Page 23 of Billion-Dollar Baby Shock

After a fifteen-minute journey across the Aegean Sea, they landed on a much bigger island on a small airfield beside an airport. A car was waiting to take them to the venue and Tara sat in the back, glad she and the dress and her hair were still relatively intact.

The driver put up the privacy division, cocooning them in the back of the car. She was still feeling guilty at walking away from her son but Dion’s words reverberated in her head.

‘You’re not on your own with this.’

No, she wasn’t. And it was taking some getting used to. The fact that she could take time for herself. Indulge herself.

Tara sensed Dion’s eyes on her and her skin got hot.

She looked at him and his gaze was golden.

He was looking at her with such nakedly explicit desire that her insides liquefied.

He did still want her. The relief was a little shameful.

He said, ‘I’m glad you came. It would have been an awful waste of a dress.

’ His gaze moved down and then back up again. He said, ‘ Gattina …you’re killing me.’

Gattina. Tara couldn’t breathe.

He had so much control over her body it made her feel vulnerable enough for a moment to try and inject something of the outside world back into this cocoon.

She wasn’t quite ready to succumb to his raw magnetism without letting him know she was still focused on her son.

‘Have you thought about what you’ll do when I don’t leave? ’

He said nothing for a long moment, then finally, ‘I’m sure we’ll make it work.’

Tara tried to envisage that. With her living and working in Athens to stay close to her son.

In the same city as Dion. Possibly seeing him out and about with other women.

And what if he did meet someone one day who managed to break through that impenetrable wall he’d built around himself?

A woman who he would marry. Niko would have a stepmother.

Tara suddenly felt quite alone at that prospect and it shook her to her core because, not only had finding out she had a son turned her world upside down, but his father had too.

Making her rethink everything she’d believed she wanted for her life, after years of sacrificing her own wishes and dreams for her siblings.

She’d believed her freedom would come from no longer feeling responsible for her siblings, but she realised that would never go.

And now she had a new responsibility: Niko.

But he didn’t feel like a responsibility.

He felt like opportunity and possibility and things Tara had never considered she might feel.

Excitement, for the future. Love, desire. She looked at Dion in shock as those words struck her. Love and desire.

He caught her eye and frowned. ‘What is it? You’ve gone pale. Are you all right?’

Somehow Tara shook her head and garbled something unintelligible.

‘Fine, just fine.’ She hurriedly looked out of her own window unseeingly as that revelation resounded through her head and body.

She knew she was in thrall to him physically, but was she really falling for Dion?

A man she’d met mere…days ago, and yet she felt as if she’d known him for ever.

And who she would know for ever, no matter what.

Their lives were bound together by Niko.

But Dion had made it very clear that they wouldn’t be together . She would be at a remove somewhere.

The thing that was keeping them together, this crackling electricity, was finite. As Dion had also pointed out. Maybe he thought—hoped?—that a couple of days in Paris would rid him of any desire for her.

Feeling a little desperate, Tara wondered if it might rid her of this notion that she was falling for him. And rid her of her desire for him. It wasn’t exactly a complication she relished either!

It was a far cry from what she’d originally imagined might happen when she met Niko’s father. If she did love him, how would she cope if anything happened to him, or Niko? She went cold all over. She knew the devastation of loss. How had she not even considered this until now?

Her breathing became short and fast and she could feel her chest tightening. She hadn’t had a panic attack in years but she was afraid she was on her way to one right now. But then Dion took her hand. ‘Tara, look at me.’

She turned her head and concentrated on Dion’s eyes. The lines of his face. His hand, warm on hers. She managed to get her breathing under control. The tightness in her chest eased.

‘Are you nervous about this evening?’

She shook her head. ‘No, I’m okay now.’ Which was just as well, because the car was pulling to a smooth stop outside the venue. All Tara could see were huge stone walls and lots of people being disgorged from cars onto a red carpet.

Dion let her hand go and stepped out of the car and came around, opening her door to let her out.

She sucked in fresh air. He took her hand again and she clung on as they walked over to the red carpet.

A veritable wall of photographers was on one side.

