Читать книгу His Pregnant Bride: Pregnant by the Greek Tycoon / His Pregnant Princess / Pregnant: Father Needed - Ким Лоренс, Robyn Donald - Страница 6

CHAPTER THREE

ROYALTY was attending the charity performance and the media were out in force to record the event. On the red carpet the star of a soap was denying for the benefit of the TV cameras rumours that she was about to marry her co-star.

The foyer was thronged with other famous faces all wearing their best smiles and designer outfits. Despite the fact all the men present were for the most part similarly dressed in dark, formal suits, Paul had no problem locating the person he had come looking for.

Angolos Constantine stood out in a crowd. It wasn’t just his height and looks; it was that rare commodity—presence.

‘Angolos…?’ he called out in relief.

The tall figure, accompanied by an elegant brunette who was dripping with jewels, turned at the sound of his name. A smile spread across his lean face when he identified the speaker.

‘Paul!’ he exclaimed, detaching his partner from his arm and moving forward, his hand outstretched. ‘I didn’t know you were an opera buff…’

‘I’m not…and even if I was it wouldn’t have got me in here,’ the shorter man admitted frankly. ‘I only got this far by telling them I was your personal physician.’

The groove above Angolos’s strong patrician nose deepened. ‘That was resourceful of you.’ His head whipped slowly from side to side as he searched the crowd. ‘And where is the lovely Miranda?’

Paul Radcliff shook his head and scanned the olive-skinned face of the friend he had known since their university days. ‘Mirrie’s not here.’

‘I thought you two were joined at the hip.’

‘Her blood pressure was up a little…nothing serious,’ Paul hastened to assure the other man.

Angolos clapped his hand to his forehead. ‘I forgot!’ he admitted with a grimace of self-reproach. ‘When is my godchild due?’

‘Last week.’

Angolos’s brows lifted. ‘The plot deepens.’

‘You’re looking well, Angolos.’

It struck him that this was something of an understatement. Nobody looking at the lean, vital figure would have believed that a few years earlier his life had hung in the balance… Paul was one of the few people who did know, and he scarcely believed it himself!

One dark brow slanted sardonically. ‘Always the doctor, Paul?’ came the soft taunt.

‘And friend, I hope.’ It was friendship that, after a lot of heart-searching, had brought him here—that and his wife’s nagging.

‘The man has a right to know, Paul,’ she had insisted.

He had still been inclined to leave well alone, but very pregnant wives required humouring. She had insisted that he speak to Angolos without delay and, as she had pointed out, it wasn’t the sort of thing you could hit a man with on the phone.

So here he was and he wished he weren’t.

The hard features of the darker man softened into a smile of devastating charm. ‘And friend,’ he agreed quietly. ‘So what’s wrong, Paul?’

‘Nothing’s wrong, exactly,’ Paul returned uncomfortably.

Angolos didn’t bother hiding his scepticism. ‘Don’t give me that. It would take something pretty serious to make you leave Miranda alone just now. It follows that this is serious.’

That was Angolos, logical to his fingertips, except when it came to his wife. Where Georgie was concerned he got very Greek and unpredictable, reflected the Englishman.

‘She…Mirrie, that is, made me come,’ Paul admitted.

Angolos nodded. ‘And I’m glad she did. I would be insulted if you hadn’t come to me with your problem. Just hold on a sec and I’ll be with you.’

‘My…prob…? But I haven’t got…’ Paul stopped and watched with an expression of comical dismay as his friend exchanged words with the brunette, who looked far from happy with what he said. Seconds later Angolos had returned to his side.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Angolos suggested. ‘There’s a bar around the corner. We can talk.’

The first thing Paul said when they had ordered their drinks was— ‘Let’s get one thing straight. I’m not here to touch you for a loan, Angolos.’

‘I’m well aware that not all problems can be solved by throwing money at them, Paul.’ The level dark-eyed gaze made the other man shift uncomfortably. ‘But if yours ever can be I will throw money at them whether you like it or not.’ The hauteur in his strong-boned face was replaced by a warm smile as he added, ‘My friend, if it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t be here at all.’

