Sidonie looked to see him holding out her university sweatshirt and was immediately bombarded with memories of meeting him on that plane, feeling like a hick.
She took it from him and said cuttingly, ‘You came all this way to deliver my sweatshirt?’
A muscle in his jaw popped and Sidonie felt increasingly vulnerable.
She looked at her watch, and then at him, and injected her voice with false sweetness. ‘Look, I’d love to stay and chat, but I have work to get to—so if you don’t mind...’
She turned to walk away but he caught her arm again and Sidonie’s blood leapt. She stopped and turned around and said in a low voice, ‘Let me go, Christakos. We have nothing to say to each other.’
Except for the fact that he’s the father of the baby growing in your belly.
Sidonie ignored her conscience. She needed to get away from him before her composure slipped.
* * *
Alexio battled to control the lust that had almost felled him the second he’d laid eyes on Sidonie again. His libido was back with a vengeance. He felt the fragility of Sidonie’s arm under his hand. She’d lost weight—weight she could ill afford to lose. Her face was more angular...giving it a haunting beauty. Her eyes looked huge and there were shadows underneath. She was exhausted. He recognised it well.
He frowned. ‘Aren’t you just leaving work?’
She tried to pull her arm out of his grip but he had an almost visceral fear that if he let her go he’d never see her again. That glorious light golden hair was duller than he remembered, and scooped up into a bun much as it had been when they’d first met. Her neck looked long and vulnerable.
‘I have two jobs—daytime and evening. Now, if you don’t mind, I don’t want to be late.’
‘I’ll give you a lift,’ Alexio said impulsively.
He was still trying to get his head around seeing her again. His conscience pricked hard. She hadn’t taken the money and she was working two jobs. To pay off the debts. Debts that weren’t even hers. Because she had never wanted the money from him in the first place. The ramifications of this, if it were true, made Alexio reel.
This time Sidonie wrenched her arm free. She glared at Alexio and her eyes spat blue and green sparks at him. ‘No, thank you. I do not want a lift or anything else from you. Now, please, go back to where you came from and leave me be.’
She turned and hurried away, her bag slung over her body. She looked very young. Alexio was grim. No way was he going to walk away until he knew what she was up to. The fact that he was clearly the last person she wanted to see only made him more determined.
As Alexio battled not to go and grab her again, and watched her disappear down the steps of a nearby metro station, he took out his mobile phone and made a terse call.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THAT NIGHT WHEN Sidonie left the Moroccan restaurant she felt so weary she could have cried. It wasn’t helped by the state of agitation she’d been in all day after seeing Alexio. She’d kept expecting him to pop up out of nowhere again and she couldn’t forget how he’d looked so drawn. Intense. He hadn’t looked like the carefree playboy she remembered.
Still... She firmed her mouth. She’d done the right thing by sending him away. He had no right to come barging into her life again just because he wanted to solve the riddle of the mysterious uncashed cheque.