Читать книгу The Greek's Acquisition - Шантель Шоу, Chantelle Shaw - Страница 8

‘I THOUGHT you would jump at the chance to own Eirenne.’ Louise prayed that Dimitri could not hear the desperation in her voice. ‘I remember you told me it meant a lot to you because you’d spent happy times there as a child.’

His jaw tightened. ‘They were happy times—for me, my sister and my parents. We spent every holiday on Eirenne. Until your mother destroyed my family. Now you have the gall to want me to buy back what should have been mine? My father had no right to leave our island to his whore.

‘I presume you would give the money to Tina, so that she can continue to fund her extravagant lifestyle?’ His lip curled in disgust. ‘What kind of sucker do you take me for? Why don’t you suggest she finds herself another rich lover? Or do what every other decent person does and find a job so that she can support herself? That would be a novelty,’ he sneered. ‘Tina actually working for a living. Although I suppose she would argue that lying flat on her back is a form of work.’

‘Shut up!’ The vile picture he was painting of her mother ripped Louise apart—not least because she could not deny there was some truth in his words. Tina had never worked. She had lived off her lovers and shamelessly allowed them to keep her—until a richer man came along.

But she was her mother, faults and all, and she was dying. Louise refused to criticise Tina or allow Dimitri to insult her.

‘I’ve told you—I am the legal owner of Eirenne and I’m selling it because I need to raise some capital.’

He frowned. ‘You’re saying the money would be for you? Why do you need a million pounds?’

‘Why does anyone need money? A girl has to live, you know.’

Unconsciously she touched the diamond fleur-de-lis pendant and thought of her grandmother. Céline had not approved of the way her daughter lived her life, but she would have wanted her granddaughter to do everything possible to help Tina. Louise had even had the pendant valued by a jeweller, thinking that she could sell it to raise funds for Tina’s treatment. But the sum she would have made was a fraction of the cost of medical expenses in America, and on the jeweller’s advice she had decided to keep her only memento of her grandmother.

She flushed beneath Dimitri’s hard stare. The contempt in his eyes hurt like a knife in her chest, but it was vital that she convinced him she was selling the island for her own benefit. If he guessed that Tina needed money there wasn’t a hope in hell he would agree to buy Eirenne. She was not being dishonest, she assured herself. She was giving Dimitri the opportunity to buy the island that had once belonged to his family at a bargain price. It was no business of his how she chose to spend the proceeds of the sale.

‘From what I remember of Eirenne it is a pleasant enough place, but I’d rather have hard cash than a lump of grey rock in the middle of the sea,’ she told him.

Dimitri felt a sensation like a lead weight sinking in his stomach. It was stupid to feel disappointed because Louise had turned out like her mother, he told himself. Tina Hobbs was the ultimate gold-digger, and it should be no surprise that her daughter shared the same lack of moral integrity.

Seven years ago he would have sworn that Louise was different from Tina, but clearly she was not. She wanted easy money. From her appearance—designer outfit and perfect hair and make-up—she was obviously high-maintenance and had expensive tastes. Her necklace was not some cheap trinket. Diamonds which sparkled with such brilliance were worth a fortune.

How was she able to afford couture clothes and valuable jewellery? Dimitri frowned as the thought slid into his head that perhaps a man had paid for her outfit in return for her sleeping with him. Her mother had made a career out of leeching off rich lovers, and he was sickened to think that Louise might be doing the same.

Seven years ago she had been so innocent, he remembered. Not sexually—although it had crossed his mind when he had taken her to bed that she was not very experienced. At first she had been a little shy with him, a little hesitant, but she had responded to him with such ardent passion that he had dismissed the idea that he was her first lover. Sex with her had been mind-blowing, and even now the memory of her wrapping her slender limbs around him, the soft cries of delight she had made when he had kissed every inch of her body and parted her thighs to press his mouth to her sweet feminine heart, caused his gut to clench.

Her unworldly air had probably been an act, Dimitri thought grimly as he dragged his eyes from her face and turned to stare out of the window. Even if she had been as sweet and lovely as he’d believed all those years ago, she was patently her mother’s daughter now.

