his future relationship with her children? That, she acknowledged hollowly, was a major responsibility to carry, particularly when she was all too well aware how wounding she had found her own father’s indifference to her existence. She definitely didn’t want her children to undergo the same paternal rejection because she had created a problematic relationship with Bastian. Hadn’t her mother done that with her father? Her parents had had a very bitter breakup and divorce and that reality had poisoned her father’s attitude to his daughters as well. He had found it easier to walk away from all of them, not only his ex-wife.
‘OK, I’ll go to Greece,’ Emmie agreed abruptly on the back of that final depressing thought. ‘I’ll show you up to your room.’
His room, not hers. Bastian watched the ripe curve of Emmie’s hips going up the stairs, unwillingly allowing that his hopes of an immediate dropping of all barriers had been rather too optimistic. She wanted him to work at things, relationship things, and Bastian had never worked at anything like that in his whole life. Women had always worked to please him, to fit his expectations, not the other way round. He gritted his even white teeth at what seemed like a memory from the far distant past for he could see that pleasing him was not even on Emmie’s agenda. It bothered him that he didn’t even know what she wanted from him. He was doing his best but so far he had not got any points for trying, he reflected angrily. She hadn’t noticed one blasted positive thing he had done so far, so why was he bothering? The answer to that question came fast: he didn’t know, he just knew he couldn’t leave her alone.
Emmie showed Bastian into one of the guest rooms her sister Kat had always kept prepared for guests. She studied his bold bronzed profile from below her lashes, reckoning there was no escape from feeding him as well while wondering why he brought out such a mean streak in her. Did she want him to go hungry? After all, it wasn’t his fault that he hadn’t fallen madly in love with her, was it? That was something that either happened or didn’t happen. And unlike her estranged father, Bastian was already determined to make a major effort to be a parent from the start, well, before the twins were even born.
‘There’s hot water if you want a shower,’ Emmie told him, belatedly wondering if she was trying to be hostess of the year a little too late. ‘You can join me for dinner in an hour. It’ll be a change to have company. My younger sister is only here for school holidays. She stays with Kat and Mikhail in London now if she leaves school to come home for the weekend.’
Bastian supposed she was offering him an olive branch of sorts and had a sudden recollection of that written apology on her hand way back at the start of their acquaintance. He almost smiled but the strained look in her bright blue eyes made him tense up instead.
‘What did you say?’ Emmie prompted Bastian in a nervous whisper, her cheeks burning after he had finished addressing his household staff, who had assembled in the big hall to greet their arrival. The official line-up struck her as incredibly Edwardian in style and thoroughly intimidated her. To be fair, she thought unhappily, it was embarrassing enough to reappear on the island on Bastian’s arm while toting an enormous pregnant stomach, but it was even worse when absolutely everyone else was pointedly avoiding looking in that direction.
‘Why?’ Bastian asked shortly as he guided her up the main staircase with a firm hand at her back. Emmie wondered if he feared that she was so big upfront that she might over-balance and fall over backwards like a beached whale, and then scolded herself for being so self-critical. You’re very pregnant with twins, get over it, she told herself in exasperation.
‘I’m curious,’ Emmie admitted.
‘I told them that you’re in charge here now—’
‘You did…what?’ Emmie stopped dead to exclaim in astonishment.
Bastian frowned. ‘I didn’t want anyone wondering about what your status was here and I want you to receive the very best attention possible from my staff.’
‘But I’m not the mistress here…or wife or whatever!’ Emmie argued.
‘Do we need a label for you? To all intents and purposes you are the most important woman I’ve ever had in my life,’ Bastian countered. ‘You’re expecting my children.’
‘I can’t possibly be the most important woman…I mean, what about your mother?’
‘Apart from the fact that I’d have a problem if she was still the most important woman at my age,’ Bastian quipped, ‘what about her?’
‘Is she still alive?’
‘Yes. She lives in Italy and I only see her if she wants money.’
Emmie’s brow furrowed. ‘That’s sad, Bastian. Are you sure you’re not misjudging her?’
‘Remind yourself of what your mother was willing to do to you in the name of profit,’ Bastian commented with considerable cynicism. ‘As the son of a woman even more mercenary than Odette, I know what I’m talking about.’
That reminder about Odette’s greed struck home but Emmie gave him a troubled look, dismayed by his outlook. ‘Why do you think your mother’s like that?’
Bastian sighed as he threw wide the door of the room where Emmie had stayed on her previous visit to his home. ‘Why are you interested?’
Emmie thought fast and hard, desperate to come up with an unemotional angle to conceal her revealing hunger for every detail she could glean about Bastian and his background. ‘Your mother will be my children’s grandmother.’
‘But Cinzia will never visit your children. Even when I was a little boy she found the idea of being seen with a child as “too aging”,’ he retorted drily. ‘She’s very vain and will never accept being a grandparent. She was a film star when my father met her but her earning power was fading because she was getting older. She married him because she needed a meal ticket and when she got tired of him, she divorced him in a process that took half of everything he possessed.’
Emmie winced as a servant settled her cases down in the beautifully appointed bedroom and withdrew. ‘Nasty.’
‘His ego battered, my father found comfort in the arms of his secretary instead,’ Bastian continued even more drily. ‘The secretary got pregnant and he married her within weeks of his divorce from my mother being granted.’
‘Oh dear,’ Emmie remarked a good deal less securely as she wondered if he saw a dangerous parallel in that development between past and present: his father had married a woman because she fell pregnant by him and clearly it hadn’t worked out.
‘She was Nessa’s mother and the only decent woman my father ever married,’ Bastian explained wryly. ‘But because my father wasn’t in love with her…’ contempt edged his tone as he voiced that particular word ‘…he thought it was acceptable to start an affair with the woman who became his third wife.’
‘Then I gather that Nessa’s mother didn’t last long?’
‘Two years.’
Emmie recalled Nessa telling her that her mother had been the only stepmother who was kind to Bastian and, considering his own mother had not set a good example of maternal affection, she found it sad that his father’s marriage to Nessa’s mother had been so brief. ‘And wife number three?’
‘Had one affair after another. My father hit the bottle hard before he finally got shot
