Chapter Two
Four months later
‘You’ve been in London, you say?’ Melina Machairas asked down the phone line.
It was early enough that the sky was still tinged with darkness, with a hint of dawn colours spreading like fingertips across the horizon—streaks of pink, purple, a splash of gold.
‘I’m still in London,’ he corrected.
She made a considering noise. ‘What for?’
‘Investor meetings.’
Another noise—one he knew well. His mother was scheming.
‘Whatever it is you are thinking, say it.’ He leaned back in his chair, reaching for his thick, dark coffee in the same movement.
‘How do you know I’m thinking anything?’
‘Because I know you.’ She might not have been his biological mother—something he’d become shockingly, painfully aware of at the age of fifteen, but she was still the woman who’d raised him. Every nuance of hers was familiar to him.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen Rosie?’
He closed his eyes against the question—and, more accurately, the unwelcome impact it had on his body. The way his gut tightened and his cock surged with a rush of blood. Damn that woman. Damn her sweet vanilla fragrance and long, curling hair that was the most striking colour he’d ever seen.
‘You know we do not socialize.’
His mother sighed. ‘Yes, I just thought perhaps at one of your fundraisers or events…’
He flattened his lips. Rosemary and he moved in very different circles. Up until her father’s marriage to his mother, Rosemary and Glen Richardson had hardly been the kind of people that would wind up at the social occasions he frequented.
Rosemary still wasn’t.
He knew—because it was impossible not to glean certain things about her—that she was a junior archaeologist, often posted in strange, out-of-the-way locations.
He had no idea how she juggled that with her fair skin, and yet, remembering the way she’d pored over those Britannicas, her job choice did make sense.
‘Do you think you could check on her?’
He instantly rejected the idea, but at least managed to stop the harsh ‘no’ from flying out of his mouth. ‘Why? Rosemary undoubtedly has plenty of friends—I doubt she needs me.’
His mother lowered her voice. ‘We’re worried about her. We’ve been trying to get her to come home, but she’s refusing.’
He ignored the anger that flared inside of him at his mother’s use of the word ‘home’. Rosemary was an outsider, just as her father was.
He could only thank God his mother had listened to common sense and had Glen sign an ironclad prenuptial agreement before the wedding. Meaning that while he might enjoy the benefits of a billionaire’s lifestyle for now, it was entirely temporary.
‘Rosemary is a big girl. I’m sure she can take care of herself.’
His mother made a sound of frustration. ‘It’s been hard on her, being excluded from the dig. She’s missing fieldwork, and has no idea when she’ll be able to get back to it. Certainly not for a year at least, but even then, she can hardly drag a baby around the world—’
He sat up straighter, as though a blade of lightning had cracked against the side of his skull.
‘Did you say “baby”?’
His mother sighed again. ‘Honestly, do you ever check your WhatsApp?’
He pulled his phone from his ear, quickly flicking into the messaging app. ‘There’s nothing there.’
‘Oh. I thought I sent something. I don’t know.
I’m so useless with technology, Aristotle.
’ There was a shuffling noise, but Aristotle barely heard it.
The word ‘baby’ was flying around and around his mind, setting parts of him on fire, turning others to ice.
‘You’ll have to teach me, next time you’re here. ’
His lips compressed tighter. ‘Are you telling me Rosemary Richardson is pregnant?’
‘Your stepsister, Rosie, yes, darling.’
He gripped his phone so tightly it was a surprise it didn’t pop out of his hand. ‘And who, may I ask, is the father?’
‘That’s the thing. She won’t say. I know she was dating someone a few months ago. Some historian or researcher, someone she met through work. Do you think you could go and check in on her? Take her some dinner or something? Let her know she has family if she needs us.’
His head was pounding all of a sudden, as though his brain had begun to beat and throb, to expand so hard and fast against the confines of his skull that it hurt all over.
‘Of course,’ he said darkly, brow beading in a hint of perspiration as he stood and reached for his suit jacket. ‘What is her address?’
Despite the fact he spent several months a year in London for work, he had no clue where his ‘stepsister’ lived—a fact he’d always been glad of. Until now. He took down her address and then said silkily, ‘You’d better give me her phone number, too.’
