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.
Dimitri wasn’t a stranger to what alcohol could do to a person and what kind of chemical prison it could be. Some responded to gentle persuasion, but the time for that had passed.
‘I’m going to get you some water, and you’re going to sleep down here on the sofa.’ There was no way he was going to let her upstairs near his child or her daughter. Mary made one last effort to complain, but he saw that off with a raised eyebrow.
‘Do not test me, Mrs Moore. You’ve done enough damage tonight.’
She just hadn’t realised how much yet.
As Mary reluctantly lay down on the sofa, Anna stuck her head over the bannisters. He raised a hand to stop her from coming further down the stairs, knowing that her reappearance would spark another round from the woman on the sofa.
Anna’s eyes were sad as she mouthed the words ‘thank you’ to him and disappeared. And just for a moment he felt sorry for her. Because she had no idea what was about to happen.
He waited until Mary Moore fell into a comfortably drunk sleep and pulled out his mobile. David answered on the second ring.
‘I need you to do a couple of things for me. I need indefinite management cover for the bed and breakfast and a list of rehab clinics as far away from this village as humanly possible, and I need both by ten a.m. tomorrow.’
‘Sure thing. Anything else?’
‘Yes. Tell Flora to get the house prepared for anything a two-year-old might need. And after that, I want you to start working on a watertight prenup.’
Dear Dimitri,
How could you do such a thing?
ANNA FLIPPED OUT the bed sheet, the whipping sound it made before it settled over the mattress making her wince. She was exhausted, having barely slept the night before. Every time she’d closed her eyes she’d seen Dimitri standing between her and Amalia as if it were a prophecy foretelling how she would, from now on, see her daughter—at a distance and with him separating them. If not that, then she’d been tortured by the memories of her own pleasure as Dimitri had teased orgasm after orgasm from her innocent body.
But when she woke, all she could think of was her mother. It had been years since Mary had turned up at the bed and breakfast that far out of control. A twinge cramped her stomach. This hadn’t been the life she’d wanted. Once she’d dreamed of escaping the small village, whose inhabitants had been hostile towards them from the moment Mary had been forced to raise her child alone. Anna had fantasised about studying art and sculpture, perhaps even at the University of Glasgow. It had been a hope that she’d cherished as she’d worked at the bed and breakfast saving every penny she made to put towards tuition fees. That Anna had somehow managed to follow in her mother’s footsteps—becoming, instead, another single mother—had sealed their fate. Undesirable. Unwanted. The cautionary tale that locals told their children. And what a cautionary tale it was. Only the masochistic would want Dimitri Kyriakou arriving on their doorstep to claim what he felt he was owed.
By the time the sun had peeked around her curtain that morning, she’d realised she needed a plan. She needed to take back the control that was slipping through her fingers like hot sand.
This was the last of the rooms that needed cleaning after the hasty departure of her guests the night before. If she was lucky, she’d be able to pull some new clients from the horse racing meeting in Dublin in a few days’ time.
Thankfully her mother had left before Anna had brought Amalia down for breakfast. It was the one showdown she hadn’t been prepared for. Where her mother was concerned, Anna realised that she no longer had any defences left. How could her mother have done that, knowing Amalia was in the house? Clearly all the talk of rehab—the apparent reason she’d taken the money from Dimitri in the first place—was a... Anna wasn’t ready to call it a lie, more of a thin spider’s web of fiction that broke under the weight of addiction.
Rehab had been a mythical promise she’d heard over and over again throughout the years. A place the woman wearing her mother’s skin would go, and upon her return would be her real mother gifted back to her. The mother who had once been a bright, powerful, creative woman with a deep well of love to give and not enough pools in which to store it. But her mother was one problem. Dimitri was another.
There were a hundred different ways she’d imagined their reunion, and not one of them came remotely close to what had happened the night before. Recalling the night they’d spent together three years before, she realised that she’d been wearing her mother’s shirt—the one with the name Mary Moore sewn onto the pocket. And, with her mother’s record, would she not have stormed in like a Valkyrie, ready to retrieve her child from such a woman? The way that no one had done for her?
She felt, rather than heard, a presence behind her. Siobhan was downstairs with Amalia, so there was only one person it could be. Only one person had ever had that effect on her body. It had been the same way the first time she’d laid eyes on him. A feeling that the world had ever so slightly tilted on its axis, a feeling that nothing would ever be the same again. It started