The Billionaire's Pregnant Mistress
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“The condom broke, remember?” He should. He’d made enough of it at the time.
“That was before your period and we did not have sex again until two days ago.” The grip on her wrist tightened painfully. “Tell me you are not pregnant. Tell me this—” he shook her hand “—is some kind of joke.”
“You’re hurting me,” she whispered as tears clogged her throat and burned her eyes.
A flash went off and he let her go, throwing her arm from him with disgust. She watched out of the periphery of her vision as one of Dimitri’s security men took off after the photographer. “It’s not a lie. I am pregnant.”
If anything, he seemed to swell with more anger. “It is not my child.”
For a moment his words paralyzed her. How could he doubt it was his child? She’d never had another lover. He knew it. “It is.”
His face contorted with revulsion. “All this time you have been haranguing me for planning to marry Phoebe, you have known you took another man to your bed. Who is it?”
His shouted question made her jump in fright. Dimitri never lost his cool. He hated scenes and putting on a public display was anathema to him.
“There is no other man.”
“The evidence is not in your favor.” His voice had dropped to freezing levels.
“I don’t know how it can be, but it is.”
“I had planned to be generous, give you the apartment. I thought you deserved it, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for your lover’s lifestyle and support his bastard child. I am not that stupid.” He grabbed the papers off the table, but tossed the box at her. “This should be a sufficiently memorable token for services rendered.”
She shoved the box aside. “There is no other man!”
His face closed up and terror coursed through her. He did not believe her. “You can have the tests done.”
He stood up. “Be assured I will demand them if you attempt to sue for any kind of support.”
Alexandra gulped, trying to get enough air. Trying not to vomit, but the pain was so intense that she wasn’t sure she could win the battle. Her arms were wrapped tightly around her middle and she still felt like she was going to fly apart into a thousand broken little pieces.
To have the gift of their child so brutally rejected hurt almost beyond bearing.
She whimpered.
Whipping her hand to her mouth, she blocked the sound with her fist. She did not want to let him see her weakness.
“You have twenty-four hours to vacate the apartment.” He gave her one last sulfuric glare, spun on his heel and left.
Alexandra paced from one side of the living room to the other. She’d called Dimitri’s cell phone at least a dozen times and gotten his message service every time. She’d left messages with the operator, at his Paris office, at his office in Athens, even with his grandfather’s housekeeper.
Every message had said the same thing. Please call.
He hadn’t. Not all day yesterday as she vacillated between tortured tears and blazing fury. Not through a sleepless night when she had tossed and turned in a bed too big for comfort without him in it. She’d tried to rest for the baby’s sake, but every time she closed her eyes images of him telling her he planned to marry intruded, or worse… his expression of revulsion when she’d told him she was pregnant.
It was now close to one o’clock in the afternoon and she’d spent the last hour calling every contact number she had for him again. It hadn’t done any good. She couldn’t sit down. She was so strung out and edgy, she felt like she’d taken a couple of the diet pills some of her fellow models used to control their appetite.
One thought played itself over and over again in her brain. Dimitri believed she’d taken another lover. What kind of trust was that? He really did think she was some kind of slut.
The thought sent her to her knees only to hop up again at the sound of a key turning in the lock. She flew to the door. He’d come back. Relief surged through her in unstoppable waves. He’d realized how idiotic he’d been to believe she could make love to another man.
She wrenched the door open. “Dim—” Her voice choked off mid word. It wasn’t Dimitri at the door. “Who the hell are you?” she demanded in English before remembering where she was and repeating her question in French.
The stocky bald man pushed his way into the apartment, followed by an efficient looking woman and another man, this one lanky and sandy haired. The woman spoke. “I am Mr. Petronides’s facilities manager. I am here to oversee your vacation of the apartment.”
Alexandra barely made it to the bathroom before she lost the little bit of food she’d forced herself to eat that day.
When she came out, the brunette was directing the two men in the packing of Alexandra’s things with an officious looking clipboard in one hand and a pen in the other. The facilities manager used her pen to point at a small Lladro figurine Dimitri had bought Alexandra when they were in Barcelona together.
The bald man picked up the statuette and began wrapping it in paper before putting it in one of the numerous boxes the moving team must have brought with them. Alexandra stood in appalled fascination as every item she could claim as her own was packed in a similarly efficient manner from the living room.
The last three days had been nightmarish, but this was beyond a nightmare. It was so horrifyingly real, she almost buckled from the pain of it.
“He sent you to evict me?” She asked the words in a bare whisper, but the other woman heard.
She turned to Alexandra, her face impassive. “I have been sent to facilitate your move, yes.”
“Have you evicted many of his ex-lovers?” Alexandra asked.
The other woman’s eyes twitched. “Your relationship with Mr. Petronides is not my business. I am simply following through on my instructions.”
“War criminals say the same thing in their defense.”
Her mouth tightening, the brunette turned away without answering. Alexandra did not push it. Instead, she marched into the bedroom she had shared with Dimitri and started packing her clothes. She didn’t want those men touching them. She already felt violated by their presence and the way they went through her home removing her things, removing traces of her.