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were as expressionless as his face. ‘I do not do business in bed. Ever. So, although you were very good—very good indeed—’ his voice was a lacerating drawl, like a razor being drawn over her flesh ‘—you have used me for no purpose. Except, of course—’ and now his eyes washed over her suddenly, and the expression in them made her gorge rise ‘—to demonstrate your… expertise. Exceptional expertise, in fact.’ Long lashes swept down over his eyes, and when they swept back up again the obsidian gaze cut like a scalpel into her.
    ‘You’re very skilled, Rhianna , but you should have contented yourself with a cash payment. I’d have been happy to pay for you. In fact…’ He reached inside his jacket again, but this time he took out a slim leather tooled wallet. He flicked it open. A cluster of fifty-pound notes fluttered on the bed. ‘Keep the change,’ he said softly.
    Then he turned and walked to the door.
    ‘You have ten minutes to vacate this suite. Hotel security will escort you out.’
    At the entrance to the reception room he paused. He did not turn.
    ‘As of now, MML no longer has any interest in Davies Yacht Design.’
    His voice was hard. As hard as stone.
    He walked out. He didn’t look back.
    In the bed, Rhianna started to shake.

CHAPTER THREE
    ‘H E ’ S in here.’
    The woman opened a door off the narrow hallway. She had an infant balanced on her hip, tugging at her hair and whimpering, and an air of distraction about her that did not impress Alexis Petrakis.
    Alexis controlled his emotions. He’d been doing that ever since he’d taken the call that his PA had patched through to him.
    The call that threatened to change his life for ever.
    It was only by the most stringent exercise of self-control that he had got to this point now. The moment of truth.
    As he walked into the room, in front of the woman he felt his hands clench at his side.
    Let this not be true! Thee mou , let this not be true!
    Because it couldn’t, couldn’t be true. It couldn’t be true what that social worker had told him over the phone That she had opened an envelope in Rhianna Davies’s flat, as she was packing things for the child who had just been taken into emergency foster care, and read the handwritten note clipped to the boy’s birth certificate—citing himself as father of her son.
    Rhianna Davies was lying.
    Christos , there could be no other explanation!
    A woman like that—who had used him, had gone to bed with him to get his money—would not have hesitated a month, a week, to claim his paternity of a child she had conceived in that sordid encounter!
    So she could only be lying. Lying to cause trouble…
    Which meant that the child he was about to set eyes on could not possibly be his.
    Dear God, please no—not his!
    Alexis’s eyes swept around the room. The carpet was strewn with children’s toys. Two school-age children were sitting on a sofa, watching children’s TV. Alexis felt his guts clench, and then release.
    But even as he felt the cold start to drain out of his veins the woman began speaking in a deliberately low voice he could hardly hear above the blaring TV.
    ‘He’s not settled at all well. I’ve done my best, but he’s just not responding. Poor little mite,’ she finished, her distracted manner softening suddenly.
    She walked in past Alexis and went up to a large armchair half hidden in this small room by the open door. Alexis felt his head turn to follow her as if it were filled with lead. Crouching down, rebalancing the infant on her hip slightly to do so, she said in a gentler voice, ‘Hello, pet. How’s tricks ?’ She ruffled the hair of the small child curled into the confines of the armchair, a battered teddy clutched tightly to him.
    The child did not respond to the woman, either to her voice or her touch. He just went on sitting there, curled like a foetus , immobile, unresponsive. Tension in every line of his little body, his face averted so only his profile