His eyes bored into hers. ‘Does she know about this?’
She pressed her lips together, releasing them to whisper, ‘No. I’ve never told her.’
Sebastian felt his spine turn to ice again. ‘Does anyone know?’ he asked, trying to keep his voice low. ‘Anyone at the orphanage?’
She moistened her lips with the point of her tongue. ‘Everyone knows he is my son but they don’t know who the father is. I swear no one does.’
Sebastian wondered whether he could believe her. She had already told so many lies he was surprised she had been able to keep track of them all. It only demonstrated how adept she was at pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes.
‘I will see you this evening once you have settled Sam into bed,’ he said. ‘I have some other engagements now, but Stefanos is doing his utmost to clear my diary for the next few days.’
She gave him a mutinous look but he had already warned Stefanos she might try and escape with the child. He had instructed his aide to put her under lock and key until he returned. He wasn’t going to risk anything at this stage. With a few choice words to the press Cassie could have made herself a fortune and brought down his rulership in one fell swoop.
The only question that niggled at him was why hadn’t she done so already?
CHAPTER EIGHT
CASSIE paced the floor of the study where Stefanos had instructed her to wait for Sebastian. Sam was in bed, exhausted, barely putting up a struggle when the elderly but totally competent nanny Eleni had told him she would be babysitting him while his mother was downstairs.
Cassie’s nerves felt as if they had been stretched beyond the limit. She was jumpy and agitated, the imposing walls of the luxury villa feeling like prison all over again. Her earlier distress had now turned to anger. As each minute dragged past she felt her rage escalating. Was he doing it deliberately? Making her wait for him like this, reminding her with chilling clarity he had all the power, all the control and all the cold-blooded ruthlessness to do what he wanted?
The door suddenly opened and she swung around. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing locking me up in this place?’ she railed as Sebastian came in.
Cassie had thought she had the highest score on anger until she saw the white-tipped fury on his face. He was in control but barely. She had never seen him so blisteringly, blazingly angry. His whole body was rigid with it, his hands clenched into tight fists, a pulse beating like a jackhammer in his neck.
‘You cold-hearted, deceitful little bitch,’ he spat at her malevolently.
Cassie took a step backwards, her voice locking in her throat.
He came up close, so close she had to fight every instinct not to shrink away. ‘You lying little whore,’ he went on brutally. ‘I didn’t think even you could go as low as you have gone, using a small, innocent child to cover up each and every one of your despicable lies.’
She swallowed tightly as guilt washed over her in scorching waves.
‘It was all a game to you, wasn’t it?’ he said when she didn’t speak.
She closed her eyes to escape the fire of his fury.
‘Look at me, damn you!’
She flinched and opened her eyes again, her whole body beginning to shake. ‘It wasn’t like that…’
‘What was it like, then?’ he said with a curl of his lip. ‘“Here is a painting by a little orphan,”’ he mimicked her voice. ‘God, I could shake you until your teeth rattled for that alone.’
Cassie bit the inside of her mouth until she tasted blood.
‘You lied to my face time and time again. How could you use a small innocent child to cover your back like that?’
‘I know…’ she choked. ‘I’m sorry…’
His eyes narrowed to black slits. ‘You are sorry? Oh, so that makes it all OK, then, does it, Cassie? You are sorry you forgot to mention you had my son five years ago but everything’s rosy now it’s all sorted out.’ He raked a hand through his hair. ‘God, give me strength.’
‘I tried to tell you…I tried to but you didn’t respond to my letter.’
His glare turned to a frown. ‘Letter?’ he asked. ‘What letter?’
She swallowed tightly. ‘I wrote you a letter as soon as I found out I was pregnant. When you didn’t respond I assumed you weren’t interested in hearing what I had to tell you. I didn’t try again. It was too dangerous in any case. I could hardly write and tell you I was carrying your child—all my letters were screened.’
