Baby of Shame (12 page)

S
HE
wouldn’t let him help her.
Wouldn’t let him guide her back to the chair.
Wouldn’t let him hold her.

She shrank away from him, clutching the door, in physical and emotional collapse.

‘Don’t touch me!’ Her voice was a yell, a screech, convulsed with a high, racking sobbing.

She shook his hands from her forcibly, trying to yank the door open. But her eyes were blind, her hands shaking,
her
limbs trembling. Unable to get the door open, she spun round, reeling, backing against the closed door like an animal at bay.

Because that was what she
was.
A wretched, hunted antelope that the leopard in front of her wanted to devour, tear apart, destroy completely.

The sobs were choking in her throat as she held her hands up to ward him off.

‘Keep away from me! Keep
away
from me!’

She couldn’t take any more—she just could not. She was hitting out at him, not impacting, but sweeping her arms in front of her to keep him away.

He stood stock still. Emotion was knifing through him, and he could not tell what it was. He had no time to think about it. She was going out of control, he could see, and collapsing visibly in front of her eyes. He turned on his heel and snatched up the house phone on his desk, barking something in Greek down the line. Then he turned round again.

‘Nurse Thompson is coming. She will look after you. If you stand aside from the door she can come in. I—I will not touch you.’

Her breathing, through the harsh, choking sobs, was gasping. He could see her chest rising and falling jerkily. A knock sounded sharply on the door from the outside.

‘That is Nurse Thompson. If you just step to one side she can come in.’

She did what he told her, rolling her body so that she was half collapsed against the wall beside the door. Nurse Thompson pushed it open carefully and, to his relief, took over immediately. With brisk, controlled movements she guided the sobbing, choking figure outside, paying no attention to the man standing there, rigidly immobile, witnessing the scene.

When she had gone, he shut the door behind her. He walked back heavily to his chair behind the desk and sank down on it. On the surface of the desk the torn document and
cheque
curled, despised and rejected. He sat still, looking at the sorry remains. Then slowly, methodically, he gathered up the shards and swept them into a wastepaper basket.

They would not be needed again.

‘Where’s Nicky?’

Rhianna’s
voice was faint, but fearful, urgent. Nurse Thompson answered calmly. ‘Karen is reading to him. He’s quite content. Just rest now.’

Rest.
It was the only thing she could do. It was as if a steamroller had just gone over her. But then that was what Alexis Petrakis was.
A savage-toothed, crushing steamroller that would crush her and tear her if she let him.

Fear convulsed through her.
More than fear.
Revulsion.

Revulsion at a man who could stoop so low as to think a child was for sale…

Her mind writhed in powerless torment. She
had
to get away from here! She
had
to!

The door of the bedroom opened.
Rhianna’s
eyes shot towards it, and Nurse Thompson’s bulky figure also turned in that direction.

Alexis Petrakis stood there. He looked taller, darker, yet there was something about him that was different.
Rhianna
didn’t know what.
Didn’t care what.

‘Nurse, I would like a few minutes alone with your patient, if you please.’

It might have been phrased as a request, but Nurse Thompson heard it as an order. For a moment she held her employer’s eyes.

‘Ms Davies is
not
to be further distressed,’ she informed one of the richest men in Greece.

Gravely, Alexis Petrakis inclined his head.

‘I shall not do so,’ he replied. Then his gaze slipped past the nurse, on to the woman lying on the bed. Again, through the tension that had instantly stiffened her body as he had entered the room,
Rhianna
felt something different about him. But fear and tension overlaid everything, blotting out any recognition of what that difference was.

Briefly, Nurse Thompson nodded, and stalked out of the room. As the door shut behind her Alexis Petrakis stepped forward. Automatically,
Rhianna
sought to back against the pillows propping her up.

Now what was he going to do? Dear God, how much more of this could she stand?

He was standing at the foot of the bed, looking down at her. She felt a shiver go through her. For what seemed like a long, timeless moment he said nothing, just stood there, tall, dark, his face shuttered, unreadable. Then, abruptly, he spoke.

