by Pippa Roscoe
‘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 don’t care who it was. I was told, in rather specific terms, that I would be paid off, just like the other hundred or so women calling to claim they had carried the heir to the Kyriakou Bank. I had—and still have—no intention of taking money from you, or depriving whatever number of illegitimate children you fathered before, or since, your imprisonment of any child support.’
‘There are no other children,’ he ground out. ‘When I...when I was arrested certain...women sought me out, claiming that I had fathered numerous children unrelated to me.’ Their sordid attempts at extortion had snuffed out the last little flame of hope he’d had in human decency. To use a child in such a way was horrific to him. In total four women had jumped on the wrong bandwagon, assuming he’d pay for their silence. But none of them, neither his two ex-girlfriends nor the two strangers who had claimed an acquaintance with him, had realised that he would never, never let a child of his disappear from his life. Dimitri resisted the urge to reach out to Anna. ‘I swear to you. There were no other women, no other children.’
‘And I’m supposed to just believe you?’ Her scorn cut him to the quick. ‘So, this is your lawyer? Tell me, Mr Lawyer, what would the courts say to a man who turns up at ten thirty at night making false accusations of alcoholic behaviour, costing me three bookings and irreconcilable damage to my professional reputation, threatening to take my daughter away from me and trying to blackmail me?’
And, finally, it was then that their daughter started to cry.
‘You’re making her upset,’ Dimitri accused.
‘No, you are,’ she returned.
Feeling the ground beneath him start to slip further, Dimitri pressed on, ignoring his own internal warning bell.
‘It’s neither here nor there. You need to pack. Get your things—we’re leaving,’ he commanded. Even to his own ears he sounded obtuse. But he couldn’t help it. It was this situation...his childhood memories clawing their way up from the past and into the present making him rash, making him desperate.
‘I’m not going anywhere and I really will call the police if you try to force me. You clearly don’t know the first thing about parenting if you’re expecting it to be okay to just upend a child at ten thirty at night.’
‘And whose fault is that?’ he heard himself shout, immediately regretting his loss of control. Nothing about this situation had gone as he’d intended and that there was a grain of truth in her last accusation struck him deeply.
David shifted in the hallway, drawing their attention.
‘My recommendation is to sleep on this a little. Clearly there has been a series of misunderstandings and we each need time to reflect on the new information we all have. Dimitri, we should take the car back to Dublin and return in the morning.’
‘I’m not leaving my daughter,’ Dimitri growled.
‘Ms Moore, is this something that you are happy to accommodate?’
Dimitri almost couldn’t look at her, didn’t want to gauge her reaction. When he’d walked into this, he’d been so sure. Sure of his plan, of his information, of the situation. Yet the moment she’d revealed that she wasn’t Mary, but Anna, he knew she wasn’t lying. He’d felt the truth of it settle about his shoulders and, looking at it now, he was relieved. The woman who had given birth to his daughter wasn’t an alcoholic. Hadn’t been arrested. The woman he’d slept with and spent years dreaming about... Layers and layers of cloudy images began to shift, and when he opened his eyes he looked at Anna and they became clear.
Anna was looking down at her daughter, rocking her gently in her arms as she settled their child, making soothing noises that seemed to satisfy the girl...his daughter. And he held his breath before her pronouncement. He felt, rather than heard, her sigh.
‘I’ll put him in one of the recently vacated rooms. I’m not comfortable with the way he’s done things.’ It irked him that she was directing her conversation to David rather than him, but he had to be fair. It was justified after the accusations he’d hurled at her. And Dimitri knew a thing or two about wrongful accusations. ‘But we do,’ she continued, ‘need to talk and figure out where we go from here.’
Dimitri followed David out to the car, assuring David that he wasn’t such a monster as to cause harm or fear to his daughter or the mother of his child, especially given that she was clearly not the woman he had thought from the report. He took several deep breaths of cool night air before returning to the small bed and breakfast. Peeking into empty rooms on the ground floor, he felt like a trespasser in his daughter’s home and hated it.
He followed the soothing sounds of a gentle lullaby that contrarily only fuelled the anger within him. How many nights had he missed the simple pleasure of putting his daughter to bed, knowing that she was safe, cared for...loved? He paused on the threshold of a dusky-pink room, gently lit by a softly glowing night light.
Dimitri looked at the nearly sleeping child in the crib. She was peaceful and angelic. He knew that was a cliché, but he couldn’t think of any other words to describe his daughter. It was the first time he’d really seen her, not hidden by the shoulder of a stranger or buried in her mother’s arms. Her skin was dark, like both her parents’, but the eyes—they were his. He knew that Anna hadn’t seen him yet, her body hadn’t stiffened the way it had every single time he’d come within a foot of her. But she was far from relaxed, and he deeply regretted that their adult emotions had come to interfere with his child’s sleep.
