An Heir for the Millionaire (4 page)

Clare forced a smile to her face.

‘Yes, I thought I'd be later, too,' she said. She left it at that. She could say nothing else. Not right now. Instead, she said, ‘How was Joey? He's out like a light now, I see.'

Vi's wrinkled face softened into a familiar smile.

‘Oh, he hasn't stirred. Don't you worry about him. Have a nice cup of tea and sit down before you take him upstairs.'

Clare went through into the sitting room and sank down onto the end of the sofa that still had its cushions on. Vi's armchair was closer to the TV in the corner, with a little table beside it, handy for the standard lamp. The room was old-fashioned, like the whole house, but Vi had lived here for thirty years and more.

For Clare it had been a haven. Those first few months, when the life she had been hoping against hope for had simply dissolved in her hands, it had been hideous. But although homeless, at least she had not been destitute. After her father had died she had received an offer for their flat which she'd felt she should not refuse, and she'd put the proceeds into the bank. But she had known she was in no state of mind to sort out her life properly, other than drifting through casual jobs from the temping agency and living in anonymous bedsits, and the money in the bank was still her nest egg. But once she'd known she was going to have to face life as a single mother, she had had to face up to the grim fact that if she bought another flat, even if just a small one, for her to live in, then what would be left for her to live off—and her baby?

The answer had come from a charity supporting single mothers, which put them in touch with elderly people who
needed someone to help them continue to live independently in their own homes. So Clare had been introduced to Vi, and Vi had taken to her, and she to the older woman. She had moved into Vi's old-fashioned terraced house in its quiet street in an unexciting but shabbily respectable part of West London. The money in the bank yielded a frugal but sufficient income for everything but luxuries like holidays, and in place of rent she looked after Vi, kept her house for her and kept her company as well, and made her home with her. Now, four years later, Vi was family—an honorary grandmother to Joey, whom she openly adored, and a kind but bracingly realistic support for Clare.

‘Here you go, love,' said Vi, making her way slowly into the room, carrying two mugs of tea. Clare took them from her, setting down hers, and putting Vi's on her little table as the old lady sat herself down in her armchair.

‘You look peaky,' observed Vi. ‘Was it very busy?'

‘Yes,' said Clare. She was trying hard to sound normal, look normal. She didn't want Vi upset—not by the fact she'd walked out of her job, nor by something so very much worse.

No—that was forbidden. She was not to think about that. Control. That was the word. The way it had been those first awful months, and then again, when her baby had been put into her arms, and the physical reality of him had brought it piercingly home to her just what she had done.

But it was the right thing to do.

‘What you'll need to do, Clare, love,' Vi was saying, ‘is give your feet a good soak. Always look after your feet, I say. My gran used to tell me that. She had very bad feet…'

Clare smiled absently, sipping her hot, reviving tea. She let Vi chat on. Vi's mind was as sharp as ever, but she liked to gossip, reminisce, just have someone to talk to. Tonight, though, Clare could hardly focus on what the older woman was telling her. All her energy was being spent on trying to block from her mind what had happened.

I can't think about it now. I'll think about it later. Tomorrow. Next week.

Never…

She had trained herself well not to think of Xander Anaketos. She'd had four long years of doing so.

But conscious thoughts were one thing to control. It was the unconscious ones she dreaded. And that night, as she lay in her bed upstairs, Joey in the little room beside her, asleep in his own bed now, it was, as it had always been, her dreams that betrayed her.

Dreams of Xander, his strong body arching over hers, his mouth on hers, his hands on her breasts, her flanks, stroking and smoothing, gliding and arousing, so arousing, taking her onwards, ever onwards, to that wonderful, ecstatic place where he had always taken her…always.

She awoke in the early hours, sick and heart pounding. The dreams had been so real, so vivid, with the horrible, super-realistic feelings that only dreams could have. Her stomach writhed, her pulse racing like a panic attack.

And her breasts, she realised with a sick horror, were swollen, her nipples distended.

She jerked out of bed, padding with bare feet down the stairs to the bathroom, feeling sick and ashamed.

The day passed with agonising slowness. She seemed to be two people. The person she always was these days—Joey's doting mother, attentive to him, responsive to him, adoring of him, and Vi's companion, bringing breakfast to her before she made her slow morning toilette, and then, after lunch, making their familiar daily expedition to the nearby park, Vi walking slowly with her stick and Clare pushing Joey in his buggy. In the park, Vi sat on her usual seat, and Joey got stuck in with Clare. First to the sandpit and then the playground, and the expedition ended with the usual ritual of taking Joey to feed the ducks on the pond. All blessedly familiar.

