‘OK. I’ll marry you,’ Billie spelled out tautly, her colour high. ‘But that means I’m trusting you not to do anything that might harm Theo or me. If I find out that I can’t trust you I’ll leave you.’
Gio flashed her a deeply appreciative smile. She would never leave him again. Not unless she was prepared to leave her son behind with him, he reflected with immense satisfaction. She might not know it yet but her days of running were at an end.
‘And you have to be totally, one hundred per cent faithful,’ Billie decreed.
‘I always was with you,’ Gio responded airily.
‘But there’s that saying about how when a man marries his mistress he creates a vacancy,’ Billie remarked flatly, her lush mouth compressing on a sense of humiliation.
‘I think my life is complicated enough,’ Gio fielded.
And of course he wouldn’t be expecting to be married to her until he was old and grey and, since he would always have an end to their arrangement in sight, straying through boredom was less likely to be a problem, Billie affixed grimly, striving not to be hurt by that truth.
‘Now that you’ve got what you wanted, can I go home?’ Billie pressed.
‘I want you here. Presumably you want to be involved in making your own wedding arrangements.’ A straight ebony brow inclined. ‘We’ll have a small wedding in the Greek Orthodox church I attend in London. I’ve already applied for the required licences.’
Billie’s eyes flared in surprise. ‘You took a lot for granted.’
Gio’s steady gaze held hers. ‘I can afford to. Why would you refuse to marry me when that was presumably what you wanted two years ago?’
Billie reddened as though she had been slapped. So, he had finally worked that obvious fact out, had he? Mortification drenched her like a tidal wave. ‘I don’t buy into fairy tales any more.’
‘But I want you to have the fairy tale, pouli mou,’ Gio breathed curtly, thoroughly disconcerting her with that statement. ‘I want you to wear a fancy dress and all the trimmings.’
‘Why? Because it will look good in the photos?’ Billie forced her strained eyes away from him, her heart-shaped face stiff because she knew that he could never give her the fairy tale. After all, the one essential facet of her fairy-tale denouement had been his love. She was also wounded that he was so sure that she would have married him like a shot two years earlier, particularly when he had coolly turned away from her to marry another, more suitable woman. Her love had meant nothing to him in those days but then she had offered her love too freely. Was it fair to judge him harshly for not being able to love her back?
‘A normal marriage,’ he reminded her quietly. ‘That is what I want and that is what we will have.’
His uncompromising arrogance set Billie’s teeth on edge. Even though he was divorced he still had no fear of matrimonial failure. But then he wanted Theo and he wanted her, Billie conceded ruefully, and she knew that high-voltage libido of Gio’s probably drove him harder than love ever could. He was, to say the least, an electrifyingly sexual personality. Had he ever loved Calisto? Or merely wanted the beautiful blonde? What had ultimately killed that wanting? And what did it matter to Billie? After all, she was only finally getting that wedding ring by default.
Gio’s business team arrived to work with him that afternoon while Billie viewed images of wedding dresses online, sent at Gio’s behest by a well-known designer. She squirmed over taking her measurements and sending them off and then buried the memory by picking her dream dress, her dream veil and her dream shoes while planning a timely trip to her favourite lingerie shop. But when she headed for the door with Theo in her arms, Gio asked coolly, ‘Where are you going?’
‘I have some shopping to do,’ Billie told him, soft mouth settling into a firm line. ‘And I want to do it with Dee.’
His stunning gaze iced over. ‘No,’ he said simply as he scrawled his signature on a document placed in front of him by an aide.
‘Yes,’ Billie said equally simply and walked on out of the door.
‘Billie!’ Gio roared down the corridor after her as she headed to the lift.
With reluctance she turned.
‘I said no,’ Gio reminded her icily.
Green eyes sparkling, Billie wandered back closer. ‘And I wasn’t going to argue with you in front of your staff but I have to see Dee.’
‘You know I’ve arranged for a sitter for her for the next two weeks.’
‘She’s my cousin and my friend and she has always been there for me when I needed her,’ Billie countered gently. ‘I don’t care what you say or how you feel about it but I will not turn my back on her.’
‘Then leave Theo with me,’ Gio urged, reaching out to take his son.
Billie retained a hold on Theo. ‘You couldn’t look after him on your own—’
‘I won’t be on my own. I hired a nanny. She’s in the hotel right now awaiting my call.’
His interference, his conviction that he knew what was best for her child, made Billie bridle. ‘Then you’ve wasted your time and your money because I will not leave Theo with a stranger.’
‘I’ll tell her to come up and you can meet her.’
Billie pursed her lips. ‘Theo comes with me. Sorry, if you don’t like that, but that’s the way it’s going to be.’
‘Don’t try to fight me,’ Gio warned her softly. ‘If you fight, I will fight back and inevitably you’ll get hurt.’
‘Nothing you do could hurt me now,’ Billie declared staunchly, refusing to be intimidated. ‘And why don’t you quit while you’re ahead, Gio? I’ve agreed to turn my whole life upside down, to marry you and meet your family. How much more do you want or expect? When do you learn to compromise?’
‘I don’t,’ Gio said succinctly, his strong jaw line squared. ‘Not when it comes to my son and your involvement with an individual I don’t want you mixing with.’
‘That individual you don’t want me mixing with was with me when I was in labour for two endless days!’ Billie snapped back at him in a low intense voice that shook with emotion. ‘She was there for me and Theo when you weren’t and I was darned glad to have her!’
An almost imperceptible pallor spread beneath Gio’s bronzed skin and his thick lashes screened his gaze to grim darkness. ‘I would have been there for you if you’d told me you were pregnant—’
‘I don’t think so, Gio. You were a newly married man back then,’ Billie reminded him without any expression at all.
‘Go, then, if it means so much to you,’ he urged with chilling bite.
‘It does mean that much to me. I’m always loyal to my friends,’ Billie declared with quiet dignity.
Gio glowered at her, lustrous dark eyes shimmering gold. ‘Once, first and foremost, you were loyal to me.’
Billie dealt him a wry look. ‘And where did that loyalty get me at the end of the day?’ she quipped, stepping into the lift.
Gio wanted to snatch her back out of the lift and Theo with her but her reference to that word, ‘compromise’ had sunk in. He had ninety per cent of what he wanted and he would have the whole once they were married. In the short term, he could afford to be generous, he told himself sternly. But Billie had changed and he could no longer ignore the fact. She was ready to go toe-to-toe with him and fight. In some ineffable way she had grown up and the girl who had looked at him with starry eyes as if he were a knight in shining armour was no more. He didn’t like that one little bit.
Even less did