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‘Coffee?’ Dee called out of the back door.
‘I’d love one,’ Billie told her cousin and housemate, Dee, with a smile.
Thankfully, she hadn’t been lonely since she had rediscovered her friendship with Dee, yet they might so easily have missed out on meeting up again. Billie had been four months pregnant when she attended her aunt’s funeral in Yorkshire and got talking to Dee, whom she had gone to primary school with although Dee was several years older. Her housemate was a single parent as well. At her mother’s funeral her cousin had sported a fading black eye and more bruises than a boxer. Back then Dee had been living in a refuge for battered women with her twins. Jade and Davis were now five years old and had started school. For all of them life in the small town where Billie had bought a terraced house was a fresh start.
And life was good, Billie told herself firmly as she nursed a cup of coffee and listened to Dee complain about the amount of homework Jade was getting, which related more to Dee’s inability to understand maths in any shape or form than the teacher overloading Dee’s daughter with work. This life was ordinary and safe, she reasoned thoughtfully, soothed into relaxation by the hum of the washing machine and the silence of the children while they watched television in the sitting room next door. Admittedly there were no highs of exciting moments but there were no gigantic lows either.
Billie would never forget the agonies of her own worst low, a slough of despair that had lasted for endless weeks. That phase of her life had almost destroyed her and she could still barely repress a shudder when she recalled the depression that had engulfed her. She had been hurting so badly and there had seemed to be no way of either stopping or avoiding that pain. In fact, in the end it had taken an extraordinary and rather frightening development to show Billie a light at the end of the tunnel and a future she could actually face. She contemplated Theo with glowing satisfaction.
‘It’s not healthy to love a baby so much,’ Dee warned her with a frown. ‘Babies grow up and eventually leave you. Theo’s a lovely baby but he’s still just a child, Billie, and you can’t continue building your whole life round him. You need a man—’
‘I need a man like a fish needs a bicycle,’ Billie interposed without hesitation, reckoning that the disaster zone of her one and only real relationship was quite sufficient to have put her off men for life. ‘And who are you to talk?’
A tall, whip-thin blonde with grey eyes, Dee grimaced to concede the point. ‘Been there, done that.’
‘Exactly,’ Billie agreed.
‘But I don’t have the options you have,’ Dee argued. ‘If I were you, I’d be out there dating up a storm!’
Theo clutched Billie’s ankles and slowly levered himself upright, beaming with triumph at his achievement. Considering her son had had both legs in a special cast for months to cure his hip dysplasia, he was catching up on his mobility fast. For a split second he also reminded her powerfully of his father and she didn’t like that, didn’t go there in her mind because she didn’t allow herself to dwell on the past. Looking back on the mistakes she had made was counterproductive. Those experiences had taught her hard lessons and she had forced herself to move on past them.
Dee studied her cousin in frank frustration. Billie Smith was the equivalent of a man magnet. With the figure of a pocket Venus, a foaming mane of dense toffee-coloured curls and an exceptionally pretty face, Billie exuded the kind of natural warm and approachable sex appeal that attracted the opposite sex in droves. Men tried to chat Billie up in the supermarket, in car parks or in the street and if they were behind a car wheel they honked their horns, whistled out of the window and stopped to offer her lifts. Had it not been for Billie’s modest take on her own assets and her innate kindness, Dee was convinced she would have been consumed with envy. Of course she would have been the last to envy Billie’s unfortunate long-term affair with the ruthless, selfish swine who had broken her tender heart, she thought guiltily. Like Dee, Billie had paid a high price for falling in love with the wrong man.
The knocker on the front door sounded loudly. ‘I’ll get it,’ Billie declared because Dee was doing the ironing and Billie hated ironing with a passion.
Davis hurtled out of the sitting room, almost tripping over Theo, who was crawling earnestly in his mother’s wake. ‘There’s a big car...a really big car on the street!’ the little boy exclaimed.
It was probably a lorry with a delivery, Billie assumed, aware that any vehicle with wheels fascinated Dee’s son. She unlocked the door and then took an immediate and very abrupt step back, astonishment and panic shooting up inside her like a sudden jarring surge of adrenalin.
‘You’re a hard woman to track down,’ Gio murmured with supreme assurance.