* * *
How had this mess happened? She’d been shocked by Dimitri’s accusations, his presence...all of it. For nineteen months, she’d forced herself to abandon the hope that he might come for her. The hope that her daughter wouldn’t grow up feeling that same sense of rejection that felt almost a solid part of Anna. But that was the thing—Anna’s father hadn’t just been absent, it wasn’t a passive thing...he had walked away. Had actively chosen to leave her and her mother behind.
She pushed at the adrenaline still pounding through her veins, desperately fighting the need to flee. Instead, she clung to the words she’d spoken to the lawyer. They really did need to find a way forward, now that he knew about Amalia, now that he claimed to want their child. Wasn’t that what she’d dreamed of when she first reached out to him? Never would she have chosen to raise her daughter without a father in her life...the way she had been raised.
As Anna watched her daughter in the crib, she marvelled at how she’d got so big. She was twenty-seven months old and before lying down on the soft mattress Amalia had held on to the bars and looked at Anna with big brown eyes. Anna h
ad reached out and smoothed a soft curl of hair from Amalia’s forehead. She’d bent down and whispered a promise to her child.
‘It will be okay, sweetheart. It will.’ She’d hoped that she wasn’t lying.
Anna waited until she heard the sounds of her daughter’s breathing slow. She waited until she knew she couldn’t put it off any more and turned to leave the room.
But Dimitri stood in the doorway.
How many times had she imagined him standing there? How many times, during Amalia’s sleepless nights, the teething, the crying...the times when Anna had been so exhausted she couldn’t even weep? What would she have given to see him standing there, a support, a second hand, anything to help take away some of the weight of being a single parent?
But when she’d heard the lawyer—the assistant, as she now knew—dismiss her claims as one of the many women who had called Dimitri, she’d realised that she hadn’t known Dimitri at all. The disbelief and incredulity in Tsoutsakis’s voice had been the reminder she’d clung to each and every night that she had been right to hang up the phone, to end the conversation before she could reveal any more of herself, of her daughter.
But now? What did it all mean? That it hadn’t been Dimitri who had outright rejected his daughter. That he was innocent of the imprisonment that had made her sure she couldn’t let a criminal be the father of her child. Now that he was here, standing before her.
‘I don’t even know her name.’ Anna read a whole host of emotions in that one sentence: pain, regret...anger.
‘Amalia. Her name is Amalia.’
For a second, he looked as if he had been punched in the chest... He closed his eyes briefly but when they opened he wore a mask.
‘She’s mine.’ It was a statement rather than a question. But for all his seeming arrogant certainty, she could tell that he needed to hear it from her. It was as if he was holding his breath.
For just a moment, Anna considered lying. It would all go away. Dimitri would leave and go back to Greece, or America, or wherever he’d come from. Life could return to normal, she’d continue to manage the bed and breakfast, continue to handle her mother’s alcoholism, continue to raise her daughter on her own. But she couldn’t do it. She knew what it was like to grow up in this small village without a father, with the stigma of being discarded and unwanted. She knew the questions that were sure to come from her daughter’s lips because they had come from her own.
Where’s my daddy? Didn’t Daddy want me? Did he not love me?
His eyes darkened impossibly as she made him wait for her answer.
‘Yes. She’s your daughter.’
‘How?’ he bit out. ‘We were careful. Every single time. We were careful.’
It was a question she had asked herself time and time again during her pregnancy. Forcing herself to relive that night, the intimacies they’d shared, trying to find the exact moment that their daughter had been conceived.
‘Protection fails sometimes,’ she said, echoing the words of the female doctor who had looked at her with pity.
Anna followed him out into the hallway, ensuring Amalia’s door stayed open just an inch.
He spun round to face her.
‘How could you? How could you keep this from me?’
This was the argument that she’d expected. The one she’d rehearsed in the dead of night when she’d known, somehow, that he would return and come to claim his child. This was the reason that she had poured hours and months into writing letters—documenting her thoughts, experiences, feelings from the day Amalia was born. Letters that had never been sent, nor read by the intended recipient, because they had been addressed to the father of her child. And this man? This man she did not know.
‘You left my bed and within hours were arrested for massive financial fraud. How could I subject the precious child I carried to a man I barely knew and who was in prison within months?’
‘I was wrongfully imprisoned,’ he bit out.
‘I didn’t know that at the time! And the moment I did find out, I was...’ She actually growled her frustration. ‘You know what I was told.’ She tried to take a calming breath. ‘Look, let’s talk about this in the morning. We both need sleep, or at least I certainly do.’ She stopped short of adding ‘please’ to the sentence. Instinctively she knew that any sign of weakness would be like blood in the water to a shark. She waited, her breath held, until the almost imperceptible nod of his head signalled his agreement.
