Chapter Five
WILLA FELT THE room tilt sideways. She was dazed, dazzled. Dumbfounded by the swerve the day had taken.
For a moment it was as if she was breathing in water not air, and she was back in the private room at the hospital with Robert looking at his hands, looking anywhere but at her face as he admitted that he wasn’t her father.
Trying to stem the rising tide of panic, she made herself focus on solid shapes in the room. The pale wood of the window frame. The curving rim of the teacup.
No, she thought, as the dog continued pressing her head against her leg.
She was being ridiculous. She had multiple follicles on her ovaries.
The infected one she’d had removed had left scarring.
And she wanted to tell Toula that she was mistaken.
That whatever it was the dog thought she sensed, she was wrong.
She wasn’t pregnant. She couldn’t be.
A sudden, vivid memory of Ares’s body surging inside hers in the pool, and before that, a conversation of not-quite asked or answered questions.
‘It’s fine,’ she’d said. ‘I’m safe.’
But was she?
Like most women, her periods had been a little erratic when she’d started menstruating.
They’d settled down, although they were light, but then she did a lot of dancing and riding.
And then she’d gone on the pill and forgotten about periods, although she did get a tiny amount of bleeding and some cramping.
But nothing that a couple of painkillers and a hot bath couldn’t make bearable, until six months ago when the cramping had gotten so painful she’d gone to hospital.
She’d thought her appendix was about to burst, but the surgeon had spotted something on her ovary.
Polycystic ovary syndrome. PCOS for short.
Not a death sentence or anything like it, but the doctor had spoken bluntly about the implications of the diagnosis.
The infertility rate for someone with PCOS was fifteen times higher than someone without it.
Treatment to remove a cyst could result in removing the ovary.
After the diagnosis she had stopped taking the pill, stopped having sex.
Because she felt unsexy, and let down by her body, and obviously someone was trying to tell her something.
Why else would she have had her future taken away on the same day as she found out that her past was a sham?
That her so-called family was not hers. Or not in any absolute way.
There were no blood ties. She was connected by shallow, ephemeral things like living in the same house and sharing a surname.
She felt something misshapen pressing in her throat so that it was hard to swallow. Since coming off the pill, her periods had stayed regular. So if her math was right, she was slightly late. A week maybe.
But a week was nothing. Look at what had been going on in her life. She’d had a long-haul flight and started a new job. And been blackmailed. Her stress hormones were probably stratospheric. It didn’t mean she was pregnant. The opposite, in fact.
Her hands clenched. Because she couldn’t get pregnant.
She couldn’t.
Because if she was, there was only one man who could be the father—
‘We should probably be getting back, Thea. Ms Hamilton and I have a lot to get through before she returns to London.’ Ares’s voice cut across her panicky thoughts, and glancing up she smiled at the older woman.
‘It was lovely to meet you, and thank you so much for the delicious tea and cakes.’ Her voice sounded fine, she thought, easy, relaxed, not even a flicker of anxiety, but she felt a sudden and urgent need to get outside.
The horses were where they had left them.
‘Hey, there,’ she said, catching Chiron’s bridle. ‘Did you have a siesta?’ she crooned as he lifted his big head to nuzzle her shoulder. ‘Are you ready to roll?’
A hand clamped on the bridle next to hers. ‘He might be, but you won’t be riding him.’
She spun round, frowning. ‘Why ever not?’
‘The terrain here is the same in any direction. And he almost lost his footing on the ridge.’
‘So did Agrius.’
‘True.’ The sun was in her eyes, and she couldn’t see his expression, but she could hear the tension in his voice. ‘But I’m not the one who might be pregnant.’
She could feel her legs swaying slightly in the sea breeze.
‘I’m not pregnant.’
‘You can’t know that.’ He was being reasonable—or what a billionaire used to people jumping through hoops when he so much as blinked thought was reasonable. But to her, it felt intrusive. It was bad enough having these thoughts in her head, she didn’t need him giving them some kind of validation.
‘Toula is a dog. Not a gynaecologist. And this conversation is completely inappropriate. There are boundaries. We agreed, remember?’
‘I haven’t forgotten. But there is always a case for making exceptions.
And this is one of them.’ For a moment with Thea, he had relaxed a fraction.