Because there was no way he was going to let Rosemary get away from him. If there was any chance she was pregnant with his baby, he needed to know.
But just the thought of it threatened to send him into an unwelcome state of panic, so he found himself clinging to what his mother had said—that Rosemary had been dating someone else around the time of her party.
At least that cast some doubt on things.
Surely that other man was more likely to be the father?
He ignored the pang of something darkly disapproving that flared at the thought of Rosemary sleeping with other men.
Of course she had—and so she should have.
If anything, he was the one who’d been in the wrong, the one who’d yet again taken advantage of the strangely alluring chemistry that sparked between them whenever they were together.
There were four years between them, but that might have been a decade when it came to life experience and outlook. Even now, at twenty-four, there was something startlingly sheltered about Rosie, something young and innocent.
His entire focus on the drive across town, to the Putney address his mother had given him, was on discounting the possibility of his being the father of her baby.
The certainty that he just needed to see Rosemary, and have her confirm that, so he’d be able to go back to his own life, heaving a huge sigh of relief.
Up until a month ago, Rosie wouldn’t have had any idea she was pregnant.
There had been a few niggling symptoms, but nothing she’d paid much attention to.
It was only a routine blood test, prior to heading deep into Colombia, that had revealed her pregnancy.
Testing for it was a standard precaution, given the risk of Zika virus in the next dig location.
She hadn’t batted so much as an eyelid at the pathology form, but when the results came back positive she could have been knocked over with a feather.
Pregnant!
She’d had four weeks to come to terms with the concept of having a baby, with the identity of the baby’s father, and the impact it would have on her career. It was as if one sledgehammer after another was being slammed into her life, splintering every single part of it to shreds.
Telling her father and stepmother had been the hardest part because she’d known it would eventually lead to them telling Aristotle, but she could hardly keep such a thing as a pregnancy secret.
And the baby? She’d agonized over that. This dear little lifeform, to whom she already felt so connected, was part Aristotle.
On the one hand, her first instinct was to tell him.
Of course! How could she not? But then, when she remembered the way he’d so vehemently insisted he never wanted children, his general coldness towards her—and everyone—she rejected the idea outright.
It would be so much better for their baby to have one parent who loved them fully, rather than suffering the pain of a parent who couldn’t open their heart. She knew that pain all too well.
She could only thank every deity known to man that she’d told her father a fib at Melina’s birthday party, inventing some fictional work colleague boyfriend, to cover any hint of suspicion that might arise around her and Aristotle.
Not that he’d so much as looked at her for the rest of the night.
For all of his ‘we should be civil’ talk, he’d basically acted as though she didn’t exist.
Which had suited her fine.
She turned her attention back to the research notes she was compiling for one of the on-field teams, ignoring the pang of jealousy in the centre of her chest. What she wouldn’t give to be out there, doing the actual work.
The thrill of discovery, the patience it took to sift sand and dirt, segment by segment, tracking every minor discovery, gently uncovering the secrets of the past. She’d always loved puzzles, and she’d always adored history: archaeology was the perfect combination of both.
And now it was a distant pipe dream.
Her door buzzer sounded and she cast it an exasperated glance, before remembering she was expecting some slides to be couriered over so she could categorise them.
She stood, rubbing a hand over her very gently rounded stomach out of habit, her heart giving a little kick as she connected with the tiny life in there, and sighed.
For all it was a major mistake, and had the potential for disaster, at the same time she had felt instantly bonded with her little hitchhiker, the life forming inside of her. Bonded, and in love with. Utterly and completely.
She pasted a smile on her face and wrenched the door in, preparing to take the envelope of slides right up until the moment her gaze connected with Aristotle Machairas’s and another sledgehammer slammed into her life.
This was an invasion of every single sense. It was a shocking crossing of the lines they’d implicitly formed. He did not invade her London life. This was her space. Her zone.
He was outside of it.
‘We need to talk,’ he said darkly, not waiting to be invited in. His big, broad frame brushed past her and he stalked into her small studio apartment, with the neat double bed, table and two chairs and kitchenette.
‘This is where you live?’ he demanded, nostrils flaring.