Baby of Shame (6 page)

Besides—another thought came into her reeling, over-wrought mind—a villa by the sea. Alexis Petrakis had thrown that at her.

A beach…

The seaside…

It would be like a holiday for Nicky.
A holiday after the trauma of being taken from her.

He’d never been on holiday…

Her thoughts flew on.

It would be warmer in Greece, too, and with a nurse for her and a nanny to help with Nicky she could get well faster there—much faster than in the bleak, damp flat she lived in. And once she was well she could get Nicky back properly again, without having to rely on Alexis
Petrakis’s
wealth.

And then—her mouth tightened—then Alexis Petrakis could go to hell.

A
LEXIS
threw himself into the back of his car, silent rage consuming him. He could feel it streaming through him like a dark flowing river. Rage that for four silent, invisible years his son had lived and breathed and he had known nothing,
nothing
of his existence! That drugged-out woman had kept him from him, hidden him away until the time was ripe for her to cash in on him…cash in on her own son!

He felt his hands clench, and he had to force himself to unclench them. On the other side of town his son was sitting huddled in a chair, ‘failing to thrive’ as the social worker had acidly informed him.

His hands clenched again and rage surged once more.

It would be spent, he knew, only when he had his son in his possession.

Safe.

Carefully, the hospital porter pushed
Rhianna’s
wheelchair up the ramp into the waiting limo. Two women got into the car after her—one middle-aged in a nurse’s uniform, the other younger than her, with a cheerful face. They smiled at
Rhianna
, introducing themselves, but she hardly paid attention.

Her heart was hammering in her breast, adrenaline running, bringing with it fear and desperate hope. Her mouth was dry, her throat tight as a drum. Her nails bit into her palms, lying on her lap swathed in a rug.

Nicky, Nicky, Nicky…

Like a litany, her son’s name went round and round in her head.

The limo moved off. Smooth though the ride was, every stop and start in the traffic seemed to jar right through her. Her breathing was slow and
laboured
,
her punished lungs still weak. Her bruised and battered body still fragile.

But she didn’t care. She could have ached a thousand times worse and she would not have cared—so long as she was going to where Nicky was…

How long the journey took she had no idea. Her hands were clasped tight into one another, twisting and clenching as she stared blindly out ahead through the windscreen. The weather was bleak, with a lowering sky. Spring seemed a million miles away.

The limo glided to a halt along the
kerb
of a busy arterial road lined with pre-war semis. They stopped by one with a small ironwork gate and a concrete path leading to the front door. The nurse and nanny climbed out.
Rhianna
strained forward, trying to see out of the open car door towards the house.

She did not see the sleek silver chauffeured saloon car draw up behind the limo, nor the tall, dark-suited figure climb out, and stand, his face drawn, looking up at the nondescript house. The front door opened and a woman came out.

Alexis watched the scene silently. He
recognised
the foster
carer
, still with a toddler fastened to her hip. She was talking to a woman beside her—neither the nurse nor the nanny, both of whom were still in the porch of the house. The other woman nodded, her face tight, and then reached out her hand peremptorily before starting to walk forward along the path. Her gait was slower than an adult’s, and Alexis felt his stomach clench as he
realised
she was leading forward a small, diminutive figure whose hunched frame and bowed head made his throat tighten. Her other hand carried a suitcase. The nurse and nanny fell into step, the nurse starting to talk to the third woman, who talked back to her, her face still set in lines of disapproval. Instinctively, emotion impelling him, he started to move forwards, towards the diminutive, hunched figure.

And then suddenly, there was a cry. A cry so high, so thin, Alexis’s head jerked round.

‘Nicky!’

It was a cry that was half a sob. At the sound of it the bowed, dragging figure looked up, eyes huge in his little face. And then, like an instant tornado, he tore down the concrete path, across the pavement, and threw himself into the car.

‘Mummy!
Mummy! Mummy!
Mummy!’

The piping voice was shrill, hysterical.
Rhianna
bent and scooped him onto her lap, clutching him to her, oblivious of the physical pain in her chest, lost in the joy that overwhelmed her. Tears poured down her face.

