Ever since she’d more or less fled from him, he’d been questioning her motives for doing so. Although he knew their relationship was purely professional, Edward Claiborne and Teddie had looked good together, and it had got to him—for, just like his mother, Teddie was not the kind of women to be alone. Despite her denial, he had no doubt that somewhere in the city there was a nameless, faceless man who had stepped into his shoes.
In fact that was why he’d found himself standing on her doorstep. Even just imagining it made a knot of rage form in his stomach, and that enraged him further—the fact that she still had the power to affect him after all these years.
His shoulders tensed. ‘Or perhaps they have their own agenda.’
Teddie felt a rush of anger spread over her skin like a heat rash. ‘Nobody has been giving me advice. I make my own decisions—although I wouldn’t expect you to understand that.’ Heart thumping, she lifted her gaze to his. ‘It was always a difficult concept for you, wasn’t it, Aristo? My being an independent woman?’
His eyes flickered, and she could almost see the fuse inside of him catch light.
‘If by “independent” you mean self-absorbed and unsupportive, then, yes, I suppose it was.’
She caught her breath. The room felt suddenly cramped and airless, as though it had shrunk in the face of his anger—an anger which fed the outrage that had been simmering inside her since meeting him earlier.
‘You’re calling me self-absorbed and unsupportive?’ She glared at him, the sheer injustice of his statement blowing her away. She could feel her grip on her temper starting to slip. How dare he turn up here, in her home, and start throwing accusations at her?
But even as she choked on her anger, she wasn’t really surprised. Back when she’d loved him, she’d known that he had a single-minded vision of the world—a world in which he was always in the right and always had the last word. Her refusing to talk to him now simply didn’t fit with that expectation.
Her motives, her needs, were irrelevant. As far as he was concerned she had merely issued him with a challenge that must instantly be confronted and crushed.
Queasily, she remembered his cold hostility when she’d refused to give up her job. Was that when their marriage had really ended? It was certainly the moment when she’d finally been forced to acknowledge the facts. That marrying Aristo had not been an act of impulse, driven by an undeniable love, but a mistake based on a misguided hope and longing to have a place in his life, and in his heart.
But Aristo didn’t have a heart, and he hadn’t come to her apartment to return a pack of cards. As usual, he just wanted to have the last word.
Crossing her arms to contain the ache in her chest, she lifted her chin. ‘If you believe that, then perhaps I should have given you the number for my doctor, as you’re clearly delusional,’ she snapped. ‘Wanting to carry on doing a job I loved didn’t make me self-absorbed, Aristo. It was an act of self-preservation.’
Aristo stared at her, his shoulders rigid with frustration. ‘Self-preservation!’ he scoffed. ‘You were living in a penthouse in Manhattan with a view of Central Park. You were hardly on Skid Row.’ He shook his dark head in disbelief. ‘That’s the trouble with you, Teddie—you’re so used to performing you turn every single part of your life into a stunt, even this conversation.’
They were both almost shouting now, their bodies braced against the incoming storm.
Her eyes narrowed. ‘You think this is a conversation?’ she snapped. ‘You didn’t come here to converse. I bruised your ego so you wanted—’
‘Mommy—Mommy!’
The child’s voice came from somewhere behind her, cutting through her angry tirade like a scythe through wheat. Turning instantly, instinctively, Teddie cleared her throat.
‘Oh, sweetheart, it’s all right.’
Her son, George, blinked up at her. He was wearing his pyjamas and holding his favourite toy boat and she felt a rush of pure, fierce love as she looked down into his huge, anxious dark eyes.
‘Mommy shouted...’
He bit his lip and, hearing the wobble in his voice, she reached down and curved her arm unsteadily around his stocky little waist and pulled him closer, pressing his body against hers. ‘I’m sorry, darling. Did Mommy wake you?’
Lifting him up, she held him tightly as he nodded his head against her shoulder.
Watching Teddie press her face against the little dark-haired boy’s cheek, Aristo felt his stomach turn to ice.
He felt winded by the discovery that she had a child. No, it was more than that: he felt wounded, even though he could come up with no rational explanation for why that should be the case.
His pulse was racing like a bolting horse, his thoughts firing off in every direction. He could hardly take it in, but there could be no mistake. This child was Teddie’s son. But why hadn’t she told him?
Thinking back to their earlier conversation, he replayed her words and felt an icy fury rise up inside of him. Not only had she said nothing, she’d lied to his face when he’d asked her about her family. Of course he’d been talking about siblings, cousins, aunts—but why hadn’t she told him then? Why had she kept her son a secret?
At that moment the little boy lifted his face and suddenly he couldn’t breathe. At the periphery of his vision he could see Teddie turning to face him, and then he knew why, for her green eyes were telling him what her mouth—that beautiful, soft, deceiving mouth—had failed to do earlier.
This was his son.
Like a drowning man, he saw his whole life speeding through his head—meeting Teddie at that dinner, her long dark hair swinging forward half-hiding a smile that had stolen his breath away, the echoing emptiness of his apartment, and that moment in the Kildare when she’d hesitated...
He breathed out unsteadily, and abruptly his pulse juddered to a halt.