So why was he so fiercely attracted to her? The question mocked him, because however much he hated to admit it he felt an overwhelming urge to stride around his desk and pull her into his arms. He felt a tightening in his groin as he imagined kissing her, pictured himself thrusting his tongue between her red-glossed lips and sliding his hand beneath her short skirt.

Gamoto! He cursed beneath his breath. The girl Loulou he remembered from years ago had gone for ever. Perhaps she had never existed at all except for in his mind. He had made her out to be special, but he had been kidding himself.

The woman standing in his office was beautiful and desirable—and he was a red-blooded male. He wasn’t going to beat himself up because she fired him up. But he was not some crass youth with a surfeit of hormones. Louise was off-limits for all sorts of reasons—not least because she was history and he had no wish to revisit the past.

Confident that he had regained control of his libido, he swung round and regarded her dispassionately. His first instinct when she had offered to sell him Eirenne had been to tell her to go to hell. But now his business brain acknowledged that he would be crazy to turn down the proposition. The island was easily worth double the amount Louise was asking. He did not know why she was prepared to sell it for less, and frankly he didn’t care.

Three years ago his lawyers had contested Kostas’s will and argued that Eirenne should remain the property of the Kalakos family, but to no avail. There had been no legal loopholes and Dimitri had had to accept that he would never own the island he believed was rightfully his. Now he had the chance to buy it at an exceptionally good price. He would be a fool to allow his pride to stand in the way of a good deal.

‘I need some time to consider whether or not I want to buy Eirenne,’ he said abruptly.

Louise hardly dared to breathe, afraid she had misheard him or misunderstood, and that the fragile thread of hope he seemed to be offering would be snatched away. A few moments ago he had told her he was not interested, but now, miraculously, he appeared to be having second thoughts.

‘How much time?’ She did not want to push him, but Tina needed to start the treatment in America as soon as possible.

‘Three days. I’ll contact you at your hotel. Where are you staying?’

‘I’m not—I arrived in Greece yesterday evening and I’m leaving tonight. I can’t be away from home for too long.’

Why not? Dimitri wondered. Did she live with a lover who demanded her presence in his bed every night? Was he the same man who had bought her the diamond pendant that sparkled so brilliantly against her creamy skin? Heat surged inside him—an inexplicable feeling of rage that boiled in his blood. It was none of his business how Louise lived her life, he reminded himself. He didn’t give a damn if she had an army of lovers.

‘Give me details of where I can contact you,’ he instructed her tersely, handing her the notepad and pen from his desk.

She quickly wrote something down and handed the pad back to him. He glanced at her address and felt another flare of anger. Property in the centre of Paris was expensive. He knew because a couple of years ago he had purchased an apartment block on the Rue de Rivoli to add to his real-estate portfolio.

She could have a well-paid job, his mind pointed out. He shouldn’t leap to the assumption that she allowed a man to keep her just because her mother had always done so. But she had told him she was selling Eirenne because she needed the money. So, had a rich lover grown tired of her? She would have to have a damn good job to afford the rent on a prime city-centre address so close to the Champs-Elysées.

Incensed by the thoughts ricocheting around his brain—about a woman he had not the slightest interest in—Dimitri strode across the room and pulled open the door for her to leave.

‘I’ll be in touch.’

Louise’s eyes flew to his face, but she could read nothing in his hard expression. Patently their meeting was at an end. The next three days were going to seem an eternity, but she could do nothing now except wait for Dimitri’s decision.

‘Thank you.’ Her voice sounded rusty and her legs felt as unsteady as a newborn foal’s as she walked out of his office. As she passed him, she caught the drift of his cologne, mingled with another subtly masculine scent that was achingly familiar even after all this time. She hesitated, swamped by a crazy urge to slide her arms around his waist, to rest her head against his chest and feel the beat of his heart next to her own as she had done a long time ago.

