Aris barely heard her, everything inside him focusing on the baby squirming in her arms. Alex was reaching his arms out to him, his silver eyes drowned in fat, trembling tears, his chubby cleft chin quivering as if he was imploring Aris to save him from a monster about to devour him.
Without volition, Aris felt his own arms rising. The woman started to loosen hers, the baby pitched toward him…
“Eleni!”
They all jerked at the harshness of the admonishment.
The woman lurched around, swinging the baby out of Aris’s reach. The baby started to whimper at the rude interruption of his purpose before he suddenly gave a squee of delight. Aris raised bemused eyes, searching out the instigator of all the reactions.
Selene. She was coming back.
Aris watched her strides pick up momentum until she was streaking toward them. A lithe leopardess wreathed in deceptive white, her hair like a piece of the deepening night she was cleaving through, flying around her like angry black flames as she charged to save her cub.
“Eleni,” Selene muttered as she slowed down, steps away. “Take Alex back to the cabin. Gather everything. We’re leaving at once.”
The woman looked stricken at Selene’s sharpness, which she likely had never been subjected to. A look of guilt gripped her face as she nodded and rushed with the once again bawling baby to what Aris realized for the first time were day-use cabins surrounding a children’s playground.
Then both baby and woman disappeared from his awareness, as everything converged on Selene. Selene, who was glaring up at him as if she’d like to pounce on him and rip out his neck like the leopardess his bemused fancy had just painted her as.
“What are you doing here?” Her eyes spewed blue fire that scorched through his numbness. “How dare you follow me.”
He shook his head. Not to negate her accusation. To jog the shards of his shattered reason back into place.
But she wanted no answer. It had been a rhetorical question. She made that clear as, in frozen fascination, he watched her hair swirl around her in a wide arc as she swung around and started to walk away.
One step. The realizations flooding through him regressed into questions. Two steps. Questions congealed into confusion. Three. Confusion stampeded into chaos. Four. Chaos crashed into his foundations, tore at the tentacles gripping them in paralysis. Five. Paralysis disintegrated, expelled him from its grasp.
He lunged after her before she’d taken the sixth step fueled by the intention to leave him behind. He latched on to her arm.
She rounded on him, expression mirroring the same upheaval roiling inside him. “I told you to leave me alone! I told you—”
“You didn’t tell me.” Her eyes jerked wider at his ragged groan, fury draining to be replaced by wariness. And the shock and disbelief bled out of him. “You didn’t tell me you had my son.”
The truth blared on her face, blazed in her eyes. He could feel the knowledge of irrevocable exposure jolting through her, see her wrestling with a hundred reactions in succession, from shock to dismay to fear to resignation to resentment and back to fury in the space it took for his heart to punch his ribs a dozen times.
But Selene Louvardis wasn’t the effective attorney she was for nothing. She could weather any shock and deal with any situation on the fly.
She straightened, presented him with her court face, collected, inscrutable, table-turning. “Why should I have told you? What does it have to do with you?”
“You made sure it had nothing to do with me.” His voice sounded alien in his ears, the rumble of a bewildered beast.
A tremor shook her lips before she contained it, pressed her lips into firm defiance. She wasn’t as in control as she’d like him to think.
Next second he thought he might have imagined it as she shrugged, her expression implacable again, her gaze dripping icy nonchalance. “Listen, Sarantos, if you’re worrying this might have repercussions for you, don’t. We had consolation sex, after I assured you it was safe. It wasn’t. I didn’t factor in the hormonal mess losing my father would cause. You didn’t think to check just to make sure, and I wasn’t about to check with you to make sure it was okay with you if I had Alex. I’m sure if you’d known, you wouldn’t have wanted him. I’m the one who did, who decided to have him. So, he’s mine, and mine alone. End of story.”
At that moment the nanny appeared in the distance, rushing back with a still-fussing Alex in a stroller.
Selene looked at Sarantos with the impatience of someone dying to conclude a most unpleasant topic, to guarantee no follow-up hassles. “I’m sorry you saw Alex and sorrier you recognized him as yours on sight. But really, nothing has changed. I always thought I’d end up having a baby on my own, anyway, from a sperm donor. It worked out differently, but don’t think of yourself as more than that. You can go back to your life as if you didn’t see this. You can also strike me off your list of available woman. Wanting me for that affair was incidental to your trip anyway, an impulse I’m sure my resistance amplified. You came to address contract terms and that has been concluded. My agreement to take you up on your business offer stands.”
She turned around, making him feel she’d already left him far behind in her mind. “Goodbye, Sarantos. I really hope our personal paths won’t cross again.”
This time, Aris couldn’t move a muscle to stop her.
He watched her take the stroller from the nanny, steer her tiny procession out of his sight in a barely subdued hurry.
He stood there, riddled in the barrage of harsh truths she’d just bombarded him with.
She was right.
In every word she’d said.
If she’d “checked” with him, he would have said a baby was literally the last thing he wanted. Until he’d followed her here and seen Alex, the very idea of having a child had filled him with terror. But he had seen Alex.
And he’d seen her again.
How would anything he’d ever believed about himself apply anymore?
Selene held on until she’d put Alex to bed, sent Eleni away after apologizing to her for barking at her for Aristedes’s intrusion. Then she let chaos consume her.
She collapsed on her bed fully clothed, a mass of tremors.
Aristedes hadn’t only found out Alex existed, he’d realized he was his.
She still couldn’t believe he had from just a look.
Alex didn’t resemble him that much, did he? If he did, why had no one else noticed? Her brothers were in the dark about the identity of Alex’s father, and not for lack of guessing. They’d tried everything, from cajoling to tantrums to detective work. They’d resorted to making a list of every man she’d ever crossed paths with, then going through systematic eliminations. Aristedes was probably the only man it hadn’t crossed their minds to consider.