Only, he wasn’t drowning in water, but in lies. Teddie’s lies.
The resentment and hostility he’d felt after she’d left him, the shock of bumping into her today—all of it was swept aside in a firestorm of fury so blindingly white and intense that he had to reach out and steady himself against a bookcase.
But the luxury of losing his temper with Teddie would have to wait. Right now it was time to meet his son.
‘I’m sorry too,’ he said gently, making sure that none of the emotions roiling inside his head were audible in his voice as he smiled at his son for the first time.
‘But you don’t need to worry.’ Skewering Teddie with his gaze, he took a step closer. ‘Mommy and I are going to have a chat, aren’t we?’
He turned to Teddie, making sure that the smooth blandness of his voice in no way detracted from the blistering rage in his eyes. Hearing her small, sharp intake of breath, he felt the glacier in his chest start to scrape forward. It had been barely audible, but it was all the confirmation he needed.
Forcing herself to meet his gaze, Teddie nodded mechanically, but inside her head a mantra of panic-stricken thoughts was beating in time to her heartbeat. He knows. He knows George is his son. What am I going to do?
Clearing her throat, she smiled. ‘Yes, that’s right. We’re going to have a grown-ups talk. And you, young man, are going to be taken back to bed.’
Although, given that her legs felt as though they were made of blancmange, that might be easier to say than do.
Aristo stared at her coldly. ‘But not before you’ve introduced me, of course.’
Her chin jerked up, but his glittering gaze silenced her words of objection.
‘This is my son, George,’ she said stiffly.
‘Hello, George.’ Aristo smiled. ‘I’m very honoured to meet you. My name is Aristo Leonidas, and I’m an old friend of your mommy’s.’
Gazing into his son’s eyes—dark eyes that were almost identical in shape and colour to his own—he felt his stomach tigh
ten painfully. George had his jawline and his high cheekbones; the likeness between them was remarkable, undeniable. At the same age they would have looked like twins.
As George smiled uncertainly back at him he felt almost blinded with outrage at Teddie’s deceit. His son must be three years old. How much had he missed during that time? First tooth. First word. First steps. Holidays and birthdays. And in the future, what other occasions would he have unknowingly not attended—graduation, wedding day...
He gritted his teeth.
Maybe he’d not actually thought about becoming a father, but Teddie had unilaterally taken away his right to be one. How was he ever going to make good the time he’d missed? No, not missed, he thought savagely. Teddie had cheated him of three years of his son’s life. Worse, not only had she deliberately kept his son a secret from him for all that time, she had clearly been planning to keep him in ignorance of George’s existence for ever.
Hell, she’d even lied to him tonight, telling him that he had to be quiet because of her elderly neighbours.
Glancing up, he refocused on his son’s face and, seeing the confusion in George’s eyes, pushed his anger away. ‘I know you’re not ready to shake hands yet and that’s a good thing, because we need to get to know each other a bit better first. But maybe we could just bump knuckles for now.’
Raising his hand, he curled his fingers into a fist, his heart contracting as his son copied him, and they gently bumped fists.
‘Hey, what’s that? Is that a boat?’ Aristo watched as George uncurled his fingers.
‘It’s my boat,’ he said solemnly.
‘I love your boat.’ Aristo glanced at it admiringly. ‘I have a real boat like that. Maybe you could come for a ride on it with Mommy. Would you like that?’
George nodded, and Teddie felt her chest hollow out with panic.
Watching the sudden intimacy between her ex-husband and their son, she felt something wrench apart inside her, for the two of them were so close—not just physically but in their very likeness. It was both touching and terrifying, almost overwhelmingly so.
Clearing her throat, she smiled stiffly. ‘That would be lovely, wouldn’t it, George? Right now though, it really is time to go back to bed.’
In his bedroom, she tucked him under his duvet, keeping up a steady stream of chatter until his eyelids fluttered shut.
If only she could just crawl in beside him and close her eyes too. Remembering the look on Aristo’s face as he’d worked out that George was his son, she felt her pulse begin beating in her neck like a moth against glass. Despite his outer calm, she knew that he was angry—more angry than she had ever seen him, more angry than she could have imagined possible.
Not that she could blame him, she thought, guilt scraping over her skin like sandpaper. Had their roles been reversed she would have been just as furious. And the fact that part of her had always wanted to tell him the truth didn’t feel like much of a defence.
She really should be relieved, though, for it had been getting harder and harder to keep lying.
But now she would have to pay the price for those lies and face his anger. That was bad enough, but more terrifying still was the sudden knife-twist of realisation that Aristo had both a moral and a legal right to be in his son’s life. It didn’t matter about their divorce. George was his son, and if he wanted to press that point home he had the power and the money to do so emphatically—not just here in her apartment but in court.
The thought of facing Aristo in court made her want to throw up.
So face him now, she ordered herself. And, taking a deep breath, she stood up and made her way back to the living room.
He swung round towards her, and her heart began beating so fast she thought it would burst through her ribs. She had thought he was angry before, but clearly each minute that had passed during her absence had increased his fury exponentially, so that now, as he walked towards her, it was the arctic blast of his contempt that held her frozen to the spot.