Billie’s facial muscles were locked tight by shock. She couldn’t have shown him an expression to save her life but her wide green eyes were huge and anxious. ‘What are you doing here? Why would you have wanted to track me down, for goodness’ sake?’
Gio feasted his shrewd, dark gaze on her. Twenty four freckles adorned her nose and her upper cheekbones: having once counted them, he knew that for a fact. Her clear eyes, delicate features and lush mouth were utterly unchanged, he was relieved to note, his attention sliding inexorably down over her in a staged appraisal because he was strictly rationing himself. A faded blue cotton tee shirt stretched to capacity over her high, rounded breasts and his attention lingered there against his will, lust sending his libido leaping for the first time in a long time.
Relief rather than irritation consumed Gio because it had been far too long since he had experienced that reaction to a woman, so long indeed that he had feared that his marriage had stripped him of his essential masculinity in some peculiar fashion. But then, he would have been the first to acknowledge that he had never wanted any woman the way he had always wanted Billie. He had once flown her out to New York for a single night because he literally could not get through another week without her in his bed.
Billie was so worked up, so horrified that Gio Letsos had come looking and found her, that her feet were glued to the hall carpet. She stared at Gio, unwilling to credit that he was really there in the flesh in front of her, the man she had once loved, the man she had believed she would never see again. Her heart started to thump very, very hard and she sucked in a sudden snatch of oxygen, flinching as Theo drew her back to reality by hauling on her jeans-clad legs with his little fat hands to pull himself upright.
‘Billie...?’ Dee asked from the kitchen doorway. ‘Who is it? Is there something up?’
‘Nothing.’ Billie rescued her voice from her convulsed throat and stooped down in a jerky movement to scoop up Theo, her dazed gaze roaming over her cousin’s children who were studying Gio as though he had just dropped in from Mars. ‘Dee...could you take the kids?’
Her voice emerged all husky and shaken and she had to force herself to direct her attention back to Gio while Dee put out her arms for Theo and urged her own children into the kitchen with her. The kitchen door closed, sealing the hall into a sudden claustrophobic silence.
‘I asked you why you were here and why you would have looked for me in the first place,’ Billie reminded her unwelcome visitor doggedly.
‘Are you really planning to stage this long-overdue meeting on the doorstep?’ Gio drawled, all velvety smoothness and sophistication. He was taking control the way he always did and it unnerved her.
‘Why not?’ Billie whispered helplessly, struggling to drag her eyes from his devastatingly handsome features, remembering all the many times she had run her fingers through his thick black hair, loving him, loving each and every thing about him, even his flaws. ‘I don’t owe you the time of day!’
Gio was disconcerted by that comeback from a woman who had once respected his every word and done everything possible to please him, and his lean, strong face set taut and hard. ‘You’re being rude,’ he told her icily.
Billie’s hand clutched at the edge of the front door while she wondered if its support was all that was keeping her upright. He was so cool, so collected and such a bully, really couldn’t help being one. Life had spoilt Gio Letsos although he had never seen it that way. People flattered him to an extraordinary degree and went out of their way to win his approval. And once she had been the same, she acknowledged wretchedly. She had never stood up to him, never told him how she really felt, had always been far too afraid of spoiling things and then losing him. Only a very naïve woman would have failed to foresee that naturally Gio would choose to walk away from her first.
Her abstracted gaze took in the fact that her neighbour was staring over the fence at them, possibly even close enough to catch snippets of the conversation. Embarrassment made her step back from the door. ‘You’d better come in.’
Gio strode into the tiny sitting room, stepping with care round the toys strewn untidily about the room. He swallowed up all the available space, Billie thought numbly as she hastily switched off the television, which was playing a noisy children’s cartoon. He was so tall, so broad and she had forgotten the way he dominated any room he occupied.
‘You said I was rude,’ she said flatly as she carefully shut the sitting room door, ensuring their privacy.
She kept her back turned to him as long as possible, shielding herself from the explosive effects of Gio’s potent charisma as best she could. It wasn’t fair that just being in the same room with him should send a shower of sparks tingling through her and give her that oh, so dangerous sense of excitement and anticipation that had once seduced her into behaving like a very stupid woman. He was so very, very good-looking that it hurt to look at him and the effect of seeing him on the doorstep had stimulated her memories. In her mind’s eye, she was seeing the straight black brows, the utterly gorgeous dark golden eyes, the distinctly imperious blade of his nose, the high cheekbones, the bronzed Mediterranean skin, the beautiful, wide, sensual mouth that had made seduction an indescribable pleasure.