He gave her a cutting look. ‘You were not going to tell me anything until you could do so for maximum effect, isn’t that right, Cassie? I am just a matter of weeks away from being crowned as King. You could not have chosen a more devastatingly effective time.’
‘No, that’s not right,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you at all… Sam and I are leaving as soon as my parole is up. I’ve…I’ve already got the tickets.’
A menacing silence tightened the air to snapping point.
‘So…let me get this right,’ he said, skewering her gaze with his. ‘You were going to take my child off the island never once telling me of his existence, is that correct?’
It sounded awful when he put it like that, Cassie thought. ‘I thought it would be for the best,’ she said. ‘You’re about to be King. I thought the last thing you would want to know about is a love-child.’
‘Is that what you call him—a love-child?’ he asked in scorn. ‘But there was no love, was there, Cassie?’
She brought up her chin. ‘I did love you.’ I do love you.
His bark of a laugh was a bitter, horrible sound that echoed ominously in the room. ‘Oh, yes, I remember now. You claimed to love me but you were opening your legs for anyone else who came along.’
‘It wasn’t like that…’ she said in a barely audible voice. ‘There was no one else.’
He came up even closer, so close she could see every dark fleck in his eyes and every spark of glittering hatred. ‘Is there no end to your falsehoods?’ he bit out. ‘Do you think I would fall for any more of your despicable lies?’
Cassie felt the cold hand of despair clutch at her insides. ‘I only told you that so I could end our relationship,’ she said. ‘I was afraid…’
‘Of what?’
‘Of…of how things were between us,’ she said, not able to hold his gaze.
‘I don’t believe you. I don’t believe a word that comes out of that perfidious mouth of yours,’ he said. ‘You are a liar just as your father always said you were. I was a fool to think otherwise. For years I have thought he was painting a worse picture of you to serve his own ends, but after this I realise everything he said about you was true. You have no conscience, no moral sense of what is right. Lying is second nature to you.’
‘Yes, well, he would have known,’ she shot back. ‘It takes one to know one, doesn’t it?’
He gave her a contemptuous look. ‘You can malign him all you like because he can’t defend himself. I know whose version I prefer to believe.’
Cassie felt her world start to crumble all over again. She had been so close to telling him what her father had been like, had told him more than she had told anyone, and yet now there was no way he would believe her if she told him the rest. The pain she felt was much worse than she could ever have imagined. It was as if her life, all of her suffering and despair had been a fantasy she had made up to protect herself.
Wasn’t that always the way it had been? Everyone had always believed her father and they continued to do so even though he was dead. She’d had no one to defend her in the past and there would be no one in the future. Not even the one person she had wanted to understand her situation more than any other.
‘Did you know you were pregnant when you ended our relationship?’ he asked, still glaring at her furiously.
‘No…I only found out after I was in prison. I had a health check done and a pregnancy test was standard procedure. The results came back positive. I was shocked. I didn’t even know you c
ould fall pregnant while on the pill.’
Sebastian heard the anguish behind the words and felt his anger loosen around the edges. She had been eighteen years old. Sure, she had acted like a streetwise slut, but finding herself pregnant and in prison must have thrown her for six.
‘That’s when I wrote to you,’ she said, her eyes glistening with moisture. ‘I asked to see you. I didn’t think it would be appropriate to tell you other than face to face.’
‘I received no such letter,’ he said, still wondering if he should believe her. She was so good at this, damn her. She could even tear up on cue. He could feel the effect on him and could only assume it was deliberate. What she hoped to achieve he wasn’t entirely sure. Perhaps a massive pay out to stop her from going to the press, but if he paid it how could he be sure she wouldn’t double-cross him? And besides, he wanted to freely acknowledge Sam as his own son. The child deserved so much better than he’d had so far in his short life.
Sebastian felt his anger simmering all over again at how his son had been born in a prison instead of the palace where he belonged. God only knew what things he had seen or heard in those first formative years of his life, the people he had been housed with, the toughened criminals, the down-and-outs and dregs of society knew his son better than he did.
‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ she said, the line of her mouth bitter.
He hesitated for perhaps a fraction too long to be convincing. ‘I can only say if a letter was sent I did not see it. Someone must have intercepted it and destroyed it.’
‘Your father?’
Sebastian considered it for a moment. ‘I would not like to think him responsible for such an act, but I have no way of proving it either way.’
‘So you’d rather believe me capable of lying than sully your father’s name with suspicion.’
He swore under his breath. ‘Cassie, you have done nothing but lie to me from the moment we met,’ he said. ‘If I am having trouble believing you now, then you have only yourself to blame.’
Tears shone in her eyes. ‘Please don’t take Sam away from me,’ she begged. ‘He wouldn’t cope with it, I know he wouldn’t. Please…please don’t take him away…’
Sebastian tried to harden his heart but it was impossible. She clearly loved the child and had gone through hell and high water to keep him. ‘I am not going to take him away from you,’ he said in a gruff tone. ‘I can see he loves you as much as you love him. I just want some answers and I want you for once in your life to be honest with me. You surely owe me that?’
‘I’m not sure I can trust you,’ she said. ‘You’ve brought me here against my will and locked all the doors behind me. I can’t bear it.’
‘There is no other way,’ he said. ‘I can’t have this leaked out to the press.’
‘Is that all that matters to you?’ she asked. ‘What people will think?’
‘Damn it, Cassie, I don’t care what people think. I am trying to protect Sam. He is totally innocent in all of this. I have missed out on five years of his life. How can I ever make it up to him? Where the hell do I start?’
Cassie felt so ashamed she hadn’t factored in how Sebastian would be feeling right now. He had only just learned of Sam’s existence. He had been robbed of so much and it could never be made up to him. She had been robbed herself when Sam had been taken away for the last year of her sentence and look how devastated that had left her. How much worse must he be feeling having not even known he had fathered a child until now?
‘I haven’t told him you are his father,’ she said into the painful silence.
‘Were you planning to tell him at some stage?’
‘How could I?’ she said in a broken whisper.
Sebastian scored another pathway through his hair. His emotions were all over the place. Every bone in his body was aching with the knowledge Cassie had borne his child alone. What if someone had intercepted her sole attempt to contact him? How could he blame her for not trying again since her first attempt had yielded nothing? Even her best friend, his sister Lissa, had deserted her at their father’s command.
And there was Sam, shy little Sam who looked as if any moment he expected someone to destroy his carefully constructed world. His mother was everything to him, his anchor, just as Sebastian’s mother had been to him. How could he swoop in and take control without considering the effect on that endearing little boy?
‘He needs to be told,’ he said heavily. ‘I would like to be the one to do so.’
Cassie looked at him with worry, a dark shadow in her green eyes. ‘You mean to acknowledge him as your own?’
He placed his closed fist against his heart. ‘He is my son, Cassie,’ he said. ‘Do you really think I would turn my back on him?’
‘No…it’s just I thought with the coronation and all…’
‘That is not important right now,’ he said. ‘I want to spend the next couple of weeks getting to know him. I have to come to some sort of decision over his future as well as my own.’
‘I’m not asking you to give up the throne,’ she said. ‘I would never ask that of you.’
He studied her for a lengthy pause. ‘Why did you agree to another affair with me?’ he asked. ‘You knew I was his father—why dance with danger by getting involved with me again?’
She bit her lip and lowered her gaze. ‘I knew it was dangerous but…’
‘But?’
She brought her eyes back to his. ‘I couldn’t help myself…’
Sebastian hoped it wasn’t another one of her lies. She looked exhausted, pale and fragile and nothing like the in-your-face Cassie of the past. She had been steadily shrinking from him from the moment he had stepped into the room, cowering almost, which made him wonder…
‘Do you mind if I go to bed?’ she asked, pinching at the bridge of her nose. ‘I have the most appalling headache. It’s been coming on all afternoon.’
