LITMIR.BIZ

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Of course it was my business when I was asking you to come back to me!’ he flung back at her, his spectacular bone structure rigid with condemnation.

      So, he didn’t want her with the encumbrance of a child. That was no surprise to Billie. He might have wanted a legitimate heir from Calisto but that want had been firmly rooted in his pride in his family line and his apparent desire to have a child to inherit his business empire. He had no particular fondness for children or interest in them that she had ever noticed. He had nephews and nieces because at least two of his sisters had married and produced but he had never mentioned those kids in a positive way, choosing instead to complain about the noise, inconvenience and indiscipline they displayed at adult gatherings.

      ‘But I didn’t owe you the information that I had a child when I had no plans to come back to you,’ Billie countered evenly, slight shoulders setting straight now that she no longer felt threatened, green eyes bright with defiance.

      ‘Then what was this afternoon all about?’ Gio demanded with cutting derision.

      ‘A mistake, as I said earlier,’ she reminded him doggedly. ‘A mistake we will obviously never repeat.’

      Gio studied Billie, all pink and tousled and undoubtedly naked below the robe. As she moved her breasts swayed, pointed nubs making faint indents on the fabric, and within seconds he was hard as iron and furious that the hunger he had so recently assuaged could return without his volition. ‘Who was the guy?’

      ‘That’s not relevant,’ Billie fielded.

      The fury still powering Gio wouldn’t quit. He breathed in slow and deep, disturbed by the level of anger still burning through him, questioning its source. ‘What age is the kid?’ he asked, although he didn’t know why he was asking because he could see no reason why he should want to know.

      ‘A year old,’ Billie answered, trimming a couple of months from Theo’s tally for safety’s sake, fearful of rousing Gio’s curiosity and making him wonder if there was the smallest possibility that her child might also be his child.

      Involved in fast mental calculations as he counted the months, Gio compressed his wide sensual mouth into a hard line of distaste. ‘So, it was some kind of rebound thing after me,’ he assumed.

      ‘Not everything in my life is about you!’ Billie snapped back defensively.

      ‘But obviously the kid’s father isn’t still around—’

      ‘Not all men are cut out to be fathers,’ she parried.

      ‘The least a man should do is stand by his own child,’ Gio pronounced, startling her with that opinion. ‘It’s his most basic duty.’

      ‘Well, mine didn’t...’ and she almost reminded him that his father hadn’t either but that felt like too sensitive a point to raise in the mood he was in.

      ‘Whatever.’ Gio shifted a broad shoulder sheathed in butter-soft leather in a Mediterranean shrug as he moved past her to the door, clearly eager to be gone this time around. ‘You should’ve told me about the child the minute I reappeared. It’s a game changer, not something I could accept.’

      Once, Billie would have assumed that she would experience a certain bitter satisfaction from Gio, in his ignorance, rejecting his own child, but instead guilt bit deep into her uneasy conscience. The passage of time had softened her outlook. Nothing was as black and white as she had believed when she had given birth to Theo without Gio’s knowledge. Less emotional now than she had been then, she knew that Gio had wronged her but that Gio’s wrong did not necessarily make her decisions right. A child wasn’t a trophy or a payback for an adult’s unkindness. A child was only a small human being, who might well not appreciate the choice she had made when he was old enough to have an opinion.

      * * *

      For Gio the next morning started with a bang when the fax spewed out a document and kept on printing. He scooped up the first page on the way to the shower and froze when he realised that he was looking at a facsimile of a birth certificate.

      Theon Giorgios, a little boy aged fifteen months, had been born to Billie Smith. Theon was his grandfather’s name and the child’s age left no doubt of when conception had occurred.

      Gio swept up the other pages of the report that had come through. His hands were trembling with rage. He was so angry, so incredulous that he wanted to smash something. He had trusted Billie and yet self-evidently she had betrayed his trust. He struggled to cool down for long enough to take a rational appraisal of the facts. No method of birth control was fool proof. He knew that intellectually, but he had always been careful, determined never to be caught in that net by something as basic as biology.

      Billie had been on the contraceptive pill but side effects had led to her trying several brands before finally choosing to have an implant put in her arm instead. In short he had allowed her to take contraceptive responsibility and it was very possible that she had simply fallen victim to the failure rate. He set down the report, strode into the shower and, below the pounding beat of the overhead power shower, he thought with an incredulous wonder that was entirely new to his experience, I have a son.

      An illegitimate son. He didn’t like that; he didn’t like that aspect at all. Gio was rigid in his views in that line and was well aware that his half-sister had suffered from having neither a father nor the acceptance and support of her own family. Times had changed since then and the world in general was much less concerned about whether or not children were born within marriage. In the Letsos family, however, such formal acknowledgements of inheritance, status and honour still mattered a great deal.

      That Billie had lied outright to him shocked Gio the most and by the time he had finished reading that report and had learned about his son’s surgery, Billie’s unacceptable childcare arrangements and the unsavoury character of the woman she was living with, he wasted no time in setting up a video-conference meeting with his legal team in London to get advice. That discussion concluded, Gio knew what his options were and they were very few and the fierce temper he usually kept under wraps was boiling up like lava below his calm surface. He was in a situation he would never have chosen and, worst of all, a situation he could not necessarily control. He would fight dirty if he had to, very dirty if need be. Billie might have taken him by surprise but Gio knew where his priorities lay.

      That same morning, Billie felt washed out because she had tossed and turned through the night and she got up early and was sitting with a cup of tea when Dee came downstairs smothering a yawn and swearing she was going straight back to bed.

      ‘I’ve done something awful,’ she confided to her cousin, quickly filling in the details and wincing when Dee looked at her in surprise and dismay. ‘I know, it was totally wrong of me to tell Gio that Theo was another man’s child—’

      ‘What came over you?’

      Billie groaned. ‘I felt cornered and threatened. I didn’t get the chance to think anything through. I know Gio’s going to be furious when he finds out the truth.’ She pushed away the curls flopping on her brow and groaned. ‘I’m going to text him and ask him to come over.’

      ‘I think you’d better. I mean...the minute you realised that he knew you had a child, you should’ve come clean. After all, if you don’t tell Gio, what happens if Theo decides that he wants to meet his father ten or fifteen years from now?’ the blonde woman asked anxiously. ‘I know Gio hurt you but that doesn’t mean that he couldn’t be a good father.’

      Dee wasn’t telling Billie anything she hadn’t thought herself during the long lonely hours of the night. Gio walking back into her life had changed everything. It was no longer acceptable to conceal the truth of Theo’s paternity and pretending that some other man was responsible for his conception had been downright unforgivable, she acknowledged with eyes that ached from the tears she was holding back. Ashamed of that moment of cowardice, she swallowed hard and lifted her phone, selecting the number she had never deleted, hoping it remained unchanged, texting...

      I

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