‘You were rude,’ Gio told her without hesitation.
‘But I was entitled to be. Two years ago, you married another woman,’ Billie reminded him over her shoulder, angry that it could still hurt her to have to force that statement out. Unhappily there was no escaping the demeaning truth that she had been good enough to sleep with but not good enough to be considered for anything more important or permanent in Gio’s life. ‘You’re nothing to do with me any more!’
‘I’m divorced,’ Gio breathed in a raw-edged undertone because nothing was going as he had expected. Billie had never attacked him before, never dared to question his behaviour. This new version of Billie was taking him by surprise.
‘How is that my business?’ Billie shot back at him, quick as a flash, while refusing to think that startling declaration of divorce through or react to it in any way. ‘I still remember you telling me that your marriage was none of my business.’
‘But then you made it your business by using it as an excuse to walk out on me.’
‘I didn’t need an excuse!’ A familiar sense of wonderment was gripping Billie while she listened, once again, to Gio vocalise his supremely selfish and arrogant outlook. ‘The minute you married, we were over and done. I never pretended it would be any other way—’
‘You were my mistress!’
Colour lashed Billie’s cheeks as though he had slapped her. ‘In your mind, not mine. I was only with you because I fell in love with you, not for the jewellery and the clothes and the fancy apartment,’ she spelled out thinly, her hands curling together in front of her in a defensive, nervous gesture.
‘But there was no reason for you to leave. My bride had no objection to me keeping a mistress,’ Gio stressed with growing impatience.
My bride. Even the label still hurt. The back of her eyelids stung with tears and she hated herself but she hated him more. Gio was so insensitive, so self-centred. How on earth had she ever contrived to love him? And why the heck would he have tracked her down? For what possible reason?
‘Sometimes I honestly think you talk like an alien from another planet, Gio,’ Billie countered, tightly controlling her anger and her pain. ‘In my world decent men do not marry one woman and continue sleeping with another. That is not acceptable to me and the idea that you found a woman to marry who didn’t care who you slept with just depresses me.’
‘But I am free now,’ Gio reminded her, frowning while he wondered what the hell had happened to Billie to change her so much that she could start arguing with him the minute he reappeared.
‘I don’t want to be rude but I’d like you to leave,’ Billie admitted unevenly.
‘You haven’t even heard what I have to say. What the hell is the matter with you?’ Gio demanded, shaken into outright disbelief by her aggressive attitude.
‘I don’t want to hear what you have to say. Why would I? We broke up a long time ago!’
‘We didn’t break up—you walked out, vanished,’ Gio contradicted with harsh censorious emphasis.
‘Gio...you told me I needed to wise up when you informed me you were getting married and I did exactly like you said...the way I always did,’ Billie muttered tartly. ‘I wised up and that means not listening to a word you have to say.’
‘I don’t know you like this.’
‘Why would you? It’s been two years since we were together and I’m not the same person any more,’ Billie told him with pride.
‘It might help if you could actually look me in the eye and tell me that,’ Gio quipped, scrutinising her rigid back.
Reddening, Billie finally spun round and collided dangerously with stunning deep-set dark eyes, heavily fringed with lashes. The very first time she had seen those eyes he had been ill, running a high temperature and a dangerous fever, but those eyes had been no less mesmerising. She swallowed hard. ‘I’ve changed—’
‘Not convinced, moli mou.’ Gio gazed steadily back at her, enjoying the burst of sexual static now thickening the atmosphere. That her tension mirrored his told him everything he needed to know. Nothing had changed, certainly not the most basic chemistry of all. ‘I want you back.’
In shock, Billie stopped breathing, but within seconds his admission made a crazy kind of Gio-based sense to her. By any standards, his marriage had lasted a ludicrously short time and she knew Gio didn’t like change in his private life. To his skewed way of thinking, reconciling with his former mistress might well now seem the most attractive and convenient option. ‘No way,’ she said breathlessly.
