Читать книгу The Holiday Escapes Collection - Сандра Мартон - Страница 48

EMILY was asleep almost before the cab arrived, her little dark head lolling against Charlotte’s shoulder as she walked to the hospital entrance with Damon at her elbow.

She could feel his simmering anger; it was almost palpable in the cold night air. It was coming off him in scorching waves that threatened to peel off her skin every time he looked at her.

‘You have a lot of explaining to do,’ he bit out as he waved down a cab.

‘This is not the time or place,’ she said. ‘I need to get Emily home and into bed.’

‘This is not over, Charlotte,’ he warned her. ‘I swear to God this is not over.’

The cab arriving forestalled any further speech and Charlotte sank into the seat with her daughter snuggling up close.

‘Put her in the seat belt,’ Damon instructed.

Charlotte’s blue eyes battled with his for a moment before she did as he demanded, even though it produced a whimper of pain from Emily. She hadn’t wanted to let her daughter go even for a second, but she knew he was right. Even a short journey could be dangerous without the protection of a seat belt.

Damon leaned forward to give the cab driver directions and Charlotte felt her heart give a tiny flutter. He had very definitely had tabs on her if he knew where she lived.

She sat back in her seat with Emily’s dark head on her lap, wondering how he would view her tiny run-down inner city rented flat. It was all she could afford. Childcare cut into her budget and, with Stacey’s ongoing demands, she often sailed a little too close to the wind. There were few luxuries. Some weeks it was all she could do to keep food on the table.

‘I cannot believe you have kept this from me for all this time,’ he inserted into the stiff silence.

‘If you remember, I did tell you,’ she threw back. ‘But you refused to believe me. I tried phoning and emailing you, but you blocked all contact.’

‘You could have told me the first night I saw you at the museum! She’s my child!’ He glared at her furiously. ‘Do you have any idea of how much I have missed out on? Do you?’

Her eyes flashed at his, her tone unmistakably sarcastic. ‘So this is now all about you, is it, Damon? I’m sorry, but I thought it was about a little child who has suffered an injury. Pardon me for being so remiss in putting her needs over yours.’

His jaw tightened until she could see white tips at the edges of his mouth. ‘I should have been told. As soon as I saw you the other night, you should have told me.’

She sent him an embittered glance. ‘I would have told you if I hadn’t thought you would whip her away from me as soon as she was born.’

There was a deadly little pause.

‘I can still do that.’

Charlotte’s eyes flew back to his, her heart threatening to jump out of her chest. ‘You can’t do that! She’s my daughter.’

His eyes were like black diamonds. ‘She is my daughter as well. And, from what I have seen so far, you are not looking after her with any degree of competency.’

‘That’s not true!’

He gave her a cynical look. ‘How can you possibly say that when she is lying between us with a serious injury?’

‘She hurt her arm,’ Charlotte said. ‘It’s not the least bit life-threatening. Children hurt themselves all the time. It could have happened at crèche.’

His eyes burned with fury. ‘You send her to crèche to be looked after by strangers?’

She rolled her eyes at him. ‘I’m a single mother, Damon, and just like any other single mother I have to work to put food on the table. And, as much as I would love to be with Emily full-time, I don’t have the luxury of that choice, so yes—I do allow strangers to look after her, but they are highly qualified strangers who each have a fully accredited childcare certificate.’

‘You will withdraw her from care immediately.’

Charlotte tightened her mouth. ‘I will do no such thing.’

‘You will cancel her childcare arrangements, for from now on you will be a full-time mother to her.’

‘I have a job!’ she reminded him heatedly. ‘I have commitments regarding the exhibition.’

‘Cancel them.’

‘I can’t cancel them! Julian is out of action and it’s all up to me to pull this off. I can’t pull out now, even if I wanted to.’

‘I will withdraw my sponsorship if you do not quit your job. I will also tell your employers of your history of theft. I was starting to believe you were innocent, but I can see now you were not. You have no trouble with lying; it comes to you so naturally.’

Charlotte felt the tension building to breaking-point. She could barely see for the white spots of it disturbing the line of her vision. She felt sick with dread in case he did as he threatened. He had so much power and she had so little…

‘Please…’ She turned to look at him, her eyes awash with unshed tears. ‘I know you are angry and I can understand how you must feel, but you will be hurting your daughter if you hurt me. I have only ever acted in her best interests. You have to believe that. I had no choice over seeing you again because you saw me as a thief. Do you know how many times I wished I could have picked up the phone in the last three years and told you of her existence? I wanted to every day of her life but I couldn’t. You made it impossible for me by labelling me the way you did. You shut me out of your life. You charged me with a crime I did not commit.’