Of their own volition, it seemed, her eyes were drawn to his face, and just as when she had first entered his office some unseen force seemed to weld her gaze to his. Unconsciously she moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue.

Dimitri’s eyes narrowed. Theos, she was a temptress—and he was a mere mortal with a healthy sex drive. Despite his determination to ignore the smouldering chemistry between him and Louise he was conscious of an ache low in his gut, and his mouth twisted in self-disgust when he felt himself harden.

For the space of a heartbeat he almost gave in to the temptation to pull her back into the room, close the door and push her against it, so that he could grind the swollen shaft throbbing painfully beneath his trousers against her pelvis. It was a long time since he had felt such an urgent, almost primitive desire for a woman. He prided himself on the fact that he was always in control, always coolly collected. But he did not feel cool now. Molten heat was surging through his veins, and as he stared into her sapphire-blue eyes every sensible thought in his head was overruled by a sexual hunger that was so strong it took all his considerable will-power not to succumb to it.

‘Antio.’ He bade her goodbye in a clipped tone, his teeth gritted.

The sound of Dimitri’s voice shattered the spell. Louise tore her eyes from his. She discovered that she had been holding her breath and released it on a shaky sigh. She forced her feet to continue moving, and the instant she stepped into the corridor she heard the decisive snick of the door being closed behind her.

For a few seconds she leaned against the corridor wall and dragged oxygen into her lungs, conscious of her heart hammering beneath her ribs. She was shocked by the effect Dimitri had had on her. He was just a man, she reminded herself. Sure, he was good-looking, but she had met other handsome men and hadn’t felt as if she had been hit in the solar plexus.

She had never met another man as devastatingly sexy as Dimitri, a voice in her head taunted. No other man had ever turned her legs to jelly and evoked shockingly erotic images in her mind that caused her cheeks to burn as she hurried into the lift. Seven years ago she had been utterly overwhelmed by Dimitri, and she was dismayed to realise that nothing had changed.

Dimitri walked back across to his desk and drummed his fingers on the polished wooden surface. He could not forget the expression of relief that had flared in Louise’s eyes when he had told her he would consider buying the island. Maybe she had debts and that was why she needed money in a hurry, he brooded. That would explain why she couldn’t wait for a buyer who would pay the full value of Eirenne.

He dropped into his chair and stared at his computer screen, but his concentration was shot to pieces and his mood was filthy. Sexual frustration was not conducive to work productivity, he discovered. With a savage curse he gave up on the financial report, snatched up his phone and put a call through to a private investigator whose services he used occasionally.

‘I want you to check out a woman called Louise Frobisher—I have an address in Paris for her. The usual information. Where she works—’ if she works, he thought to himself‘—her friends …’ his jaw hardened ‘…boyfriends. Report back to me in twenty-four hours.’

It was past midnight when Louise arrived back at her apartment in the Châtelet-Les-Halles area of Paris. Ideally located close enough to the Musée du Louvre that she could walk to work, it had been her home for the past four years, and she let out a heartfelt sigh as she walked through the front door. Her flat was on the sixth floor, in the eaves of the building. The sloping ceilings made the compact interior seem even smaller, but the view over the city from the tiny balcony was wonderful.

The view was the last thing on her mind, however, as she dumped her suitcase in the hall and kicked off her shoes. The past forty-eight hours—in which she had flown to Athens and back again, and had that tense meeting with Dimitri—had been tiring, not to mention fraught with emotions.

As she entered the living room Madeleine, her Siamese cat, stretched elegantly before springing down from a cushion on the wide windowsill.

‘Don’t give me that look,’ Louise murmured as she lifted the cat into her arms and Madeleine fixed her with a reproachful stare from slanting eyes the colour of lapis-lazuli. ‘You weren’t abandoned. Benoit promised he would feed you twice a day, and I bet he made a fuss of you.’

