Chapter Five #3
Then, the precious bundle in her arms and her heart in her throat, Vayle turned to where a statue-still Nelios stood frozen.
Despite not moving, he occupied every square inch of the doorway until she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t see anything else but him.
Or that convoluted parade of emotions which included shock, bewilderment and now, incredibly… jealousy?
She didn’t understand why his gaze darted towards where her left hand was tangled in the blanket. And, when it searched and apparently didn’t discover what he was looking for, recaptured her gaze. ‘You’re married?’
Why was his voice so hoarse? So accusatory?
‘You may have turned my life inside out a year ago, but I don’t believe I owe you any information now,’ she replied tartly.
Angelos whimpered, perhaps sensing the tension in the air. Or perhaps it was simply a demand for milk now he was awake. She shifted him in her arms, and again Nelios’s gaze darted to her left hand. She realised he was looking for a ring, and almost laughed.
‘It’s the twenty-first century, Nelios. A woman isn’t doomed to ruin simply because she has a child out of wedlock.
’ Her inner hysteria threatened to spill over at the very thought of dating another man while pregnant and then going as far as to marry said mystery man—amidst the turbulence of having Nelios proceed with his plans to rip Vayle Hotel from her grasp, leaving them homeless and having to scramble to rearrange their lives.
She would’ve needed to be Wonder Woman herself.
And, while she was proud of herself for battling through the trials and tribulations of the past year, she was well-versed in what it felt like to approach breaking point.
To teeter over the very edge of the abyss and force herself back just in time.
Another wave of shock travelled through him. ‘So the child is yours?’ he pressed a little jaggedly.
This time she frowned. ‘What are you talking about? Of course he is.’
She didn’t think it possible but he seemed to harden further, his breath locked in his towering body. Frantic eyes fell on Angelos, his gaze sharpening into probing drills. Whatever he saw made the great Nelios Petralis positively stagger for the first time since she’d known him.
Perhaps it was the brown eyes her baby had inherited from him, or the tiniest hint of a dimple in his chin that would grow as prominent as his father’s one day.
Or maybe it was an elemental feeling of recognition between father and son she wasn’t privy to.
Angelos fell silent then beneath his father’s scrutiny, his wide eyes taking in the man who looked as though he was fighting a great inner battle.
Whether he won or not was questionable because, when he next spoke, his voice remained gravel-rough.
‘I am going to ask you a question, Vayle. And I would be extremely appreciative if you didn’t play games with me.’
‘I don’t—’
‘How old is this child?’ he cut across her, his voice no longer shaken but scalpel-sharp.
Now, Vayle froze. ‘What? You know how old he is. He’s exactly three months next week. Why would you—?’
‘Vayle.’ His chest rose, held, fell, eyes turned midnight dark, pinning her in place. ‘Is this child… Is he mine?’
The cycle of outrage at the question came and went in split seconds because it occurred to her that she’d missed something—several ‘somethings’, as it turned out.
Nelios Petralis wasn’t dim, far from it.
He was the most astute man she knew. Yet, every sign pointed to him being in pitch darkness about his son’s existence. How was that even possible?
She stared down at her baby, the most precious thing in her life and felt something seismic move through her. A warning? A rallying cry?
Against what? Surely he wouldn’t…
Another bedroom door opened behind her, but the brief reprieve she yearned for to parse through what was happening never came because Agnes stepped out and immediately froze at the sight of her son.
‘Demetrius.’
‘That is no longer my name,’ Nelios growled, a mighty predator swinging his mighty paws. ‘If you respect nothing else, respect that,’ he said through gritted teeth.
She went sheet-white, and stumbled back against the door.
Nelios lunged towards her—so he wasn’t entirely unfeeling after all—but Agnes straightened before he reached her and he froze halfway between Vayle and his mother.
And there, caught in some invisible vortex, his head swung from his mother to her. ‘It’s now clear one of you orchestrated this. So I will ask again—is this child mine?’ he breathed.
She might have crafted things into being for Agnes’s sake, but Vayle resented the unfounded accusation. Her temper flared anew.
