash payment. I’d have been happy to pay for you. In fact…’ He reached inside his jacket again, but this time he took out a slim leather tooled wallet. He flicked it open. A cluster of fifty-pound notes fluttered on the bed. ‘Keep the change,’ he said softly.

Then he turned and walked to the door.

‘You have ten minutes to vacate this suite. Hotel security will escort you out.’

At the entrance to the reception room he paused. He did not turn.

‘As of now, MML no longer has any interest in Davies Yacht Design.’

His voice was hard.
As hard as stone.

He walked out. He didn’t look back.

In the bed,
Rhianna
started to shake.

‘H
E
’
S
in here.’

The woman opened a door off the narrow hallway. She had an infant balanced on her hip, tugging at her hair and whimpering, and an air of distraction about her that did not impress Alexis Petrakis.

Alexis controlled his emotions. He’d been doing that ever since he’d taken the call that his PA had patched through to him.

The call that threatened to change his life for ever.

It was only by the most stringent exercise of self-control that he had got to this point now.
The moment of truth.

As he walked into the room, in front of the woman he felt his hands clench at his side.

Let this not be true!
Thee
mou
,
let this not be true!

Because it couldn’t,
couldn’t
be true. It couldn’t be true what that social worker had told him over the phone That she had opened an envelope in
Rhianna
Davies’s flat, as she was packing things for the child who had just been taken into emergency foster care, and read the handwritten note clipped to the boy’s birth certificate—citing himself as father of her son.

Rhianna
Davies was lying.

Christos
,
there could be no other explanation!

A woman like that—who had used him, had gone to bed with him to get his money—would not have hesitated a month, a week, to claim his paternity of a child she had conceived in that sordid encounter!

So she could only be lying. Lying to cause trouble…

Which meant that the child he was about to set eyes on could not
possibly
be his.

Dear God, please no—not his!

Alexis’s eyes swept around the room.
The carpet was strewn with children’s toys. Two school-age children were sitting on a sofa, watching children’s TV. Alexis felt his guts clench, and then release.

But even as he felt the cold start to drain out of his veins the woman began speaking in a deliberately low voice he could hardly hear above the blaring TV.

‘He’s not settled at all well. I’ve done my best, but he’s just not responding. Poor little mite,’ she finished, her distracted manner softening suddenly.

She walked in past Alexis and went up to a large armchair half hidden in this small room by the open door. Alexis felt his head turn to follow her as if it were filled with lead. Crouching down, rebalancing the infant on her hip slightly to do so, she said in a gentler voice, ‘Hello, pet.
How’s tricks
?’ She ruffled the hair of the small child curled into the confines of the armchair, a battered teddy clutched tightly to him.

The child did not respond to the woman, either to her voice or her touch. He just went on sitting there, curled like a
foetus
, immobile, unresponsive. Tension in every line of his little body, his face averted so only his profile showed.

With a sigh she got to her feet. ‘You see?’ she said to Alexis.

He did not hear her.
Did not see her.
Saw nothing but the child curled into the chair.

His profile was familiar from a dozen family photo albums.

Himself.
Himself when young.

He could not move. His lungs were frozen, his body rigid.

But emotion was knifing through him, blow after blow.

Killing him.

How long he stood there he did not know. Time had stopped.

Stopped five long years ago when his seed had melded with the woman who now, the social worker had told him, lay in a hospital bed. Just in time, she had told him, to make it so much easier to take the boy into care—away from such an irresponsible and unfit mother.

My son.

The words repeated inside his head over, and over again.

My son.

Out of nowhere, overwhelming him, emotion poured through him.
The fiercest, most overpowering urge to wrap that small, hunched body to him, to enfold him and protect him—
always.

It shook through him, and he knew it for what it was. It was unasked for, but it had come all the same. And he would, he knew, be in its power all his days.

