The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance. Annie West

to love him? And why the heck would he have tracked her down? For what possible reason?

      ‘Sometimes I honestly think you talk like an alien from another planet, Gio,’ Billie countered, tightly controlling her anger and her pain. ‘In my world decent men do not marry one woman and continue sleeping with another. That is not acceptable to me and the idea that you found a woman to marry who didn’t care who you slept with just depresses me.’

      ‘But I am free now,’ Gio reminded her, frowning while he wondered what the hell had happened to Billie to change her so much that she could start arguing with him the minute he reappeared.

      ‘I don’t want to be rude but I’d like you to leave,’ Billie admitted unevenly.

      ‘You haven’t even heard what I have to say. What the hell is the matter with you?’ Gio demanded, shaken into outright disbelief by her aggressive attitude.

      ‘I don’t want to hear what you have to say. Why would I? We broke up a long time ago!’

      ‘We didn’t break up—you walked out, vanished,’ Gio contradicted with harsh censorious emphasis.

      ‘Gio...you told me I needed to wise up when you informed me you were getting married and I did exactly like you said...the way I always did,’ Billie muttered tartly. ‘I wised up and that means not listening to a word you have to say.’

      ‘I don’t know you like this.’

      ‘Why would you? It’s been two years since we were together and I’m not the same person any more,’ Billie told him with pride.

      ‘It might help if you could actually look me in the eye and tell me that,’ Gio quipped, scrutinising her rigid back.

      Reddening, Billie finally spun round and collided dangerously with stunning deep-set dark eyes, heavily fringed with lashes. The very first time she had seen those eyes he had been ill, running a high temperature and a dangerous fever, but those eyes had been no less mesmerising. She swallowed hard. ‘I’ve changed—’

      ‘Not convinced, moli mou.’ Gio gazed steadily back at her, enjoying the burst of sexual static now thickening the atmosphere. That her tension mirrored his told him everything he needed to know. Nothing had changed, certainly not the most basic chemistry of all. ‘I want you back.’

      In shock, Billie stopped breathing, but within seconds his admission made a crazy kind of Gio-based sense to her. By any standards, his marriage had lasted a ludicrously short time and she knew Gio didn’t like change in his private life. To his skewed way of thinking, reconciling with his former mistress might well now seem the most attractive and convenient option. ‘No way,’ she said breathlessly.

      ‘I still want you and you still want me—’

      ‘I’ve built a whole new life here. I can’t just abandon it,’ Billie muttered, wondering why on earth she was stooping to making such empty excuses. ‘You and me...it didn’t work—’

      ‘It worked brilliantly,’ he contradicted.

      ‘And your marriage didn’t?’ Billie could not resist asking.

      His hard facial bones locked in an expression she remembered from the past. It closed her out, warned she had crossed a boundary. ‘Since I’m divorced, obviously not,’ he fielded, smooth as glass.

      ‘But you and I,’ Gio husked, reaching out to grasp her hands before she could guess his intention, ‘did work very successfully—’

      ‘Depends on your definition of successful,’ Billie parried, her hands trembling in his, perspiration dampening her entire skin surface. ‘I wasn’t happy—’

      ‘You were always happy,’ Gio had no hesitation in asserting, because her chirpy, sunny nature was what he remembered most about her.

      Billie tried and failed to draw her hands free of his without making a production out of it. ‘I wasn’t happy,’ she repeated again, shivering as the almost forgotten scent of him assailed her nostrils: clean, fresh male overlaid with tones of citrus and something that was uniquely Gio, so familiar even after all the time that had passed that for a charged and very dangerous split second she wanted to lean closer and sniff him up like an intoxicating drug. ‘Please let go, Gio. Coming here was a waste of your time.’

      His hot urgent mouth swooped down on hers and he feasted on her parted lips with fiery enthusiasm, plundering and ravishing with a hunger she had never forgotten. Electrifying excitement shot through Billie like a lightning bolt to stimulate every skin cell in her body. The erotic thrust of his tongue into her mouth consumed her with burning heat and a crazy urge to get even closer to that lean, virile body of his. Wild hunger started a glow of warmth in her pelvis and made her nipples tighten and strain. She wanted, she wanted...and then sanity returned like a cold drop of water on her overheated skin when Theo wailed from the kitchen, jarring every maternal sense she possessed back to wakefulness.

      Wrenching her mouth free of his, Billie looked up into the smouldering dark golden eyes that had once broken her heart and said what she needed to say, what she owed it to herself to say. ‘Please leave, Gio...’

      Billie stood at the window watching Gio climb into his long black limousine on the street outside, her fingernails biting into her palms like sharp-pointed knives. Without even trying he had torn her in two, teaching her that her recovery was not as complete as she had imagined. Letting Gio walk away from her had almost killed her and there was still a weak, wicked part of her that longed to snatch him back with both hands. But she knew it was pointless, because Gio would be furious if he ever found out that Theo was his child.

      Right from the start, Billie had known and accepted that truth when, finding herself accidentally pregnant, she had chosen to give birth to a baby fathered by a male who had only wanted her for her body. There would be no support or understanding from Gio on the score of an illegitimate child, whom he would prefer not to have been born. She had only been with him a few weeks when he had told her that if she ever fell pregnant he would regard it as a disaster and that it would destroy their relationship, so she couldn’t say she hadn’t been warned. She had finally decided that what he didn’t know about wouldn’t hurt him and she had so much love to give their son that she had convinced herself that Theo would not suffer from the lack of a father.

      Or so she had thought...until after Theo’s birth when concerns began to steadily nibble gaping holes in her one-time conviction that she had made the right decision. Then she had guiltily asked herself if she was the most selfish woman alive to have chosen to have a child in secrecy who would never have a father and she had worried even more about how Theo might react when he was older to what little she would have to tell him.

      Would her son despise her some day for the role she had played in Gio’s bed? Would Theo resent the fact that although his father was rich he had grown up in comparative poverty? Would he blame her then for having brought him into the world on such terms?

CHAPTER TWO

      BILLIE STUFFED HER FACE in the pillow and sobbed her heart out for the first time in two long years and once again Gio had provided the spur. When she had finally cried out all the pain and the many other unidentifiable emotions attacking her, Dee was by her side, seated on the edge of the bed and stroking her head in an effort to comfort her.

      ‘Where’s Theo?’ Billie whispered instantly.

      ‘I put him down for his nap.’

      ‘Sorry about this,’ Billie mumbled, sliding off the bed to go into the bathroom and splash her face with cold water because her eyes and her nose were red.

      When she reappeared, Dee gave her an uncomfortable look. ‘That was him, wasn’t it? Theo’s dad?’

      Billie didn’t trust herself to speak and she simply nodded.

      ‘He’s absolutely gorgeous,’ Dee remarked