is going to make me?’ Tabby snapped back, unimpressed, the fighting spirit that had carried her through many years of loss and disappointment rising to the fore again to strengthen her backbone.
‘What does she want?’ Acheron asked his lawyer in English as if she weren’t there.
‘I suggest we take this back into your office,’ Stevos remarked on a loaded hint.
Savage impatience gripped Ash. Only three days earlier he had returned from his father’s funeral and, without even allowing for his grief at the older man’s sudden death from a heart attack, it had turned into a very frustrating week. The very last thing he was in the mood for was a drama about some child he had never met and couldn’t have cared less about. Troy Valtinos, oh, yes, he could remember now, a third cousin he had also never met, who had unexpectedly died and, in doing so, had attempted to commit his infant daughter to Ash’s care. An act of sheer inexplicable insanity, Acheron reflected in exasperation, thinking back incredulously to that brief discussion with Stevos some months earlier. He was a childless single male without family back-up and he travelled constantly. What on earth could anyone have supposed he would do with an orphaned baby girl?
‘I’m sorry I swore at you,’ Tabby lied valiantly in an effort to build a bridge and win a hearing. ‘I shouldn’t have done that—’
‘Your mouth belongs in the gutter,’ Acheron breathed icily and he addressed the security guards, ‘Free her. You can take her out when I’m done with her.’
Tabby gritted her teeth together, straightened her jacket and ran uncertain hands down over her slender denim-clad thighs. Ash briefly studied her oval face, his attention lingering on her full pink mouth as a rare flight of sexual fantasy took him to the brink of picturing where else that mouth might be best employed other than in the gutter. The stirring at his groin put him in an even worse mood, reminding him of how long it had been since he had indulged his healthy libido. He knew he had to be in a very bad way if he could react to such an ignorant female.
‘I’ll give you five minutes of my valuable time,’ Acheron breathed with chilling reluctance.
‘Five minutes when a child’s life and happiness hang in the balance? How very generous of you,’ Tabby replied sarcastically.
Roaring rancour assailed Acheron because he wasn’t accustomed to such rudeness, particularly not from women. ‘You’re insolent as well as vulgar.’
‘It got me in the door, didn’t it? Politeness got me nowhere,’ Tabby traded, thinking of the many phone calls she had made in vain requests for an appointment. As for being called cheeky and vulgar, did she really care what some jumped-up, spoilt snob with loads of money thought about her? Yet her brain was already scolding her for her aggressive approach, telling her it was unwise. If she could get around the freeze front Acheron Dimitrakos wore to the world, he was in a position to help Amber while she was not. As far as Social Services were concerned, she could not be considered a suitable guardian for Amber because she was single, had no decent home and was virtually penniless.
‘Start talking,’ Ash urged, thrusting the door of his office shut.
‘I need your help to keep Amber in my custody. I’m the only mother she’s ever known and she’s very attached to me. Social Services are planning to take her off me on Friday and place her in foster care with a view to having her adopted.’
‘Isn’t that the best plan in the circumstances?’ Ash’s lawyer, Stevos Vannou, interposed in a very reasonable voice as though it was an expected thing that she should be willing to surrender the child she loved. ‘I seem to remember that you are single and living on benefits and that a child would be a considerable burden for you—’
Acheron had frozen the instant the phrase ‘foster care’ came his way but neither of his companions had noticed. It was a closely guarded secret that Ash, in spite of the fact his mother had been one of the richest Greek heiresses ever born, had once spent years of his life in foster care, shifted from home to home, family to family, enduring everything from genuine care to indifference to outright cruelty and abuse. And he had never, ever forgotten the experience.
‘I haven’t lived on benefits since Amber’s mother, Sonia, passed away. I looked after Sonia until she died and that was why I couldn’t work,’ Tabby protested, and shot a glance brimming with offended pride at Acheron’s still figure. ‘Look, I’m not just some freeloader. A year ago Sonia and I owned our own business and it was thriving until Troy died and she fell ill. In the fallout, I lost everything as well. Amber is the most important thing in my world but, in spite of me being chosen as one of her guardians, there’s no blood tie between Amber and me and that gives me very little real claim to her in law.’
‘Why have you come to me?’ Ash enquired drily.
Tabby rolled her eyes, helplessly inflamed by his attitude. ‘Troy thought you were such a great guy—’
Ash tensed, telling himself that none of what she had told him was any of his business, yet the thought of an innocent baby going into foster care roused a riot of reactions inside him drawn from his own memories. ‘But I never met Troy.’
‘He did try to meet you because he said his mother, Olympia, used to work for your mother,’ Tabby recounted.
Acheron suddenly frowned, straight black brows pleating as old memories stirred. Olympia Carolis, he recalled very well as having been one of his mother’s carers. He had not appreciated when the guardianship issue had arisen that Troy was Olympia’s son because he had only known her by her name before marriage, although if he stretched his memory to the limit he could vaguely recall that she had been expecting a child when she left his mother’s employ. That child could only have been Troy.
‘Troy was frantic to find a job here in London and you were his business idol,’ Tabby told him curtly.
‘His...what?’ Ash repeated with derision.
‘False flattery won’t advance your cause,’ Stevos Vannou declared, much more at home in the current meeting than he had been in the last, for the matter of the will would require considerable research of case law to handle.
‘It wasn’t false or flattery,’ Tabby contradicted sharply, angry with the solicitor for taking that attitude and switching her attention back to Ash. ‘It was the truth. Troy admired your business achievements very much. He even took the same business degree you did. That and the fact he saw you as head of his family explains why he put you down as a guardian in his will.’
‘And there was I, innocent that I am, thinking it was only because I was rich,’ Acheron breathed with sardonic bite, his dark deep drawl vibrating down her spine.
‘You really are a hateful, unfeeling creep!’ Tabby slammed back at him tempestuously, fiery emotion ablaze in her violet eyes. ‘Troy was a lovely man. Do you honestly think he realised that he was going to die at the age of twenty-four in a car accident? Or that his wife would suffer a stroke within hours of giving birth? Troy would never have taken a penny from anyone that he hadn’t earned first.’
‘Yet this lovely man left both his widow and child destitute,’ Ash reminded her censoriously.
‘He didn’t have a job, and Sonia was earning enough money at the time through the business we owned. Neither of them could possibly have foreseen that both of them would be dead within a year of having that will drawn up.’
‘But it was scarcely fair to name me as a guardian without prior