‘It would appear,’ he said, and there was
a tightness
in his voice that made it sound strange, forbidding, ‘that I have been wrong about you.’

She said nothing, only felt her fingers clench into the coverlet laid over her.

Something moved in his eyes. Again she could not tell what. The tension lacing through her did not allow for any analysis.

‘Not in everything,’ he went on—and in those few words she heard unmistakably that note of harsh condemnation she had become so familiar with in his accusing exchanges with her. ‘But in one essential area.’ He paused a moment, and
Rhianna
became aware that his fingers were clenched tightly at his sides.

His voice changed.
Became strained, not harsh.

‘You do, after all, seem to care for Nicky.’

Rhianna’s
eyes widened. She could not help it. Stupefied, she stared at the man standing at the end of the bed.

‘I thought it a show—
a parade of false emotionality—put on deliberately to up your value, present
yourself in a good light to me. Bid up your price.’

His voice was drained of emotion, and
Rhianna
felt the breath stop in her lungs.

‘But you turned down twenty-two million pounds for him. That—’ suddenly his breath rasped sharply, slamming down his emotions ‘—is very convincing.’ He paused, taking in another sharp breath.
‘So convincing that I am now prepared to…re-evaluate…my estimation of you.’
Again the harshness entered his voice. ‘Although I can never forgive you for keeping my son from me, nor for the manner of his conception, I do now accept that you do, indeed, care for him more than the wealth his paternity promises you. Accordingly, I now wish to make a…’ he paused,
then
continued.
‘A rapprochement…with you.
For Nicky’s sake, he cannot have parents at war with one another. It is too distressing for him—too destructive.’

There was an edge in his voice like the blade of a knife over vulnerable flesh.

‘We must make an accommodation with each other for his sake. Present a front to him that, whilst not idyllic, nevertheless will not blight his childhood.’ Dark, expressionless eyes bored down on her. ‘Only one person is important here—and that is Nicky. Whatever our feelings about each other, they
must not
poison him. I will not allow it.’ He took a final, sharp intake of breath. ‘So, on this basis, I am prepared to move forward.

‘For now,’ he continued, his voice changing minutely, ‘your focus must be to recover your health. Mine will be to continue to get to know my son. This will also—’ his mouth tightened ‘—give us the opportunity to…accommodate…each other.’

His eyes flickered over her
assessingly
, taking in her blank, hostile expression.

‘I would appreciate it,’ he said, the edge coming back to his voice, ‘if there is a concomitant effort made on your part. All that is required is common civility—’

‘Civility?’
Her voice was thin. She was finally finding her words now, after the sheer stupefaction she had felt at hearing what he was saying to her. ‘You expect civility from me—after what you’ve said to me, what you’ve done to me? Threatening me, verbally abusing me, haranguing me—’

His expression stiffened.

‘I accept now that much of what I feared to be true about you is not so—’

‘Well, everything I feared to be true about you
is
so!’ she shot back, venom in her voice as she struggled to sit up properly. ‘You are
every
bit as foul as I thought.
Throwing your filthy accusations at me, time and again.’

Alexis’s eyes flashed with instant anger. Then, visibly, he controlled it.

‘I have just said that I accept that I was mistaken—’

‘And
I’ve
just said that I wasn’t! You tried to buy my son. What the
hell
kind of man does that?’

His expression tensed. His eyes became opaque. He couldn’t tell her that he’d experienced it himself, had been put through that torment.

‘I had to be sure. Sure that it wasn’t just my money you were after. I had to make you choose between Nicky and money—’

Her eyes widened in horror.

‘You deliberately offered me that stinking money to see if I would sell my son to you? It was just some kind of disgusting
test?’

Emotion choked in her.

‘I had to be sure,
Rhianna
—’ His breath rasped again in his throat. ‘And now that I am, we can, as I have come to make clear to you, move forward. Nicky needs us both.
Both.
And, however much neither of us wants to accept that, we must.’ He shifted his weight on his feet. ‘We must.