‘Oh, Nicky—Nicky!’
She crushed him against her, tears choking in her throat, ecstasy in her heart.
‘Oh, my darling, my darling!
Mummy’s own best boy!’

Sobs were racking through her, and she thought she must die of happiness as she held the son she had never thought to see again safe in her arms.

Outside on the pavement Alexis Petrakis stood, immobile, watching.

His face was set like stone.

The car was moving again.
Rhianna
was oblivious to it—oblivious to everything except the little hand clutching hers so tightly it wrung her heart.

‘Have you been a good boy, my darling?’ she asked Nicky, her hand cupping his cheek. He was as close as possible to the wheelchair, fastened safely into a child seat that had
materialised
from nowhere.

He
nodded,
his eyes huge.

‘You weren’t there,’ he said.

‘Your mummy’s been ill, poppet,’ the nanny chipped in. She was sitting next to Nicky, while the nurse sat on a fold-down seat opposite.

‘But I’m getting better,’
Rhianna
added hurriedly.

‘Are we going home now?’ Nicky asked. There was a painful eagerness in his little voice that stabbed at her.

She started to speak, but the nurse got in first.

‘Your mother isn’t well enough to look after you all on your own yet, young man,’ she said in a firm voice. ‘So she’s going to have a little holiday—yes,
with
you. Don’t worry!
Mr
Petrakis has it all arranged.’

Nicky’s eyes widened.

‘A holiday?
Mummy! Are we?
Where?’

There was anxiety underlying the astonishment, she could hear. He’d been through so much. She couldn’t bear it if he was to be upset now when he discovered they were not just going home after all. It might just be a rundown council flat, but it was the only home he could remember. She swallowed and made herself smile.
Please
let him
be
OK with what was going to happen to them. She injected enthusiasm into her voice.

‘Far away!
It’s an adventure! We’re going in an
aeroplane
.’

Nicky’s mouth opened in disbelief.

‘An
airyplane
?’ he echoed, in an awed voice.

‘Yes,’ she answered, filled with relief that he was not upset about not going back to his familiar home.
‘An
airyplane
.’

She squeezed Nicky’s tightly clutching hand and felt tears of joy seep into her eyes.

She had got Nicky back.
Her precious son.

She would never let him go ever again. No matter the cost to herself.

Seven hours later
Rhianna
felt as if she’d been hit by a speeding car all over again. Every bone in her body ached, it seemed, and her lungs were like a soggy swamp. Even with luxury travel—a private executive jet from the local city airport, a helicopter from Athens to Alexis
Petrakis’s
private island in the Aegean, a stretcher to convey her to a bedroom in his villa—she was still exhausted.

It made her
realise
how impossible it would have been to look after Nicky at home on her own.

Conducted by a large black-clothed woman, who spoke English with a strong Greek accent and who introduced herself as Maria, Karen, the nanny, took Nicky off to his bedroom, in between hers and his mother’s, while Nurse Thompson got her patient into bed.

Rhianna’s
last waking sight, some little while later, before she gave herself up to the cool, crisp sheets and the soft, soft pillows, was Nicky, padding into her room in his worn
pyjamas
, clutching his faithful teddy, and Karen lifting him carefully onto her bed so that he could kiss her goodnight.

‘Sleep tight, Mummy,’ he said, and wrapped his little arms around her neck to kiss her. ‘Don’t ever go away again.’

Bliss washed through her.

‘My darling—never,’ she murmured, and slid away to sleep the sleep of angels in paradise.

Alexis gave her a week.

It was longer by seven days than he’d wanted it to be. With every instinct he possessed he wanted to be with his son.
To start making up—
now
—for the four years without him.

But the relationship that he was going to start now—four years late—was going to have to last a lifetime. He had to get it right.
Thee
mou
,
he knew what happened when a father failed to get it right…

It was also seven days longer than he’d wanted to leave it before he saw
Rhianna
Davies again. Not that his desire to set eyes on her again was driven by anything like the same instinct that was impelling him to his son.

The opposite entirely.

