Alexio couldn’t remember being like this before either—not even in the days when he’d been struggling and working night and day to make a success of his business. But for the last four months he’d barely stopped to breathe. On automatic pilot.
His fortune had doubled. His acquisitions had extended to North America, making him the first European budget airline to secure such a lucrative contract. Now he was global, having taken half the time people had predicted.
But Alexio felt as if an essential fire inside him had been doused. He rejected the thought immediately. Nothing was different. He was still the same—held the same values and ambitions.
As the small aircraft circled lower and lower he fought her memory. This was precisely why he’d avoided coming back here before now. During daylight hours he had to make a concerted effort not to think of her; that was where work came in. But in the nights she haunted him. Stopped him from sleeping. Made his body ache so badly that he had to ease it like a horny teenager.
He wouldn’t mind if he could alleviate his frustration with another woman, but he could barely look at a woman these days without feeling a measure of disgust. And a disturbingly flatlining libido.
He told himself it was because he’d come so close to being burnt. A vivid memory came into his mind as the glittering sun-kissed sea below the villa came into view—Sidonie launching herself onto his back as they’d walked up the steps from the sea, kissing his neck, joking, laughing. And all the time plotting to feather her nest.
Alexio felt sick, and he almost told the pilot to keep going...but they were landing now and Alexio refused to let a memory override his intellect.
He’d finally agreed to go somewhere for a few days’ R&R after he and his brother had almost come to blows for the first time in years. Alexio had been closing a deal with Rafaele to create a joint company which would invest in research for future technologies in cars and aircraft. They’d been in Rafaele’s palazzo outside Milan, where he was spending the summer with his family.
Alexio had been keen to keep working one day and Rafaele had looked at him incredulously. ‘Are you crazy? We’ve been working all day—Sam is making dinner tonight and Milo’s back from summer school in Milan. I haven’t seen him since this morning. I have a family now, Alexio...things are different.’
Alexio had felt a completely irrational anger erupt at his brother’s very valid reasons not to keep working. Since he’d arrived he’d found the domestic idyll of Rafaele’s family almost too much to bear. The openly loving looks between him and his wife. His precocious and gorgeous nephew, who bathed everyone in his sunny charming nature. The way he was doted on by both Sam and Rafaele. The way Rafaele’s relationship with his own father had clearly undergone a transformation for the better.
It had brought Alexio back to that dark place when he’d believed such things existed, only to find out that they didn’t. It had brought back the resentment that he’d felt because he’d witnessed something ugly in his own family that Rafaele had never had to witness simply because he’d been free to get on with his own life, leaving Alexio behind in a toxic atmosphere.
He’d been caught in the grip of that darkness, emotions swirling in his gut, and he’d sneered, ‘You’re losing your touch, Rafaele, ever since you let that woman get to you—’
His brother had stepped right up to him, chest to chest, and Alexio had felt the heat of his anger.
Rafaele had blistered at him, ‘Do not ever call Sam that woman again. Whatever is going on with you, Alexio, sort it out.’
Sam had come into the study then, smiling widely, oblivious to the tension at first. And then her grey eyes had grown wide and concerned as she’d immediately looked to her husband. Something in that look, something that had seemed so naked and dangerous to Alexio, had made him push past his brother.
He’d found the wherewithal to stop and say tightly, ‘I’m sorry, Sam. I have to leave. Something’s come up...’ and then he’d left the palazzo as if hounds were at his heels. Running from that picture of domestic bliss which he wanted to believe was a sham...but which he knew deep down wasn’t.
He’d avoided the repeated phone calls from his brother since then.
He was here now, so he’d get it together if it killed him. And maybe tonight he’d go to that nightclub and his libido wouldn’t flatline in the presence of other women. Maybe it would surge back to life and he would finally be able to erase her image from his mind once and for all, claw back some sense of equilibrium.
* * *
Sidonie gave a groan of satisfaction as she slid into the steaming water of the cracked and discoloured bath. Tante Josephine had squirted in enough bubbles to hide Sidonie’s body from view completely, but she didn’t need it to be hidden to know what she’d see without the bubbles: a small bump protruding over the waterline, as it had started to do over the last week.
It seemed to be getting bigger by the day now as she became more noticeably pregnant.
Her boss at the café had pulled her aside earlier and said bluntly, ‘I have five children. You’re pregnant, aren’t you?’
Sidonie had blanched, too shocked to deny it, and nodded her head.
Her boss had sighed. ‘Okay, you can stay for a couple of months, but as soon as you start to get big you’re gone—this is not work for a pregnant woman.’
Sidonie had gasped, but he’d walked away. She’d realised the irony of her boss being a chauvinistic Greek man but hadn’t felt like laughing.
She bit her lip now with worry. So far she and Tante Josephine were doing okay. When Sidonie had got back to Paris and moved in with her aunt she’d gone to see a financial advisor who had helped them consolidate their debts to a monthly total. Now all Sidonie had to do was earn enough to make that payment. Every month. For a long, long time into the future.
They were just about managing, with Tante Josephine’s job and Sidonie’s two and sometimes three jobs. But now that a baby was in the mix...
Sidonie bit down on her lip hard and put her hand over the small swell. Since the moment she’d seen the first pregnancy test turn positive, and then the next and the next—five tests in all—she’d forged an indelible bond with the clump of cells growing inside her. She’d never consciously thought about having a baby—it was something she’d put off into the distant future, not really wanting to consider the huge responsibility, especially after her own damaging experiences—but crazily, in spite of everything, somehow it felt right. And Sidonie couldn’t explain why, when she had every reason to feel the opposite.
Sometimes, though, panic gripped her so hard she had to stop and breathe. She fought it. She would get through this somehow.
It didn’t help that Tante Josephine kept asking Sidonie, ‘But where is your boyfriend? The one you told me about? Won’t he want to take care of you? I thought he was going to make everything okay?’