the waiter. ‘Why not? Life has moved on. Fathers are now equal to mothers—’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Read it and you’ll see why the family court reached that decision,’ Jax said drily.
‘I can’t read Greek well enough yet,’ she admitted grudgingly.
‘The father is willing to work at home to be with the child while the mother would be leaving him in a nursery all day. Why are we talking about this anyway?’ Jax demanded impatiently.
‘It’s an interesting case,’ Lucy proffered stiffly. ‘The mother’s a paramedic who doesn’t have the option of working at home.’
‘While the father wants his child and what’s best for his child, which is as it should be,’ Jax interposed as a bottle of wine and glasses arrived at the table.
A cold skitter of fear pierced Lucy’s tense body as a glass of wine appeared in front of her. ‘Is that how you would feel?’
‘We’re not talking about me. I won’t be fathering any children,’ Jax declared with a cynical twist of his expressive mouth. ‘Don’t need the hassle or the responsibility. But if I did have a child I certainly wouldn’t sit back and allow a woman to take my child away from me...in fact that is the very last thing I would do.’
A quiver of sheer fright rippled down Lucy’s taut spine as she reached for her wine. That risk, that particular fear of losing her child, had never once crossed her mind as a possibility. And why hadn’t it? Jax might not want children but he was a very possessive guy. What was his was very much his, not to be shared or touched or even looked at by anyone else. Once he had treated Lucy like that, enraging her with his determination to own her body and soul and control her every move. Suppose she told him about Bella and he felt the same way about his daughter?
Sobered by that fear, Lucy decided there and then to continue keeping Bella a secret until she had, at least, taken legal advice. In fact maybe the legal route would be the best way to go when it came to breaking that news, she thought cravenly. It would be more impersonal and less likely to lead to confrontation and bad feeling. Just at that moment Lucy could not face telling Jax that he was the father of her child and that because of his behaviour after their breakup she had had no way of telling him that she was pregnant. That was not her fault, she reminded herself. That was unquestionably his fault.
‘When did you move to Athens?’ Jax prompted.
‘Six months ago... I was struggling to make ends meet in London,’ she confided, almost rolling her eyes at that severe understatement before taking several fortifying swallows of wine.
‘When we talked in Spain, you had no plans to track your father down,’ he reminded her with a frown. ‘You thought he had deserted your mother and you said—’
‘I was wrong. When I needed help, my father came through for me,’ Lucy admitted. ‘Why did you ask me to meet you?’
Jax watched her sip at the wine, one little finger rubbing back and forth over the stem of the glass, her lush mouth rosy and moist. Like a sex-starved adolescent, he remembered the feel of her mouth, the flick of her teasing little tongue and he went rigid.
‘Jax?’ she pressed, setting down the glass.
Lean, dark features taut, Jax topped up the wine. He had tried to teach her about wine once: how to select it, savour it, how to truly taste it, and she was still knocking it back as if it were cheap plonk. That had been another lesson that had inexplicably ended up between the sheets. But then nothing had ever gone to plan with Lucy. His self-discipline had vanished. When he had taken her shopping he had taken her in the changing cubicle up against the wall, stifling her frantic cries with his hand. Yes, she had definitely earned that red dress he had later seen her wearing while she gave her body to another man.
‘Why?’ Lucy prompted in growing frustration at his brooding silence.
Jax inclined his head to Zenas and spoke to him soft and low when he approached. ‘We’ll go somewhere more private—’
Lucy collided with smouldering green eyes like highly polished emeralds and stiffened in instant rejection of that idea. ‘No.’
‘I don’t know what I was thinking of. This is not the place to talk.’ Or fight, Jax reflected, in no doubt that angry words were likely to be exchanged when he challenged her.
Lucy gulped down more wine in an effort to steady herself and think carefully before she spoke. ‘I don’t want to go anywhere else with you,’ she argued.
‘Don’t lie,’ Jax advised in the driest of tones. ‘I could have you on your back in five minutes if that’s what I wanted...but it’s not.’
A tide of outraged colour slowly dappled Lucy’s creamy skin as she gazed back at him, aghast at his crudity. ‘I can’t believe you said that.’
Jax shrugged again, a knowing look in his stunning eyes. ‘It’s only what we’re both thinking about.’
Lucy bristled like a cat stroked the wrong way and threw her shoulders back. ‘No, it’s not. Speak for yourself.’
‘I fell for the virgin ploy once. Don’t push your luck, koukla mou,’ Jax advised as he thrust back his chair and began to rise. ‘Born-again virgins push the wrong buttons with me.’
‘Don’t call me that... I’m not anyone’s doll!’ Lucy protested, aware of the meaning of those words because her father used them around Bella.
‘Don’t push your luck, Tinker Bell,’ Jax stabbed instead.
And the sound of that once familiar pet name hurt like the unexpected swipe of a knife across tender skin. It turned her pale because it took her back to a place she didn’t want to go, to a period when she had fondly believed herself to be loved and safe and cherished. But it had all been a lie and a seriously cruel lie at that. It hurt even more that she had adored that lie and longed for it to last for ever and ever, just like in the fairy tales.
‘You still haven’t told me what this is about,’ Lucy argued as she drank down her wine with desperate little swallows that pained her throat. ‘I’m staying here.’
A long silver limousine purred along the kerb. They were in a pedestrian zone and the car shouldn’t have been there but the two police officers lounging across the street did nothing to interfere with its progress.
‘Get in the car or I’ll throw you in it!’ Jax bit out in a driven undertone, what little patience he had taxed by her obstinacy.
He had made a mistake, he thought furiously, turning his head and unexpectedly encountering Zenas’s shocked appraisal, registering that the other man had heard that threat.
Incredulous, Lucy giggled. ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ she told him.
And he did. He picked her up off the chair and shoved her into the back seat of the limo as if she were a lost parcel he was retrieving, aware throughout that his bodyguards were watching him as if he had gone insane. But it was entirely Lucy’s fault. She would never ever do as she was told. She would never ever accept that he knew best. And the whole situation was going to hell in a hand basket fast and he could blame himself for that because he should never have arranged to meet her in the first place.
