don’t need to rely on any man. And if you take my advice you’ll never fall in love like I did with your father. I swore after him that I’d never let myself care about any man ever again.’
Shaken by Tina’s reference to her father, whom she had never known, and traumatised by the scene with Dimitri, Louise left Eirenne within the hour. She hadn’t expected to see him again, but as she climbed into the motor launch that would take her to Athens she was shocked to see him striding along the jetty.
‘Loulou … wait!’
Wearing bleached jeans and a black tee shirt that accentuated his incredible physique, he looked unbelievably gorgeous, and it struck her then that she’d been mad to believe he could have been attracted to her. He could have any woman he wanted, so why would he want an unsophisticated student whose looks could at best be described as passable?
Overwhelmed by self-doubt, she instructed the boatman to start the engine.
Dimitri broke into a run. ‘Theos! Don’t go. I want to talk to you about what I said up at the villa.’
‘But I don’t want to talk to you,’ she told him stonily. ‘You made everything perfectly clear.’
She felt a fool, but she’d be damned if she would let him see that he had broken her heart. The boat engine roared, drowning out Dimitri’s response. He looked furious as the boat shot away from the jetty, and shouted something after her. But she didn’t hear his words over the rush of the wind, and told herself she did not care that she would never speak to him again.
She had been unaware when she had left Eirenne that a few weeks later she would urgently need to talk to Dimitri …
Louise tossed restlessly beneath the sheets. She sat up to thump her pillows and flopped back down again, wishing the bombardment of memories would stop. Tiredness swept over her, and her last conscious thought was that in a few short hours she had to get up for work.
She must have fallen into a deep sleep at first, but towards dawn the dream came. She was running down a long corridor. On either side were rooms like hospital rooms, and in each room was a baby lying in a cot. But it was never her baby. Every time she went into a room she felt hopeful that this was the right one—but it was always someone else’s child looking up at her.
She ran into the next room, and the next, feeling ever more frantic as she searched for her baby. She was almost at the end of the corridor. There was only one room left. This had to be where her child was. But the cot was empty—and the terrible truth dawned that she would never find her baby. Her child was lost for ever.
Dear God. Louise jerked upright, breathing hard as if she had run a marathon. It was a long time since she had last had the dream, but it had been so real she was not surprised to find her face was wet and that she had been crying in her sleep. For months after the miscarriage that she’d suffered, three weeks after discovering she was expecting Dimitri’s child, she had dreamed that she was looking for her baby. And each time she had woken, just as now, feeling a dull ache of grief for the new life she had carried so briefly inside her.
Seeing Dimitri again yesterday had triggered memories buried deep in her subconscious. She had never told anyone about the baby, and had struggled to deal with her sense of loss alone. Maybe if she had been able to confide in someone it would have helped, but her mother had been totally absorbed in her relationship with Kostas, and as for Dimitri—well, it was probably better that he had never known she had conceived his child.
No doubt he would have been horrified. But she would never know how he might have reacted, because he had refused to speak to her when she had plucked up the courage and phoned him to tell him she was pregnant. A week later, when he had finally returned her call, she had switched off her phone. There hadn’t seemed any point in telling him she had lost his baby. At the time there hadn’t seemed a lot of point in anything. The weeks and months following the miscarriage had been desperately bleak, and she had just wanted to stay in bed and hide from the world, she remembered.
She had told herself it would not have been ideal to bring a fatherless child into the world. She knew only too well what it was like to grow up with only one parent, to feel the nagging sense of failure that perhaps it was her fault her own father had rejected her. She had tried to convince herself it was for the best that her pregnancy had ended. Yet even now, whenever she saw a child of about six years old, she imagined what her child would have been like and wished she could have known him or her.
Tears filled her eyes and she blinked them away. There was no point in dwelling on the past. She stroked Madeleine’s downy-soft, cream fur. ‘At least I’ve got you,’ she murmured to the cat. And Madeleine, who seemed to possess an intuition that was beyond human understanding, gently purred and rubbed her pointed chocolate-coloured ears against Louise’s hand.
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