He almost doubled over as if from a one-two combo to the groin and gut.
He stood there as she walked to the door, vibrating like a building in the aftershocks of an earthquake.
The moment she put her hand on the doorknob, he growled, “Break it off.”
She turned to him with a disbelieving glare.
He pressed on. “If you can kiss me back, want to slide under my skin, consume me whole, like you just did, it won’t do him any favors if you’re with him for all good cerebral reasons while you’re starving for me. It will end up hurting and humiliating him.”
She gave him a pitying glance. “You think you have everything in this world figured out, don’t you?”
“No, but I have finally figured out what we share. If you can tell me that being with me wasn’t the most intense pleasure of your life, that this other person provides you with a fraction of what you shared with me…you’ll be lying. Wanting like this, compatibility like this, happens once in a lifetime, if we’re phenomenally lucky. As we were, to have that weekend out of time to find each other.”
She shook her head, started to turn again.
He was across the room, catching her in a second. “Say yes to me, like you did that weekend, and let’s take what we need together. Break up with this…other man. I’ll wait.”
This time she yanked her arm away as if his touch burned her. “No. And that’s a final no. We had our fling, and there’s no good enough reason in my book to resurrect it for occasional indulgences, even of the mind-blowing variety.” She opened the door, tossed him one last look over her shoulder. “You know the way by now, Sarantos. See yourself out.”
Aris saw himself out. But not before he gathered the information he needed to plan her capitulation campaign.
He was damned if he’d take no for an answer. And he wouldn’t wait for her to come to her senses, either. She wasn’t engaged or married. So his plan was clear. He would find out who the other man was and break them up.
He’d learned that she no longer lived in the mansion, so he’d waited in his car until she left.
He tailed her to an exclusive country club, followed her inside.
He watched her stop by a woman with a baby. She greeted the woman and bent to kiss the baby before rushing away.
He rushed, too, afraid to miss her probable meeting with the man he already considered his rival. He approached the woman and the baby she’d greeted, sparing both a distracted glance.
Something he couldn’t define made him take a second glance. Then a third. Then the world came to a crashing halt.
Something detonated inside his chest, threatened to expel whatever he had inside him that passed for a soul.
That baby…
That baby.
He was…his.
Three
Conviction sank through Aris like a string of depth mines.
Observations accumulated at an intolerable rate, burying him under an avalanche of details, everything that comprised this fresh, robust life.
The deep blue velvet jumpsuit that encased the baby’s sturdy body. The pattern of each mahogany curl adorning his perfectly formed head. The slant of eyebrows and the press of lips that painted his face in unwavering determination as he commanded his toys’ submission. The same expression he’d seen on another face, in an almost forty-year-old photo. Then came the incontrovertible sense that trumped all. That kindred tug. That blood jolt.
It was impossible, incomprehensible. It was also irrefutable. It filled every recess of his being with the first pure certainty of his life.
This was his son.
Then the baby noticed him.
The baby captured him in the bull’s-eye of silver pools of endless, elemental curiosity. Slowly, answering recognition formed in their gleaming depths, beginning to radiate, then hurtle at Aris like heat-seeking missiles, skewering him through the heart and gut.
Before a reaction could form inside him, it dawned. And almost incinerated him with its advance.
A smile.
A six-toothed blow of unadulterated glee and eagerness.
Aris struggled to fill lungs that felt as if they had collapsed. Before he managed a breath, the baby moved, expelling every remaining wisp of air inside his chest, leaving it a cage tightening around an igniting coal.
He watched, mute, motionless, as that package of energy and purpose and zeal incarnate crawled in his direction as if in a fast-forwarded video. He stood there, for the first time in over twenty-five years unable to think, powerless to act, waiting for another entity’s whim to decide his fate.
He looked down in total helplessness as the baby reached him, caught him in a lunging hug. Then, with the same determination with which he’d conquered his toys, the baby tried to climb his legs.
Aris felt…felt…
There were no words for what razed through him.
He stared down at the baby who was using him as a prop. The baby looked up at him and riddled his vision with the brightness of his excitement, fanning the heat inside his chest to combusting…
“Alex, come here, sweetie.”
The feminine tones lashed through Aris, splitting the shell of upheaval clamping him in two. He lurched, his gaze sightlessly following the direction of the alien voice.
The woman with the baby. Dark haired and eyed, evidently Greek, a few years older than him. Neatly dressed and carefully coiffed. She wasn’t looking at him but at the baby, distress on her face.
“Oh, I’m sorry, sir,” she gasped. “I’ll get you a wet towel to wipe this off!”
Aris stared blankly into eyes the woman now raised to his in embarrassment, watched her rush to her table, then back with the promised towel. He followed her gaze down to where the baby still clamped his legs, found him busy chewing on his pants, having already caused a sizable drool patch.
The woman swooped down on the baby, extricated him gently from around Aris’s legs, to the baby’s explosively vocal protest.
Aris stood rooted as the woman thrust the towel at him as she tried to get a firm hold on the now twisting, shrieking baby.
“I’m so sorry, sir,” she spluttered. “I hope the stain comes out, and if not, I’m sure Ms. Louvardis will be only too happy to compensate you.”
Aris numbly took the towel, stared at the woman, aware of only his mushrooming realizations.
She must work for Selene. No doubt as the baby’s nanny.
Selene’s baby.
Selene’s baby…and his.
“I don’t know what came over him,” the woman went on. “Alex is usually very reticent with strangers.”