The Pregnancy Shock Read Free

size and I don’t think you can deliver without help. I believe the possibility of a C-section was discussed during your antenatal visits?’ the doctor questioned, while the midwife urged Billie not to push any more.
    Billie nodded anxious affirmation, too out of breath to speak.
    Hilary gripped her hand. ‘You’ll be fine and so will the baby be—’
    Everything moved very fast from that point. The procedure had to be explained to Billie and she had to sign consent papers before she was moved out of the labour room to the operating theatre. She was given an epidural and while her lower body went numb a little curtain was erected midway down her body so that she couldn’t see anything. Time became a little blurred and there was a feeling of pressure and then suddenly Hilary was whooping with excitement.
    ‘It’s a boy, Billie!’
    ‘A whopping great boy,’ the doctor added.
    The cry of a baby intervened and Billie’s heart lurched. She was so eager to see him she could hardly contain herself while the staff took care of measuring him and making him presentable for his first meeting with his mum. He weighed ten pounds and he was verylong, exactly what she might have expected with his father’s genes; Alexei’s family was one of tall, well-built men. At last her son was placed in her arms.
    Tears stung Billie’s eyes as she looked down into that adorable little face and carefully tracked her gaze over his big dark eyes and the shock of black hair that proclaimed his paternity. ‘He’s…gorgeous,’ she whispered chokily, smoothing a wondering fingertip over his baby-soft cheek.
    At that moment everything she had undergone to have him seemed worthwhile. In the early stages of her pregnancy, Hilary had talked her through every option from termination to adoption, yet nobody loved babies more than Hilary, who had never had the opportunity to have one of her own.
    ‘Any idea what you’ll call him?’ her aunt prompted, stepping back to let the nurse reclaim the baby, for Billie’s eyes were very definitely sliding shut.
    ‘Nik—’
    ‘What?’ Hilary queried.
    ‘Nikolos.’ Billie spelled out the letters through lips that barely moved.
    ‘Isn’t giving him a Greek name a little revealing?’
    ‘I’ve lived in Greece since I was eight,’ her niece reminded her, and on that thought she drifted asleep while her mind swept her back seventeen years to her very first meeting with Alexei Nikolos Drakos…
    The boys shouted rude words at Bliss when she followed them onto the beach. She knew the words were wrong but she didn’t understand their meaning and refused tolet their attitude bother her. At least the boys talked to her in some way, recognising her actual existence. The girls in the village school, on the other hand, shunned her, whispering behind her back and shooting disapproving looks at her while excluding her from their games and conversations. It was very similar to the way her mother was treated by the local women. After a year, Bliss had discovered that life on the Greek island of Speros could be very lonely for a little girl who didn’t fit in.
    Bliss hated everything about herself: her lack of height, her fiery red head of hair and skinny body, even her pale skin, which burned horribly in the sun. The fact she had no father meant yet more mortification on an island where single parents were frowned upon. And although Bliss would never have admitted it to anyone in those days, her mother embarrassed her most of all.
    As Lauren often reminded her daughter, she was only thirty years old and couldn’t be expected to live as if she were a ‘dried-up old hag’. An artist, Lauren rented a small house in the village and sold watercolours to the well-off tourists who patronised the exclusive resort spa at the other end of the island. None of the local women dressed as her mother did. Lauren was most often to be found clad in skimpy bikini bottoms with her full braless breasts bouncing in a cut-off