‘Nonsense.’

The other man’s patent discomfort made Angolos grin, his teeth flashing white in the darkness of his face. ‘Your British self-deprecation borders on the ludicrous, Paul,’ he observed wryly. He set his elbows on the table and leant forward, his expression attentive. ‘Now what’s the problem?’

‘I wouldn’t call it a problem…It’s just that Dr Monroe retired and his patients have been relocated to us…’ In response to Angolos’s frown Paul breathed in deeply and went on quickly. ‘Yesterday my partner was called out on an emergency and I saw some of the new patients.’ He swallowed. ‘Georgie…your Georgie was one of them.’

Angolos’s expression didn’t change, but his actions as he picked up his untouched drink and lifted it to his lips were strangely deliberate. A moment later, having replaced the glass on the table, he lifted his eyes to those of the other man.

‘Is she ill?’

‘No, no!’

Almost imperceptibly Angolos’s shoulders relaxed.

He privately acknowledged that it was slightly perverse, considering he had cursed his faithless wife with all the inventive and vindictive power at his disposal three and a half years earlier, that the possibility of her being ill now should have awoken such primitive protective instincts.

‘Actually she looked fantastic…a bit thin, perhaps,’ Paul conceded half to himself. ‘She always had great bones.’

‘I have not the faintest interest in how she looks.’ Angolos’s jaw tightened as the other man turned an overtly sceptical gaze on his face. ‘And I don’t remember you mentioning her great bones when you told me I would be making the greatest mistake of my life if I married her…’

‘Ah, well, I was afraid that you were…’

‘Out of my mind?’ Angolos suggested when his friend stumbled. ‘You were right on both counts, as it happened.’ Elbows set on the table, he leaned forward slightly. ‘Did she ask you to intercede on my behalf? I thought you had more sense than to be taken in by—’

The doctor looked indignant. ‘Actually, mate, I got the distinct impression you’re the last person she wants to contact,’ he revealed frankly.

‘Indeed!’

‘She was pretty shocked when she saw me. In fact,’ he admitted, ‘I thought she was going to run out of the office. And when I said your name she looked…’ He stopped; there were no words that could accurately describe the bleak expression that had filled the young mother’s eyes. ‘Not happy,’ Paul finished lamely.

Angolos leaned back in his seat and, loosening a button on his jacket, folded his arms across his chest. ‘Yet you are here.’

‘I am.’ Paul ran a hand across his jaw. ‘This is hard. Mirrie does this sort of thing so much better than I do.’

At this point, if he had been having this conversation with anyone else Angolos would have told them to get on with it, but this was Paul, so he controlled his impatience and made suitably encouraging noises.

‘The thing is, Angolos, she brought the boy.’ The expression on his friend’s face as he looked at him from beneath knitted brows was less than encouraging, but Paul persisted. ‘Have you ever seen…?’

‘No, I have never seen the child,’ Angolos responded glacially.

‘He’s a fine little lad and not spoilt either. Georgie’s done a fine job, though I got the impression reading between the lines that money’s tight.’

Angolos’s lip curled contemptuously. ‘So this is what this is about—she’s been playing the poverty card. I deposit a more than adequate amount of money in a bank account for the child’s needs. If Georgette has got greedy, if she has some deluded hope of extracting a more substantial amount from me, she can forget it. She’s taken me for a fool once…’

‘She honestly didn’t mention money, Angolos, but if she wanted to bleed you… Did you see how much that rock star who denied paternity got taken for when the girl took him to court? DNA testing can—’

‘DNA testing,’ Angolos cut in, ‘has robbed her of the opportunity of passing the child off as mine. If she’s that desperate she could always sell her story to some tabloid.’ His nostrils flared as he drummed his long fingers on the tabletop. ‘That would be her style.’

‘Wouldn’t she have done that before now if she was going to? And if she wanted money I imagine the divorce settlement would be pretty generous.’

‘Over my dead body.’

‘I get the feeling you mean that literally.’

‘I was hoping it wouldn’t come to that,’ Angolos returned smoothly. ‘Are we drifting here, Paul?’

