The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance. Annie West

is she?’ he pressed.

      ‘I have the address, Mr Letsos, but I haven’t yet acquired sufficient info to make up a proper background report,’ Joe Henley explained. ‘If you give me a couple of days, I’ll proceed the usual way—’

      ‘All I need, all I want,’ Gio stressed with rippling impatience at the thought of waiting even an hour, ‘is her address.’

      And suddenly, Gio was smiling for the first time in a very long time. He had finally found her. Of course that didn’t automatically mean he intended to forgive her, he swiftly qualified, straightening his muscular shoulders. His wide, sensual mouth compressed in a manner that would have made his chief executives quail, for he was a tough man, an inflexible, stubborn man, very much feared in the business world. After all, Billie had walked out on him, was, in fact, the only woman ever to pull that stunt on Gio Letsos. But there she was on screen, his Billie, still wearing flowery clothes like a nature explosion, a shock of caramel-coloured blonde curls flowing round her heart-shaped elfin face, her wide green eyes unusually serious.

      ‘You’re not a very active host,’ a voice remarked from the doorway. The speaker was as short as Gio was tall and as fair as Gio was dark but Gio and Leandros Conistis had been friends since their schooldays, both of them born into wealthy, privileged and pedigreed, if dysfunctional, Greek families and sent to England to board at exclusive fee-paying schools.

      Gio closed down his laptop and studied his old friend. ‘Did you expect anything different?’

      ‘Even for you, that sounds arrogant,’ Leandros countered.

      ‘We both know that even if I threw a non-alcoholic party in a cave, it would be packed,’ Gio said drily, well aware of the pulling power of his vast wealth.

      ‘I didn’t know you were going to throw a divorce party.’

      ‘That would be tasteless. It’s not a divorce party.’

      ‘You can’t fool me,’ Leandros warned him.

      Gio’s lean, strong face was expressionless, his famed reserve kicking in hard and fast. ‘Calisto and I had a very civilised divorce—’

      ‘And now you’re back on the market and the piranhas are circling,’ Leandros commented.

      ‘I will never marry again,’ Gio declared grimly.

      ‘Never is a long time...’

      ‘I mean it,’ Gio emphasised darkly.

      His friend said nothing and then tried to lighten the atmosphere with an old joke, ‘At least you could trust Calisto to know that Canaletto isn’t the name of a race horse!’

      Momentarily, Gio froze, his lean, dark, devastating features tightening, for that gag had worn thin years before he stopped hearing it. Sadly, not Billie’s most shining moment.

      ‘I mean...’ Leandros was still grinning ‘...I don’t blame you for ditching that one...what an airhead!’

      Gio said nothing. Even with his oldest friend Gio was not given to making confidences or baring his soul. In actuality, Gio had not ditched Billie; he simply hadn’t taken her out with him in public again.

      * * *

      In the garage, Billie was going through garments and costume jewellery that she had acquired during the week to sell in her vintage clothes shop. She was sorting items into piles for washing, repair or specialist cleaning while dumping anything past its prime. While she worked, she talked non-stop to her son. ‘You’re absolutely the most cute and adorable baby ever born,’ she told Theo warmly as he kicked his legs in his high chair, smiled beatifically and happily got on with eating his mid-morning snacks.

      With a sigh, she straightened her aching back, reflecting that all the bending and stretching had at least started knocking off a few pounds of the extra baby weight she had been carrying for months. The doctor had told her that that was normal but Billie had always had to watch her weight and she knew that while putting it on was easy, getting it back off again was not. And the problem with being only five feet two inches tall with an overly large bust and hips was that it only took a few surplus pounds and a thicker waistline to make her look like a little barrel.

      She would take all the kids to the playground and walk round and round and round the little park with the pram, she decided ruefully.

      ‘Coffee?’ Dee called out of the back door.

      ‘I’d love one,’ Billie told her cousin and housemate, Dee, with a smile.

      Thankfully, she hadn’t been lonely since she had rediscovered her friendship with Dee, yet they might so easily have missed out on meeting up again. Billie had been four months pregnant when she attended her aunt’s funeral in Yorkshire and got talking to Dee, whom she had gone to primary school with although Dee was several years older. Her housemate was a single parent as well. At her mother’s funeral her cousin had sported a fading black eye and more bruises than a boxer. Back then Dee had been living in a refuge for battered women with her twins. Jade and Davis were now five years old and had started school. For all of them life in the small town where Billie had bought a terraced house was a fresh start.

      And life was good, Billie told herself firmly as she nursed a cup of coffee and listened to Dee complain about the amount of homework Jade was getting, which related more to Dee’s inability to understand maths in any shape or form than the teacher overloading Dee’s daughter with work. This life was ordinary and safe, she reasoned thoughtfully, soothed into relaxation by the hum of the washing machine and the silence of the children while they watched television in the sitting room next door. Admittedly there were no highs of exciting moments but there were no gigantic lows either.

      Billie would never forget the agonies of her own worst low, a slough of despair that had lasted for endless weeks. That phase of her life had almost destroyed her and she could still barely repress a shudder when she recalled the depression that had engulfed her. She had been hurting so badly and there had seemed to be no way of either stopping or avoiding that pain. In fact, in the end it had taken an extraordinary and rather frightening development to show Billie a light at the end of the tunnel and a future she could actually face. She contemplated Theo with glowing satisfaction.

      ‘It’s not healthy to love a baby so much,’ Dee warned her with a frown. ‘Babies grow up and eventually leave you. Theo’s a lovely baby but he’s still just a child, Billie, and you can’t continue building your whole life round him. You need a man—’

      ‘I need a man like a fish needs a bicycle,’ Billie interposed without hesitation, reckoning that the disaster zone of her one and only real relationship was quite sufficient to have put her off men for life. ‘And who are you to talk?’

      A tall, whip-thin blonde with grey eyes, Dee grimaced to concede the point. ‘Been there, done that.’

      ‘Exactly,’ Billie agreed.

      ‘But I don’t have the options you have,’ Dee argued. ‘If I were you, I’d be out there dating up a storm!’

      Theo clutched Billie’s ankles and slowly levered himself upright, beaming with triumph at his achievement. Considering her son had had both legs in a special cast for months to cure his hip dysplasia, he was catching up on his mobility fast. For a split second he also reminded her powerfully of his father and she didn’t like that, didn’t go there in her mind because she didn’t allow herself to dwell on the past. Looking back on the mistakes she had made was counterproductive. Those experiences had taught her hard lessons and she had forced herself to move on past them.

      Dee studied her cousin in frank frustration. Billie Smith was the equivalent of a man magnet. With the figure of a pocket Venus, a foaming mane of dense toffee-coloured curls and an exceptionally pretty face, Billie exuded the kind of natural warm and approachable sex appeal that attracted the opposite sex in droves. Men tried to chat Billie up in the supermarket, in car parks or in the street and if they were behind a car wheel they honked