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‘Annabel Weston is in my care,’ she told the man quietly. ‘She is my responsibility, no matter who the father turns out to be.’
He glanced at her, reluctant admiration flickering briefly in his eyes before he shrugged. ‘We shall see.’
Panic rose in her throat, and she tasted bile. Was Theo implying that they would take Annabel away from her if Christos was the father? Lukas had said something similar.
Why had she not considered how this might happen?
Because you wanted the fairy tale.
Theo strode away, and Lukas put his arm around Rhiannon’s shoulders, guiding her towards the rocky path that led to the villa.
‘None of you want her,’ she choked out in a whisper, and Lukas simply shrugged.
‘It’s not a question of want.’
‘But of responsibility, right?’ She shook her head. ‘I wanted more for Annabel.’
‘I’m afraid,’ Lukas said quietly, ‘that what you want is not my primary consideration.’
She glanced at him, saw the grim determination hardening his eyes, his mouth, his words, and felt a stab of fear. She was not his primary consideration…or any consideration at all, she finished bleakly.
* * *
AN HOUR LATER Rhiannon prowled restlessly around her bedroom. It was large and spacious, with a wide balcony overlooking the sea. Annabel sat on the floor, playing happily with some seashells Rhiannon had found in a decorative bowl.
There was a light knock on the door, and with her heart rising straight into her throat she called out, ‘Come in.’
Lukas opened the door. He’d changed from his business attire, was now dressed in jeans and a white cotton shirt open at the throat. Those few undone buttons revealed a tanned column of skin that Rhiannon couldn’t seem to tear her gaze from.
‘Have you found everything to your satisfaction?’ he asked, and she jerked her eyes upwards towards his face.
His hair was damp, brushed back from his face, his eyes sparkling silver as he smiled with a wry amusement that caused her face to burn with humiliated realisation.
He knew how he affected her, and he thought it was amusing. No doubt he had women falling for him all the time, and he obviously had no problem putting them in their place. Rejecting them.
‘Yes, fine,’ she said shortly.
He glanced at her still unopened suitcase by the bed. ‘You haven’t unpacked.’
‘We’re not going to be here for long.’
‘Perhaps not,’ Lukas agreed. ‘But it would be more comfortable, certainly, to enjoy a short stay.’
‘Before I’m booted out?’ Rhiannon interjected. ‘Sorry, I don’t feel like complying.’
Lukas shrugged, ran a hand through his hair. Rhiannon watched as it flopped boyishly across his forehead; she resisted the urge to brush it back with itching fingers.
‘Suit yourself,’ he said. ‘I only thought you might want to be comfortable.’
‘I don’t want to be comfortable,’ she snapped, even though she knew she was being childish.
Lukas’s eyes flashed. ‘You should—at least for Annabel’s sake. Surely it is in her best interests for both of you to be relaxed and comfortable during your stay here? It is, in fact, your responsibility,’ he continued in a harder voice, ‘to be so.’
Rhiannon’s mouth pursed in annoyance. ‘It’s all about responsibility, isn’t it?’
For a half-second Lukas looked nonplussed. ‘Of course it is.’
‘Not love.’
His eyebrows rose. ‘Who am I supposed to love?’
‘Annabel!’ Rhiannon cried, too angry and despairing to be embarrassed that he might have actually thought she meant herself. ‘I came here so she could find her father…a father who would love her!’
‘But I am not her father,’ he reminded her. ‘And I cannot love a child I’ve never even seen before. Not right away.’
‘Especially one that is not yours, I suppose?’ Rhiannon finished, and he shook his head, dismissing her jibe.
‘If Annabel is Christos’s child—which I believe she is—then I will make sure she is cared for. Absolutely.’
Rhiannon’s mouth dried. Absolutely. It was a word that didn’t allow for difficulties, differences. Flexibility. It was a cold, hard, unyielding word, and she didn’t like it. ‘I didn’t want it to be like this,’ she finally said after a moment, her eyes averted.
‘I understand. But this is now how it is. How it will be remains for me to decide.’
‘You,’ Rhiannon said, ‘and not me, I suppose?’
Lukas shook his head. ‘I don’t know what you want from me. If you came to the Petra resort to find Annabel’s father, you succeeded. You did your duty. Now you will leave the rest to us.’
