'I didn't hear a car,' Billie commented.
'I walked over from the villa,' Alexei fielded, eyes framed by dark-as-midnight lashes skimming over her blushing face. 'Sorry if I interrupted something.'
'You didn't,' Billie countered flatly, tugging her skirt down to her knees and reaching defiantly for another sandwich.
The two men walked round the house while Billie sat outside in the shade, fed up with both of them as she listened to snatches of their revealing dialogue. Damon was so deferential around Alexei that he set her teeth on edge and Alexei had no business declaring that a larger terrace was a necessity, rather than an extravagant extra. And what was Damon playing at? Why did men always refuse to take no for an answer? How many times did she have to tell him that she wasn't interested now in dating him?
Alexei reappeared and asked her for the keys of the car she had driven over, which did after all belong to him. 'Come back with me. I have some calls for you to make.'
Ignoring Damon's look of disappointment, Billie scrambled up and smoothed down her skirt. Red-hot temper made her hands tremble a little. It was not that she wanted to stay and risk encouraging Damon, it was resentment at being smoothly manipulated into doing what Alexei wanted her to do.
'You're about to overstep the boundaries again,' she warned Alexei fiercely as she climbed into the hot car with him.
'He's not the guy for you. A bloody picnic on a building site…' he breathed with incredulous derision. 'How cool is that?'
'If I listened to you, I'd never get a guy! Every time one comes near me, you interfere and stick a spoke in the wheels. I'd like to know how you justify that when I'm not even allowed to call a doctor if you hurt yourself!' Billie launched back at him in an angry hail of words that she shot at him like bullets.
'You can trust me to put your interests first,' he drawled with unblemished assurance, his bold bronzed profile relaxed. 'Damon will most probably end up returning to his wife and children. Don't get caught up in their drama.'
'Working for you I've got enough drama of my own!' Billie bawled back at him, turning up the air conditioning with an impatient hand, ignoring it when he winced at the furious rush of icy air directed at him. 'You have no right to interfere. I'm an adult entitled to make my own mistakes. Stay out of my private life!'
And she sat there thinking how ridiculous it was for her to argue with him when she was carrying his child, to be able to shout but not to tell him the truth. But he would pity her if he knew the truth and he would feel very guilty. She knew him well enough to make that forecast and although her heart ached inside her like an open wound she was painfully aware that neither his pity nor his guilt, and certainly not his money, would provide her with the smallest comfort…