‘I still want you and you still want me—’
‘I’ve built a whole new life here. I can’t just abandon it,’ Billie muttered, wondering why on earth she was stooping to making such empty excuses. ‘You and me...it didn’t work—’
‘It worked brilliantly,’ he contradicted.
‘And your marriage didn’t?’ Billie could not resist asking.
His hard facial bones locked in an expression she remembered from the past. It closed her out, warned she had crossed a boundary. ‘Since I’m divorced, obviously not,’ he fielded, smooth as glass.
‘But you and I,’ Gio husked, reaching out to grasp her hands before she could guess his intention, ‘did work very successfully—’
‘Depends on your definition of successful,’ Billie parried, her hands trembling in his, perspiration dampening her entire skin surface. ‘I wasn’t happy—’
‘You were always happy,’ Gio had no hesitation in asserting, because her chirpy, sunny nature was what he remembered most about her.
Billie tried and failed to draw her hands free of his without making a production out of it. ‘I wasn’t happy,’ she repeated again, shivering as the almost forgotten scent of him assailed her nostrils: clean, fresh male overlaid with tones of citrus and something that was uniquely Gio, so familiar even after all the time that had passed that for a charged and very dangerous split second she wanted to lean closer and sniff him up like an intoxicating drug. ‘Please let go, Gio. Coming here was a waste of your time.’
His hot urgent mouth swooped down on hers and he feasted on her parted lips with fiery enthusiasm, plundering and ravishing with a hunger she had never forgotten. Electrifying excitement shot through Billie like a lightning bolt to stimulate every skin cell in her body. The erotic thrust of his tongue into her mouth consumed her with burning heat and a crazy urge to get even closer to that lean, virile body of his. Wild hunger started a glow of warmth in her pelvis and made her nipples tighten and strain. She wanted, she wanted...and then sanity returned like a cold drop of water on her overheated skin when Theo wailed from the kitchen, jarring every maternal sense she possessed back to wakefulness.
Wrenching her mouth free of his, Billie looked up into the smouldering dark golden eyes that had once broken her heart and said what she needed to say, what she owed it to herself to say. ‘Please leave, Gio...’
Billie stood at the window watching Gio climb into his long black limousine on the street outside, her fingernails biting into her palms like sharp-pointed knives. Without even trying he had torn her in two, teaching her that her recovery was not as complete as she had imagined. Letting Gio walk away from her had almost killed her and there was still a weak, wicked part of her that longed to snatch him back with both hands. But she knew it was pointless, because Gio would be furious if he ever found out that Theo was his child.
Right from the start, Billie had known and accepted that truth when, finding herself accidentally pregnant, she had chosen to give birth to a baby fathered by a male who had only wanted her for her body. There would be no support or understanding from Gio on the score of an illegitimate child, whom he would prefer not to have been born. She had only been with him a few weeks when he had told her that if she ever fell pregnant he would regard it as a disaster and that it would destroy their relationship, so she couldn’t say she hadn’t been warned. She had finally decided that what he didn’t know about wouldn’t hurt him and she had so much love to give their son that she had convinced herself that Theo would not suffer from the lack of a father.
Or so she had thought...until after Theo’s birth when concerns began to steadily nibble gaping holes in her one-time conviction that she had made the right decision. Then she had guiltily asked herself if she was the most selfish woman alive to have chosen to have a child in secrecy who would never have a father and she had worried even more about how Theo might react when he was older to what little she would have to tell him.
Would her son despise her some day for the role she had played in Gio’s bed? Would Theo resent the fact that although his father was rich he had grown up in comparative poverty? Would he blame her then for having brought him into the world on such terms?
CHAPTER TWO (#u4b007831-7560-5e6a-9ff7-22cd66c6bca4)
BILLIE STUFFED HER FACE in the pillow and sobbed her heart out for the first time in two long years and once again Gio had provided the spur. When she had finally cried out all the pain and the many other unidentifiable emotions attacking her, Dee was by her side, seated on the edge of the bed and stroking her head in an effort to comfort her.
‘Where’s Theo?’ Billie whispered instantly.
‘I put him down for his nap.’
‘Sorry about this,’ Billie mumbled, sliding off the bed to go into the bathroom and splash her face with cold water because her eyes and her nose were red.