‘I didn’t realise,’ he said, frowning in concern. ‘You should have said. I will get Stefanos to show you to your room. It is next door to Sam’s and close to mine if you need anything during the night.’
‘Thank you…’
‘Cassie?’
She turned and looked at him, her face bleak and her eyes nothing less than soulless. ‘Yes?’
‘Thank you for not getting rid of him,’ he said. ‘You would have had many reasons to do so, but you did not.’
‘I could not,’ she said almost fiercely. ‘Termination or adoption was never going to be an option for me. I had grown up without knowing my mother. It’s been like a gaping hole in my life. I couldn’t bear for my child to suffer the same.’
Sebastian could sense the pain behind the quietly spoken words. How had he not seen this about her before? But then he reminded himself their clandestine meetings had always been about satisfying an urgent physical need, they had not been about discovering intimate details of each other’s lives.
He suddenly realised he had told her even less about his own life. He hadn’t shared his frustration over his father’s heavy handedness. He had told her nothing of the sense of duty that was at times burdensome. He had simply enjoyed a red-hot affair with her, not for a moment thinking she was anything but a good-time girl.
Sebastian could see how fragile she was now. She looked like a wraith with her too-slim body and long, blonde hair awry from dragging her fingers through it agitatedly. It awoke every protective instinct in his body to draw her close and offer what comfort he could.
‘Cassie.’ He reached out and touched her ever so gently on the arm, but she flinched away as if he had slapped her.
She looked at him, her tear-washed eyes glittering with a last stand show of defiance. ‘I don’t want to talk any more. I’m tired and my head feels as if it’s going to explode. If you had a decent bone in your body you’d realise that and let me go to bed.’
He held her challenging glare for a moment before he let out a weary sigh. ‘Of course,’ he said, holding the door open for h
er. ‘Kalinichta, Cassie.’
She didn’t respond, which he more or less expected, but it disappointed him all the same. He saw the shadows in her emerald eyes and knew he had played a huge part in putting them there. Now he wanted to know how on earth he was going to remove them.
CHAPTER NINE
CASSIE wasn’t sure what had woken her only an hour or so later. The silence most probably, she thought wryly as she threw back the covers to go and check on Sam, who was sleeping next door. After years in a noisy prison she still found the quietness of night faintly disturbing.
She gently pushed open the door of Sam’s room but came to a startled halt when she saw who was sitting beside the bed, with one of Sam’s tiny hands cupped in his. ‘Is…is everything all right?’ she said in a low whisper.
Sebastian tucked Sam’s hand back under the covers. ‘Yes…I was just…checking him before I went to bed.’
Cassie waited until they were out in the corridor before she spoke. ‘Haven’t you been to bed yet? It’s way past midnight.’
He rubbed one of his hands down his face, the scrape of his palm over his stubble sounding loud in the silence. ‘No, I had some things to see to,’ he said. ‘How is your headache?’
Somehow the genuine concern in his voice made Cassie’s skin tingle with awareness. So too did the fact she was standing before him in an almost sheer slip of a nightgown with only a light bathrobe covering it. ‘It’s gone…sort of…’
He lifted a hand and gently brushed back the hair off her face, his touch so light she felt every nerve spring to life. She stood stock-still, not breathing, not thinking—just feeling.
‘Do you fancy a drink or something?’ he asked in a brusque tone, shoving his hand in his pocket as if he regretted touching her. ‘I was just about to go downstairs and make one.’
She lifted her brows. ‘You fix your own drinks?’
‘Occasionally,’ he said, his expression locking her out. ‘Just because I have a late night doesn’t mean my staff have to as well.’
‘Did Sam call out?’ she asked as he led the way downstairs. ‘I checked him before I went to bed and he was fine.’
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