‘I’m not going to leave it up to you,’ Rhiannon protested. ‘Annabel is my ward, not yours. Any decisions that are made will involve me.’ Her voice came out more strident than she intended, and Annabel looked up anxiously. Rhiannon bent down, soothed her with a few hushing motions.
‘The only decision that has been made so far,’ Lukas said, with a deliberate patience that warned Rhiannon he was close to losing his temper, ‘is for you to remain here until the question of paternity is resolved. All I’m asking now is that you stay here, in comfort, not snapping and biting like a fish on a line, and enjoy a few days in what most people consider to be paradise.’
Rhiannon watched Annabel bang two shells together, her eyes wide and round. Lukas’s analogy was dead on, she realised grimly. She did feel like a fish on a line, dangling desperately—and, worse yet, she’d willingly put the hook in her own mouth.
‘A few days—and then what?’
‘That remains to be seen.’ His mouth was a thin line, his eyes dangerously blank, and Rhiannon knew better than to press him now. She wasn’t going to ask questions she didn’t want answers to.
‘Fine,’ she said heavily. ‘Have you spoken to Christos?’
‘No. He is on a friend’s yacht at the moment. I’ve left a message on his mobile, but he probably won’t answer it until he is on shore.’ His mouth twisted, tightened in derision. ‘He doesn’t like his holidays disturbed.’
‘And this is the man you want for Annabel’s father?’ Rhiannon said with a shake of her head.
‘No, this is the man who is Annabel’s father. We cannot change that…if it is proved.’
He glanced down at the baby, frowning as he saw her suck the edge of a shell. ‘Do you think this is an appropriate toy for the child?’ he asked, taking the offending item from a reluctant Annabel, who immediately howled in outrage.
Rhiannon scooped her up, pressed the baby to her body in a defensive gesture. ‘It’s the best I could do. Leanne had few toys for Annabel, and there hasn’t been time…’
‘I will make sure that you are both adequately supplied while you’re here,’ Lukas said, although there was still a frowning furrow on his forehead.
‘We don’t need anything from you,’ Rhiannon protested, as Annabel began to tug rather painfully on her earring.
The look Lukas gave her was swift, searching. Knowing. ‘On the contrary,’ he corrected quietly, ‘there are many things you need from me. That is why you came, is it not?’
Before she could answer, he sketched a brief bow of farewell and left her alone.
‘Ouch!’ Rhiannon disengaged Annabel’s chubby fingers from her earring. ‘Not so hard, sweetheart.’ She set the baby back on the floor, prowled the room once more.
Her heart was racing in time with her thoughts, whirling helplessly, out of reach, out of answers.
After a moment she flung open the doors to the balcony, went outside and breathed in the clean sea air. She needed it to steady her, for her senses were still reeling from Lukas’s presence, his power.
He seemed determined to take responsibility for Annabel. To care for her.
This was what she had wanted—yet not like this. Never like this. With Annabel as discarded goods, unwanted, thrust on someone who believed he needed to do his duty.
Her life would be loveless; she would grow up with the cold knowledge that she’d only been taken in because there had been no other place for her, because no one had wanted her.
As Rhiannon had grown up.
I want her. The words burned in her brain and lit her soul. I want her. She would not give Annabel up so easily. When she’d envisaged giving her up, it had been to a loving home, to a father who wanted her. Who loved her.
A fantasy, she acknowledged now, and perhaps she realised that from the moment she’d spoken to Lukas Petrakides. A fantasy based on what she’d always wanted—always dreamed of—for herself.
But this was not about her, or her lost dreams. It was about Annabel. And she would not condemn the infant to a childhood like she’d had. She’d come to France, to Lukas, to keep that from happening. Now that things had changed she would do what was necessary to keep Annabel from being the burden she herself had been.
She’d thought that meant walking away. Now it meant staying.
* * *
‘THE GIRL MUST go.’
Lukas jerked his contemplative gaze away from the study window and turned to see his father standing still and erect in the doorway. Though his hair was snow white, his face lined, Theo Petrakides was still a handsome and imposing man.
He was also dying.
The doctors had told Lukas that Theo had a few good months left in him—but it would go downhill from there. Theo knew; he accepted it with the grim stoicism with which he’d accepted all the tragedies in his life.
