When he came out of the dining room he saw Sidonie putting on her coat and lifting her bag. The panic escalated, making him feel constricted, rudderless. As if he were freefalling from a great height.
‘Where are you going?’
Sidonie avoided his eye. ‘I said I’d go over to Tante Josephine’s this morning.’
She looked at him then, but there was no expression on her face or in her eyes. She was pale. The swell of her belly was visible under her top. Alexio had a sudden urge to beg Sidonie not to go, but something held him back. The memory of his mother’s cold face when he’d blurted out, Why can’t you love each other? Those tentacles were dragging him back, stronger than he could resist.
He assured himself he was overreacting. Sidonie would be back this afternoon and they would talk again. When he’d regained some sense of being in control. He was still shaking with rage at the insinuation that she would have slept with any willing red-blooded man last night because she’d just been horny.
‘My car and driver are outside if you want to use them.’
Sidonie said a quiet, ‘Okay.’ And then she opened the door and left. Alexio had the awful sensation that even while he was so intent on retaining control he was losing it anyway.
* * *
Alexio spent the morning and early afternoon on the phone to his offices in London and Athens. But he couldn’t get his poisonous words to Sidonie out of his head: Millions of other women around the world haven’t had the sense to fall pregnant by a billionaire. Or how stricken she had looked after he’d said them. She’d looked that stricken on Santorini.
A cold fist seemed to be squeezing his heart.
His solicitor Demetrius rang and asked him, ‘When are you going to stop playing nursemaid and come back to work?’
A volcanic rage erupted deep inside Alexio as he recalled how this man, his friend, had unwittingly fed Alexio’s deeply cynical suspicions four months ago, and he slammed the phone down before he could say or do something he might regret. Like fire him. Alexio had no one to blame but himself.
He looked at the phone belligerently. The fact was that he had no desire for work. He had desire only for one thing and he was very much afraid that he had just let that one thing slip out of his grasp.
He picked up the phone again and dialled. After a few seconds a recording of Sidonie’s voice sounded in his ear: ‘I’m sorry I can’t take your call. Leave me a message and I’ll get back to you.
Short, economical. Up-front. Alexio felt sick, and the back of his neck prickled. He didn’t leave a message. He made another call and asked Tante Josephine if Sidonie had left her yet.
Tante Josephine answered him and the panic rose high enough in his throat to strangle him.
He forced himself to sound calm. ‘When did she leave?’
She told him and Alexio did rapid calculations in his head. Somehow he managed to get out something vaguely coherent and then he put down the phone and stood up. And then he sat down again abruptly. Alexio didn’t know what to do, and he was filled with a sense that for the first time in his largely charmed life he couldn’t predict the outcome with his usual arrogance.
An image of his brother Rafaele came into his mind’s eye, and he recalled how turbulent his emotions had been at seeing his brother embrace love and a family. Alexio realised now that he’d been poisonously jealous of his brother. Jealous of what he’d reached out for when everything in his life should have told him it wasn’t possible.