Chapter Six
He’d never noticed that there was a certain starkness to the penthouse until he saw it through Rosemary’s eyes.
He’d never thought about it. The place had ticked all his boxes, most importantly, the security aspect.
The building was shared by other high-profile individuals who valued privacy, and the complex was like a fortress.
His own apartment was big enough to offer everything he could ever need, but the facilities of the building were second to none—including a rooftop helipad.
The view was also exceptional, reminding him in some ways of the view from his parents’ estate.
And yet this epitome of modernity was as far removed from the ancient, sprawling estate as one could get.
And for that, he was eternally grateful.
It was his home away from home, except neither was really a ‘home’. His parents’ estate had ceased feeling like that from the moment he’d discovered his adoption and confronted his father. And this?
It was only seeing Rosemary’s slightly dazed expression as her wide green eyes swept across the details of each room that made him realise that. He had added only a few personal effects since moving in. His clothes, a state-of-the-art office and gym, and that was pretty much it.
‘It’s very…grey,’ she said pensively, flicking a glance at him and frowning in a way that almost made him laugh. She looked at him as though he had morphed into some kind of inhuman monster—though hadn’t he always been that to her?
No. Not always. As a teenager, she’d been helpless to hide the way she looked at him.
He couldn’t be back in Greece without finding her staring at him, watching him, her cheeks flushing pink if he glanced in her direction.
He remembered the way his friends had called him out on it, at his twenty-first birthday.
He hadn’t wanted a party, but his parents had insisted.
Rosemary had happened to be there—it coincided with her school holidays—and from that point on, she’d become the butt of the joke to his one-time friends.
His gut twisted when he remembered some of the things they’d said about her—that he’d let them say because he’d been so angry with her, for the way she’d swept into his parents’ home and seemingly taken his place.
For the way his mother loved her, which made him despise her.
It wasn’t until the night of his mother’s wedding that Aristotle had finally had enough of their cruel, insensitive, demeaning comments and told them all to take a damn hike.
Not because of Rosemary, but because they’d crossed into generalized misogyny, and he didn’t hold any quarter with that kind of talk.
Treating women like meat, as though sex with them could be turned into some kind of game… It had sickened and disgusted him.
‘I mean, it’s fine,’ she quickly added, frowning, looking back to the room he’d just presented as hers.
She stepped into the space, moving disastrously close to the bed. Reminding him that for all they’d slept together twice, neither of those occasions had been in a bed. And yet there was one just a few feet away from her, all made up, big and soft and…
‘I think I’ll need to paint it,’ she said apologetically, nose scrunching up a little. As though she was afraid he might say no.
‘Rosemary, you can paint anything. You can buy whatever furniture suits, change the artwork. This is now your home—act like it.’
Her eyes widened as though the reality of that was just sinking in. She looked around again, but this time it was with a spark of intent.
‘Okay.’ She nodded, moving towards the curtains and pulling them open, her gaze falling on the spectacular view. ‘It’s so lovely.’ She sighed to emphasise that. ‘It’s funny, for all I’m an archaeologist, I’ve done very little work in Greece.’
He tamped down on the part of him that was blaring with a clear warning sign. This whole situation would work better if they kept things on a businesslike footing. He didn’t need to know the whole backstory to her life.
‘Why is that?’ he asked anyway, moving further into the room.
‘Good question. On the one hand, most of these sites have been explored again and again.’
‘So there’s less chance of a new discovery?’
‘Oh, there’s always a chance,’ she said, flicking her eyes towards him as her lips lifted in a small smile. ‘I suppose I just like to follow the path less travelled.’
‘Where have you worked?’
He told himself not to move towards her. To stay safely on the other side of the bedroom. It was a large space—at least twice the size of her apartment in Putney. She put her hand on her stomach, gaze returning to the sparkling view of Athens.
‘Afghanistan, Peru, Turkey, Zimbabwe, India, Ecuador, Algeria. I’m meant to be in Colombia right now.’
Somehow, he was across the room. His body, usually excellent at doing exactly what he wished, had developed a mind of its own. He stood across from her. Close enough that he could reach out and brush his hand over her arm, down to that sweet hip of hers, squeezing her tight.