Her neighbour, who lived in the flat below, had been a great help recently, offering to feed Madeleine while Louise spent time with Tina at the hospital. She would visit her mother after work tomorrow. For now, she knew she should eat something, but her appetite was as depleted as the interior of her fridge. A quick shower followed by bed beckoned, and half an hour later she slid between crisp white sheets and did not bother to make even a token protest when Madeleine sprang up onto the counterpane and curled up in the crook of her knees.

Sleep should have come quickly, but it eluded her as thoughts chased round inside her head. Seeing Dimitri again had been so much more painful than she had been prepared for. It had been seven years, she reminded herself angrily. She should be over him by now—was over him. And what was there to be over, anyway? The brief time they had spent together had hardly constituted a relationship.

But as she lay in bed, watching silver moonbeams slant through the gap in the curtains, she could not hold back her memories.

She had gone to Eirenne for the Easter holidays. Her friends at university had tried to persuade her to stay in Sheffield, but she’d had exams coming up and had guessed she wouldn’t get any studying done if her flatmates planned to hold parties every night. Besides, she had planned to spend her nineteenth birthday with her mother.

But when she had arrived at the island she’d found Tina and Kostas about to leave for a holiday in Dubai. It wasn’t the first time Tina had forgotten her birthday, and Louise hadn’t bothered to remind her. All her life she had taken second place to her mother’s lovers. At least she would be able to get her assignment finished, she’d consoled herself. But she had been lonely on Eirenne with only the villa’s staff for company, and she had missed her new university friends.

One afternoon, bored with her studies, she had decided to ride around the island on her pushbike. Eirenne was a small island, but on previous visits she had never strayed far from the grounds of the opulent villa that Kostas had built for his mistress.

The road that ran around the island was little more than a bumpy track and Louise had been carefully avoiding the potholes when a motorbike had suddenly shot round the bend and swerved to avoid hitting her. In panic she had lost her balance and fallen, scraping her arm on the rough ground as she landed.

‘Theos, why weren’t you looking where you were going?’

She had recognised the angry voice, even though she had only met Kostas’s son Dimitri a handful of times when he had happened to visit his father at the same time as she had been staying on Eirenne. She had never really spoken to him before, although she had overheard the arguments he’d had with Kostas about his relationship with Tina.

‘You nearly crashed into me,’ she’d defended herself, her temper rising when he grabbed her arm none too gently and hauled her to her feet. ‘Road hog! Some birthday this is turning out to be,’ she had added grumpily. ‘I wish I’d stayed in England.’

For a moment his unusual olive-green eyes darkened. But then he threw back his head and laughed.

‘So you do speak? You’ve always seemed to be struck dumb whenever I’ve met you.’

‘I suppose you think I’m over-awed by you,’ she said, flushing. Not for the world would she allow him to know that since she was sixteen she’d had a massive crush on him.

He stared down at her, his eyes glinting with amusement in his handsome face. ‘And are you over-awed, Loulou?’

‘Of course not. I’m annoyed. My bike’s got a puncture, thanks to you. And I’m going to have a lovely bruise on my shoulder.’

‘You’re bleeding,’ he said, noticing where she had scraped her arm. ‘Come back to the house and I’ll clean that graze and fix your tyre.’

‘But the Villa Aphrodite is that way,’ she said in a puzzled voice when he turned in the opposite direction. ‘Where are you staying, anyway? I haven’t seen you around. I thought Kostas had banned you from the villa after your last row with him.’

‘It suits me never to set foot inside that tasteless monstrosity my father has built for his tart.’ The anger returned to Dimitri’s voice. ‘I’m staying at the old house my grandfather built many years ago. He named the house Iremia, which means tranquillity. But the island is no longer a tranquil place since your mother came here.’

Leaving his motorbike by the side of the track, he pushed Louise’s bicycle. She followed him in silence, daunted by the rigid set of his shoulders. But his temper had cooled by the time they arrived at the house, and he was a polite host, inviting her in and instructing his butler to serve them drinks on the terrace.