Anna led Dimitri down the hallway to a room. Admittedly it was the smallest room she had to offer, but right now Anna was going to take any small victory she could. Did it make her petty? Perhaps. But she was too tired to care.
Only she hadn’t been prepared for the sight of his large build in the small room. She hadn’t braced herself for the memories that rushed to greet her of the last time he’d spent the night under this roof.
He’d swept into her life when she had been at her lowest, when she had felt helpless against the failings of both her parents. When all she’d wanted was something for herself. Just for once. One night that wasn’t about being responsible or putting someone else’s needs above her own.
She’d told herself that she would stop at one drink. She’d told herself she’d stop at one kiss, one touch...and after he’d given her pleasure she had never imagined possible she’d told herself she only wanted one night. But that had been a lie.
Until she’d woken, alone. The dull ache that took up residence in her heart that morning robbed her of the pleasure and the reckless need for one stolen night. In that moment she was cured of any selfish want she’d ever have, and she’d promised never to lose herself like that again. But she had never regretted that night. And she never would. For it had brought her Amalia.
* * *
Dimitri looked around the small room. It was little bigger than the cell he’d had in prison, but the exhaustion in Anna’s eyes had struck a nerve. He’d come here, all guns blazing, expecting to sweep in and take his child away from a mother who couldn’t care less about his child. What he’d seen instead was a beautiful woman who was fiercely protective of her child. A woman who had raised a child alone, just as his own mother once had. Perhaps he should take the time to work this new information into his plans, before trying again. As if sensing his resolution, Anna backed out quietly from the small room, and Dimitri sat heavily on the surprisingly comfortable mattress.
David was probably helping himself to a whisky from the hotel’s minibar right now, Dimitri thought as he pulled off his shoes. But he wouldn’t have changed places with the man. He was sleeping less than twenty metres from his daughter. From his own child. And he knew that he’d never let her out of his sight again.
A loud crashing sound from below jerked Dimitri from the fitful sleep he’d fallen into. Terror raced through his bones for just a second, until he saw the faint outline of flowery wallpaper and felt the soft mattress beneath him. He wasn’t back in prison. No one was about to get hurt. He waited for a moment to get his breath back, for the painful sting of adrenaline to recede from his pores.
But then the crash sounded again, and his daughter started to cry. What the hell?
He launched out of the bed and into the hallway, where he met Anna.
‘Anna, what—?’
‘Go back to bed,’ she whispered harshly. ‘Please, just—’
Another crashing sound came, this time accompanied by the sound of breaking glass.
He caught a look of panic passing across Anna’s features before she disappeared down the stairs. Amalia was starting to cry in earnest now, and he went into her room. Did he pick her up? Would that make her stop, or cry even harder?
Her poor little face was already red, with big, fat tears rolling down her cheeks. The ear-piercing screams of his daughter caught in his heart and he reached down and picked her up, ignoring the stab of hurt as she tried to
pull away from him, her strength surprising him.
He held her against his chest and followed Anna’s footsteps down to the hallway and the bar below, thinking he was ready for whatever he would find down there. But he wasn’t.
Anna was on the floor, kneeling before a small red-haired woman, who was trying to shake Anna off.
‘Please, Ma. You need to go.’
‘You left me with that man—’
‘You know Eamon, Ma.’
Dimitri watched as Anna’s mother tried to get out of the chair, pushing Anna away and nearly succeeding, until Anna stood and took her by the shoulders.
‘Ma, please. It’s late and you’ve woken Amalia.’
For a moment, that seemed to do the trick. ‘My precious Amalia...’ But the moment she caught sight of Dimitri standing with her granddaughter, any hold that Anna might have had on her mother disappeared.
She knocked Anna off balance and she fell awkwardly on her knee. Mary took two uncertain steps towards him and Dimitri instinctively turned to protect his daughter, angling his body away from the drunk woman. He held out his arm.
‘Enough!’ His strong command brought the older woman to a standstill. ‘Anna, take Amalia upstairs.’
Anna looked for a moment as if she was about to argue, but clearly thought better of it.
She took her daughter from him, their skin brushing against each other’s for the first time since that night three years before. Ignoring the waves of little pinpricks that rushed over his hands, Dimitri watched as Anna disappeared up the stairs, her last glance at them uncertain and worried.
Dimitri stared at the woman in front of him, seeing very little trace of Anna’s colouring, but for just a moment he could see reflections of what must have once made the older woman beautiful, especially in the startling moss-green eyes looking back at him.
