The Greek Tycoon's Secret Child (17 page)

Mattie's mouth was hanging open. ‘B-but why?' she stammered. ‘It's not as though…as though this is some kind of love match.' She winced as she said that, hating the cold way it sounded, as though what she had felt for him, and still felt, could be dismissed in a few well-chosen words. ‘You misunderstood my intentions in telling you about the pregnancy! I know you never wanted fatherhood.' Good heavens. She knew he could barely bring himself to utter the word
relationship
without adding a string of other qualifications!

‘And however strong your sense of duty is, I don't intend to fall victim to it.' Brave words that cost her dear.

Dominic strode over to where she was perched on the window ledge, but instead of doing his usual, trapping her so that the sheer force of his personality could engulf her, he leaned against the window and looked down outside so that she was privy to his averted profile.

‘This isn't about
you
, though, is it?' He turned to look at her then. ‘And it isn't about whether I wanted to become a daddy or not. The reality is that you're pregnant with my baby and I intend to take care of the situation.'

‘This is not
a situation
,' Mattie told him, but a small, treacherous side of her longed to be taken care of. It was the same small, treacherous side that had told her she could handle a man like Dominic. Wisdom would be to avoid that small, treacherous side like the plague.

‘Event. Occurrence. Happening. Call it whatever you want to, but whatever you decide to call it you're not running away from me this time.'

Mattie stared at him. Her breathing slowed. Even her heartbeat seemed to have slowed.

‘We're going to get married.'

M
ATTIE
being Mattie, she laughed, walked towards the tired old single bed that she had converted into a sofa of sorts with the addition of three cushions and a colourful throw. She plonked herself down, leaned against the cushions and stretched out her legs.

‘Married? What a ridiculous suggestion. We aren't living in the Dark Ages. In case the twenty-first century has passed you by, Dominic, women get pregnant these days and bring the baby up very competently and very single-handedly.' She took one of the cushions and pressed it to her stomach, drawing her legs up so that she was peering at him over her knees.

‘Good for them.' Dominic shrugged indifferently. ‘Fortunately their lives don't concern me.' He had known what her reaction would be and he was more than prepared to listen to all her objections. But they weren't going to do any good. She would marry him and the thought felt good, right somehow. Fate had given him his hand to play and he intended to play it very well indeed. ‘Yours, on the other hand, does.'

Mattie squeezed the cushion to her. Marriage. No emotion, no mention of love. Just another business proposition, just like the one she had been idiotic enough to accept the first time round.

This man could make her burst out laughing, could make her think, could make her body sing with pleasure, could make her fall hopelessly in love with him. He could do all that and still keep that vital part of himself
shut away, and now he was proposing marriage. Well, thoroughly modern she might be, but she wasn't so modern that she was going to tie herself up in a loveless union. That spelt days and years of misery, hungering silently for the impossible, becoming the anchor round his ankles that he quietly endured for the sake of his child.

She kind of wished that he would come a bit closer to her instead of just standing there, watching her.

‘Look, Dominic…' Mattie's voice took on a coaxing, reasonable tone. ‘We both know why we got involved with one another and we both know what the stipulations were. No talk of commitment, never mind marriage.' She wished desperately that she had seen what she could see now. That he had wanted her physically and that he was a man capable of extracting emotion from any situation. Without emotion all things were possible. Even marriage to a woman he fancied, liked even, but did not love.

What had possessed her to imagine that she had access to the same kind of inner coldness that he had? When she had spent years tied up with Frankie because she felt sorry for him? She had no doubt that he could remain married to her forever. To her or to anyone, for that matter, because he would never be victim to the agonising of his feelings. He doubtless envisaged a union wherein he might just carry on sleeping with her till he got bored, then he would simply conduct his private life discreetly outside the marital home. His child would be the one to keep him rooted.

‘That was then and this is now.'

‘I just can't get married to you. I could never marry anyone unless there was love. Why do you think I never married Frankie? Well, you know. I told you once. I
might have stayed with him, might have thought I loved him, and I did in a way, but deep down I knew that I could never marry him because the love wasn't there, not the kind of love that makes a marriage work.'

Dominic gave a short, derisive bark of laughter. ‘And what sort of love is that, Mattie? The sort with pink icing on the top?'

‘You're so cynical!' Mattie flared back. ‘It's the kind of love that keeps my parents together! And yours as well!'