‘How dare you come here, all superior and indignant, asking questions you already know the answers to? You claim to despise games, which begs the question—what game are you playing? You might have ignored his existence up till now, but don’t you dare pretend you didn’t know you had a son!’
Nelios had never been in a war zone, beyond the one he’d been thrown into when he’d been too young and ill-equipped to withstand it. He’d never felt bullets whistle about his head though, sure, he knew only too well what the sound of flying fists felt like when they landed.
But in this moment, when emotional landmines exploded across his every sense, he knew what soldiers of war experienced.
What it felt like to have one’s life flash before one’s eyes as devastation unravelled all around.
For a long stretch of time, he saw everything he’d imagined the rest of his life would be detonate and turn to ash right before his eyes, leaving him with the most desolate landscape he’d yet endured.
But, curiously, even that image didn’t linger.
It attempted to morph, take a different shape.
He shut it down before it solidified. Because screw fate for attempting to rearrange his destiny without his permission.
Screw karma for this…unacceptable effort to show him a different landscape from the one he’d meticulously drawn out for himself while enduring those fists and darkness and humiliation.
Ignored his existence up till now…
Know you had a son…
He shook his head, wondering for a moment, but knowing he hadn’t misheard her. Vayle Lancaster had many faults but she’d never tossed out words she didn’t find a way of expressing one way or another.
Especially the one particular way that still had the power to turn his insides out, which he most definitely wasn’t going to think about.
Even if the consequences of it was right there in his face, in the form of a cherubic angel staring at him with open curiosity an infant this young surely shouldn’t possess.
Unless that infant was his and thus superior in all the ways that counted.
His child.
The ominous sensation that had taken hold of him when he’d first set eyes on the boy built now, seizing every corner of his being. Setting off a pendulum of emotions he only seemed to feel around Vayle Lancaster.
No, that wasn’t true. Unbelievably, the woman quietly sobbing behind him also held that power, even after all this time.
It was almost laughable that, having sworn never to clasp eyes on these two people again in this lifetime, he now found himself caught in the maelstrom of emotions they both triggered in him.
Well, three now. He didn’t doubt that, had Apostolis been alive, he too would’ve merrily riled him. His heart lurched at the thought of the father he’d never seen again after that fateful night. The father who’d thrown him away.
Looking into the child’s eyes, something tight, profound and earth-shaking seized his chest, convulsed, jump-started and changed the very fibre of his being.
Glad you didn’t have that vasectomy now?
His breath caught, unprepared for that hissing taunt. For the unguarded punch to his solar plexus at the notion that this child, who had the power to trigger such weighty emotions in him, might never have existed.
Which meant what, exactly?
He shook his head again and redoubled his effort to corral his control. And when he succeeded—because he always succeeded—he levelled his most fearsome glare at the woman holding the child…his son…in her arms.
‘I’m willing to accommodate your belief that I knew about my…
about this baby’s existence.’ Son. Something inside him veritably rumbled at uttering the word he’d stumbled on.
He, who never, ever stumbled. But Nelios knew, and readily accepted, that the moment he took full possession of the truth a great many things would change, in ways even he wasn’t prepared for.
So, yes, he was well within his rights to buy himself a little time.
‘Just as I hope you will accommodate my need to get to the bottom of it.’
Ne, he sounded more than reasonable. Surprising, considering the tsunami of sensations bombarding him. She must’ve thought so too, because those alluring blue eyes, eyes he’d watched glaze with pleasure so pure he’d never witnessed the likes of it before, widened a fraction.
‘I…could see my way to doing that,’ she murmured, then her gaze darted past him. ‘What about Agnes?’
His teeth clenched and he forced himself to turn round. To face the woman who’d once held his hand on the way to school before she’d turned into a monster. ‘What do you want? Why am I here?’
Agnes’s lips quivered for a second. Her gaze lingered on his face before they dropped. ‘I wanted to talk to you. Explain what really happened.’ Her face twisted. ‘And some other things I think you’re old enough to know now.’