LITMIR.BIZ

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a breath—a deep, shuddering breath—and focussed his eyes on her. Emotion worked in his face. ‘Instead—’ He stopped, abruptly. His expression changed. So did his voice. ‘Instead,’ he repeated, ‘I have to apologise. I said things to you that I...that were unfair—’

      He broke off again. Reached for his coffee and downed it. Then he was looking at her again. As if she were not the person he had thought her to be.

      But she isn’t. She’s not the avaricious, ambitious gold-digger I thought. It was she who insisted on Vasilis leaving his personal fortune to Nicky, his lawyers told me, with nothing for her apart from that paltry income.

      It was not what he’d expected to hear. But because of it...

      It changes everything.

      It was the same phrase that had burst from him when he’d discovered the existence of Vasilis’s son, and now it burned in his head again, bringing to the fore the second thing he had to tell her. The imperative that had been building up in him, fuelled by that strange, compelling emotion that had filled him when he’d crouched down beside the little boy to console and comfort him.

      ‘I would like to see Nicky again—soon.’

      Immediately Christine’s face was masked.

      ‘He is my blood,’ he said tightly. ‘He should know me. Even if—’ He stopped.

      She filled the gap, her face still closed. Her tone was acid. ‘Even if I am his mother?’

      Anatole’s brows drew together in a frown. ‘I did not mean—’ Again he broke off.

      He’d just told her he couldn’t accuse her of wanting her husband’s fortune—but she’d still persuaded a man thirty years older than her to marry her in order to acquire the lavish lifestyle she could never have achieved otherwise. That alone must condemn her. What other interpretation could there be for what she had done when she had left him to marry his uncle?

      Conflict and confusion writhed in him again.

      ‘Yes, you did,’ Christine retorted, her tone still acid. ‘Anatole, look—try to understand something. You may not have wanted to marry me, to have a child with me—but your uncle did. It was his choice to marry me. You insult him if you think otherwise and your approval was not necessary.’

      She saw his hand clench, emotion flash across his face, but she didn’t want to hear any more. She got to her feet, weariness sweeping over her. She longed for Vasilis’s protective company, but he was gone. She was alone in the world now. Except for Nicky—her beloved son.

      The most precious being in the universe to her.

      The very reason she had married.

      * * *

      Anatole watched her walk out—an elegant, graceful woman. A woman he had once held in his arms, known intimately—and yet now she was like a stranger. Even the name she insisted on calling herself emphasised that.

      Emotion roiled within him in the confusing mesh that swirled so confusingly in his head, that he could make no sense of.

      But there was one thing he could make sense of.

      Whatever his conflicting thoughts about Tia—or Christine, as she now preferred to be known—and whatever she had done...abandoning him, marrying his uncle, remaking her life as Vasilis’s oh-so-young wife...she’d gone up in the world in a way that she could never have imagined possible the day she had trudged down that London street with a heavy suitcase holding all her possessions.

      Now she was transformed into a woman who was poised and chicly dressed, who was able—of all things!—to introduce an exhibition of ancient artefacts as if she were perfectly well acquainted with such esoteric knowledge. Yes, whatever she had done in these years when he had never seen her, there was one thing he could make sense of.

      Nicky. The little boy who had lost the man he’d thought of as his grandfather—who would now be raised only by his mother, knowing nothing of his paternal background or his heritage.

      Anatole’s face steeled. Well, he would ensure that did not happen. He owed it to Vasilis—to the little boy himself—to play some part in his life at least.

      A stab of remorse—even guilt—pierced him. In the five long years since Tia had left him he’d received, from time to time, communications from his uncle. Careful overtures of reconciliation.

      He’d ignored them all—blanked them.

      But he could not—would not—ignore the existence of Vasilis’s young son.

      I want to see him again!

      Resolve filled him. Something about the child called to him.

      Again that memory filled his head of how he’d distracted the little boy, talking about painting a picture of a train, just as he himself had once done for his uncle in that long-ago time when it had been he himself who’d been the child without any kind of father figure in his life to take an interest in him. When there had only been occasional visits from Vasilis—never his own father, to whom he had been of no interest at all.

      Well, for Nicky it would not be like that.

      He’ll have me. I’ll make sure of it!

      And if that meant seeing Tia—Christine—again, well, that was something he would have to endure.

      Unease flickered in him. Can I cope with that? Seeing her in the years to come with Nicky growing up?

      It was a question that, right now, he did not want to think about.

       CHAPTER SEVEN

      ‘MUMMA, LOOK!’

      Nicky’s excited voice called to her and Christine finished her chat to Nanny Ruth and paid attention to her son.

      They were out in the garden now that spring was here, and Nicky was perched on a bench beside a rangy young man who was showing him photos on his mobile phone.

      As Nanny Ruth went off to take her well-earned break Christine went and sat herself down too, lifting Nicky onto her lap. ‘What have you got there, Giles?’ she asked with a smile.

      The young man grinned. ‘Juno’s litter,’ he said. ‘They arrived last night. I couldn’t wait to show Nicky.’

      ‘One of them is going to be mine!’ Nicky piped up excitedly. ‘You said, Mumma, you said!’

      ‘Yes, I did say,’ Christine agreed.

      She’d talked it through with Giles Barcourt and his parents. They were the village’s major landowners from whom Vasilis had bought the former Dower House on the estate. They had always been on very friendly terms, and now, they were recommending to Christine that acquiring a puppy would help Nicky recover from losing his beloved pappou. She was in full agreement, seeing just how excited he was at the prospect.

      ‘So,’ Giles continued, ‘which one shall it be, do you think? It will be a good few weeks before they’re ready to leave home, but you can come and visit them to make your final choice.’

      He grinned cheerfully at Nicky and Christine, and she smiled warmly back. He was a likeable young man—about her own age, she assumed, with a boyish air about him that she suspected would last all his life. He’d studied agriculture at Cirencester, like so many of his peers, and now ran the family estate along with his father. A born countryman.

      ‘By the way,’ he went on, throwing her a cheerful look again, ‘Mama—’ he always used the old-fashioned moniker in a shamelessly humorous fashion ‘—would love you to come to dinner next Friday. My sister will be there, with her sproglets and the au pair, so Nicky can join the nursery party. The sproglets are promised one of the pups too, so there’ll be a bunfight over choosing. What do you say?’

      Christine smiled, knowing

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