But she was someone else as well, she knew. Someone who was still jarring with shock, with disbelief that she had actually seen Xander Anaketos again, spoken to him, run from him…

He's gone. It's over.

She kept telling herself that repeatedly, as the other person she was went through the familiar rituals in the park.

I've got to calm down. I've got to get back to normal. I've got to forget it happened.

But it seemed so cruel. It had been such agony four years ago, to do what she had known she must—get over it, move on—but she had done it. She'd had to put her son first. And they were safe now. Secure. Familiar.

The past was gone.

Last night had been nothing but an aberration. And she had run from it, just as she had run from that hideous night when her stupid, stupid hopes and illusions had been ripped from her.

‘Let's go, Mummy!' Joey's little voice was a welcome interruption from her tormenting thoughts. He lifted up the empty plastic bag that had contained the bread crusts. ‘All gone,' he announced.

‘Time for tea,' said Vi, and got slowly to her feet from the bench she'd been sitting on.

Then they headed homewards in a slow procession.

She had no premonition. No warning. Just as she had had none last night.

As they rounded the corner into the street where Vi's house was it was Joey who spoke first, pointing.

‘Big car!'

Clare followed the direction of his pointing, and slowly her heart stopped in her chest. Outside Vi's house was parked a long, lean, brilliant scarlet monster of a car.

And out of it Xander Anaketos was emerging.

Why? That was the first weird thought in Clare's stricken brain. Why was he here? What for? What else could he possibly have to say to her, now he'd vented his spleen at her for daring not to be disposed of in exactly the way he liked to get rid of discarded mistresses?

Then, like an explosion in slow motion, she realised that it didn't matter why he had come here, or how he had found out where she lived.

Because as he started to walk towards them she realised he was not looking at her. His eyes were entirely, terrifyingly, on Joey.

Her breath was crushed from her lungs. She gave a silent, inaudible, breathless scream inside her head.

Desperately her brain worked feverishly. If she could just
bundle Joey inside, without him getting close enough to make out his features…

But it was too late. She could see it. See it in the change of expression in Xander's face. See the shock—the disbelief—jagging across his features.

He stopped. Just halted where he was, in the middle of the pavement, some yards from them.

Greek came from him. Hollow. Rasping.

Then slowly, very slowly, his eyes lifted from his son and went to her.

There was murder in his face.

X
ANDER
got them indoors. He had no memory of how he'd done it, or of what house they'd gone into. No awareness of anything other than the raw, boiling rage thundering through him. His mind had gone into a white-out.

Somehow, and he had no conscious thought of how, he had got her away from the old woman and the boy.

My son.
Theos—
my son!

There was no doubt about it—could not be! He could see his own features in the child's face.

And in hers—oh, he could see completely, absolutely, that she knew the toddler she was pushing along was his. She'd given birth to
his
son!

An iron will clamped down over the raging voice in his head. Control. That was what he needed now—absolute, total control. He was good at control. He had practised it all his life, from childhood with his stern uncle, who had required silence while he worked, and carrying the same discipline into his business dealings—never letting his rivals see his hand, always concealing his thoughts and aims from them.

And control, too, had been his watchword when it came to his dealings with women. It was the reason he changed them so frequently. A rule he had bent only once…

The irony of it savaged him.

Emotion surged in him like a terrifying monster, but he slammed it back down as he marched Clare down through the
house, out through a door at the back, yanking it open and thrusting her outside. There was a garden there, narrow and quite long, with a plastic sand tray and a miniature slide. There were children's toys, a ball, a push-along dog and some big colourful bricks, on the small stone-paved patio before the lawn started.

He grabbed her elbows and hauled her round.

‘Talk,' he said.

His eyes bored down into hers like drills.

Her face had gone white. He was not surprised. Guilt was blazoned across it. Rage spurted through him again. The vicious, vengeful bitch! To keep his son from him! Deliberately, knowingly…

‘Talk!' he snarled again.

Her face seemed to work, but not well. Slowly, faintly, she spoke.

‘What do you want me to say? There's nothing
to
say.'

He shook her like a rag, and she was boneless in his grip.

‘You keep my son from me and say there's nothing to say?' he demanded, fury icing through his words, his features. ‘Just what kind of a vengeful
bitch
are you?'

Her expression changed. Blanked.

‘What?' she said. There was complete incomprehension in her voice.

He shook her again. Emotion was ravening in him, like a wolf.

‘To keep my son from me as some kind of sick revenge!'

Her mouth opened, then closed. Then suddenly she tore free.