When she reappeared, Dee gave her an uncomfortable look. ‘That was him, wasn’t it? Theo’s dad?’
Billie didn’t trust herself to speak and she simply nodded.
‘He’s absolutely gorgeous,’ Dee remarked guiltily. ‘I’m not surprised you fell for him but what’s with the limousine? You said he was well off, not that he was minted...’
‘He’s minted,’ Billie confirmed gruffly. ‘Seeing him again was upsetting.’
‘What did he want?’
‘Something he’s not going to get.’
* * *
Rejection was the very last thing Gio had anticipated. After assigning two of his security team to watch Billie round the clock and ensure that she did not disappear again, it occurred to him that perhaps there was another man in her life. The idea sent him into such a violent maelstrom of reaction that he couldn’t think straight for several rage-charged minutes. For the very first time ever he wondered how Billie had felt when he had told her about Calisto and he groaned out loud. He didn’t do complicated with women but Billie was certainly making it that way.
How had he believed it would be when he turned up out of nowhere? he asked himself impatiently. Billie had asked him to leave: he still couldn’t believe that. She was angry with him: that reality had sunk in. He had married another woman and she was holding that against him but how could she? Gio raked long brown fingers of frustration through the curly black hair he kept close cropped to his skull. She could not possibly have believed that he might marry her...could she?
He was the acknowledged head of his family owing to his grandfather’s long-term ill health, and it had always been Gio’s role and responsibility to rebuild the aristocratic, conservative and hugely wealthy Letsos clan. He had vowed as a boy that he would never repeat the mistakes his own father had made. His great-grandfather had had a mistress, his grandfather had had a mistress but Gio’s father had been less conventional. Dmitri Letsos had divorced Gio’s mother to marry his mistress in a seriously destructive act of disloyalty to his own blood. Family unity had never recovered from that blow and the older man had forfeited all respect. Gio’s mother had died and he and his sisters’ childhoods had been wrecked while Dmitri had almost bankrupted the family business in an effort to satisfy his spendthrift second wife’s caviar tastes.
Well, if there was another man in Billie’s bed, he would soon find out, Gio rationalised with clenched teeth and a jaw line set rock hard with tension. In twenty-four hours he would have the background report from Henley Investigations. Regrettably he was not a patient man and he had assumed she would throw herself back into his arms the instant he told her that he was divorced. Why hadn’t she?
Her response when he’d kissed her had been...hot. In fact Gio got hard just thinking about it, his libido as much as his brain telling him exactly what and who he needed back in his life. He wondered if he should send her flowers. She was crazy about flowers, had always been buying them, arranging them, sniffing them, growing them. It had been selfish of him not to buy her a house with a garden, he conceded darkly, wondering what other oversights he must’ve made when the woman who had once worshipped the ground he walked on now felt able to show him the door. No woman had ever done that to Gio Letsos. He knew he could have virtually any woman he wanted but that wasn’t a consolation when he only wanted Billie back where she belonged: in his bed.
* * *
After a disturbed night of sleep, Billie rose around dawn, fed all the kids and tidied up. It was only at weekends that she and Dee saw much of each other. On weekdays, she took the kids to school to allow Dee, who worked evenings as a bartender in a local pub, a little longer in bed. Theo went to work with Billie in the mornings and Dee collected him at lunchtime and minded the three kids for the afternoon. After the shop closed, they all ate an early evening meal together before Dee went off to do her shift. It was an arrangement that worked very well for both women and Billie was fond of Dee and her company because her two years in a city apartment where Gio was only an occasional visitor had been full of lonely days and nights.
Of course, in those days she had learned to make good use of her free time, she acknowledged wryly. In those two years with Gio she had acquired GCSEs and two A-levels, not to mention certificates in various courses ranging from cordon-bleu cookery and flower arranging to business start-up qualifications. Gio might not have noticed any of that or have shown the smallest interest in what she did when he wasn’t around, but making up for the education she had missed out on while she was acting as her grandmother’s carer throughout the teenage years had done much to raise Billie’s low self-esteem. After all, when she had first met Gio she had been working as a cleaner because she had lacked the qualifications that would have helped her to aspire to a better-paid job.
