At that cruel taunt, her delicate facial bones tightened below her fair skin and her fingernails bit sharp crescents of restraint into her palms, because she truly wanted to shout and scream at him for daring to make that humiliating comparison. He had never in his life before compared her to her feckless and avaricious parent, and that he should do so now hurt like the sharp slice of a knife in already tender flesh. 'I'm not like my mother and you know I'm not.'
; Crossing the big echoing hall on his passage to the grand staircase, Alexei skimmed a cool glance at her taut profile. 'Once I would have agreed with that statement, but not any more. I don't know you the way I thought I knew you.'
A lump formed in her throat. 'I don't feel I know you either just at this moment.'
'I'm still very angry with you,' Alexei responded with succinct bite. 'Of course I am. I've already missed out on months of my child's life and I'm a complete stranger to him.'
Mounting the stairs by his side, Billie murmured, 'I thought you weren't ready for a child.'
'He's here, ready or not!' Alexei quipped with derision.
'I didn't realise you'd feel this way.'
'Until I found out about Nikolos, neither did I,' Alexei admitted in a raw undertone. 'But he's the next generation of my family and his beginnings couldn't have been worse! He's my responsibility and the buck stops here.'
Ouch, Billie thought at that far-reaching assumption of responsibility but she said nothing, recognising that he had to have a lot of conflicting feelings to work through and that in many ways he was probably still in shock at the result of the DNA test. All of a sudden he had been plunged into fatherhood and the smokescreen with which she had surrounded Nicky's birth and paternity only complicated that state of affairs.
Kasma was playing with Nicky on the floor of the well-appointed nursery. Alexei told the nursemaid to take a break and the young Greek woman had barely crossed the threshold when he bent down to scoop his son up off the carpet. Taken by surprise, Nicky loosed a startled yell of complaint and scowled at his father.
'He can be a bit strange at present; he's not comfortable with anyone he doesn't know,' Billie warned him reluctantly, mentally willing Nicky to be compliant and friendly at this crucial first meeting with his father.
Alexei drew his son awkwardly closer and Nicky burst into noisy floods of tears and wrenched his little body dramatically sideways in his mother's direction.
Billie reached out to take her distraught son into her arms. 'Try playing with him first,' she suggested.
'I've never played with a kid in my life,' Alexei said flatly. 'Is he always this jumpy or is it just me?'
'Babies can be very sensitive to atmosphere and we're both fairly tense.'
Alexei studied his son's truculent little face with intense interest. He scanned the baby's tousled black hair, his olive skin tone, his big dark accusing eyes and the manner in which he was clinging to his mother. Alexei wondered how he hadn't guessed that Nikolos was his child for, in his opinion, the physical resemblance was marked. How come some sixth-sense prompting hadn't urged him to take a closer look at Billie's supposed cousin? How come he hadn't tied together the evidence of her unexplained sickness as reported by Anatalya and her months-long career break, which had come out of nowhere at him? But he knew exactly why he hadn't put it all together.
He had had no recollection of their sexual encounter and he had trusted her absolutely while she had gone to extraordinary lengths to deceive him: there was no getting round that unpleasant truth.
Billie lifted up a picture book and pushed it into Alexei's hand. 'That's Nicky's favourite. I'll put him in the baby seat and you can read it and show him the pictures.'
'Surely he's still too young for stories?'
'He always looks interested and stays quiet while I read to him. Babies like familiar rituals.'
With a strong air of reluctance, his lean dark features tense, Alexei sank down in the armchair beside the baby seat and leant down to Nicky's level. 'You don't have to stay,' Alexei told Billie. 'I don't need an audience for this.'