The house was nestled in a dip in the land, surrounded by pine trees and olive groves so that it was hidden from view. It was not surprising that Louise had never seen it before. Unlike the ultra-modern and to Louise’s mind unattractive Villa Aphrodite, Iremia was a beautiful old house built in a classical style, with coral-pink walls and cream-coloured wooden shutters at the windows. The gardens were well-established, and through the trees the cobalt-blue sea sparkled in the distance.

‘Hold still while I put some antiseptic on your arm,’ Dimitri instructed after he had led her out to the terrace and indicated that she should sit on one of the sun-loungers.

His touch was light, yet a tiny tremor ran through Louise at the feel of his hands on her skin. His dark head was bent close to hers, and she was fiercely aware of the tang of his aftershave mingled with another subtly masculine scent that caused her heart to race.

He glanced up and met her gaze. ‘I hardly recognised you,’ he said, his smile doing strange things to her insides. ‘The last time I saw you, you were the proverbial ugly duckling.’

‘Thanks,’ she muttered sarcastically, flushing as she remembered the thick braces she’d worn on her teeth for years. Thankfully she’d had them removed now, and her teeth were perfectly straight and white.

As a teenager she had been slow to develop, and had despaired about her boyish figure, but in the last year or so she had finally gained the womanly curves she had longed for. However, she still lacked self-confidence, and Dimitri’s comment hurt. She tried to jerk away from him, but instead of releasing her arm he trailed his fingers very lightly up to the base of her throat and found the pulse that was beating frantically there.

‘But now you have turned into a swan,’ he said softly. ‘Ise panemorfi—you are very beautiful,’ he translated, although he had no need. She spoke Greek fluently.

That had been the start of it, Louise thought, turning her head restlessly on the pillows. That moment when she had looked into Dimitri’s olive-green eyes and made the startling discovery that he desired her. That had been the beginning of a golden few days when they had become friends, while the awareness between them had grown ever more intense.

When Dimitri had learned that she was spending her birthday alone he had insisted on taking her to dinner on the neighbouring island of Andros, which was a short boat ride away from Eirenne. It had been a magical evening, and at the end of it, when he had escorted her back to the Villa Aphrodite, he had kissed her. It had only been a brief kiss, no more than a gossamer-light brush of his lips on hers, but fireworks had exploded inside her and she had stared at him dazedly, her heart thumping, longing for him to kiss her again.

He hadn’t, but had bade her goodnight rather abruptly, so that she had wondered if she had annoyed him in some way. Maybe he regretted kissing her because she was the daughter of his father’s mistress? she had thought miserably. But the next morning he had arrived as she was sitting disconsolately by the pool, facing another day on her own. He had invited her to go to the beach with him, and the day that had seemed so bleak suddenly became wonderful.

They had swum and sunbathed and talked about every subject under the sun—apart from her mother’s affair with his father. Dimitri never mentioned Tina.

Over the next few days Louise’s faint wariness had faded and she’d grown more relaxed with him, so that when he’d kissed her again—properly this time—she had responded with an eagerness that had made him groan and accuse her of being a sorceress who had surely cast a spell on him.

It had seemed entirely natural for him to take her back to the house in the pine forest and make love to her one long, lazy afternoon, with the sun slanting through the blinds and gilding their naked bodies. He had been so skilled and so gentle that losing her virginity had been a painless experience.

Dimitri had been unaware that it was her first time, and she had been too shy to tell him. She had responded to the stroke of his hands and the exquisite sensation of his mouth on her breasts, teasing her nipples until they were as hard as pebbles, with a passion that had matched his. It had been perfect, their bodies moving in total accord, until simultaneously they had reached the zenith of sensual pleasure.

She had spent the whole of that night with him, and each time he’d made love to her she had fallen deeper in love with him.

The following morning he had walked her back to the Villa Aphrodite.

‘Come and swim in the pool,’ she had invited. ‘No one is here.’ By ‘no one’ she had meant her mother.

Dimitri hesitated. ‘All right—but afterwards we’ll go back to Iremia. I hate this place. I assume Tina chose the décor,’ he said sardonically, glancing at the zebra-print sofas and the white marble pillars that were everywhere in the villa. ‘It just goes to prove that no amount of money can buy good taste.’