‘What the
hell
do you think you're saying to me?'

His eyes darkened like night.

‘You kept my son from me because you were angry that I finished with you!'

Her face worked again, but this time there was a different emotion in it. Her features contorted.

‘You conceited oaf!' she gasped at him. ‘Just who do you think you are? First you think I played some stupid manipulative game by walking out the way I did! Now you think, you
really
think, that I didn't tell you I was pregnant so I could get some kind of
revenge
on you?'

‘What other reason can there be?' he snarled back at her.

A choking sound came from her.

‘How about the fact you'd just replaced me with a new model and had given me my pay-off of a diamond necklace, like I was some kind of
whore
?' she spat at him.

Xander's mouth whitened.

‘You knew you were pregnant that evening?' His voice was a raw rasp. ‘You knew you were pregnant and you kept
quiet
about it! You walk out, carrying my baby, and you never say a
word
to me—in
four years
?'

She was staring at him. Staring at him as if he had spoken in Greek.

‘Well?' he demanded. His jaw was gritted, fury still roiling inside him. Fury and another emotion, even more powerful, that he must not, must
not
yet yield to, but which was driving him—driving him onwards with impossible motion.

‘You're not real,' she said. Her voice had changed. ‘You're just not real. You actually think I would tell a man who'd chucked me on the garbage pile, who'd paid me off with a diamond necklace, that I was pregnant by him?'

His expression stiffened. ‘I did not “pay you off”,' he bit out. ‘It's customary to give a token of appreciation to—'

‘Don't say that word to me! Don't
ever
say that word to me again! And don't even think of trying to tell me that after you'd just flushed me down the pan I was supposed to announce I was carrying your child.'

Emotion was mounting in Xander's chest.

‘If you had told me, obviously I would have rescinded my decision to—'

A look of incredulity passed across her contorted features.

‘Rescinded your decision?'
Her voice was high-pitched and hollow. ‘It wasn't a bloody business meeting. You had made it clear—absolutely, killingly clear—that I was out. You had someone new to warm your bed and that was that.'

His face tightened. ‘Obviously, had you told me that you had got pregnant, then everything would have been very different.'

She turned away. The gesture angered him. He reached out for her again, his hand closing on her shoulder.

She froze at his touch. He could feel it, all her muscles tensing. Her reaction angered him even more. Why should she resist him?

She never resisted me—always yielded to me…eager for me. All that cool, English composure dissolved, like ice in heat…my heat…

He thrust the memory aside. It was irrelevant. All that was relevant now was to deal with this shattering discovery.

I have a son!

The impulse, overwhelming and overpowering, to go now, this instant, to find the child that was inside the house, find him and—

No, he could not do that either. Not yet. Not until—until…
Christos
, he could hardly think straight, his mind a storm of emotion.

His hand dropped from her.

‘As,' he said heavily, ‘it will be different now.'

She was still half turned away from him. He could not see her face. He didn't care. Providing she could hear, could understand, that was all that mattered. He fought the storm inside him for control. He had been iron-willed all day. Controlled enough to instruct his London PA, very calmly, to find out the address of Clare Williams from the hotel she had been working at. Detached enough to rearrange today's schedule so that he could be free by late afternoon to drive and find her. She'd run out on him once before, vanished into the night—she was not going to do so a second time.

But the reason he had sought her out had evaporated—instantly, like water in a volcano—the moment he had realised just what Clare Williams had done to him…

Emotion whipped through him again, that white-hot disbelieving fury that had ripped through him the moment his eyes had gone to the child in the buggy she had been pushing.

That
was all that concerned him.
That
was all that consumed him.

But he must control it. Giving vent to the storm inside him would achieve nothing. With Herculean effort, he hammered down his emotions.

‘I want to see him.'

His voice was flat. Very controlled.

She turned her head back towards him. Her eyes were quite blank.

She uttered a single word. A word that went into him like a knife.

‘Why?' she said.

Carefully, very carefully, he layered icy control over his features.

‘Because he is my son,' he enunciated. Then, before she could answer, he walked back indoors.

The elderly woman was in the small, drab sitting room. It looked ancient, and so did she. She was sitting in an armchair and the television was on, with a cartoon. His son was sitting on her lap, lolled back on her, all his attention on the screen.

As Xander walked in, the woman looked at him. She was old, but her eyes were sharp. They rested on him for a second, then went past him. Behind him, Xander could sense Clare. The child did not look round.

The knife went into Xander again. He did not know the name of his own son.

‘Tell me his name.'

He spoke quietly, but there was an insistence in it that would not be brooked. It was the old woman who answered.