‘I knew you were shallow and unscrupulous,’ he said, his eyes gleaming like black ice, ‘but at what point exactly did your morals become so skewed that you decided to keep my son a secret from me?’
‘That’s not fair—’
His black eyes slammed into hers. ‘Fair? You’re really quite something, Teddie. I thought you just stole money from me. Turns out you stole my son.’
‘I didn’t steal him—’ she began, but he cut her off.
‘Oh, I’m sure you’ve post-rationalised it. What did you tell yourself? What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him?’ he imitated her voice. ‘It’ll be for the best.’
‘I did do it for the best.’ Her voice was shaking, but her eyes were level with his. ‘I did what was best for me, Aristo, because there was only me.’
He felt his breathing jerk. ‘Not true. You had a husband.’
‘Ex-husband,’ she snapped. ‘We were divorced by then. Not that it would have made any difference. You were never there.’
His eyes didn’t leave hers. ‘You really can’t help yourself, can you? It’s just lie after lie after lie.’
Teddie swallowed. It was true—she had lied repeatedly. But not because she’d wanted to and not about the past. It wasn’t fair of Aristo to judge her with hindsight. He might be in shock now, but she’d had just the same shock four years ago when, thanks to him, she’d been homeless and alone.
‘I was going to tell you—’ She broke off as he laughed, the bitterness reverberating around the small room.
‘Of course you were.’
‘I didn’t mean now—today. I meant in the future.’
‘The future?’ He repeated the word slowly, as though not quite sure of its meaning. ‘What’s wrong with the present? What was wrong with this morning?’
‘It all happened so quickly.’ She looked at him defensively. ‘I wasn’t expecting to see you.’
Aristo stared at her in disbelief. ‘And that’s a reason, is it? Reason enough for my son to grow up without a father? Or have you got some surrogate daddy in mind? Is that why you ran out on me this morning?’
The thought stung. He might not have been celibate, but dating—certainly anything serious—had been the last thing on his mind for the past four years. Work—in particular the expansion of his empire, and more recently his upcoming flotation on the stock exchange—had taken up so much of his time and energy. On those occasions when he’d needed a ‘plus-one’, he been careful to keep her at a distance.
Clearly Teddie had found him far easier to replace.
His eyes narrowed. ‘I mean, it’s just what you do, isn’t it, Teddie? That’s your real act! Not all this nonsense.’ He held up the box of cards. ‘You set it all up.’ Set me up, he thought savagely. ‘Then take what you want and move on.’
‘If you’re talking about our marriage, I had plenty of reasons to leave. And I didn’t take anything.’
She felt a sudden sharp pang of guilt as she thought of her son—their son—but then she repeated his sneering reference to her work as ‘nonsense’ inside her head, and pushed her guilt aside.
Glaring at him, she shook her head, whipping her dark hair like a horse swatting flies with its tail. ‘And not that it’s any of your business but there is no man in my life, and there’s certainly no daddy in George’s.’
The outrage in her voice sounded real, and he wanted to believe her for his pride’s sake, if nothing else. But, aside from the faint flush of colour creeping over her cheeks, she had already told so many different lies in such a short space of time that it was hard to believe anything she said. Clearly lying was second nature to her.
His heart was suddenly speeding and his skin felt cool and clammy with shock—not just at finding out he was a father, but at how ruthlessly Teddie had played him.
‘So let me get this clear,’ he said slowly. ‘At some unspecif
ied point in the future you were planning on telling me about my son?’
Teddie hesitated. If only she could plead the Fifth Amendment but this was one question that required an answer. Actually, it required the truth.
‘I don’t know. Honestly, most days I’m just trying to deal with the day-to-day of work and being a mom to George.’
And grieving for the man I loved and lost.
Blocking off the memories of those terrible weeks and months after they’d split, she cleared her throat. ‘We were already divorced by the time I found out I was pregnant. We weren’t talking, and you weren’t even in the country.’
His eyes bored into eyes. ‘And so you just unilaterally decided to disappear into thin air with my child? He’s my son—not some prop in your magic show.’
Stung, and shocked by the level of emotion in his voice, she said defensively, ‘I know and I’m sorry.’
He swore under his breath. ‘Sorry is not enough, Teddie. I have a child, and I fully intend to get to know him.’
It wasn’t an outright threat, more a statement of intent, but she could see that his shock at discovering he was a father was fading and in its place was that familiar need to take control of the situation.
She felt a ripple of apprehension run down her backbone. Where did that leave her?
Last time she and Aristo had gone head to head she’d been cast out from his kingdom, her unimportance in his life no longer just a private fear but an actuality.
But four years ago she’d been young and in love, unsure of her place in the world. Now, though, she was a successful businesswoman and a hands-on single mother—and, most important of all, she understood what she’d been too naive and too dazzled to see four years ago.
Aristo had no capacity for or interest in emotional ties. She’d learned that first-hand over six agonising months spent watching his obsession with work consume their marriage and exclude her from his life.
She brought her eyes back to his. Yes, she should have told him the truth, but he’d given her no reason to do so—no reason other than biology for her to allow him into George’s life.
Demanding His Secret Son Page 4