How strange, he thought, with a hardening of his eyes as he sat staring into the middle distance from behind his desk in his corporate HQ in Athens, that he could love his son so much—and hate the mother.

Deliberately he made himself relax the tensed muscles in his back and shoulders.
Rhianna
Davies was no longer an issue. She existed now for one purpose only—to be there if his son wanted her. For his son’s sake alone he would tolerate her existence. It might gall him to know he had to finance her in a life of ease simply because she was the mother of his son, but by the same token it was the way he was going to be able to control her. She would remain there, for his son, or he would let her drop back into the gutter. He would make it very, very clear on what terms he would tolerate her existence in his son’s life.

A frown flickered across his brow. One thing, however, he would not tolerate. The drugs had to go. However long it took to get her off them, go they must. A look of disgust fleeted in his eyes. God knew, he didn’t expect much from a woman of her stamp—amoral and venal—but surely the mirror alone should have told her what drugs were doing to her? They’d sucked the beauty from her as surely as they’d sucked her health! The image of her gaunt death’s head intruded in his mind, and then an image from the night she’d come to him, five years ago. The contrast was grotesque, repulsive.

He thrust both images from him and reached for his phone. His schedule this week had been more punishing than anything he’d ever put himself through. In a single week he had cleared out of the way everything that needed to be dealt with at Petrakis International. Once he reached the villa he wanted nothing to make him leave again for at least a month. His pilot could bring him any documents he needed, and his study there was equipped with communications to the rest of his empire.

Not that he wanted work to distract him. His entire focus was going to be on his son—the son who did not yet even know that he was his father.

Acid anger seethed again in his guts like sour bile.

Rhianna
sat back in the padded reclining chair and gazed out over the scene ahead of her. A profound and heartfelt wash of happiness and gratitude swept through her. All around her the gentle warmth of the Mediterranean spring lapped like
swansdown
. A soft golden sun, radiant in the late-afternoon sky, was blessing down upon the white-flecked blue of the sea curved into the little bay. From the vine-shaded, stone-paved terrace on which her chair was positioned she could easily see over the balustrade on to the sandy beach, a mere eight feet below. Nicky, in T-shirt, shorts and sun hat, was down there, contentedly digging in the sand by the seashore, with Karen to look after him.

With a child’s resilience, safe and secure again with his mother there, and all the happiness of a small child by the seaside, Nicky already seemed to be over the trauma of having being separated from his mother. As for herself, she was feeling so much better too. Now that her anxiety was gone, her body was free to get on with the task of healing itself—a task made so much easier in the balmy warmth of the Aegean in this luxurious villa, with the ministrations of Nurse Thompson and the complete absence of any housework and childcare.

It was certainly a blissful way to live.

For a moment she felt a stab of guilt go through her. Had she not kept Nicky’s existence from Alexis Petrakis her son might have grown up in surroundings like
this.
However grudgingly he’d have done it, the state authorities would have required him to take financial responsibility for his offspring, however unintended.

Her expression hardened.

No—not in exchange for all the financial support in the world would she ever have told Alexis Petrakis about Nicky! Some fathers were just not worth having. Hadn’t her own sorry childhood taught her that? With her mother constantly hoping that her errant husband would return, and
herself
yearning for a father who had no interest in her. No—better for Nicky to have no father than one who was worse than nothing, a father he might spend his life trying to get to love him in vain…

The way she had.

A growing noise cut off her thoughts. Down on the beach she saw Nicky and Karen crane their necks upwards. A moment later
Rhianna
realised
what it was.
A helicopter, getting closer, the racket from its rotors deafening her as it started to descend.

Was it the doctor again?
she
wondered. He’d been out twice to see her—firstly on the day after she’d arrived, and then the day before yesterday. But he’d been pleased with her progress and wasn’t due again till next week.

So who could this be? Arriving now, like this?

She did not have long to wait to find out.

Alexis’s mouth tightened as he strode out on to the terrace. Surprise was always a reliable element of attack. Had she really thought she would be allowed to settle down here, in the lap of luxury, and not be called to account?