‘I think we should let the dust settle on this and leave for now,’ Rosie suggested tightly, laying a trembling hand on Alexius’s sleeve. ‘I can come back to visit when tempers cool … if I’m still welcome, of course.’
‘Of course, you will be,’ Alexius pronounced with unbelievable cool as if nothing whatsoever had happened. ‘It is I who will not be so.’
‘If you’re not marrying him, you shouldn’t be going anywhere with him,’ Socrates Seferis delivered in a final cutting piece of advice.
Rosie glanced from her grandfather’s angry, dissatisfied face to her aunt’s barely hidden triumph at Rosie’s fast fall from grace and decided that she had had enough of the family reunion for one day. ‘I make my own decisions and I trust Alexius,’ she said quietly.
‘Why on earth didn’t you stand up for yourself?’ Rosie demanded of Alexius once they were back in the car. ‘He’s the one who told you to get to know me.’
‘I have great respect for Socrates, moli mou. He said nothing that was not deserved. I do have the reputation of a womaniser and I should, for once, have practised restraint.’ Yet even in the midst of that, Alexius was hopelessly amused and oddly touched by the manner in which Rosie had waded in like a miniature prize fighter to try and defend him to her grandfather, failing to appreciate that Socrates was probably the only man alive whom Alexius would have allowed to speak to him in such terms.
‘Maybe I should have kept my hands off you,’ Rosie muttered, irritated that he was trying to shoulder all the blame as if she were some helpless little fluttery thing with no brains between her ears.
‘No, I wanted you and I am too used to taking what I want and not counting the cost,’ Alexius breathed with a raw edge. ‘That, at least, was a fair comment.’
‘You should’ve listened to me when I told you not to mention me being pregnant so soon.’ Rosie sighed, wishing he were not so highly resistant to accepting advice.
‘The least I owed my godfather was the truth.’
‘My aunt is poisonous—she really enjoyed that awful scene. Why didn’t you warn me what she was like?’
‘I didn’t want to influence your opinions before you met them. They’re not my family, after all,’ he traded. ‘As a rule, Socrates is a liberal, warm-hearted man but he has your quick temper. He will very much regret the way you parted. I underestimated his reaction. His values are naturally those of the older generation and I should have foreseen that.’
Alexius took her back to the airport and it was a shock when they were suddenly engulfed in a seething mass of people waving cameras and shouting questions. She shrank into Alexius’s side, blinded by the flash bulbs going off all around her, barely aware of the security men struggling to keep the crush at bay.
‘Who’s the girl?’ voices shouted repeatedly. ‘What about Adrianna Lesley?’
Journalists, Rosie labelled belatedly, what she supposed were called paparazzi, she guessed as, his handsome mouth clenched, Alexius herded her silently through the building where everybody was staring, no doubt wondering who they were. Although as the airport security staff joined in with Alexius’s own team to practise crowd control in keeping the most overenthusiastic members of the press from preventing their free passage, she began to appreciate that Alexius appeared to be exceedingly well-known and that ironically it was her presence in his company that was creating the stir. At the back of her mind, she was trying very hard not to wonder who Adrianna was. A girlfriend? What did she know about his private life?
‘Sorry about that,’ Alexius pronounced, reading the shock at the onslaught of the paps in her dazed expression after he had slotted her into a helicopter and Bas arrived in his pet carrier.
‘How often does that happen to you?’ Rosie whispered shakily, shooting a troubled glance his way.
‘Too often.’
‘Why were they so curious about me?’
‘You arrived in my private jet. I’m rarely seen travelling with a woman. Someone at the airport probably tipped them off.’ His voice was clipped, offhand, as if such incidents were so common in his daily life that he didn’t even think about them. But what his tone seemed to say was misleading because for the first time ever Alexius had been enraged by a press intrusion. Rosie had been frightened and she was pregnant and it shouldn’t have happened. He had felt like scooping her up into his arms to shield her but had known such behaviour would only serve to incite the paparazzi to even greater aggression.
‘Where are we going now?’ she asked on the back of a huge yawn as she idly stroked Bas’s ear through the bars of his carrier.
‘Somewhere private,’ Alexius breathed, flexing his big shoulders below his finely tailored jacket and relaxing visibly at the prospect, long powerful thighs spreading.
Rosie was so sleepy and overwhelmed by the events of the day that she would not have cared had he announced that he was taking her to the moon. He had turned her life upside down though: she was very much aware of that. She flexed her crushed toes in the designer shoes she wore, brushed the expensive fabric of her dress with a wondering hand and rested her head back drowsily. It was like being a princess for a day, she thought ruefully, but fine feathers did not make fine birds because underneath she was the exact same Rosie Gray and not at all the sort of woman normally associated with a billionaire. And while enumerating all the possible ways in which she did not fit that frame, Rosie fell asleep.
Alexius almost laughed when he realised that Rosie was dead to the world: a woman had never fallen asleep in his company before. After all, he never spent the night with a woman and while he was awake his normal style of lover was too hyped up with the desire to entertain and impress him to relax to that extent. But then Rosie didn’t fall into the normal category for him, he acknowledged absently. She was no star-struck groupie, ready to do anything to please, and he was discovering that he very much liked her ability to treat him as an equal and her lack of awe and subservience.
Rosie awakened only when the helicopter landed and she stumbled groggily onto solid ground again. It was dark but the moonlight illuminated a giant white house set against a dark backdrop. She blinked, not quite sure of what she was seeing, for it was so imposing a building that it looked vaguely like a film set to her. ‘Where on earth are we?’
‘We’re on Banos, the island where I spent my earliest years,’ Alexius supplied as outside lights came on to show her a uniformed older man trundling their luggage across an immaculate lawn towards the house.
‘An island … and a house like a palace,’ she mused, insanely aware of her tousled hair and crumpled dress and scolding herself for being so vain. Had she snored while she was asleep? A school friend had once told her that she had snored on a sleepover. Inwardly, she cringed.
‘Can I let him out?’ Alexius enquired because Bas was whining and scratching in his carrier.
In answer, Rosie grasped the carrier and undid the door. Bas lurched out like a little drunken dog, struggling to balance on his three good legs against the weight of the cast.
‘Thee mou, he could wring pity from a stone,’ Alexius groaned. ‘How long does he need the cast for?’
‘Another month …’ Rosie was endeavouring not to stare goggle-eyed at the magnificent house with its white weatherboarding and long gracious colonnaded verandah. ‘Any minute now I expect Scarlett O’Hara to appear on the front step,’ she admitted.
‘It was modelled on a Southern plantation house in the thirties for one of my grandmothers,’ Alexius conceded.
Nothing could have more adequately illustrated his illustrious, privileged background, Rosie thought dizzily, than the awe-inspiring sight of the marble hall, ornamented with a huge crystal chandelier, a superb wide staircase, bronze statues and more gilded furniture than Rosie had ever seen outside