The Billionaire's Pregnant Mistress(9)

Yet, tonight, he’d picked her up like he owned her. Twice. “Please put me down, Dimitri.” It was a sign of how vulnerable she felt that she made it a request instead of a demand.

Either way, he did not comply. “I do not think I should. You are too volatile right now.”

She closed her eyes in frustration. “I’ll control myself if you keep your hands and lips to yourself.”

“I cannot promise this.”

“Poor Phoebe. Does she know what an unfaithful letch she is married to?”

“Phoebe is married to a man of absolute honor,” he replied, his voice laced with furious affront.

“You? Don’t make me laugh,” she scorned. A man with integrity did not marry one woman after impregnating another.

Dimitri sat down, keeping Alexandra pinned in his lap. His blue gaze scorched into hers. “You believe I am married to Phoebe? And you believe I have no honor?” The last was said with escalating anger.

“I suppose you’re going to try to tell me you’re not married to your little Greek paragon.”

“This is true. I am not.”

Alexandra closed her eyes. She didn’t know why, but she hadn’t expected him to lie to her. She opened them again and stared into his deceitful face. “She told me she was your wife, so you can just forget about the smoothy deceptions.”

“She would not have told you she was my wife.” His voice was filled with such conviction that Alexandra thought back to the devastating phone call.

“She told me she was Mrs. Petronides.”

“But then she told you she was married to my brother.”

“What?”

“She told you she had wed my brother.”

“She did no such thing!” But she could have. Alexandra remembered the voice still talking as she’d ended the call.

Dimitri wouldn’t let her look away from him, his compelling eyes holding hers hostage. “She did.”

“But…”

“She also pleaded with you to tell her where you were.”

Alexandra remembered that part. “I wasn’t about to have a heart-to-heart with your new wife.”

“She is not my wife.”

“Prove it.”

In his shock at her demand, Dimitri’s grip loosened and Alexandra extricated herself from his lap, this time much more carefully. “You say you are not married to Phoebe Petronides. Well, I don’t trust you anymore, Dimitri. If you want me to believe it, you’ll have to bring me proof.”

He shot to his feet again, all outraged male. “How dare you question my word?”

“You wouldn’t believe how easy it is,” she admitted.

That seemed to shake him. “I will get you the proof you require,” he said angrily.

“Fine. Until then, I suggest you go.”

“I am not letting you out of my sight again.”

“What do you propose, setting up camp outside my sister’s door and dogging my every footstep?”

“Count on it, but I have no desire to sleep in a hallway. You can come with me to my suite.”

“No way. I’m not staying in a hotel room with you.”

“There are two bedrooms, though there was a time you would not have required the other one.”

She glared at his, to her mind, savagely insensitive reminder. “Forget it. I’m not going.”

“Then I will stay here. It is a large apartment. I’m sure your sister has a spare room I could use.”

She felt flummoxed. “You can’t stay here. Madeleine would have a hissy fit. She hates you.”

He shrugged his broad shoulders. “Speaking of hissy fits, your brother-in-law implied your mother would have one if you were featured in a scandalous article.”

Alexandra couldn’t prevent her eyes from rolling in exasperation. “Yes.” She’d spent six years living as someone else to protect her mother’s sense of family dignity. Dupree women did not work.

Only this generation of Dupree women would have been out on the street if one of them hadn’t ignored the old money heritage and gotten a job to support the family. The cousin of a friend from school had offered her a modeling contract. She’d taken it with one proviso…she work anonymously under an assumed name. He’d gone one better and helped her create Xandra Fortune, French orphan turned fashion model.

Dimitri was speaking again. “She would be most upset to see an exposé interview with her daughter’s discarded tycoon lover and rejected father of her child.”

Her body didn’t know whether to go faint or boil with fury at his implied threat and twisting of the facts. “I didn’t discard you. You dumped me to marry Phoebe, the Greek virgin bride, or don’t you remember?”

“I am not married to Phoebe.”

“You don’t have to have committed a murder to be guilty of a crime.”

Instead of getting angrier, he smiled. “Are you saying you believe I did not marry her?”

“No!”

“You still require proof?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’ll have to convince your sister to give me a bed for the night because I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

“And if I don’t, you’re going to make sure my family’s name gets a good smearing in the tabloids, is that it?” she asked with all the derision at her disposal.

He didn’t even flinch. “Yes.”

“I despise you.”

“Not hate?”

“No. I don’t love you anymore, but I refuse to hate you. Part of you is in my child and I won’t ever have my child believing there is anything about him I could hate.” Her son deserved better than a mother eaten up by bitterness.

A look she could not decipher settled on Dimitri’s chiseled features. “That is commendable. Now, shall we talk to your sister about my accommodation?”

In the end, Alexandra decided it would be better to accompany Dimitri to his suite. The mere thought of trying to work out the current complications in her life with her younger sister breathing fire at Dimitri left her cold. Alexandra did not want Madeleine and Hunter forced into a position of enmity with a man of Dimitri’s wealth and power because of her.

Going to Dimitri’s suite was the only workable solution. It wasn’t going to be all that bad, she decided. She didn’t need to worry about Dimitri getting to her. She was well and truly over him. The kiss had just been physical reaction to memories and she wouldn’t let it happen again.

All that was left between them was to determine how they would handle his role in her son’s life.





If anyone had asked Alexandra two days ago the chances of her sitting down to breakfast with Dimitri in his hotel suite, she would have said nil. Nada. Zilch. Absolutely not one. Yet, here they sat. She pushed her eggs and fruit around the plate of breakfast room service had provided minutes earlier. He eyed her with calculating regard.

She knew what he saw. A positive hag. She hadn’t been able to sleep again last night, not with the knowledge that Dimitri rested on the other side of the wall. Her eyes looked bruised while her complexion wore its usual sallow tint from her pregnancy. Most women finished with morning sickness at three to four months. Not Alexandra. She still woke up every day feeling like she had the flu and she was in her fifth month.

Her one consolation was Dimitri didn’t look much better. She’d been too overwrought to notice it the night before, but he’d lost weight and there were new lines around his eyes. His grandfather’s illness coupled with the search for his unborn child must have taken their toll on the man usually untouched by human frailty.

“You need to stop playing with your food and eat it.”

Her head snapped up. “Don’t tell me what to do.”

He leaned back in his chair on the other side of the small walnut table and smiled. “It appears someone needs to. I have always heard pregnant women glow. You look as if you’ve just come off a nine-day flu.”

Stupid tears filled her eyes. She knew she wasn’t the beautiful model he’d gone to great lengths to get in his bed any longer, but did he have to rub it in? She gritted her teeth and blinked her eyes, trying to rid them of their wet sheen.

She hated the emotional weakness she’d experienced since getting pregnant. “It’s a good thing I’m not trying to make a living as a model any longer then, isn’t it?”

He reached across the table, grabbing her hand before she had a chance to pull it away. “I did not say you are no longer beautiful, merely that you look unwell.”

She jerked her hand out from under his as the warmth of his skin burned into her own. “I’m pregnant.” It was fine for him to sit there looking a bit worse for the wear, but still sexy as sin and in sickeningly good health.

“Yes, but not happily so from the look of things.”

“Are you trying to imply I don’t want my baby?”

He exhaled an impatient breath. “I think the fact you are five months into an obviously difficult pregnancy is ample proof you want my child.”

“I don’t want your child. I want this baby.”

His lips creased in a devilish grin. “Same thing.”

Unwilling to agree on any point, but equally unwilling to deny the truth, she remained silent and took a bite of ripe melon, savoring its sweet and juicy freshness in her mouth. “I want this baby and I’m keeping him. Do you hear me?”