and her lips were trembling. With a sense of being slightly out of control, he tugged open her shirt to reveal the spill of her breasts and stared at them in disbelief.
‘Theo,’ he said softly. ‘Your breasts are magnificent.’
‘A-are they?’
‘They are everything I dreamed they would be. And more.’
‘Have you been dreaming about my breasts?’
‘Every night.’
He drew a finger over one generous curve and he heard her moan as he bent to touch his lips to the same spot. And that was when she chose to press her palm over the tight curve of his denim-covered buttock, as if tacitly giving him her permission to continue.
He groaned as he straightened up to kiss her again and once he’d started he couldn’t seem to stop. It was only when she began to writhe frustratedly that he tugged off the elastic band so that her pale hair spilled free, and suddenly she managed to look both wholesome and wanton. She looked...like a woman, he thought longingly. Soft and curving; warm and giving.
His hands were shaking as he stripped her bare, then laid her down on the narrow bed as he removed his own clothes, his eyes not leaving her face. With shaking hands he groped for his wallet and found a condom. Thank God. Slipping it on as clumsily as if it had been his first time, he moved over her, smoothing back her thick hair with hands which were still unsteady. And as he entered her a savage cry was torn from his throat.
He moved inside her and it felt pretty close to heaven. Sweet heaven. He had to keep thinking about random stuff about mergers and acquisitions to stop himself from coming and it seemed like an eternity until at last her body began to tense beneath him. Until she stiffened and her back arched and, inexplicably—she started to cry.
Only then did Alek let go himself, although the salty wetness of her tears against his cheek gave him a moment of disquiet. Outside, the thunder seemed to split the sky. The rain began to teem down against the window. And his body was torn apart by the longest orgasm of his life.
ELLIE TURNED THE SIGN to Closed and started clearing away stray currants and dollops of frosting from the glass counters which lined the cake shop. She stacked cardboard boxes, swept the floor and took off her frilly apron.
And then she went and stood at the back of the little store, and wept.
The tears came swiftly and heavily and she tried to think of them as cathartic as she covered her face with her hands. But as they dripped through her fingers all she could think was: How had this happened? How had her life suddenly become a living nightmare?
She knew she’d been lucky finding work and accommodation at Candy’s Cupcakes so soon after leaving the hotel. She’d been doubly lucky that the kindly Bridget Brody had taken a shine to her, and not cared about her ignominious sacking. But it was hard to focus on gratitude right now. In fact, it was hard to focus on anything except the one thing she couldn’t keep ignoring. But you couldn’t make something go away, just because you wanted it to—no matter how hard you wished it would. Her feet were heavy as she made her way up to the small, furnished apartment above the shop, but not nearly as heavy as her heart.
The mirror in the sitting room was hung in a position you couldn’t avoid, unless you walked into the room with your eyes shut, which was never a good idea with such uneven floorboards. The healthy tan she’d acquired while working in the garden restaurant of The Hog had long since faded. Her face was pasty, her breasts were swollen and her skin seemed too loose for her body. And she’d lost weight. She couldn’t eat anything before midday because she kept throwing up. She hadn’t needed to see the double blue stripes on the little plastic stick to confirm what she already knew.
That she was pregnant with Alek Sarantos’s baby and didn’t know what she was going to do about it.
Slumping down in one of the overstuffed armchairs, she stared blankly into space. Actually, that wasn’t quite true. There was only one thing she could do. She had to tell him.
She had to.
It didn’t matter what her personal feelings were, or that fact that there had been a deafening silence ever since the Greek billionaire had walked out of her bedroom, leaving her naked in bed. This was about more than her. She knew what it was like not to have a father and no real identity. To feel invisible—as if she were only half a person. And that wasn’t going to happen to her baby. She hugged her arms tightly around her chest. She wouldn’t allow it to happen.
But how did you tell someone you were having his baby when he had withdrawn from you in more ways than one as soon as he’d had his orgasm?
Her mind drifted back to that awful moment when she’d opened her eyes to find Alek Sarantos lying on top of her in the narrow bed in the staff hostel. His warm skin had been sticking to hers and his breathing sounded as if he’d been in a race. On a purely physical level, her own body was glowing with the aftermath of the most incredible sexual experience of her life—although she didn’t exactly have a lot to compare it with. Her body felt as if she were floating and she wanted to stay exactly where she was—to capture and hold on to the moment, so that it would never end.
But unfortunately, life wasn’t like that.
She wasn’t sure what changed everything. They were lying there so close and so quiet while the rain bashed hard against the windows. It felt as if their entire lives were cocooned in that little room. She could feel the slowing beat of his heart and the warmth of his breath as it fanned against the side of her neck. She wanted to fizz over with sheer joy. She’d had a relationship before—of course she had—but she had never known such a feeling of completeness. Did he feel it, too? She remembered reaching up to whisper her fingertips over his hair with soft and rhythmical strokes. And that was the moment when she read something unmistakable on his face. The sense that he’d just made the biggest mistake of his life. She could see it in his eyes—those compelling blue eyes, which went from smoky satisfaction through to ice-cold disbelief as he realised just where he was. And with whom.
With a wince he didn’t even bother disguising, he carefully eased himself away from her, making sure the condom was still intact as he withdrew. She remembered the burning of her cheeks and feeling completely out of her depth. Her mind was racing as she thought how best to handle the situation, but her experience of men was scant and of Greek billionaires, even scanter. She decided that coolness would be the way to go. She needed to reassure him that she wasn’t fantasising about walking up the aisle wearing a big white dress, just because they’d had sex. To act as if making love to a man who was little more than a stranger was no big deal.
She reminded herself that what they’d done had been driven by anger and perhaps it might have been better if it had stayed that way. Because if it hadn’t suddenly morphed into a disconcerting whoosh of passion, then she might not be lying there wishing he would stay and never leave. She might not be starting to understand her own mother a bit more and to wonder if this was what she had felt. Had she lain beside her married lover like this, and lost a little bit of her heart to him, even though she must have known that he was the wrong man?
She remembered feigning sleepiness. Letting her lashes flutter down over her eyes as if the lids were too heavy to stay open. She could hear him moving around as he picked up his clothes from the floor and began pulling them on and she risked a little peep from between her lashes, to find him looking anywhere except at her. As if he couldn’t bear to look at her. But she guessed it was a measure of how skewed her thinking was that she was still prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.
‘Alek?’ she said—casual enough to let him know she wouldn’t mind seeing him again, but not so friendly that it could be interpreted as pushy.
He was fully dressed by now—although he looked dishevelled. It was strange to see the powerful billionaire in her room,