‘You lie!’ He threw the words at her like stinging arrows. ‘You are lying now. You were never going to tell me of my daughter’s existence. I know that. I can see it in your eyes. You wanted this last hold of power over me. The ultimate revenge was to have stolen the most priceless thing of all—my child.’

Charlotte set her mouth. ‘I did not steal her,’ she said. ‘You threw her away when you threw me away.’

‘When did you suspect you were pregnant?’

‘I was late and started to worry. I know condoms aren’t foolproof and although I’d gone on the pill I wasn’t sure it had kicked in when…when we…’ She moistened her dry mouth and continued, ‘When you came to the gallery that afternoon I tried to tell you of my suspicions, but you had suspicions of your own.’

Damon struggled to listen without interrupting. He wanted to defend his actions but he was starting to see that Charlotte had been in a difficult situation.

‘I didn’t have the pregnancy confirmed until I was back in Sydney,’ she said in a subdued tone, her fingers brushing back the silky hair off Emily’s peacefully sleeping face.

Another tense silence tightened the air between them.

‘Was it deliberate?’ he asked. ‘As a way of snaring yourself a billionaire?’

She sent him a furious glance. ‘How can you ask that? I was halfway through my Honours degree. I had a chance to sidestep a Masters to have a go at a Ph.D. Why would I deliberately compromise that by getting pregnant on purpose? And, if I had, why then would I keep it a secret for all this time?’

Damon turned his head to look out at the city streets flashing by. It was raining, the cold sheets of icy moisture reminding him of how far away he was from home. He felt out of his depth, not just because of the climate change but because everything had changed.

He was a father.

He had responsibilities he had to face, even though the thought of tying himself to a woman who had exploited him and his family was anathema to him.

Yes, he still desired her. She was a fever beating in his blood and the fact that she had borne his child only made it a thousand times worse. They were connected in the most intimate way possible, their blood lines linked, their future enmeshed in the body of the small, exquisitely beautiful child lying between them.

He knew his mother would be beside herself with joy to find she had a grandchild, especially so soon after the tragic loss of Eleni. How much hurt would little Emily repair by meeting her grandmother for the first time?

‘Once the exhibition is over we will go to Santorini,’ he said.

Charlotte stared at him in shock. ‘I’m not going anywhere with you.’

His eyes met hers with a challenge she knew was going to be hard to withstand. ‘You come with me, Charlotte, or I swear to God you will never see your daughter again.’

She swallowed convulsively. ‘You can’t do that…’

His expression was unmoved by her emotionally charged statement. ‘I can and I will. You have reared my child in an unsafe environment. She is daily exposed to danger. Tonight is a case in point. God knows what we will find at your flat.’

Charlotte felt her heart sink in despair. Stacey wasn’t to be trusted. She sat on the edge of her seat, the sharp teeth of terror gnawing at her insides as the cab driver pulled into her street…

The bedroom light was on in her flat, which hopefully meant Stacey had taken her up on her offer of a bed for the night.

Damon had Emily in his arms, his hold so gentle and protective it brought tears to Charlotte’s eyes as she led the way to the door.

She heard a low male groan as soon as she opened the door, her heart instantly tripping in alarm.

‘Come on, baby, give it to me,’ the stranger’s voice said. ‘I paid you double the money—now deliver.’

Charlotte shut the door with a snap and turned to face Damon’s thunderous frown, her back pressed flat against the door. ‘W-we can’t go in there…’

His jaw tightened until she could see a pulse leaping at the side of his mouth. ‘Your sister?’ he asked.

The colour of her shame answered for her. ‘Yes.’

‘How often does this occur?’ he asked.

She knew he wouldn’t believe her but she felt compelled to defend herself. ‘It hasn’t happened before, I swear it hasn’t.’

She was right—he didn’t believe her. His disgust was evident on his face as he made his way back to the pavement with Emily still asleep in his arms.

‘Damon…’ Charlotte rushed after him. ‘I swear to God, Stacey has never done this before! She would never dream of betraying me like this.’

He sent her a withering glance as he reached with one hand for his mobile, somehow managing to keep Emily secure in his arms. ‘Your sister is just as untrustworthy as you. How dare you expose my daughter to such depravity?’

Tears spilled from her eyes. ‘She promised me she would get help! She gave me her word.’

