Page 28 of After-Hours Heir

He said nothing. “This is a terrible place to have this conversation.”

“It is,” she agreed. “But I didn’t know what else to do. I just found out this morning.”

“Before the meeting?”

“Yes.”

“You told me right away, even though I hadn’t been in contact with you?”

“I didn’t overthink it. I knew that whatever decision I made, I wanted you to suffer along with me.”

He laughed, but there was no humor in it. “That is more ruthless than I tend to think you are.”

“I’m feeling ruthless, to be honest.”

For a second, she looked across the bistro table at him and felt completely upended. How had they just been sitting across from each other in a conference room? How had he been the man on the other side of those texts? How had it come down to this? She wasn’t going to think about the fact that he was the man she had made love with. Because that was an even more difficult truth to wrap her mind around.

“This changes everything,” he said.

“We don’t know what it changes yet. We haven’t fully processed—”

“There’s nothing to process. You’re pregnant with my child, and so you will marry me.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

ITWASAcold day in hell when something surprised Christos Onassis. Which meant right now the underworld must be experiencing its first blizzard.

Because never in his life…not in his wildest…

Dreams?

He didn’t even have dreams. He went to sleep and closed his eyes and saw nothing but darkness.

He had never conceived of this.

Sylvie Jones?

She was the woman, his secret. She was the one he had been carrying on an affair with. The one who had left him rocked, gutted, after their time together?

He looked at her frizzy red hair, her freckles, her ample bosom. He felt attraction to her. He had for a long time, but he had always put that down to the fact that it was human nature to crave the forbidden, and very little was forbidden to him. Lusting after a woman who so clearly hated him was of course its own sort of fantasy.

One that he welcomed.

And yet. And yet. The thought that she was the one that he had been…

She knew him.

For a moment, he felt as if his ruthlessly tailored suit had been stripped from his body. Like he was sitting there in the coffeehouse naked.

He had never worried about such a thing and had never found such a thought embarrassing in his life.

He wasn’t even sure he had ever been embarrassed before.

She knew things about him. This woman that he was engaged in a business battle with knew things about him.

He’d…he’d had sex with her. And it had stripped him of his protective layer, and it had been her all along.

And suddenly, something occurred to him.