a control freak you were the day I married you.’
Apollo surveyed Hector, who was seated on the rug, his little face seemingly anxious. You and me too, buddy, Apollo thought wryly while he wondered if it was possible that Pixie could roll off the sofa and hurt herself while she slept. For the first time in his life concern was weighing him down like a big grey cloud closing out the sun. He had never truly had to worry about anyone but his father but now he had a wife and a child on the way. He thought it extraordinary that achieving the pregnancy required to fulfil the terms of his father’s will should suddenly and quite inexplicably feel, not like a prize, but more like a poisoned chalice.
* * *
Apollo came to bed in the early hours. Having persuaded herself that he might not even choose to still share the same room, Pixie was lying sleepless watching the moonlight glimmer through the shadows. She listened to him in the shower, watched him stride naked towards the bed and sensual heat curled low in her body because she could see that he was aroused.
Apollo slid quietly into bed and lay there, thoroughly irritated by the throbbing at his groin. Pixie was pregnant, fragile and definitely off-limits. But it was as if she had lit a fire in him the first time they had had sex. It was a fire only she could seem to cool and that knowledge seriously disturbed him. Throughout his adult life Apollo had viewed sex as a casual diversion from more important activities. Sex had always been easily available and his libido had never homed in on one particular woman. His life had been wonderfully simple, he reflected grimly. He would see a woman he wanted, enjoy her for a while and when he got bored move on to the next. And now, for some peculiar reason, he wasn’t getting bored any more…and he was feeling urges he had no desire to feel.
Pixie shifted across the bed inch by inch, wishing it weren’t quite so big. Her hand settled on the male shoulder furthest from her and slowly drifted down over Apollo’s magnificent torso. She smiled as she felt his hard muscles ripple and tense across his abdomen.
He turned towards her and his eyes glittered in the moonlight. ‘We shouldn’t,’ he breathed with sudden amusement.
‘Don’t be silly,’ Pixie whispered, her tiny hand heading further south to find the long, jutting length of him and stroke. ‘I’m pregnant, not breakable.’
Apollo groaned out loud and arched his lean hips while watching her slide below the sheet to administer an even more potent invitation and that fast his once renowned self-control broke like a dam breaking its banks. He tugged Pixie up to him with shuddering impatience and rolled her under him while his hungry mouth tasted hers with heated urgency.
‘That’s more like it,’ Pixie commented a shade smugly as she gazed up at him, her fingers skimming caressingly through his damp, tousled hair. She felt lighter than air at the ego-boosting confirmation that he still wanted her. Intelligence warned her that he was a young healthy male, who was usually in the mood for sex, but she refused to think about that angle, choosing to concentrate instead on the soothing conviction that pregnancy wasn’t quite the turn-off she had feared.
‘There is only one way this can continue,’ Apollo decreed, resting her back against the pillows. ‘You lie there… I do the work, koukla mou.’
And it was amazing, she thought much later, drifting into an exhausted and gratified sleep, but then it always was amazing with Apollo.
Apollo held her while she slept and marvelled at how natural it had become to hold her close. One large hand splayed across her flat stomach. How had he ever believed that he could walk away untouched after conception occurred? How had he credited that he could bring a child into the world and not want to play a full part in his son or daughter’s life? The unquestioning arrogance of those selfish assumptions belatedly savaged his view of himself. As fond memories of moments with his own father while he was still a little boy drifted through his mind he finally understood Vassilis Metraxis’s almost primitive need to safeguard the continuation of the family line, and he also grasped that walking away at any stage from his own child wasn’t an option he would ever be able to live with.
THREE WEEKS LATER, Pixie blinked sleepily into wakefulness and finally sat up to make a grab for the phone ringing while ruefully contemplating the empty space beside her. It was forty-eight hours since Apollo had flown to London on business. Pixie would have accompanied him had the whole household not been in chaos getting ready for the big party the following day. With the housekeeper, Olympia, presenting Pixie with query after query it had slowly dawned on her that she needed to stay on Nexos to take charge.
‘Nonsense,’ Apollo had declared without hesitation. ‘These matters have been managed without a wife’s input for years.’
But during that conversation Pixie had had to race off and be horribly sick, which had driven home hard another drawback. Hours of travel with her current delicate stomach would make her miserable and she was in no hurry to face Apollo with the repugnant downside of pregnancy. She was being ill an awful lot more than she had ever expected because her morning sickness seemed to attack at all times of the day. For that reason she had used the party arrangements as an excuse because she didn’t want Apollo to realise just how sick she was. While in her head she knew she should be sharing her suffering with him because he was an adult, it was a struggle to overcome her reluctance. He would fuss and she hated fuss and didn’t want to be treated like an invalid. In any case they had arranged for Pixie to have her first scan that very afternoon and she planned to ask the visiting gynaecologist then about her seemingly excessive sickness.
Pixie put the phone to her ear.
‘Pixie?’ Holly exclaimed before bursting into a mile-a-minute speech that left Pixie, who was still drowsy, none the wiser.
‘Sorry, I didn’t catch all that,’ she confided.
‘You’ve seen that stupid story already, haven’t you?’ Holly groaned. ‘Your voice sounds weird…you’ve been crying…’
A cold feeling slid down Pixie’s spine while she leant back against the pillows, striving to overcome the nausea beginning to creep over her. It would’ve been easier for her to simply admit that she was pregnant and sick but her best friend would be arriving the next day for the party and she wanted to save her baby news until she saw her in person. ‘What story?’
‘Vito insists it’s untrue…well, with that particular girl.’
‘Can I phone you back, Holly?’ Pixie gasped, cutting off the call and leaping from the bed in wild haste to charge for the bathroom.
Afterwards, she rested her brow down on the welcome coldness of the marble vanity counter and tried to muster the energy to clean her teeth. Oh, dear, she thought limply, it had not occurred to her that pregnancy would be quite so challenging. Certainly Holly had had a few upsets during her pregnancy but nothing similar to what Pixie was encountering.
And what had Holly been referring to? Some story in a newspaper? About Vito? No, why would she be phoning Pixie if it had been about Vito? And why would Holly think she had been crying about something? The chilled feeling of foreboding returned and as Pixie’s brain began to function again she reached for the tablet by the bed and put Apollo’s name in the search engine. The usual flock of references came up. She knew from experience that if she wanted to she could now access images of herself arriving on Nexos looking like a skinny bird in a very big sun hat that covered her face almost completely…
She sat on the edge of the bed