‘It's Joey,' she said. ‘Joey, pet—say hello.'

Reluctantly, the toddler twisted his head briefly. ‘'Lo,' he said, then went straight back to the cartoon.

He must be gone three, Xander thought. I have a three-year-old son, and I never knew. I never knew…

The storm of emotion swirled up in him again, but he forced it back. The elderly woman was looking at him. She had a steady gaze. Did she realise who he was? He assumed so. He had recognised his son instantly. It would not be hard to see him in Joey, and know that he must be the boy's father.

His throat convulsed, and again he had to take a deep, steadying breath. He opened his mouth to speak, but the old woman was before him.

‘Clare, love, Joey needs his tea. The programme will be over soon, and he'll realise he's hungry. I'd do something quick for him, if I were you. Eggy soldiers is always nice, isn't it?'

She spoke cheerfully, calmly, as if she were not witnessing a man discovering his three-year-old son.

She was right to do so, Xander realised. Whatever else, his son—
Joey
—must not be upset. What must be settled now would not be helped by his giving voice to fury, his emotions. Abruptly, he sat himself down on the rather battered sofa, opposite his son. He said nothing, just watched him watching the television with a rapt expression on his face, interrupted by bursts of childish laughter.

My son!

The storm of emotion in Xander's breast swirled, then gradually, very gradually subsided. But deep inside his heart seemed to swell and swell.

 

Clare put the eggs to boil. She got out the bread, and popped it in the toaster. She fetched some milk, and poured it into Joey's drinking cup. She set out a tray with his plastic plate with pictures of puppies on it, and started to pare an apple for his pudding. She worked swiftly, mindlessly.

She mustn't think about this. Mustn't do anything. Just give Joey his tea.

When it was ready she carried it through. The programme's credits were rolling, and Joey had returned to the real world. He looked about him.

‘Time for tea,' he announced. Then he focussed on the man looking at him. ‘Hello,' he said. He looked interestedly at the man who had started his life four long years ago.

Xander looked at the child who was his. Emotion felled him. For a moment his brain went completely and absolutely blank. What did he know of children? His own childhood was so far away that he never thought of it—his father had been dead, his mother too. He had no memories of them.

Cold iced in his spine. If he had not come today, sought out the woman who had walked out into the night four years ago, his own son would, like him, have had no memories of his father…

That will not be…

Resolution steeled inside him. His son would have a father, and memories of a father, starting right now.

‘Hello, Joey,' said Xander. ‘I am your father. I've come to see you.'

Clare felt the knife go through her throat, and she gasped
aloud. Xander ignored her. So did Joey. Joey tilted his head and subjected Xander to an intense look.

‘Fathers are daddies,' he announced.

Xander nodded. ‘Quite right. You're a clever boy.'

Joey looked pleased with himself.

‘Clare, give Joey his tea. He's a growing boy.' Vi beckoned to her, and cleared some space on the table by her chair. Shakily, Clare crossed and put down the tray.

‘Soldiers!' shouted Joey, pleased. ‘Eggy soldiers.' He seized one of the fingers of toast and plunged it into one of the two eggs with the end sliced off, starting to eat with relish. Around his neck, Vi was deftly attaching a bib.

It was all, thought Clare, with a sick, hollow feeling inside her, intensely normal.

Except for one thing.

She rubbed a hand over her brow, her eyes going to the man sitting on Vi's old sofa. The man who was her son's father. This couldn't be happening. It just couldn't. Wave after wave of disbelief was eddying through her. So much shock. Last night had been bad enough, but now this… This was a nightmare. She couldn't think, couldn't feel. Could only watch, with a strange unnatural calm, how Xander Anaketos was watching his son—her son—eat his tea.

He stayed for another half an hour. Time for Joey to finish his tea and start playing with his toys. Clare washed up, trying to do anything to bring back normality—to pretend that her life hadn't just crashed all around her. She started to get her and Vi's supper ready, taking a cup of tea in to the other woman. Silently, she placed a mug of instant coffee—black, as she knew he liked his coffee—beside Xander. He gave her a long, level look that was quite expressionless. Then he returned his attention to his son, asking him about the car he was pushing around on the carpet.

‘I like cars,' said Joey.

‘So do I,' she heard Xander say. ‘When you're bigger you can ride in my car.'

‘The big red one?' asked Joey interestedly.

‘Yes, that one.'

‘Does it go fast?' Joey enquired, making ‘vrooming' noises with his own toy car.

‘Very fast,' said Xander.

‘I like fast,' said Joey.

‘Me too,' agreed his father.

‘Can we see it now, outside?'