‘Not exactly a Zagat guide of tourism hotspots for the average woman in her early twenties.’
‘Unless you’re into archaeology,’ she pointed out.
‘Where was your favourite?’
Her lips twisted. ‘I couldn’t choose.’
‘You love what you do.’ It was a statement; her passion was obvious. So too the heaviness of her sigh, when she looked up at him and nodded.
‘Yes.’
Then he did reach out, surprising them both by putting a hand on her stomach. ‘This isn’t a death sentence, Rosemary. Our baby doesn’t have to signal the end of your career.’
‘That’s actually more true now that I’m here with you than it was before.’
But he was hardly listening. He was a rational man, he knew it wasn’t actually possible for their child to somehow be communicating with him, but the second his hand touched her stomach he felt the strangest aching sense of all-body warmth.
It was as though he’d come home. It was overwhelmingly strange.
He pulled his hand back, dropping it to his side, keeping his gaze locked to a point above her head, rather than risking that she’d see whatever foolish emotions were rioting through him.
He wouldn’t allow this baby to make him vulnerable.
‘This is the guest suite of the apartment,’ he said, glad to be returning to a less personal topic of conversation.
‘It was designed with groups of guests in mind. There are three bedrooms, each with their own bathroom, and there’s a small private sitting room.
I thought it would be perfect for you, a nursery and a nanny’s room. ’
‘A nanny?’ she repeated, and now his eyes did drop to hers, probing without meaning to, reading those green depths, and hating the way he was imagining their baby with her eyes and dimples.
‘Do you have a problem with that?’
She twisted her hands in front of her in that way she had. It wasn’t uncertainty so much as a placeholder, to indicate she was thinking something through.
‘I guess it’s way outside of my experience,’ she said. ‘Did you have a nanny?’
‘Yes.’
She nodded, but he heard himself elaborating, for no reason he could think of.
‘My mother was very hands-on, so my nanny—Marta—was with me if they travelled, or when they went out at night. She was an older woman from the village my mother grew up in. I sometimes wondered if my mother didn’t take her on because she needed a job, and a home, after her own husband had died. ’
Rosemary’s smile changed her face completely. It was so unguarded and beautiful. So breathtakingly beautiful.
Out of nowhere, he remembered what it had been like, seeing her at the wedding.
She’d been twenty. The teenager whose gaze had followed him around was nowhere in evidence.
In her place had been a sinfully sexy, stunning Madonna, with her full breasts and dazzling smile.
It was the kind of smile that changed her entire face, making her eyes sparkle and her cheeks glow.
He swallowed hard, forcing his body to heel, even when it would have much preferred to keep exploring the connection they’d resurrected outside his mother’s house.
‘That sounds like your mum,’ she said with obvious affection.
He felt a pang in his chest, but it was different to the jealousy he’d felt all those years earlier, when he’d been little more than a boy himself. At least, the motivation was different. He heard in Rosemary’s voice an admiration for his mother that he knew she’d never feel for him.
And he didn’t have to be a genius to work out why.
From almost their first encounter, he’d treated her in a way that was designed to keep her at a distance.
By belittling, rejecting, icing her out at every opportunity.
He’d resented her place in his parents’ life, but as she’d got older, and went from fourteen to eighteen, then nineteen, and grew into a woman, he’d started to resent the hold she had on him.
He’d intentionally avoided conversations around her, left the room if his mother and father were discussing her archaeological studies, started planning his visits home around when she wouldn’t be there.
And in his absence she’d formed a connection with his mother that was real and full of love.
‘I hate you.’
A salient reminder of her feelings for him, in total contrast to the way she was warmly reflecting on Melina.
‘She has such a big heart. She didn’t know anything about my family life, my mother, the way I was made to feel like an outsider in my own home,’ she murmured. ‘And yet it was like she did know. As though she just understood. She welcomed me with the kind of affection I’d never known.’
‘I remember.’
Her eyes lifted to his, and that sweet smile slipped, smudging a thoughtful frown in its place. ‘And you always hated me.’