Page 25 of After-Hours Heir

“Get coffee somewhere else. Anywhere else,” she said, stepping inside. But he was close behind her.

“I am meeting someone.”

She stopped. And looked up at him. And suddenly, the world began to fall away. She had thought that it was crumbling before, but that had been theoretical. It wasreallycrumbling now. Like everything that held her to the earth was breaking off in great chunks and leaving nothing behind. Any moment now she was going to start falling. Falling and falling. Into that well in his dark eyes, or maybe hell. Who could say?

“Who are you meeting?” she asked, her mouth suddenly dry.

“No one of any interest to you.”

“Who are you meeting, Christos?”

“Why?”

“BecauseI’mmeeting someone,” she said, her eyes filling with tears against her will. No. That would be…outrageous.

Impossible.

Where did you find the phone, Sylvie?

Outside of the publishing event. A publishing event that Christos Onassis had been present at.

No.

Because that man could not be the man that she had carried on all those text conversations with. Because Christos didn’t have a heart, and that man had a heart. He had…he had comforted her when she was at her wits’ end because of Christos himself, so it couldn’t be…

His eyes sharpened. “Who areyoumeeting?”

Her throat was constricted; it was nearly a whisper. “I don’t know what he looks like.”

And she knew satisfaction for one second. Because he looked as if his own world had done very much the same thing hers had done.

He was shocked. Which really did a lot to eliminate what her next question and accusation would have been. That he had done this to her on purpose.

He hadn’t.

He hadn’t known.

Brilliant tactician, Christos Onassis, genuinely had not known that he was talking to her. He hadn’t known that she was the woman that he’d met for sex.

He had no idea, all through that meeting, when they were sitting across from each other, that she was pregnant with his baby.

Just as she hadn’t known who she’d been speaking to, who she’d met that night.

Who the father of her baby was.

That’s why you reacted to him the way that you did.

No. God. It was awful.

It was terrible.

He… Shehadknown. Her body had known. That was absurd.

She had felt this rising tension every time she saw him because her body had known. She hadn’t been able to put the two together because she just hated him so much. She hated him so much even now as they stood there with people moving around them, getting visibly frustrated with the fact that they were taking up so much floor space standing there motionless, staring at each other, unable to move. She hated him.

Even as the truth seemed to bloom and throbbed between them.

“Let me see your phone,” he said.