‘Are you in pain?’
‘No.’ Rosie suppressed her embarrassment by burying her face in a strong brown shoulder, drinking in the hot musky scent of him and loving it. She felt both light as air with happiness and exhausted. ‘I’m totally fine, Alex.’
‘Is there anywhere I can get a shower here?’ Alexius enquired, suddenly ill at ease with the way he was holding her to him and in search of a good get-out clause. He lacked the cuddle gene and didn’t even pay lip-service to it, but her tiny body felt surprisingly good nestled close to him, and he discovered that he was ridiculously reluctant to risk hurting her feelings by pushing her away.
‘There’s no hot water at this time of night,’ she muttered uncomfortably. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s not a problem.’ It was a lie: the lack of hot water was one more unnecessary reminder that he was in an unfamiliar environment in an unacceptable situation with a woman he should never have touched. He felt disorientatingly like an accident victim while he tried to work out how he, a guy who was very logical and controlled and a terrific planner, could have ended up in such a position. When had the rot set in? The instant he saw her standing in that office doorway? Little and cute, which had never attracted him before, he ruminated grimly. She didn’t even know who he was and she trusted him. That bothered the hell out of him and he didn’t even know why. The deep, even tenor of her breathing and the relaxed weight of her against him informed Alexius that she had fallen asleep. He eased one leg out of the bed slowly and quietly while edging Rosie back down, covering her with the duvet. And then he got dressed, swiftly and silently, his face set in forbidding lines.
As he stepped out onto the landing something tugged at his trouser leg and growled. He looked down. Bas had a mouthful of his trousers. He tried to shake him off; it was a mistake. Bas took advantage of the defensive movement to sink his needle-sharp teeth into Alexius’s leg instead. Alexius gritted his own teeth in disbelief and then bent down to detach the chihuahua from his flesh. It wasn’t easy because Bas fought back, snarling and growling as if under attack. Finally, Alexius had the writhing little body captured in one big hand. Enraged big brown eyes glared at him from below the ridiculous bat ears.
‘I deserved it … you’re right,’ Alexius breathed, gently opening Rosie’s door and pushing the tiny dog through the gap before quickly closing it again. Baskerville, she had called the dog. Now what was the name of that Sherlock Holmes story? The Hound of the Baskervilles? If the nasty little animal hadn’t bitten him, Alexius would have laughed, for Bas, undersized though he was, had lived up to his name.
A bastard, he reflected, would simply tell Socrates that his granddaughter was a bad bet. That way Rosie would be deprived of a fortune and Alexius would never have to see her again or acknowledge what he had done. But having got to know Rosie in the flesh, Alexius knew he couldn’t do that. He also knew that, having had her once, he already wanted her again. But he couldn’t do that either. An ongoing affair with his godfather’s grandchild was out of the question. Socrates would expect him to marry her and, while Rosie seemed to fire Alexius’s sex drive as no other woman before her, he had no intention of marrying anyone. Sex was literally all he had to offer her and in this particular scenario it wasn’t enough.
He walked downstairs and out of the front door. His protection unit, the four-man team who watched over him everywhere he went, was sitting in a car on the other side of the street. He hailed them. He would get back to his own life and within days it would be as if this strange episode with Rosie had never happened, he thought impatiently. He had made a mistake but everyone made mistakes and there was no point in beating himself up over a one-night stand.
Rosie slept in the next morning and had a frantic rush to get to her maths class in time. It was late afternoon before she had the opportunity to consider the fact that Alex had left during the night without even asking for her phone number or leaving her a note. Her discussions with more experienced friends warned her that that was not unusual behaviour. But once it sank in that she had slept with him on what was virtually the first date, her mood plummeted. Even the magazines warned that men were less keen in those circumstances and more inclined to deem the woman concerned easy and less desirable. Of course, Alex could be simply assuming that he would see her on Monday evening when he was working late again, she reasoned, frantically keen at the hope of seeing him again on her horizon.
Her spirits rose to a bubbling high when she got home that afternoon to find a gorgeous bunch of flowers awaiting her, the gift card signed only with a large letter, ‘A’. He wouldn’t have spent that much money if he wasn’t planning to see her again, would he? She borrowed a vase from one of her housemates and set it in the cramped lounge where everyone could enjoy the flowers.
But when Rosie arrived for work at STA Industries on Monday evening, the office Alex shared was empty. She thought he might be away on a business trip and refused to fret about it, but as the week crept on without a single glimpse of him the optimism roused by the expensive bouquet began to drain inexorably away. Was it possible that he was simply avoiding her? The suspicion made her cringe in mortification. He was a professional man and he had slept with a humble cleaner. Maybe he was ashamed of the fact.
On the Friday, her boss, Vanessa, phoned to tell her that the following week she would be working somewhere else. The job at STA Industries was finished and she would not be returning there. But although that temporary contract was now at an end, STA Industries had offered Vanessa’s cleaning service a more lucrative twelve-month contract at another one of their companies. So that was that, Rosie thought numbly that weekend. She would never see Alex Kolovos again. He had obviously sent her the flowers out of some misplaced sense of guilt while aware that he had no intention of contacting her again.
Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, she reflected painfully, astonished by how much his rejection hurt and made her question herself. She had taken a risk, had awarded her trust to a man she barely knew and she had suffered accordingly. Let this be a lesson to you, she told herself squarely, exasperated by how torn up she felt about the disrespectful way he had treated her. Alex had only wanted to get her into bed and, having achieved that so easily, he had had no desire to repeat the experience. Now that she knew he had gone for good she allowed herself to recall how disconcerted he had been to become her first lover. Clearly an amateur between the sheets had little appeal for him.
At the end of the second week, Rosie was concerned when her period failed to arrive because she was usually as regular as clockwork in that department. She reminded herself that she was on the pill and very unlikely to be pregnant but the fact that she had slept with Alex still loomed large in her mind. One anxious week after that she made an appointment to see her doctor and was sent straight off for a pregnancy test.
‘But I’m taking the contraceptive pill—I thought I was protected!’ Rosie exclaimed when the doctor broke the news that she had conceived.
The doctor was kind, understanding and he asked her several specific questions, one of which was had she suffered from any stomach upsets. And then she remembered that night she had been ill and her eyes locked with the doctor’s in sudden dismay and comprehension.
‘You probably threw up your pill and that compromised your protection. You should have taken other precautions for the rest of the month,’ he pronounced with a sigh.
Rosie left the surgery in a daze, barely able to believe that what she had been told was true. It didn’t seem possible to her that what she had shared so briefly with Alex could result in an actual child, but there was something very realistic about the numerous leaflets on pregnancy that she had had pressed on her at the surgery. A baby, she thought sickly. How on earth would she ever be able to cope with a baby when she could barely afford to feed and clothe herself?
It occurred to her that Alex Kolovos was equally responsible.