His dislike of her mother was evident in his voice, and Louise felt uncomfortable, but then he smiled at her and the awkward moment passed. They swam for a while, and then he carried her out of the pool and laid her on a sunbed. She had wound her arms around his neck to pull him down on top of her—when a shrill voice made them spring apart.

‘What do you think you ‘re bloody well doing? Take your hands off my daughter! ’

All these years later Louise could still hear Tina screaming at Dimitri as she tottered across the patio in her vertiginous heels, quivering with fury so that her platinum-blond beehive had seemed to wobble precariously on top of her head.

‘It’s bad enough that Kostas cut our trip short with some excuse about needing to be at a meeting in Athens. But to find you here, preying on Loulou, is the last straw. You have no right to be here. Your father banned you from the villa.’

‘Don’t you dare talk to me about rights.’ Dimitri’s anger had been explosive as he’d leapt to his feet and faced Tina.

The row that had followed had been a vicious exchange of words. Louise had said nothing, but her mother had said more than enough.

‘Do you think I don’t know what’s in your nasty, vengeful mind?’ Tina hissed to Dimitri. ‘It’s obvious you decided to try and seduce Loulou to get at me—out of some misplaced revenge for your mother.’

‘No!’ Louise interrupted desperately. ‘This has nothing to do with you.’

‘Doesn’t it?’ Tina laughed mockingly. ‘So Dimitri has told you about his mother, has he? That she took an overdose and that he blames me for her death? Has he also told you that his father has disinherited him because of the way he has repeatedly insulted me?’ Tina continued relentlessly. ‘Or that now he is no longer in line to inherit a fortune the woman he hoped to marry has dumped him? This has everything to do with me—doesn’t it, Dimitri? You hate my guts, and the only reason you’ve been sniffing around my daughter is because you want to cause trouble.’

Tina’s accusations sent a cold chill down Louise’s spine. Her mother had always been over-dramatic, she reminded herself. Dimitri couldn’t have been pretending to be attracted to her. He had been so attentive, and the passion between them had been so intense that she had even begun to think—to hope—that he was falling in love with her.

‘It’s not true. Is it?’ She turned to Dimitri, pleading for his reassurance, but inside her head doubts were already forming. She had not even known his mother had died, let alone the tragic circumstances of her death. Not once in the past few days had he mentioned it.

She had thought they were friends, and now they were lovers. But Dimitri had turned into a hard-faced stranger and the coldness in his eyes froze her blood.

‘Yes, it’s true.’

His harsh voice broke the silence, and like a pebble hitting the surface of a pool his words caused shockwaves to ripple through the tense atmosphere.

‘My mother took her own life because she was heartbroken that my father had divorced her and thrown away the love they had shared for thirty years for a worthless whore.’

He stared contemptuously at Tina, and then turned and walked away without saying another word. He didn’t even glance at Louise; it was as if she did not exist. And she watched him go, paralysed with shock and feeling sick with humiliation that she had been nothing more to him than a pawn in his battle with her mother.

‘Don’t tell me you were falling for him?’ her mother said, when she caught sight of Louise’s stricken face. ‘For God’s sake, Lou, until recently he was engaged to Rochelle Fitzpatrick—that stunning American model who is regularly on the covers of the top fashion magazines. He wasn’t really interested in you. Like I said, he just wants to cause trouble. A while ago Dimitri overheard me telling Kostas how keen I am for you have a good career,’ Tina continued. ‘He knew I would be upset if you dropped out of university to have an affair with him. I imagine he thought that if you fell for his flattery he would be able to turn you against me. And of course his ultimate goal was to cause friction between me and his father.’

Tina prattled on relentlessly, unaware of the agonised expression in Louise’s eyes. ‘It’s lucky I came back before he persuaded you into bed. The villa staff told me he’s only been hanging around for a couple of days. Go back to university and forget about Dimitri.’ She gave Louise a sudden intent look. ‘You’re clever. You can make something of your life. You don’t need to rely on any man. And if you take my advice you’ll never fall in love like I did with your father. I swore after him that I’d never let myself care about any man ever again.’

