Baby of Shame by Julia James Page A

man digging a hole in the sand with him was his father.
    A new thought came to her.
    Maybe Alexis Petrakis wasn’t planning on telling him after all. Maybe he was still thinking about whether to acknowledge him as his son.
    Supposing he does and then changes his mind?
    Her stomach clenched. Far, far worse than not knowing who your father was would be knowing your father had rejected you.
    As if you weren’t good enough for him.
    As if you’d failed him.
    Emotion knifed through her. Emotion and memory.
    Nicky scrambled to his feet.
    ‘I want to put water in!’ he announced. He seized his bucket and raced to the sea’s edge.
    Before she could stop herself Rhianna heard herself blurting out, as Nicky ran out of earshot.
    ‘You’re not going to acknowledge him, are you? He’s not going to know you’re his father, is he?’
    Alexis’s head swivelled to her.
    ‘Nicky will know I am his father. When I judge the time to be right I will tell him,’ he said grimly.
    ‘You can’t change your mind once he knows. You know that, don’t you? You can’t decide later that you don’t want to be his father any more.’
    There was sharpness in her voice. And fear too.
    He looked at her, eyes narrowed.
    Assessing.
    The way he’d looked at her when he’d come out on the terrace.
    ‘I have no intention of doing so. Nicky is my son for ever.’ His voice became grim suddenly. ‘Every boy needs a father. Something you callously chose to ignore. His needs are paramount. Which is why you will stay with Nicky while he needs you— ’
    ‘He’ll always need me. I’m his mother!’
    His jaw tightened. ‘While he needs you, he has you.’ His eyes flashed again, dark fire. ‘I would never part a child from its mother—even if she wanted to leave him!’
    Rhianna stared at him incredulously.
    ‘ No woman leaves her child!’
    There was a sudden night-black tension in his face.
    ‘Some do. Some women have no maternal instinct. It is a quality absent from their beings.’
    Rhianna bit her lip. ‘Then they don’t have children.’
    ‘Don’t they?’ The dark of his eyes seemed to be burning with a blackness that was impenetrable. That reached down into the depths.
    Something shuddered deep inside her. Then, like the breaking of a tautening wire, Nicky was stumbling towards them with his bucket slopping water, and Alexis turned his attention away from her.
    Back to his son.
    Nicky was pouring the water into the hole. He watched it a moment, then announced.
    ‘It’s going away!’
    ‘It won’t stay, Nicky,’ Alexis told him. ‘It’s draining into the sand.’
    ‘But I want it to stay!’ Nicky exclaimed indignantly.
    ‘We can’t always have what he want ,’ he replied.
    His eyes flickered towards the woman who sat, legs curled under her, on the sand. No, you couldn’t always have what you wanted.
    He didn’t want Rhianna Davies to be Nicky’s mother, but she was.
    He watched her a moment. Her face was shuttered and tense, not looking anywhere near him. She was still thin, but she was no longer the death’s head she’d been when he’d first laid eyes on her in hospital.
    A frown darkened his eyes.
    It hadn’t been drugs that had made her look so ill.
    When the nurse had so soundly refuted this, he’d contacted Dr Paniotis and he had confirmed this morning that there was no evidence of drug abuse by Rhianna Davies. What the social worker had found in her flat had simply been flu powder. And she had, indeed, been suffering from a serious untreated lung infection before she’d been knocked down on a pedestrian crossing by a drunk speeding driver.
    Which meant that it had not been her fault she’d ended up in hospital looking like a death’s head. Which meant—
    His mind veered off the path it was leading him down. No, he would not feel compunction. Nor pity for her. He could be glad, yes, for Nicky’s sake, that at least she wasn’t a drug addict, but that in no way exonerated her from the rest of her