Slowly, very, very slowly, he started to walk forward, towards the little boy. At his approach the child tensed even more, his head turning fearfully. Dark, distended eyes stared up at him anxiously, his mouth trembling. Alexis felt his heart clench—with fury and with pain.

He forced a smile to his face. He must not,
must not
frighten the child.

‘Hello, Nicky,’ he said slowly, speaking to his son for the first time ever.

Rhianna
stirred sluggishly, sleep draining from her. Her eyes opened heavily.

She stared, confused. She was no longer in a hospital ward. She was in a room on her own. The walls were a soft pink. A nurse was altering the slats of the Venetian blinds over the window.

‘Hello,’ she said brightly. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Where am I?’
Rhianna’s
voice sounded faint and dazed.

‘You’re in the
Sellman
Wing of the hospital. It’s the private wing.’

‘Private? But I can’t afford—’

The nurse smiled reassuringly.

‘Don’t worry—everything has been taken care of. Now, tell me how you’re feeling. You have a visitor, you know.’

Emotion leapt in
Rhianna’s
eyes, completely obliterating the question of how she had come to be in a private ward.

‘Nicky!’ Her voice was a hoarse croak, and she started to try and sit up.

Immediately the nurse hurried forward to help prop her against the pillows, easing her
skilfully
back.

‘Nicky?’ she echoed.

Rhianna’s
eyes were strained and wide as she steadied her breathing after the effort of moving.

‘My little boy,’ she said, the pain in her voice audible.

The nurse stood back and shook her head regretfully.

‘I’m afraid not. But if you’re ready I’ll send him in. He’s been most impatient for you to wake.’

She bustled out.

Rhianna
closed her eyes, desolation washing through her.

Nicky—he was her only thought. She had to get to him, find him,
get
him back. She didn’t care if she could still hardly get out of bed, let alone walk, that her lungs still ached even through the painkillers, that her body still felt as if a steamroller had gone over it. She
had
to get home!
Had to.
Because how else could she get Nicky back?

Anxiety laced through her, fretting in every cell of her aching body.

The door started to open. Her eyes flew to it.

Who was it this time? Who could possibly be so impatient to see her?

The nurse had said ‘him’, so it couldn’t be that awful social worker coming to triumph over her. So who, then?

As her eyes
focussed
on the man who walked in she felt for one sickening, hideous moment that she must still be asleep. Because she couldn’t,
couldn’t
be awake!

Shock buckled through her.

And horror.
Deep, deep horror.

As if through a hole ripped out of time a man walked into the room—from a past that came from her worst dreams, her sickest memories.

Alexis Petrakis had just walked in.

Alexis closed the door behind him and let his eyes rest on the woman lying in the bed.

What the hell—?

This wasn’t
Rhianna
Davies. It was nothing like her!

Rhianna
Davies had possessed a beauty so enticing that she had been able to make a fool of him as
no
other woman had ever done! Had made him feel—He couldn’t now admit how she’d made him feel. She had been a woman who could have lured him to his doom if he hadn’t found the strength of mind to throw her from him like a rotten fruit.

But her rottenness had been hidden beneath a surface so exquisite that he had been putty in her hands…

This woman looked like a death’s head. Gaunt, her eyes sunken into their sockets, cheeks hollow, the bones sharp like a knife, and lines etched around her mouth. Her hair was lank, much shorter than it had been, straggling limply around her haggard face.

Involuntarily the image of the way he remembered her pushed into his mind—her body pulsing beneath him, her soft, lush curves, naked, wanton, sated.

And before that, in that silver evening dress, her hair like a silken fall, her eyes like smoke—promising everything, everything he wanted from her…

Something had punched through him the moment he set eyes on her at that dinner, five long years ago. Something he had never felt about a woman before.
Never thought existed.
He had wanted her instantly.
Totally.
More than any other woman he had ever wanted.

And for the chance to slake that overpowering, insistent wanting he had broken every rule in his book—just to possess her that very night as she’d offered herself to him on a plate.

And in the morning he’d discovered why she’d done so.