Shaken by Tina’s reference to her father, whom she had never known, and traumatised by the scene with Dimitri, Louise left Eirenne within the hour. She hadn’t expected to see him again, but as she climbed into the motor launch that would take her to Athens she was shocked to see him striding along the jetty.

‘Loulou … wait!’

Wearing bleached jeans and a black tee shirt that accentuated his incredible physique, he looked unbelievably gorgeous, and it struck her then that she’d been mad to believe he could have been attracted to her. He could have any woman he wanted, so why would he want an unsophisticated student whose looks could at best be described as passable?

Overwhelmed by self-doubt, she instructed the boatman to start the engine.

Dimitri broke into a run. ‘Theos! Don’t go. I want to talk to you about what I said up at the villa.’

‘But I don’t want to talk to you,’ she told him stonily. ‘You made everything perfectly clear.’

She felt a fool, but she’d be damned if she would let him see that he had broken her heart. The boat engine roared, drowning out Dimitri’s response. He looked furious as the boat shot away from the jetty, and shouted something after her. But she didn’t hear his words over the rush of the wind, and told herself she did not care that she would never speak to him again.

She had been unaware when she had left Eirenne that a few weeks later she would urgently need to talk to Dimitri …

Louise tossed restlessly beneath the sheets. She sat up to thump her pillows and flopped back down again, wishing the bombardment of memories would stop. Tiredness swept over her, and her last conscious thought was that in a few short hours she had to get up for work.

She must have fallen into a deep sleep at first, but towards dawn the dream came. She was running down a long corridor. On either side were rooms like hospital rooms, and in each room was a baby lying in a cot. But it was never her baby. Every time she went into a room she felt hopeful that this was the right one—but it was always someone else’s child looking up at her.

She ran into the next room, and the next, feeling ever more frantic as she searched for her baby. She was almost at the end of the corridor. There was only one room left. This had to be where her child was. But the cot was empty—and the terrible truth dawned that she would never find her baby. Her child was lost for ever.

Dear God. Louise jerked upright, breathing hard as if she had run a marathon. It was a long time since she had last had the dream, but it had been so real she was not surprised to find her face was wet and that she had been crying in her sleep. For months after the miscarriage that she’d suffered, three weeks after discovering she was expecting Dimitri’s child, she had dreamed that she was looking for her baby. And each time she had woken, just as now, feeling a dull ache of grief for the new life she had carried so briefly inside her.

Seeing Dimitri again yesterday had triggered memories buried deep in her subconscious. She had never told anyone about the baby, and had struggled to deal with her sense of loss alone. Maybe if she had been able to confide in someone it would have helped, but her mother had been totally absorbed in her relationship with Kostas, and as for Dimitri—well, it was probably better that he had never known she had conceived his child.

No doubt he would have been horrified. But she would never know how he might have reacted, because he had refused to speak to her when she had plucked up the courage and phoned him to tell him she was pregnant. A week later, when he had finally returned her call, she had switched off her phone. There hadn’t seemed any point in telling him she had lost his baby. At the time there hadn’t seemed a lot of point in anything. The weeks and months following the miscarriage had been desperately bleak, and she had just wanted to stay in bed and hide from the world, she remembered.

She had told herself it would not have been ideal to bring a fatherless child into the world. She knew only too well what it was like to grow up with only one parent, to feel the nagging sense of failure that perhaps it was her fault her own father had rejected her. She had tried to convince herself it was for the best that her pregnancy had ended. Yet even now, whenever she saw a child of about six years old, she imagined what her child would have been like and wished she could have known him or her.

Tears filled her eyes and she blinked them away. There was no point in dwelling on the past. She stroked Madeleine’s downy-soft, cream fur. ‘At least I’ve got you,’ she murmured to the cat. And Madeleine, who seemed to possess an intuition that was beyond human understanding, gently purred and rubbed her pointed chocolate-coloured ears against Louise’s hand.