Dion bent his head towards her. ‘Just follow my lead, okay? Normally I wouldn’t stop but we’ll let them take some pictures. ’

Tara had no choice but to follow Dion as they stepped up in front of the bank of photographers. She even heard one say to another, ‘Dimitriou is stopping—he never stops!’

And then it went crazy, a million flashes of light. Dion bent his head again. ‘Just smile, a couple more seconds.’

Tara fixed a rictus grin on her face and, somehow, endured the ordeal and then Dion was leading her up the carpet and into the venue. Tara’s heart was clamouring. Dion turned to her, ‘Okay?’

She half nodded. ‘That was…intense. Is it always like that?’

He nodded. He looked grim. ‘Sorry, I should have warned you.’

Tara waved a hand. ‘It’s fine, but I think I might need a drink.’

Dion snagged two glasses of sparkling wine from a passing waiter and handed her one. Tara took a gulp and wrinkled her nose at the fizz. Dion was looking at her.

She said, ‘What?’

He shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

She didn’t have time to probe further because he was accosted by someone, who was followed by someone else.

It gave Tara time to get her breath back and take in their impressive surroundings.

She could glimpse an amphitheatre where an orchestra was set up, people milling about.

It was more than impressive, the location was stunning, against a backdrop of ancient ruins and with the vast sky and sea beyond.

They were gradually encouraged into the amphitheatre and Dion had seats near the front and right of the stage.

As the crowd settled, the music started and the opera singers’ voices swelled and filled the entire space.

Tara was swept away. The fact that it was outside in the balmy air, with the moon rising in the sky behind the ruins…

it was magical. She’d never experienced anything like it, and soaked it all up, rapt.

When it was over she looked at Dion, who was regarding her with an indecipherable expression on his face. He said, ‘You really loved that, didn’t you?’

She felt emotional. ‘It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen or heard.’

There was a wry touch to Dion’s mouth. ‘Now you’re making me feel jaded.’

‘Good,’ Tara responded tartly. ‘If you’ve lost the ability to appreciate such beauty then I fear for your soul.’

‘My soul was lost a long time ago.’

Tara looked at him. ‘No, it’s still there, it’s just buried under layers and layers of self-protection and cynicism.’

* * *

Dion might have argued with Tara but she excused herself to go to the bathroom before they left and he found himself waiting for her as the guests made their way back out of the venue. Night had fallen now and Dion had to admit that he couldn’t really have argued with Tara because she was right.

She was also the only person he could imagine saying something so blunt to him. Self-protection and cynicism. The fact that she saw him was both disturbing and exposing. He’d told her so much. Spilled his guts to her, practically from the moment he’d met her.

He knew he was cynical. He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t been cynical. As for self-protection…wasn’t that just what everyone did? Otherwise how could you function in the world? You wouldn’t last two minutes before being crushed under the pain and disappointment meted out by people.

She’d been in his life for mere days. Another reminder of what was at stake here. Falling under her spell and forgetting the devastation she could cause.

He’d looked out of his office window earlier that day and he’d seen Tara in the pool with Niko, holding him high before lowering him into the water.

He’d been squealing with joy, arms flapping at the water.

They’d been wearing sunhats. Niko in a sunsuit and Tara in a one-piece that might as well have been a string bikini for the effect it had had on him.

It had been a perfectly pedestrian domestic scene, a mother playing with her son, and yet it had caught at Dion in a million jagged places deep inside him.

He’d felt a sense of poignant loss for something he’d never experienced.

But he was also ashamed to admit that he’d felt a spurt of something that had felt suspiciously like jealousy.

An emotion he’d never really encountered before.

Certainly not for a woman. But he’d felt jealous of Tara too, and her easy accord with Niko, and how she’d slotted so seamlessly into their lives.

The overwhelming sensation it had left Dion with was one of dread.

He knew not to trust such a benign image.

He knew the only things he could trust were himself and his son.

They were a unit and they would be a unit long after Tara had decided to move on.

And that was okay. He’d left her under no illusions that he expected anything else.

Her voice came into his head. ‘You do expect something of me—the worst possible outcome.’