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
