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Billionaire baby almost dies from neglect!
Beside it they had run a large photo of Ari. Beneath ran a story about Lucinda’s mother, Cindy, stating that she had been a model and an ex of Ari’s before heroin became her downfall. The item described how the baby had been found starving in a squat beside the body of her mother. Ari was named as the baby’s father.
‘Well, they’ve got the story very wrong,’ Cleo pointed out. ‘What I don’t understand is why you should think that this nonsense has anything to do with me...’
‘I imagine that if I checked your bank account I’d find the proof that you were paid for that story by a journalist, who decided to put his own, more interesting twist on Lucinda’s background! It’s much more newsworthy if I’m cast in the role of a neglectful father!’
‘I can assure you that you won’t be checking my bank account any time soon,’ Cleo retorted crisply. ‘But I’m not responsible for this article. I haven’t told anybody about Lucinda or your father’s second family—’
‘Perhaps you decided to keep my father’s affair and the children born from it a secret as a special favour to me. I don’t know,’ Ari grated with distaste. ‘I only know that you were theonlyperson who knew about my niece and her unsavoury beginnings, and now here it is, spread across the newspapers for all to read about, and nowI’mbeing accused of having abandoned her vulnerable mother and left my child to starve and suffer.’
Cleo folded her arms. ‘Well, the article’s nine tenths rubbish, so I don’t know why you’re so bothered about gossipy conjecture when you know the truth and the authorities do as well. You didn’t even know Lucinda’s mother, never mind have an affair with her,’ she pointed out with quiet common sense. ‘But while I understand that you’re upset to see this kind of stuff being printed, I don’t understand why you’re bringing it to my doorstep when I had nothing to do with it—’
‘It has to be you who leaked certain facts... There are no other possible profiteers in the picture!’ Ari slammed back at her accusingly.
Cleo refused to be intimidated, although her temper was steadily climbing and had she had the physical strength she would literally have thrown him out of the apartment. Even so, she could already feel the sharp piercing sting of hurt and disappointment that he could believe her capable of breaking his trust and profiting from his family’s tragic secrets. But she buried that vulnerability as fast as she could and refused to acknowledge it. ‘Don’t be so naive, Ari. There must be dozens of people who know enough about Lucinda to have sold this story,’ she parried curtly.
‘What the hell are you trying to say?’
‘Well, a lot of people have been involved in Lucinda’s life because of her near-death experience. Start with your lawyer and those who work for him—that’s one set of people in possession of facts you would prefer to keep confidential. Then there’s the private investigation agency you hired to find your siblings, who identified Lucinda as potentially being your brother’s child... That’s another set. What about the paramedics and the police who found Lucinda and her parents? Or the medical staff, who cared for your niece in hospital? Or even the DNA-testing facility you used to find out whether or not you and her were related? Then there’s the social services staff involved in finding a home for her and her foster carers. Why don’t you start counting up just how many different people already know enough about Lucinda’s background to cause you grief?’
Ari stared back at her in brooding silence. Cleo looked so tiny standing there, even with her slight shoulders thrown back and her body stretched to its maximum, not very impressive height as she squared up to him. She was wearing pyjamas with horrendous zebra stripes on them, her mop of curls an explosion of gold round her face, her bright blue eyes wide and shocked. She didn’t look remotely like a young woman who had been caught out in a shameful money-grabbing exercise. ‘I—’
‘No, don’t you accuse me of anything more,’ Cleo warned him in a brittle tone as she struggled to hold her composure together. ‘I’m not responsible for this stupid story, and I would suggest that you concentrate your energies on finding out whois.’
With that advice, she lifted the newspaper, folded it and thrust it back at him before walking back to the door and yanking it open to encourage his departure. She slammed it shut behind him even as he began swinging back to say something else. In all her life she had never felt more exposed or more hurt. With a few simple sentences Ari Stefanos had trashed her every hope and belief, revealing his true opinion of her character.
She was poor, which apparently meant that she was also untrustworthy and a potential gold digger without a conscience. Tears stung her eyes. Ari had encouraged her to develop a false impression of their relationship. He had emptied a fashionable restaurant for her benefit just in an effort to see her again. But what had that been worth? He was an incredibly wealthy man, a man accustomed to doing exactly as he liked, regardless of cost. It hadn’t meant that he set a high personal value on her or her character. Nor had his confidences about his father’s second family meant anything more concrete. She had simply been in the right place at the right time at the retreat when he had been in the mood to talk to someone.
But shehadmade a big mistake, hadn’t she? The mistake of thinking that she was somehow special in Ari’s eyes.
Only now that pathetic conviction had fallen down around her ears like a collapsed house of cards, warning her that she had been vain and foolish to overestimate her importance to him. The instant someone had talked to the press about Ari’s private life, she had become his prime suspect! Yet if he had thought it through, he would have realised that had she been guilty she would have made much more money from selling therealstory, which he had shared with her. And not a story that merely twisted a tiny part of the whole to falsely depict him as a mean-spirited, neglectful father who had failed to look after his illegitimate child’s well-being.
So, lesson learned the hard way as always, Cleo reflected unhappily. She was nobody and nothing in Ari’s eyes, just a girl he had slept with a couple of times. Everything else had been icing on an empty cake and she had been an absolute idiot to believe that it could ever be anything more.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘THESEAREGORGEOUS!’ Ella chorused in wonderment over the extravagant arrangement of tiger lilies in the vase that had been delivered with them. ‘You can’t put these ones in the bin as well.’
‘Well, I’ve nobody left to give flowers to,’ Cleo pointed out, having handed out the previous bouquets to neighbours and workmates. ‘And I don’t want to look at them here and be reminded of him.’
‘I wish you’d tell me what he did that issounforgivable,’ Ella said and not for the first time. ‘He is certainly saying sorry with style.’
‘He can say it until he’s blue in the face... It won’t change anything,’ Cleo said, her generous pink mouth suddenly tight and flat as a steel bar. Ari Stefanos had wronged her in the most unforgivable way. He should never have risked sharing his wretched family secrets in the first instance if he was so ready to suddenly flip and blame her for selling them to the press.
‘If you’re sure you don’t want them, I’ll give them to my mother when I meet her for lunch. She’ll be thrilled,’ her flatmate declared. ‘Are you certain?’
‘Completely certain,’ Cleo asserted as she finished her make-up and gave her reflection a cursory glance in the mirror.
‘You don’t even want the vase?’ Ella checked. ‘It’s crystal.’
‘Not even the vase,’ Cleo confirmed.
‘He’s gorgeous, Cleo,’ Ella remarked abruptly, having got a look at Ari when he called at the flat to find out where Cleo worked. ‘In your shoes, I think I’d cut him some slack.’
‘Looks aren’t everything,’ Cleo parried, grabbing up her bag to leave, wondering exactly how long it was likely to take for that hollow sensation of loss that she had been nursing inside her to dissipate. Ten days had passed and that awful feeling hadn’t yet faded even a little bit. ‘And he’s already had a second chance and he blew that as well, so I’m not about to put myself out there again.’
The bar was quiet when it opened, and she was up on a stool dusting shelves when the doors swung and she flipped her head expecting to see a customer and seeing Ari instead. Ari, devastatingly spectacular in a dark suit that fitted him like a glove, his bronzed and handsome face unusually grave. She froze and then lurched down off the stool clumsily, almost turning her ankle, wincing as she made contact with the ground again.
