Compulsion she could not deny had her dialing the number to the Paris apartment. There had been no news of Dimitri’s wedding in the New York society pages. Fool that she was, she couldn’t stop herself from looking and even more foolishly hoping. Had he come to his senses? Called off the wedding?
Perhaps the latter was too much to hope for, but surely after two months he would have had enough time to calm down and realize Alexandra would never have been unfaithful to him.
The phone rang several times and Alexandra remembered belatedly it would be the dinner hour over there. Perhaps he was out, or not in Paris at all. She let the phone continue to ring, knowing she didn’t have the courage to call his cell. For some reason this was news she needed to tell him when he was in the apartment they had shared.
The other line picked up. “Hello?”
Alexandra almost dropped her phone. It was a woman’s voice at the other end of the line. She forced her vocal chords to work, praying the unfamiliar voice was that of a new housekeeper and not Dimitri’s newest woman. “Hello. Is Mr. Petronides available, please?”
“I’m sorry, he’s out. This is Mrs. Petronides. Can I help you or would you like to leave a message?”
Mrs. Petronides. Alexandra stopped breathing. The bastard had gone through with it. He’d married another woman while Alexandra was pregnant with his child. Funny, until that very moment, she hadn’t truly believed he would do it. And it was only in the absence of all hope that she realized how much she’d been living on the unspoken faith in a man who cared nothing for her and clearly never had.
“Are you there?”
“Yes.”
“Did you want to leave a message for my husband?”
“No. I…” The words simply trailed into nothingness as the joy that had buoyed her up since discovering she carried Dimitri’s son drained away.
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“Who’s calling please?” The young woman, Phoebe Leonides, no…Phoebe Petronides now, sounded impatient.
Because Alexandra was so emotionally devastated, she answered the other woman’s question without thought. She couldn’t think. Her brain had ceased to function. She gave the name an occupant of the Paris apartment would expect to hear. “Xandra Fortune.”
“Miss Fortune, where are you? Dimitrius has been looking for you. He’s desperate about the baby.”
Dimitri had told his wife about her, about their baby? Alexandra pulled the phone from her ear and stared at it in her hand as if she didn’t know how it had gotten there. She could hear the woman’s voice, but not the words she was saying. She sounded frantic.
Alexandra cut the connection without putting the phone back to her ear.
CHAPTER THREE
DIMITRI took a sip of his neat whiskey and walked out onto the terrace of the New York high-rise apartment. It was empty, no doubt due to the chill in the air brought on by November’s cooling temperatures.
He’d come late to the holiday party, at the insistence of a business acquaintance who’d told him the host was an investment banker he thought Dimitri should meet. For the past four months, Dimitri had had very little interest in making money. He’d had little interest in anything, but finding the mother of his child.
He was in New York because that was her last known whereabouts. She’d had her things shipped to a Manhattan receiving office and picked them up on the day of their arrival. One day before he had instigated a search for her. After that, there had been nothing. His investigators had been unable to find a single lead.
She’d canceled her contract with her modeling agency. She’d even closed her credit cards and checking account. No one had seen or heard from Xandra Fortune in three months.
Well, that was not strictly true. She’d called the Paris apartment four weeks ago and spoken to Phoebe. Xandra had hung up without saying why she’d called or answering Phoebe’s questions about where she was. The call had been placed on an untraceable cell phone.
Dimitri still cursed whenever he thought of that ill-fated phone call. Would she have told him where she was if he had been there to answer the phone?
The sound of voices drifted out onto the almost deserted terrace and he asked himself why he’d bothered to come. He spun on his heel, intending to go when a woman caught his eye. She had her back to him. Long curling blond hair reached to the center of her back, a back that looked much too familiar. Then she moved, gripping the balcony railing and letting her head fall back as she took a deep breath of air.
“Xandra!”
She spun around to face him and his heart tightened in a painful knot, for although the woman had enough surface resemblance to Xandra to be her sister, she wasn’t the model.