Dominic shrugged. ‘They belong to a different generation,' he dismissed. ‘Divorce these days is endemic. Married one day, divorced the next.' He stuck his hands casually in the pockets of his trousers and continued to look at her thoughtfully. ‘Now here are my thoughts on the matter. We were two people who were attracted to one another, had a relationship, and now you're pregnant with my baby. Yes, on one level I can't deny that everything in my life is about to change. On the other hand, I'm thirty-four years old. Leave it much longer and I might still be capable of fathering a child, but, as they say, would lack the energy to pick it up. I also don't walk away from my responsibilities.'

‘I'm not asking you to walk away from anything!' Mattie protested desperately. ‘When the baby's born, you can come and visit whenever you want…'

‘When the baby's born, there will be no need for that because you will be living with me, under my roof, as my wife. I will not have any child of mine born illegitimate, and don't,' Dominic raised his hand in rejection of the stunned protest Mattie was about to make, ‘bother telling me that illegitimacy is the norm these days. Where I come from, babies are born into wedlock.'

‘
Happy
wedlock,' Mattie contradicted in a shaking voice.

‘Happy wedlock is successful wedlock and we have the ingredients to make it work.' He ticked them off one by one on his fingers. ‘One, we like one another. Two, we were great in bed. Three, we are going to have a child and, like it or not, a child needs the support of both parents. Both parents, on tap. Four, without love muddying the waters, our partnership stands an even greater chance of survival.'

This, he knew, was the only way to persuade her. Reason. Cool, calm logic. No mention of his tortured nights when his imagination took flight and refused to come back down to earth. He would deal with all that himself.

‘And what when…the
great in bed
bit begins to wane? What then?'

Dominic looked down briefly. Wane? This woman made him feel alive, sensationally so. He seriously couldn't imagine a day when he wouldn't want her or want to be with her.

‘Why cross bridges before we get to them?' he asked. ‘Now, who have you told about…this? Your parents? Friends?'

Mattie shuddered. Living in sin with Frankie might have scraped through her parents' moral net, but single and pregnant to a man they didn't know and who didn't feature as an ongoing part of her life was a different thing altogether.

‘I've only just found out myself!' she objected. ‘You're the only other person who knows, and I'm beginning to wonder whether I shouldn't have just kept my mouth shut.'

‘I shouldn't if I were you.' Dominic's voice was grim.

‘Shouldn't what?'

‘Go down the road of thinking what might have happened if you had kept this to yourself. Because sooner or later I would have found out and then your life wouldn't have been worth living.'

‘If that is supposed to reassure me that marrying you is the best thing I could do, then you're way off target!'

‘Think about it, Mattie. How do you think I would react, how any normal man would react, if he discovered that he'd fathered a child without knowing it? If he suddenly bounced into his ex walking hand in hand with a toddler who was his?'

‘A lot of so-called
normal
men would breathe a hearty sigh of relief that they hadn't been landed with the burden of bringing up a child they didn't ask for!' Mattie flashed back at him.

‘We could argue about this till the cows came home. No point. When do you intend to tell your parents?'

‘Soon,' Mattie told him uncomfortably. She sneaked a glance at him and hated the way just looking at him could make her feel all hot and bothered and hideously aware of her vulnerability.

‘And what do you think they're going to say about you living here, pregnant and alone?'

Not a lot, Mattie thought miserably. They certainly wouldn't be clapping their hands with glee. More likely, they would go silent with disappointment and that would be all the harder to bear after their joy at her landing her job. And their relief, even though they had tried hard to hide it down the end of the phone, that she and Frankie were no longer an item.

‘Especially when they find out that the father of your child proposed marriage.'

That conjured up an even more disastrous scenario. ‘How would they find that out?'

‘Well, I would tell them, naturally.'

‘That would be emotional blackmail!'

Dominic refrained from informing her that he would use anything to get her back into his life, where she belonged. Not even his pride, which reared up every time he thought about her sleeping with him then dismissing him with a flick of her head, could stop him from still wanting her back, needing her back.

‘But of course,' he went on smoothly and relentlessly, like a bulldozer ploughing over rough ground, ‘that would be nothing compared to what our child will feel in the years to come when he or she understands that a family life would have been possible but for the pigheaded stubbornness of its mother…'

Mattie's mouth fell open at this unexplored avenue.

‘You wouldn't,' she gasped.

‘I would. Now, let's get going.'