His dark eyes narrowed. ‘To get help for what?’

Charlotte felt her chest cave in as she realised what she had revealed.

‘To get help for what?’ he repeated, his voice scraping along her nerves like the blade of a serrated knife.

She lowered her gaze, her stomach churning in anguish and dread, her voice coming out flat and empty. ‘She’s a heroin addict…ever since our mother got sick, she became involved with an unsavoury crowd…I couldn’t stop her…it went downhill from there…’

‘So she sells herself to feed her habit?’ he asked, his dark eyes almost closed in fury.

Charlotte couldn’t meet his narrowed glittering gaze. Shame felt like a searing brand all over her. She felt its imprint on every surface of her body—even her eyes were stinging with it.

She heard his harshly indrawn breath in the aching silence. ‘You have allowed my daughter to be exposed to this?’

‘I didn’t have any choice,’ she said, dragging her eyes back to his. ‘What could I do? Abandon my sister? I am all she has. I wanted Emily to grow up knowing her aunt. I had to do what I could to keep Stacey alive, even if it meant at times compromising myself in the process.’

‘You have not just compromised yourself but my daughter!’

‘I had no choice!’ Charlotte fought back. ‘Do you know what it’s like to watch someone you love destroy their potential and be unable to do anything to stop it? I have tried everything. I have begged, I have bribed, I have given her chance after chance, and time and time again, just when I think she is turning the corner, she lets me down.’

‘Then get rid of her out of your life.’

She sent him an accusing look. ‘Like you did to me?’

‘As far as I was concerned, you were guilty. I saw no reason to continue our association.’

‘It’s so easy for you, isn’t it? Anyone who steps over your boundaries, you cut out of your life, but she is my sister. My only living relative, apart from Emily, and I won’t write her off like you did to me. She is guilty of being weak—yes—but she needs help and I will not give up on her.’

‘I will not allow my daughter to be exposed to such a person,’ he said as a cab pulled into the kerb. ‘You will not be returning with Emily to your flat. I will make arrangements for your things to be moved to my hotel immediately.’

‘A hotel is not the place for a small child,’ Charlotte argued as he bundled her into the cab.

‘Neither is a back yard brothel,’ he threw back as he settled Emily between them.

‘I told you—she’s never done that before. She promised me she was going to go to detox. I planned to take her to a new clinic. That’s why I took your money—to pay for it. It’s expensive…I couldn’t do it without—’

His eyes cut to hers. ‘You used my money for that whore?’

Charlotte tightened her mouth. ‘You sit so high up in your ivory tower seat of judgement, but what price would you have paid for your sister to get well again?’

Damon looked at her in dumbstruck silence. She was right. He would have paid any price to get Eleni well again, but no amount of money had been able to achieve it.

‘You don’t know what the real world is like, Damon,’ she went on as the cab tyres swished over the rain-slicked roads. ‘I’ve done everything possible to help my sister. She’s broken my heart so many times but I won’t give up on her. I don’t believe in giving up on people, unlike you, who with just one whiff of suspicion threw our relationship away. You didn’t give me a fair trial; you had made your mind up and nothing I said was ever going to change it. As far as you were concerned, I was guilty, but only because you wanted me to be guilty.’

‘I did not want you to be guilty.’ Damon spoke the words but he wondered deep inside if they were true. Had he been looking for a way out of their rapidly escalating relationship? His family had always married within the Greek community. A bride had already been selected for him—Iona Patonis, a pretty young woman who had all the makings of a submissive wife. She had been a close friend of Eleni’s and so everyone had assumed that in time he would settle down and make her an offer…and yet…

‘I did not want you to be guilty.’ He repeated the words, but even the second time around they didn’t ring with any more conviction.

‘Yeah, right,’ she said, flicking him a disdainful glance as she drew her daughter closer. ‘Your so-called love for me didn’t last the distance, did it, Damon? If you had truly cared anything for me, nothing would have stopped you from defending me, but you let me go the first chance you could.’

‘If it is any comfort to you, it was not easy for me to do so,’ he said, looking down at his hands resting on his tiny daughter’s pink pyjama-clad bent knees.

She gave him an embittered look and turned her head to look at the raindrops beading on the window of the cab. ‘Then you escaped lightly,’ she said. ‘The hardest thing for me was walking away from you and staying away.’

But she hadn’t walked away of her own free will, Damon reminded himself with a deep pang of regret as he settled back in his seat, his hands still on his tiny daughter’s legs.

He had sent her away…