‘Not real?’ he softly. ‘It looks pretty real from where I’m standing.’
Her whole body throbbing, she breathed out unsteadily. ‘That’s magic for you, Aristo. It plays tricks with the senses…makes you believe in the impossible. And you and I are impossible.’ Fixing her green eyes on her ex-husband’s breathtakingly handsome face, she gave him a small, tight smile. ‘You being George’s father changes nothing between us.’
His expression was unreadable, but as his dark, knowing gaze locked with hers she knew that she wasn’t fooling either of them, and his next comment reinforced that fact.
‘You’re right, it doesn’t,’ he said into the tense silence. ‘So perhaps from now on we can both stop playing games.’
He took a step backwards, his satisfied expression making her heart thump against her chest.
‘I’ll call you, but if in the meantime you want me desperately…’
Eyes gleaming, he reached into his jacket and held out a small white card. ‘That’s my number.’
‘Well, I won’t be calling it,’ she snapped. ‘As the chances of me wanting you “desperately” are less than zero.’
He smiled. ‘Of course they are.’
She wanted to throw his remark back in his face, to claim that he was reading the signals all wrong, but before she had the chance to think of a suitably withering response he turned and strolled out of the room with the same swagger with which he’d entered it.
Heart pounding, she waited until she was sure that he’d left the building before darting across the room to close and bolt the door. Only, like the stable door, it was too late, she thought as she sank down onto her sofa with legs that were still unsteady. She’d not only let him back into her home, but into her life.
WALKING INTO HIS APARTMENT, Aristo stared blankly across the gleaming modern interior, a stream of disconnected, equally frustrating thoughts jamming his brain. He’d barely registered the hour-long drive home from Teddie’s apartment. Instead he’d been preoccupied by that simmering undercurrent of attraction between them.
They’d both been so angry, and yet even beneath the fury he had felt it, strumming and intensifying like the vibrating rails beneath an express train.
Of course he’d known it was there since this morning—from that moment when he’d turned around in the Kildare and his stomach had gone into freefall. It had been like watching flashes of lightning on the horizon: you knew a storm was heading your way.
And he’d wanted the storm to come—and so had Teddie—right up until she’d told him that it was all in his head.
Not that he’d believed her. It had been just one more lie in a day of lies.
He breathed out slowly, trying to shift the memory of her final stinging remark to him.
‘You and I are impossible. You being George’s father changes nothing between us.’
Wrong, he thought irritably. It changed everything.
No matter how much she wanted to deny it, there was a connection between them—and it wasn’t just based on sex, he thought, his heart tightening as he remembered his son bumping fists with him.
He still couldn’t believe that he was a father. A father!
The word kept repeating inside his head like a scratched record.
Suddenly he needed a drink!
In the cavernous stainless steel and polished concrete kitchen, he poured himself a glass of red wine and made his way to the rooftop terrace that led off the living area.
Collapsing into a chair, he gazed moodily out at the New York skyline. Even from so high up he could feel the city’s energy rising up like a wave, but for once he didn’t respond to its power. He was too busy trying to piece together the life that Teddie had shattered when she’d walked into his hotel.
And if that hadn’t been enough of a shock, she’d then lobbed a grenade into his perfectly ordered world in the shape of a three-year-old son.
Welcome to fatherhood, Teddie-Taylor style.
Thanks to her, he’d gone from nought to being the father of a miniature version of himself in a matter of seconds, with Teddie presenting George to him like the proverbial rabbit being pulled from a hat.
He ran his hand slowly over his face, as though it might smooth the disarray of his thoughts. It felt surreal to be contemplating even the concept of being a father, let alone the reality. He’d never really imagined having a child—not out of any deep-rooted opposition to being a father, but because work and the expansion of his business empire required all his energy and focus.
He frowned. But maybe there were other reasons too? Could his father’s decision to opt out of his responsibilities have made him question his own programming for parenthood? Possibly, he decided after a moment’s thought. Apostolos Leonidas had been an intermittent and largely reluctant presence in his life, and maybe he had just assumed that he’d be the same.
And up until now he’d more or less given his father a free pass—having been made to look a fool, his father had understandably wanted nothing to do with his adulterous wife, and that had meant having nothing to do with his son either.
But even when Aristo had been blinded with shock and anger earlier he’d felt no resentment towards George, no sense of panic or dismay. Gazing down into his son’s dark eyes, he had felt his heart tighten in recognition—and love.
His shoulders stiffened. The same love that Teddie clearly felt for George?
Resentment still simmered inside him, but he couldn’t stop himself from reluctantly admiring his ex-wife. Whatever else she might be, Teddie was a good mother. George clearly adored her, and she loved their son—not with his own mother’s chilly, grudging variety of love, nor the nod of recognition that had passed for love in his father’s head. Just love—pure, simple and unselfish.
Imagining how it must feel to be the focus of that kind of affection and tenderness, he felt something tauten inside him—not just a sense of responsibility, but of resolve. He was George’s father, and it was his job to make sure his son had the love and security that he himself had been denied as a child.
His parents’ divorce and subsequent remarriages had left him rootless and unsure of his place in the world, and he knew instinctively that George needed both his parents. But if that was to happen then this time Teddie wouldn’t be running anywhere—ever. Only, judging by how quickly she had bolted from his life last time, he needed to make that clear sooner rather than later.
* * *
‘Well, if you ask me, it could have been a lot worse.’
Elliot raised his elbows swiftly off the breakfast bar as Teddie swept past him with a wet cloth, cleaning the evidence of George’s cereal from the surface and wishing she could wipe Aristo from her life