‘Yes, well, actually, it’s…the DNA thing…’

‘The DNA thing?’ Angolos said blankly.

‘Are you totally sure a test would come up negative?’

‘Sure…?’ Angolos looked at his friend incredulously. ‘You of all people can ask me that? The chemo saved my life but there was a price to pay—it rendered me sterile. My only chance of having a child is stored in a deep-freeze somewhere.’

‘It was tough luck,’ Paul, very conscious of his own impending fatherhood, admitted.

‘Tough luck?’ Angolos’s expressive mouth dropped at one corner. ‘Yes, I suppose it was tough luck. However, considering that without the treatment and, more importantly, your early diagnosis I would not be here at all, I consider myself lucky.’

‘But it’s not an easy thing to come to terms with.’

‘Actually, intellectually I have no problem with the situation, but somehow, no matter how many times I tell myself there’s more to a man’s masculinity than his sperm count, I still feel…’ His mouth twisted in a self-derisive smile, he met Paul’s eyes. ‘Maybe Georgette was right about that, at least—perhaps at heart I am an unreconstructed chauvinist…’

‘Was there ever any doubt?’

This retort drew a rueful smile from Angolos.

‘Is that why you never told her about the chemo and the cancer? Were you afraid she’d…?’ Paul gave an embarrassed grimace. ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t…’

‘Was I afraid she’d think me any less a man, you mean? What do you think, Paul?’

‘I think if I knew what went on in your head I’d be the only one,’ his friend returned frankly. ‘You know, when it comes to answering questions you’d give the slipperiest politician a run for his money. If you want my opinion, you were wrong. I know Georgie was young, but she always struck me as pretty mature…’

‘Mature enough to cheat on me and try to pass off the product of her amorous adventures as mine.’

Paul winced. ‘Ah, about that, Angolos…’

‘You want to discuss my wife’s infidelity?’

‘Of course not.’

‘If you’ve discovered who her lover was…’ Right up to the end she had refused to admit her guilt or provide the name of her lover. Though he knew who he was. ‘I’m really no longer interested.’

‘Maybe there was no lover?’

Angolos’s dark brows knitted as he gave a contemptuous smile. ‘Was no lover…? What are you suggesting—immaculate conception?’

Paul held up his hand. ‘Angolos, hear me out. I know that the sort of chemotherapy you had normally results in infertility, but there are exceptions…you didn’t have any tests post—’

‘No, or the counselling, which apparently would have made me content to be less than a man.’

‘Yes, you made your opinion of counselling quite plain at the time.’

‘One cannot alter what has happened; one must just accept.’

‘Terribly fatalistic and fine.’

‘We Greeks are fatalists.’

‘You’re the least fatalistic person I’ve ever met. And sometimes it helps to talk…but I didn’t come here to discuss the benefits of counselling.’

‘Are you likely to tell me what you did come for any time this side of Christmas?’

‘The boy is yours.’

A spasm of anger passed across Angolos’s face. Paul watched with some trepidation as his friend took several deep breaths. There was a white line etched around his lips as he said in a low, carefully controlled voice, ‘Anyone but you…Paul…’

‘You’d knock my block off, I know, but I still have to say it. The boy, Angolos, he’s the living spit of you. Oh, I don’t mean a little bit like—I mean a miniature version. There’s absolutely no doubt about it in my mind—Nicky is your son.’

‘Is this some sort of joke, Paul?’

‘I’ve got a warped sense of humour, Angolos, but I’m not cruel. If you don’t believe me I suggest you go look for yourself.’

‘I’m not buying into this fantasy.’

‘They’re staying at the beach place.’

‘I have absolutely no intention of going anywhere near that woman.’

‘Well, that’s up to you, but if it was me—’

Angolos’s eyes flashed. ‘It is not you. You have a wife waiting for you at home; you will hold your newly born child in your arms…’ He saw the shock on the other man’s face and, worse, the dawning sympathy. ‘The truth is, Paul,’ Angolos added in a more moderate tone, ‘I envy you. Never take what you have for granted.’