‘I will leave you now, to think over what I have said. And please prepare yourself for one other thing. It is time I told Nicky that I am his father. I propose to do so this afternoon.’ The dark eyes rested on her. ‘It would be best if you were present. He may become confused, even distressed. But postponement will, I believe, only lead to greater confusion. His life has changed hugely in these past weeks, and it would be best if this final change—discovering he has a father after all—is absorbed into the overall changes to his life.’

He gave a final, long glance at her as she lay there, incapable of speech, reaction, and then without another word he was gone.

‘Mummy, please may you cut a peach for me?’

Nicky selected the biggest one in the large blue pottery bowl on the table and handed it across to
Rhianna
with an expectant expression on his face.

She took it, and began to pare it with a knife. A fly buzzed idly in the lunchtime heat and she flicked it away. At the head of the table set on the wide terrace overlooking the beach Alexis Petrakis sat, relaxed back in his chair, half a glass of chilled Chablis in his hand.

Lunch had been a strange affair. Outwardly it had looked completely normal, with Nicky chattering away to both her and Alexis. All conversation had been
centred
on Nicky; hardly any direct exchanges between herself and Alexis had taken place. And when there had been one, always initiated by Alexis, never herself, he had been doggedly, scrupulously civil to her.

It had been totally unnerving.

Totally unreal.

A sense of complete weirdness enveloped
Rhianna
. It was as if all feeling, all thought,
had
been suspended. As if she had gone beyond emotion, beyond the will required for either function.

When Alexis had withdrawn from her bedroom, bombshell deposited, she had simply gone on staring at the space he had occupied, her mind groping
flounderingly
over what he had just said and done. Emotions like waves had come over her, each wave quite opposite from each other. One wave carried a surge of stunned, disbelief; the next surged with a kind of blind, inchoate fury that he should have dared to declare in so lordly a fashion that he now deigned to believe that she put her son at a higher value than his filthy money. But even after that wave had boiled through her, a third and final wave had taken its place.
A sense of extreme and total exhaustion of the spirit.
She just couldn’t take any more.

And that was still with her as she sat opposite Alexis, cutting Nicky’s peach for him, trying not to look anywhere near the tall, dark figure at the other end of the table, his saturnine face shaded by the overhang of the terrace roof.

‘There you go, darling,’ she said, pushing the prepared fruit towards Nicky.

He started to eat it with gusto, mumbling a ‘thank you’ as he did so, then, turning towards the end of the table, he said, ‘Can we do more swimming after lunch? Please,’ he added, then frowned, puzzled. ‘Please,
Mr
—
Mr
Pe
—
Mr
Petra—’

He stopped, not knowing how to continue.

Alexis set down his wine. ‘You don’t have to call me
Mr
Petrakis, Nicky,’ he said.

And suddenly, quite suddenly, every nerve in
Rhianna’s
body quivered. Desperately she tensed forward. But it was too late. Alexis was speaking again. His voice was careful, almost inexpressive, as if he were testing out each word for the weight it could bear.

‘Nicky, tell me something. Did your mummy ever tell you about your daddy?’

The breath froze in
Rhianna’s
throat. Oh, God, he’s going to tell him now—right now. And I haven’t had any time to prepare myself. Prepare Nicky…

‘Nicky…’ Her voice was faint.

Her son didn’t hear her. Nicky was polishing off his peach. He looked across at the man who’d asked him the question.

‘Mummy says I haven’t got one. Not all children have daddies, she says.’

‘Would you like one?’

There was reserve in Alexis’s voice. It sounded quite neutral. In agony,
Rhianna
tried to catch his eye, to stop him. But she knew it was hopeless. He’d said he would tell Nicky and now it was happening.

Nicky frowned.

‘Only if he’s nice.
Sometimes where we lived the daddies were not nice. They yelled and said rude words. Mummy used to go inside quickly and shut the door when they did that.’