But now his voice had shifted back into that familiar autocratic way of speaking, the one that assumed everyone would simply and obediently take instruction.
‘You’re on my land, you’re my responsibility.
And I take my responsibilities very seriously. ’
There was the hum of an engine, and an SUV appeared, crunching over the pebble-strewn driveway. As it stopped, two of the stable hands climbed out, and she watched with a mixture of disbelief and fury as they mounted the horses.
‘Ms Hamilton.’ Ares paused. ‘Could you get in the car?’ He waited, and his will was like a living thing, but she stood her ground literally, and after another few pulsing seconds, he said quietly, ‘Please, would you get in the car, Willa?’
For a moment she imagined storming away from him across the rugged hillside, but he would insist on coming with her. At least in the car they wouldn’t be alone, and the journey would take less time.
And what was the alternative?
Ares was going nowhere. He was standing there, tall and straight-backed like a Greek column made of flesh and blood and muscle instead of marble. And he would stand there for all eternity if that was what it took.
It took seven minutes to get back to the villa, and Willa spent every one of those minutes trying to steady her thoughts. There was no reason for her to be getting so het up. Thea was very sweet, but it was just a random, throwaway comment. And as for Toula…
Yes, the dog had been oddly attentive, protective even, but maybe Toula thought she was someone else or that she would give her some cake. Which weren’t good reasons to go into a tailspin like this. She was here to do Ariana Konstantinou’s prenup. Everything else was a distraction.
Including the man sitting next to her.
She had thought Ares was going to start in as soon as they got in the car, but his interest in her appeared to have waned as swiftly as it had caught fire. As they walked into the villa, he was typing something into his phone.
But her relief was premature and short-lived. His housekeeper, Iona, came out to the entrance hall to greet them, only for Ares to snap something in Greek, and she melted back through the doorway. Now he turned to face Willa.
‘We need to talk.’ His eyes found hers. ‘About what Thea said.’
‘No, we really don’t.’ She turned and walked swiftly away from him.
The layout of the villa was still so new she had no idea where she was heading, and she found herself in a sitting room that on any other occasion would have stunned her into silence with its uninterrupted view of the Aegean. Now though, she felt…
Unmoored.
Panicky.
Blurred at the edges.
Inside her head, she could hear Robert’s voice, a memory now but clear like an audio file, hear the pain, the shame, and it was her pain, her shame. And now as then, she wanted it so badly not to be true.
‘We had unprotected sex.’ Ares had followed her into the room as she knew he would, but she was still unprepared for the bluntness of his words. ‘You said you were safe,’ he said tersely. ‘Ten minutes ago, your face said otherwise.’
‘I was surprised.’ She did her best to keep her voice level.
‘You think it’s a possibility—’
‘I don’t,’ she lied.
He held out his phone. ‘I looked it up. Dogs can smell the hormonal changes of pregnancy before mothers test positive.’
Her chest and throat tightened so that it was hard to speak. ‘Are you saying you trust a dog more than you trust me?’ She shook her head. ‘Maybe you should get Toula to do Ariana’s prenup.’
A muscle tightened in his jaw. ‘I’m saying that you seem very on edge about something you claim is impossible.’
‘I didn’t say it was impossible,’ she snapped.
And only realised as she did so that she had effectively self-sabotaged her own denials. The sudden narrowing of his gaze told her he’d reached the same conclusion.
‘So you could be pregnant?’
She hesitated. If she said no, it would mean telling him about herself, revealing things that she had never revealed to anyone.
And he didn’t deserve to know anything about her, she thought, muted by the memory of waking alone, her confusion and that crippling feeling of stupidity at having got it so wrong.
‘Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. But it’s all supposition.’
‘Currently, yes. But there’s an easy and highly accurate way to find out for sure,’ Ares said, and that statement as much as the intensity of his gaze made her feel suddenly weak and loose inside, and she understood on a visceral level just how unrelenting he could be.
‘No.’ She shook her head. The idea of doing what he was suggesting, here, now, in his villa was horrifying. ‘I won’t be doing a pregnancy test because your former housekeeper’s dog was friendly to me. That’s crazy.’
‘You’re overreacting.’
‘And I’ll stop overreacting when you stop overstepping. Just because we had sex once does not mean you get to have an input in my private life.’
‘You can’t hide from this, Willa. You can’t hide it from me.’