“Yes.” She’d selected France for the debut of Xandra Fortune for those very reasons.
“Go on,” Dimitri prompted.
She grimaced. “There’s not much else to tell. Mother would have ignored the redundancy notices until the sheriff showed up to evict us from our home. Madeleine still had two years left at Our Lady’s Bower and I couldn’t bear for her to lose that stability after we’d all just lost Papa.”
“So you went to work.”
“Under an assumed name. I was trying to spare my mother’s feelings. It didn’t work.”
“She could not reconcile herself to the thought of her daughter working?”
“No.” She smiled ruefully. “I’ve always felt guilty, that I had failed her, but I simply could not think what else to do. I hadn’t gone to college yet. I was too young for most well paid career choices. Modeling looked like my only option. My friend’s cousin helped me create Xandra Fortune. It was cloak and dagger stuff and he really got into it. He made sure the only people who knew about Alexandra Dupree’s connection to Xandra Fortune were me, my family and him.”
“So this man knew you were Alexandra Dupree, but I, your lover for a year did not.” He sounded mortally offended.
“Got it in one. I didn’t know about Phoebe, the patiently waiting bride-to-be, either. I guess we’re even on that score.” Her throat felt dry from all the talking and she took a long cool sip of water.
He didn’t take the bait, surprising her. “Your mother’s sensibilities are the reason you refused New York assignments.”
“Yes. I never took an assignment in the States period. I was careful to avoid doing commercials for international products and as you know, I tried to stay out of the media limelight in my personal life.”
“Yet, you were well-known in Europe.”
“Yes, but only as a French model, not a supermodel. My biggest claim to fame was being your lover and you were careful to keep that fact under wraps.”
“Not completely,” he said enigmatically. “You did your family a great service and your mother should be proud of you.”
His words warmed her, but Alexandra felt a burble of laughter well up and let it out. “Proud of me? Her scandalous working daughter who got pregnant without the benefit of matrimony? She hadn’t forgiven me yet for not saving the family home. I’ll be the black sheep of the family forever at the rate I’m going.” She tried to hide the hurt that knowledge caused her. She didn’t want Dimitri to see her weakness.
“Your mother lost her home?”
“My income as a model kept my mother in Chanel suits and provided a complete education for my sister. She graduated from Smith a month before she married Hunter last year.” Pride in Madeleine’s accomplishment tinged Alexandra’s voice.
Then she sighed. “The money did not stretch far enough to keep up payments on a heavily mortgaged mansion and the staff necessary to run it. Mother was forced to sell and move into a converted apartment serviced by a daily maid. Although it’s still in a socially acceptable New Orleans neighborhood, it is not the Dupree Mansion.”
“And she blames you for this? Not your irresponsible father who left his wife and daughters in debt?”
She didn’t take exception to Dimitri’s view of her father. Dimitri was a responsible guy, someone who would never leave his family in the lurch. He couldn’t comprehend a man who had absolutely no sense about money.
“Mama doesn’t exactly blame me for losing the mansion, but she was furious when I wouldn’t stop modeling after it was sold. She would have much preferred I married well rather than work to support her and Madeleine.”
“But you did not wish to marry well?”
“I wanted to marry a man I loved, not a bank account.”
“Then it should please you to marry me. If the words you spoke at Chez Renée were true, I can give you both.”
“They were true then,” so much so that parts of her heart were still cracked and bleeding after the abrupt way they’d broken up, “but I don’t love you anymore.”
“I refuse to believe a woman of such strong character could fall out of love at the first sign of adversity.”
She was beginning to have a horrible suspicion he was right, but she wasn’t about to feed his smug pride admitting it. “I wouldn’t call you ejecting me from your life with the force of a rocket launcher so you could marry another woman the first sign of adversity.”
“Yet I did not marry her.”
“Because your brother beat you to the punch.”
He sighed. “You are sure I would have married her otherwise?”
Why was he asking her that? Of course she was sure. He’d made his position very clear that last meeting in Paris. “Yes.”
“If I told you I had already decided not to go through with the marriage, you would not believe me, hmm?”
Was he saying that? No. This was just another one of his subtle manipulations. “Don’t tax your personal integrity making the claim. You’re right. I wouldn’t buy it.”
“And yet I had hired a detective agency to find you within days of you leaving Paris.”
“I waited for you to change your mind for a whole week, Dimitri. You didn’t even call. I can believe you started to consider the consequences if I’d told the truth about the baby, but I don’t think you were prepared to call off your wedding because of it. I didn’t matter to you then, and I don’t matter to you now. It’s all about the baby and I’m not stupid enough to forget that.”
His hand gripped his wine glass very tightly. The same hand that still wore a bandage from the night he’d come to Madeleine and Hunter’s party.
“How did you cut yourself? I never asked.” Her mind had been on other things that night.
He carefully put his wine glass down, staring at it as if it held the answer to an important question. Then he looked up at her and she gasped.
His eyes held a torment that was haunting.
“When Madeleine told me you were dead, I crushed the glass in my hand.”
CHAPTER SIX
DIMITRI’S statement hung in the air between them like a bomb that had not exploded, but still might.
“You were that upset at the prospect of losing your child?” She had not considered Dimitri’s emotional involvement with their baby. Which wasn’t all that surprising considering she’d seen him as an emotionless monster for the past three months.
His jaw tautened. “If it pleases you to believe so, yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
He inclined his head. “With your background, you should understand the importance of our child being raised in his home country of Greece and as a Petronides.”
That was more like it. Dimitri wanted his son because family pride demanded he be raised Petronides. “I understand the importance of loving my baby for his own sake, not the sake of family pride. Whether he’s raised a Dupree or Petronides, he will still be worthy of my love. Can you say the same?”
Dimitri’s features took on the cast of the Iceman. “Apparently you do not believe me capable of any level of emotion, so why should I bother answering?”
She’d hurt him, wounded his sense of self and for some reason, she simply couldn’t bear that. “I didn’t mean—”
“Leave it. Do you want dessert?”
“No.” She couldn’t eat anything now.
“Then we will return to the suite. If we are to have yet another argument, we will do it in privacy.”
The drive back to his hotel was a silent one. She felt guilty and kept telling herself she shouldn’t, but the feeling remained. Just because Dimitri did not love her did not mean he was not capable of loving his son. She’d had no right to imply that it did.
She was still trying to work up to an apology when he let them both into the suite a half an hour later.
“Dimitri, I—”
“I said leave it.” He rubbed his forehead. “I’m tired.”
His admission of weakness stunned her.
His lips twisted wryly. “You think I cannot get exhausted like the next man? We all have our limits, pethi mou.”
He hadn’t in the twelve months she’d lived with him.
“I have not slept well for the three months I have searched for you,” he further shocked her by admitting. “I believed once I found you, everything would fall into place. You would agree to marry me. We would be on the next plane to Greece so you could meet my grandfather. I believed I would have to assuage your anger, I did not expect to find a woman who hated me.”
“I don’t hate you,” she averred, “I told you that.”
“You do not wish to hate me for our child’s sake. I understand this, but you do not want to marry me. You do not trust me. I am at a loss where to go from here. Just as you saw modeling as the only solution to your family’s financial difficulties, I see marriage as the only workable solution to our situation.”
It was her turn to sigh. “I know you do.”
“And I am sexually frustrated.” His laugh was harsh. “I don’t like going without.”
She didn’t know if she could handle Dimitri in this strange mood. She was used to him taking charge, demanding. His admissions of weakness surprised her silly. “It hasn’t been that long, surely?”