as a father? Being denied the right to hold his child? Anger crushed his chest.
‘Thank you, Siobhan. You can go now.’
‘If you’re sure?’ the young girl asked, casting him a doubtful look. After a quick nod of reassurance from the woman holding his child, the girl brushed past him, letting loose a low tut as she did so.
Dimitri locked his gaze with Mary’s. If looks could kill...
* * *
It was all Anna could do to take him in. Dimitri filled the entire doorway, looking like the devil come to collect his dues. Tall, broad and mouthwatering. Anger slashed his cheeks and made a mockery of the taut bones of his incredible features. The long, dark, handmade woollen coat hung almost to his knees, covering a dark blue knitted jumper that, she knew, would stretch across his broad shoulders perfectly. Broad shoulders that she’d once draped with her hands, her fingers, her tongue. Even the sight of him drove away the bone-deep chill that had settled into her skin from the rain. Her body’s betrayal stung as it vibrated, coming to life for the first time in three years, just from his proximity. Desire coated her throat while heat flayed her skin.
He looked as if he’d just stepped from the pages of a glossy magazine. And there she was, soaking wet, an old, hideous luminous-green waterproof jacket covering ill-fitting jeans and a T-shirt that was probably indecently see-through from the rain. But it was his eyes, shards of obsidian and hauntingly familiar, so like the ones she’d seen every single day since her daughter had been placed in her arms. Though they had never been filled with such disdain.
‘You have five minutes.’ His voice was harsh and more guttural than she remembered. Cursing herself silently, she forced her brain into gear.
‘For what?’ Anna asked, thinking that this was an odd way to start the conversation she’d spent years agonising over.
‘To say goodbye.’
‘Goodbye to who?’
‘Our daughter.’
Dear Dimitri,
I didn’t mean for it to be like this.
INSTINCTIVELY ANNA CLUTCHED Amalia tightly to her chest.
‘I’m not saying goodbye to my daughter!’
‘Don’t play the put-upon mother now.’
Dimitri had taken a step towards her and Anna took a step back.
‘You,’ Dimitri continued, ‘who only two days ago blackmailed me with news of her. The transfer has been made, but I’ve come to collect. Because there’s no way I’m leaving my daughter in the care of an alcoholic, debt-ridden liar and cheat.’
Anna’s head spun. So much so, it took her a moment to realise that he had somehow mistaken her for her mother.
‘Wait—’
‘I’ve waited long enough.’
Anna watched, horrified, as another man appeared in the doorway. A man who had ‘legal’ stamped all over him. It didn’t make a dent in Dimitri’s powerful tirade.
‘Mary Moore of Dublin, Ireland. Mortgaged up to the hilt, with three drunk and disorderlies, one child and no father’s name on the birth certificate. You should have been on the stage,’ Dimitri spat, his anger infusing his words with misplaced righteousness. ‘The woman I met that night three years ago was clearly nothing more than a drunken apparition...with consequences. That consequence—’
‘Don’t you dare call my child a consequence,’ she hissed at him, struggling not to raise her voice and disturb Amalia, who was wriggling in discomfort already.
‘That consequence is why I am here,’ he pressed on. ‘Now that I am aware of her existence, I shall be taking her with me. If it’s money you need, then my lawyer here will draw up the requisite paperwork for you to sign guardianship over to me. Though I wouldn’t normally pay twice for something, I will allow it this time.’
‘Pay twice for something? You’re calling my daughter “something”?’ Anna demanded furiously.
His words provoked her beyond all thought. Blood pounded in her ears; injustice over his awful accusations sang in her veins; fury at his arrogance, anger at his belief that she would do just as he asked lit a flame that bloomed, crackled and burned.
‘I am sure that it would be possible, Mr Kyriakou, almost easy for you, even, to have your lawyer draw up paperwork, to hand over ludicrous amounts of money, money that would be yours, I’m sure, not taken from the clients of the Kyriakou Bank...’ she paused for breath, ignoring how his darkened eyes had narrowed infinitesimally, before continuing ‘...were I Mary Moore.’
His head jerked back as if he had been slapped.
‘Mary Moore is guilty of all the things you have lambasted her for. She is the one who contacted you demanding money for her silence. But I. Am. Not. Mary. Moore. I’m Anna Moore. And if you raise your voice to me in front of our daughter one more time, I’ll throw you out myself!’
In her mind she had been shouting, hurling those words against the invisible armour he seemed to wear about him. But in reality she had been too conscious of her daughter, too much of a mother to do anything that would upset her child. But she had caught Dimitri on the back foot—she could see that from the look of shock, then quick calculation as he assessed the new information. And she was determined to press her advantage.
‘I will call the police if I have to,’ Anna continued. ‘And with your record—even expunged—I think you’ll find that they’ll side with me. At least for tonight.’
The smirk on his cruel lips infuriated her.
‘My lawyer would have me out in an hour.’
‘The same lawyer that told me he’d pay me off, “just like the last one”, when I tried to tell you of our child’s birth?’
Dimitri spun round to look at David in confusion. But David seemed just as confused as he. ‘It wasn’t me,’ his friend said, shaking his head. ‘I don’t know anything about that.’
‘What? When did this happen?’ he demanded, already beginning to feel unsteady on the shifting sands beneath his feet.
‘When you were first freed from prison nineteen months ago, I called your office. You may like to think that I purposefully kept my daughter from you, but I did try to reach out to you,’ Mary—Anna—said from over his shoulder. Reluctantly he turned back round to look her in the eye, needing to see the truth of her words. ‘He referred to himself as Mr Tsoutsakis. It’s not something I’m likely to forget.’
‘Theos, that was my ex-assistant and, I assure you, he will never work again,’ Dimitri swore, still trying to wrap his head around the fact that Anna had tried to reach him for something other than bribery or money.
‘I
