The Greek Tycoon's Secret Child

by Cathy Williams

  ‘Look, I’m sorry.’ Mattie felt a dismaying sense of unreality and had to struggle to get her thoughts together. ‘I know you think that this is probably going to turn your world upside-down, but it won’t.’

  ‘And how do you work that one out? Clarify for me.’

  You don’t even care, do you? she wanted to shout. ‘Nothing’s going to change between us. It’s only right that you should know but it’s a formality—’

  ‘A formality!’ Dominic banged his fist on the table.

  ‘Ssh!’

  ‘Don’t tell me to be quiet, Mattie! You chose this ridiculous venue to break this news, well, you’ll just have to live with the fact if I don’t collude and duck down quietly!’

  ‘Shouting isn’t going to get us anywhere.’

  ‘And what are you proposing we do? What’s this anywhere you have in mind?’

  ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have met here after all,’ Mattie whispered, biting her lip. Several people had looked around when his fist had hit the table, and she could feel their ears flapping at the prospect of an impromptu cabaret show even though they had returned to their conversations.

  ‘You picked the place!’

  ‘Could you keep your voice down?’

  ‘I’ll shout as loudly as I like!’ Dominic deliberately raised his voice a few more notches and was rewarded by sudden silence from the tables surrounding them. Then he sat back and folded his arms and looked at her.

  How dared she think that she could be carrying his baby, only to tell him that his involvement was reduced to a mere formality?

  She looked pale and tense and he had a sudden urge just to go round the table, pull her to her feet and wrap his arms around her until the paleness and the tension were both wiped away.

  ‘We need to get out of here,’ he said roughly. ‘This is no place to discuss a subject like this and you know it. We’ll go back to my apartment. It’s only ten minutes’ walk away and at least we’ll be private there.’

  ‘No way!’ The thought of being alone with him in his apartment, the place where they had shared so many good times, where her love had taken root and grown without her even realising, made her flush with panic. ‘If anything, we can go to…to my place. But there’s nothing we can say there that we can’t say here.’ She discovered that she was wringing her hands, like a damsel in some Victorian saga, and she shoved them safely out of sight on her lap.

  ‘Fine.’

  Which was not the description she would have used as they sat in total silence in the back of the cab on the way to her flat. Hideous might have been more apt. And if she felt like this now, trapped and miserable and longing for the impossible, when they weren’t even alone, how was it going to be when they were in her very tiny sitting room?

  It felt like ages before the taxi arrived at the tired converted Victorian house.

  ‘You live here?’ Dominic asked in a scathing voice. ‘You gave up the apartment to move into this?’

  ‘It’s affordable,’ Mattie said briefly, turning to unlock the front door. She could feel his presence behind her and it sent ripples of awareness shooting up and down her spine like moth wings.

  ‘It would be,’ Dominic commented from behind her, looking at the eight little cubby-holes used for the post, ‘considering how many people are crammed in here. I suppose you’re at the top?’

  Mattie ignored him, even though it wasn’t too difficult to imagine what he was thinking as they mounted the stairs towards her flat. Peeling wallpaper, threadbare carpet, bare bulbs hanging at intervals from the high ceilings.

  ‘You do realise,’ he said, once they were inside her flat and she had shut the door behind them, ‘that this is unacceptable.’ He stood in the middle of the room and looked around him with a practised and disdainful eye.

  ‘I happen to find it very comfortable.’

  ‘A sitting room with a bed shoved up one end, a bathroom that can only accommodate an anorexic and a kitchen…’ he strolled into the kitchen, cast the same disapproving eye around ‘…a kitchen just about big enough to house a table and two chairs, provided mobility isn’t high on the list of priorities. It won’t do.’

  Mattie felt tears spring up into her eyes and she turned away quickly, but not quickly enough.

  His arms around her were like a sanctuary and a haven and she turned around into him, feeling his warmth settle over her like a blanket.

  ‘It’s not just you now.’ His words sank into her hair. ‘You’re having my baby and I won’t let you tackle this pregnancy alone, in a dump like this, never mind when the baby’s born.’

  ‘You won’t let me?’ Mattie pushed herself out of the treacherous embrace and walked towards the window, to turn round and face him. ‘I didn’t come to see you so that you could…could manipulate me…again!’

  ‘I don’t give a damn what you call it, Mattie, but hear me now and hear me very carefully…’ His voice was low and travelled from his mouth to her ears like an arrow, a deadly, speeding arrow. ‘You will not bring any child of mine up in a place like this. You will not labour up flights of stairs when you’re pregnant, risking a miscarriage. You might not care for me laying down the law, but that’s exactly what I intend to do.’

  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.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  MATTIE 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 busi
ness 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.