As she placed the new pieces of costume jewellery on display in the battered antique armoire she had bought for that purpose, she was a thousand mental miles away on an instinctive walk down the memory lane of her past. Unlike Gio, Billie did not have a proper family tree or at least if she did it was unknown to her. Her mother, Sally, had been an only child, who had reputedly gone wild as a teenager. As Billie’s only source of information about her mother had been her mean-spirited grandmother she was inclined to take that story with a pinch of salt. Billie had no memory of ever meeting Sally and absolutely no idea who had fathered her, although she strongly suspected that his name had been Billy.
Billie’s grandma and her mother had lived separate lives for years before the day Sally turned up without warning on her parents’ doorstep with Billie as a baby. Her grandfather had persuaded her grandmother to allow Sally to stay for one night, a decision she had had Billie’s lifetime to loudly and repeatedly regret because when the older woman got up the next morning she had discovered that Sally had gone, leaving her child behind her.
Unfortunately, Billie’s grandma had neither wanted nor loved her and, even though she received an allowance from social services for raising her grandchild, her resentment of the responsibility had never faded. Billie’s grandpa had been more caring but he had also been a drunk and only occasionally in a fit state to take an interest in her. Indeed, Billie had often thought that her background was the main reason why she had been such a pushover for Gio. His desire for her, his apparent need to look after her, had been the closest thing to love that she had ever known. So, although she would never have admitted it to him, she had been madly, insanely happy with Gio because he had made her feel loved...right up until the dreadful day he’d told her that he had to get married and father a child for the sake of his all-important snobby Greek family and his precious business empire.
Chilled by the sobering and humiliating recollection that Gio had not even considered her a possible candidate for a ring, Billie brought out the new garments she had prepared at home and began to price the stock. Theo was napping peacefully in his travel cot in his little cubbyhole at the back of the shop. Customers browsed, purchased and departed as she served them while she worked. Only a month earlier, she had hired her first employee, a Polish woman called Iwona, who did part-time hours when Billie couldn’t be at the shop. In fact, the business was doing well and was steadily fulfilling all Billie’s hopes. But then she had always loved the character and superior workmanship of vintage clothes and she was careful only to stock quality items. Slowly but surely she had built up a list of regular customers.
Gio climbed out of his limo while his chauffeur argued with the traffic warden and his security team were disgorged from the vehicle behind. He scanned the shop front, adorned with the name, ‘Billie’s Vintage’, and frowned, positively transfixed by the idea that Billie could have opened up her own business. Yet there was the proof in front of him. Theos! He shook his arrogant dark head, thinking that women were strange, unpredictable creatures and finally wondering if he had ever really known Billie at all because nothing that she had done or said so far had appeared on his list of her potential reactions. His frown grew even darker, lending a saturnine quality to his hard, dark features. He had important projects to manage and people to see and yet here he was still stuck after twenty-four exceedingly boring hours in a back-end-of-nowhere Yorkshire town chasing Billie! What kind of sense did that make?
Dee and Iwona arrived at the shop within minutes of each other. Dee strapped Theo into his pram and asked Billie what she fancied eating for supper while Iwona wrapped a purchase for a customer. That was when Gio strode in, utterly frying Billie’s brain cells because she stopped mid-conversation with Dee and totally forgot what she had been about to say.
Garbed in a charcoal designer pinstripe suit that sheathed his tall, muscular body like a tailor-made glove, Gio simply took her breath away. His white shirt accentuated his bronzed complexion and the very masculine black stubble already beginning to shadow his handsome jaw line. A startling sunburst of honeyed heat blossomed between Billie’s thighs and she pressed them tight together, her colour steadily climbing. She was even more painfully aware of the swelling heaviness of her breasts and the sudden tightening of her nipples. She was appalled that Gio could still have that immediate an effect on her, an effect that was markedly more intense than the day before when she had blamed her surrender to that kiss on the fact that he had caught her unprepared. What was her excuse this time?
‘Billie...’ Gio breathed in his dark, velvet drawl, poised several feet away and acting as if his appearance in her shop were the most natural thing in the world.
‘G-Gio...’ she stammered half under her breath, quickly closing the space between them, fearful of being overheard. ‘Why are you here?’
‘You’re not stupid, don’t act it,’ Gio advised, glancing around. ‘So, you left me to open a shop—’