It had been another punch to his guts.

But quite, quite different.

He stared down at her now, hatred in his eyes.

This woman
couldn’t
be the same one.

Thee
mou
,
he’d known that she’d been taken into hospital after having been knocked down by a car, but that alone couldn’t account for the hideous transformation of so exquisite a beauty into this…this…
hag.
.

His mouth tightened. He remembered what the social worker had told him.

Drugs.
Was that what had turned
Rhianna
Davies from a sexual temptress into this wasted, bone-thin hag?

The cruel word stabbed at him. The woman looked so terrible it would be inhuman not to feel pity for her. Yet pity was the last thing she deserved. The very last thing…

He felt the rage well up in his throat again, as it had ever since he’d looked down into the stricken face of his son.

Any child,
any,
deserved a mother better than this! On top of everything that he already knew her to be—the kind of slut who traded her body for financial gain—yet she was worse still. Irresponsible, feckless, leaving a four-year-old on his own while she slept off her despicable addiction—an addiction that made her violent, brandishing a knife at the very woman appointed to protect her child…

And that such a female was mother to
his
son! A son she had deliberately, calculatingly hidden from him, kept him ignorant of!
Thee
mou
,
no torment was good enough for such a woman!

And yet rigid self-control sliced down over his seething emotions. He was going to have to treat her with kid gloves. His lawyers had been blunt, even though he had wanted to hurl them from his office. The fathers of illegitimate children in the United Kingdom had no automatic right of custody. To gain custody of his son would be a complicated, controversial business. And while it was conducted his son would remain in care, certainly until his mother was physically fit enough to look after him, and possibly—if the social worker’s case for wanting a Care Order were valid—indefinitely.

His jaw tightened. No—that was one thing that would
not
continue! His son was coming out of that foster woman’s house—his unhappiness, his misery had been palpable.

Whatever it took—he would get his son out of there!

Even if it meant dealing sweetly with someone as contemptible as
Rhianna
Davies.

Alexis’s eyes swept over the gaunt, haggard face staring horrified up at him. His stomach clenched.
Rhianna
Davies might be mercenary, an irresponsible drug-addict, but his son had cried for her…

Piercing like a needle into his memory, he heard the pinched little voice whispering, almost inaudibly, at his oh-so-carefully phrased question this morning, ‘Mummy…I want Mummy.’

His nails dug into his palms. Dear God—a child crying for his mother…

A mother who never came back…

Memory gutted through him, drenching him with remembered pain, making him hear the heartbroken crying of a child for its mother. With a wrench he silenced the voice he could still hear inside his head, as if it were yesterday, not thirty long years ago.

No.
Enough memories.
They were no use now.

All that was needed now was his most honed negotiation skill.
Rhianna
Davies held the key to his son—he had to find a way to turn it. And his emotions—seething, swirling like a black inky pit inside him—were only going to get in the way of doing so. Ruthlessly, he schooled himself.
Time for finesse now, not the indulgence of emotion.

Regaining control, he let his eyes rest on her appalled expression. He brought to the forefront of his mind what he had concluded her long-term plan was to be. Obviously
Rhianna
Davies had kept his son from him quite deliberately, so she must have been biding her time, planning on producing him at a time of her choosing, when she would gain the greatest advantage from the disclosure.

That she had not done so as soon as she’d known she was pregnant could only have been because she had not, at that stage, been sure of his paternity. A woman as free with her
favours
as he knew her to be could easily have had any number of contenders for the privilege of impregnating her. Perhaps she had not been sure enough of his contribution to risk challenging him with a DNA test. Better, she must have reasoned, for her to have waited until the boy had grown sufficiently for his Greek heritage to be visible in his features. Then she would be on much safer ground to claim him as her child’s father.

Well, fate had taken a hand, and disclosure had come prematurely. From his point of view that could only be a good thing. She had lost the advantage of timing. Indeed—his eyes swept over her haggard features once more—she had lost a lot more advantages as well.