Before she could leap off the bed he was moving swiftly towards the chest of drawers, where he began extracting her clothes, tossing them on the bed—in fact, on her.

The blankness in Mattie's head cleared and she scrambled up and began gathering the hurled items of clothing into her arms, while she demanded what he thought he was doing.

Dominic paused briefly to look at her. ‘Getting you out of here, of course. You're coming back with me.'

‘You put those things back! At once!'

‘You'll wake the neighbours if you carry on shouting like that. Where do you keep your suitcase?' He didn't give her time to answer. Just checked under the sofa, which was the only place it was likely to be, and sure
enough he extracted it, flipped open the lid and began stuffing her clothes in.

‘The rest will have to wait until tomorrow. George and I will come and collect it all. How did you get here anyway? Who helped you move?'

‘You can't do this! I'm not going to marry you, Dominic Drecos!'

‘Tell me you didn't lug this stuff over in stages by yourself? In your condition?'

‘In my condition?' Mattie was momentarily distracted by the old-fashioned nature of the observation. ‘I'm pregnant, not ill!'

Dominic paused in what he was doing, which was surveying empty drawer number two with an expression of satisfaction. ‘Well, you won't be doing any lugging around of anything when you're with me. You need to be taking things easy.' He stood up, flexed his muscles and then strode towards the small kitchen while Mattie scrambled off the bed in hot pursuit.

‘I told you, I'm not—'

‘Good. You kept a couple of boxes. That'll do for starters.' He picked up one of the cardboard boxes that she had stuck under the kitchen table when she had moved and promptly forgotten about. ‘Sit down. I might as well get started here straight away. Less to pack tomorrow.'

Mattie sat down. Her legs felt shaky anyway. Well, they would do, wouldn't they, she thought a little frantically, considering she herself felt as though she had been suddenly stuffed into a tumble-drier that had been turned on full speed?

‘You can't just waltz in here and take over my life like this!'

‘I can and I am. Is this all the food you have in this
place?' He looked scathingly at the virtually bare kitchen cupboard. A jar of coffee, some sugar, some baked beans, pasta, a couple of cans of tuna. ‘Have you been eating
at all
?' He slammed the contents of the cupboard into the box then turned to look at her narrowly and accusingly.

‘Of course I have!' Guilt made her defensive and she glowered at him from under her lashes. This was all happening so fast. It seemed to her that after a life that had dragged on and on and on, everything had sped up the minute this man appeared on the scene. Their affair, her job, her hurt when she had discovered how he had manoeuvred her to get what he wanted, then the pregnancy. Now this.

‘You barely touched your food tonight, I noticed.'

‘Can you blame me? I was feeling just a tiny bit nervous about what I had to say to you!'

‘Aside from anything else, you need supervision if you're not going to eat properly.' He opened the fridge, which was almost as bare as the cupboard.

‘
Supervision?
Now you're being absurd. And will you please close that fridge? It has a habit of conking out if the door's held open for too long!'

Dominic shut the fridge very quietly, leant against it and gave her a long, hard look. ‘Well, that says it all about this place. Your landlord ought to be reported. In fact, I've a good mind—'

‘All right! I'll move back to the apartment. I'm sure Liz wouldn't mind…'

‘You're coming with me and tomorrow we're going to go shopping. For a ring. Then we're going to arrange for a registrar. Then you're going to phone your parents and explain everything and I'll call mine.'

‘I haven't even told Frankie,' Mattie whispered. She
might have missed the morning sickness but, thinking about it, she had been feeling very fragile recently. Prone to tears. That probably explained why she had spent every night crying since Dominic had disappeared from her life. No, of course it didn't.

But she was feeling very fragile now. Her head drooped and she rested it wearily on the table.

She was hardly aware of Dominic until she felt his hand stroke her downturned head. It felt strangely soothing. Then she heard him pull up a chair until he was sitting right next to her.

‘What a mess,' Mattie said, twisting her head so that she was still draped on the table but looking at him now.

‘Why do you find it so upsetting that you haven't told Frankie?' Keep it light, Dominic thought, unthreatening. But just the mention of that loser's name was enough to arouse a raw anger inside him. At a time like this, the last person he wanted her thinking about was her ex-boyfriend.

‘It didn't even occur to me,' Mattie admitted.

Dominic felt the temptation to smile broadly. He adopted a serious, compassionate expression and continued to smooth her hair, her wonderful silky, fair hair that looked like spun gold between his long brown fingers.