LITMIR.BIZ

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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.’

      Theo glanced sharply at his son, but with a jerky nod he left the room.

      Lukas swivelled to stare out of the window. The aquamarine sea stretched flatly to an endless horizon—yet he knew that only a few miles out there would be boats. Boats disguised as fishing vessels, but filled with photographers and journalists clamouring for an exclusive shot of Lukas with his illicit family. Photographs which would then be sold to tabloids around the world, to make the Petrakides name raked through the mud and the dirt once again.

      He sighed, thrusting a hand through his hair. He understood the need to avoid bad press—God knew, the Petrakides family had had enough of it.

      He also understood that Rhiannon Davies would have

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