‘I’ll die well,’ he’d said with cold detachment. ‘I’ll do my duty.’
Yes, Lukas knew Theo would do his duty in death—as he had in life.
Just as he would do his. His promise to care for Annabel had not been rash. As soon as the possibility had arisen that Christos might be the father Lukas had known what it would mean. The sacrifice he would have to make.
Caring for a child, he told himself, was hardly difficult. He’d hire a nanny, enlist the best help. It might mean travelling a bit less to be more available to her as a father. That thought, that word, shook him more than he cared to admit.
Still, he would do what needed to be done to provide for the child and, more importantly, to keep the Petrakides name free from scandal or shame. He would do his duty.
‘What girl?’ he asked now, forcing his mind back to the present, to the frowning countenance of his father.
‘That English girl. She has no place in our lives, Lukas.’
Lukas’s palm curled into a fist on the smooth, mahogany-topped desk. Slowly, deliberately, he flattened it out again. ‘She’s Welsh, and her name is Rhiannon. She does have a place in our lives, Papa—she’s Annabel’s guardian.’
Theo’s eyebrows rose at hearing the casual, almost intimate way Lukas referred to both Rhiannon and Annabel.
Lukas realised he’d spoken about Rhiannon as if he knew her, liked her. He shrugged. What he said was still true.
‘For now,’ the older man agreed flatly. ‘But when Christos—damn him!—is shown to be the father, she will have no place at all. You told me she’s not related, just a friend of the mother. We are blood relations, and we will do our duty—even for Christos’s English bastard.’
‘Is that what you plan on telling the child, when she is old enough to hear?’
‘I won’t be around then,’ Theo replied with brutal frankness, ‘so you can do the honours. She can hardly complain if she has been well provided for. No one can accuse us of being ungenerous.’
‘No, indeed,’ Lukas agreed dryly, and Theo frowned.
‘Don’t tell me you’ve a fondness for that English piece?’
‘She’s Welsh, and, no, I have not. But I prefer to speak about any woman with respect.’
‘She will only complicate matters,’ Theo continued, ignoring his son. He strode to the window, watched the waves crash onto the rocky shore. ‘If she isn’t already attached to the child, she will become so, and we cannot have the bad press of a messy custody case. The tabloids would make a meal of this, Lukas. You’ve already seen what they’ve done with these rumours of your mistress and your love-child.’
‘I have,’ he replied tightly. ‘But I believe Rhiannon is willing to be reasonable if we approach her with sensitivity. I don’t want to take her from the child now. Annabel has had a great deal of upheaval in her life, and it would do none of us any favours to send Rhiannon away before she is settled.’
Theo glanced shrewdly at his son. ‘None of us?’ he repeated, and gave a dry chuckle. ‘Oh, very well. If you must have her, have her. You’ve been without a woman too long, haven’t you? You never learned how to be discreet in such matters.’
‘I prefer to be restrained.’ Lukas’s head was throbbing with fury. He knew he should be used to his father’s frank, crass ways—and he knew his father believed duty was a public matter, rather than a private one. As long as people saw what you did was right, it hardly mattered what you thought.
He felt differently.
‘This would be solved,’ Theo continued in a harder voice, ‘if you did your duty to provide me with an heir and marry.’
‘You know I never plan to marry.’
‘Your duty—’
‘I refuse to marry a woman I love,’ Lukas intervened flatly, ‘and I refuse to marry without love. It would not be fair to the woman.’
‘There are plenty of women who would marry without love,’ Theo scoffed.
Lukas suppressed a sigh. They’d had this conversation many times.
‘Scheming gold-diggers or materialistic snobs,’ he dismissed. ‘Hardly suitable material.’ The thought of not providing an heir for the Petrakides empire was an uncomfortable one, but he knew his limits. Marriage was outside of them. As was love.
‘Fine,’ Theo said, willing to let go of this thorny subject for a moment. ‘Still, the English bit goes.’ He stared his son down. ‘And soon.’
Lukas gazed at his father. ‘There is no question that she will leave when the child’s paternity is determined,’ he agreed coolly. ‘There can be no place for her in our lives. But until then it would benefit us all to keep her sweet.’ He busied himself with some papers on his desk. ‘Now, I have work to do, Papa. I will see you at dinner.’
