demeaning—’
‘Hard work is never demeaning, Dad,’ Lucy declared, her dimples flashing as she smiled down soothingly at him. ‘Don’t be a snob. I’m not half as posh as you are and I never will be.’
Kreon bit back tart words of disagreement because he didn’t want to hurt his daughter’s feelings, most particularly because she had only been in his life for the last six months and he was afraid of driving her away by acting like a heavy-handed parent. After all, Lucy had never had a proper parent to look out for her, he acknowledged guiltily. But fiercely independent and proud as she was at twenty-one years old, she had been very much down on her luck when she’d finally approached Kreon, toting his baby granddaughter in her arms, both of them shabbily dressed and half starved. The older man’s heart softened at the thought of little Bella, who was the most adorable toddler and the light of his life and his wife, Iola’s, for he and Iola had met and married too late in life to have a family. He loved having the two of them in his home but he was firmly convinced that his daughter and her child still very much needed a husband to look after them when he himself was no longer around.
And that would have been so easy to achieve if only Lucy weren’t so defensive and insecure, Kreon reflected in frustration, because his daughter was an extraordinarily beautiful girl. In the bar where she worked men stopped in their tracks simply to stare at her. With a mane of strawberry-blonde curls reaching halfway down her back, creamy skin and big blue eyes, she was a classic beauty and dainty as a doll. She made more on tips than any other waitress in the hotel and was, he had been reliably assured by the owner, who was a friend, a terrific asset to business.
Lucy went about her work, ruefully aware that the job she had insisted on taking only annoyed her father. Unfortunately, being a single parent was an expensive challenge even with the wonderful support her father and stepmother had given her in recent months. She was very grateful that she had come to Greece to finally meet her long-lost father for he and his wife had freely given both her and her daughter love, kindness and acceptance. Her father was the son of a Greek who had married an Englishwoman and he had grown up in London. Kreon was a wonderfully supportive parent and grandparent. Without a word of protest or reproach he had taken in Lucy and her child even though she hadn’t warned him about Bella when he’d first invited her out to Greece.
But while Lucy was willing to accept free accommodation as well as her stepmother Iola’s help as a sitter with Bella, she was determined not to become a permanent burden or to take too much advantage of the older couple’s generosity. She was willing to admit that she had desperately needed help when she’d first arrived in Athens but she was trying very hard now to stand on her own two feet. Her earnings might be small but that salary meant she could pay for the necessities like clothing for herself and her child and for the moment that was enough to ease her pride.
As she stepped away from a customer, her boss and the hotel owner, Andreus, signalled to her. ‘We’re hosting an important business meeting here in the rear conference room tomorrow morning at eleven,’ he informed her. ‘I’d like you to serve the drinks and snacks. I only need you for a couple of hours but I’ll pay you for a full shift.’
‘I’ll check with Iola but that should be fine because she doesn’t usually go out in the morning,’ Lucy said, before taking off to serve a customer waving his hand in the air to get her attention.
The customer tried to chat her up and get her phone number but Lucy simply smiled politely and ignored his efforts because she wasn’t even slightly interested in dating, or indeed in anything more physical, being well aware that the very fact she already had a child encouraged most men to assume that she would be a good bet for a casual encounter. She had been there, done that, lost the tee shirt and got a baby for her pains. Unhappily, as a green-as-grass nineteen-year-old virgin she hadn’t grasped that she was involved in a casual fling until it was far too late to protect herself and she had been ditched. In fact, having been treated with such devastating contempt and dismissal by Bella’s father, that final humiliation was still etched into her soul like a burn of shame that refused to heal whenever she thought about it...which was why she didn’t allow herself to think about it or him very often.
In any case, what was the point in agonising over past mistakes and misjudgements, not to mention the most painful and cruel rejections she had suffered? Agonising never did change anything. Lucy had learned that the hard way time and time again when she was a vulnerable child growing up in care, subject to the whims of others and unable to control where she lived or even who she lived with. Now it meant that she found it hard to trust people and if she didn’t have a certain amount of independence and choice she tended to feel horribly trapped and powerless.
But life, she reminded herself with dogged positivity, was getting better because for the first time in years she was daring to start putting down roots. She was happier than she had been in years and hoping to come up with a plan to improve her career prospects for Bella’s sake. Very probably she would accept her father’s offer to pay for some sort of job training or further education that would enable her to move out of low-paid employment. Perhaps it was finally time to start making some long-term decisions and think like a responsible adult, she told herself firmly.
‘You’re worth so much more than this kind of grunt work...’ Bella’s father had told Lucy two years earlier in Spain.
Well, look just how badly daring to have dreams and believe in them had turned out for her then, Lucy reflected, rigid with regret and pain as she stood at the bar to collect an order. Her friend at the time, another waitress called Tara, had been far more realistic about that relationship.
‘He’ll sleep with you and dump you and move on the minute he gets bored,’ Tara had forecast, although the words she had used had been much earthier. ‘Guys like that don’t stick with girls like us. We’re only good enough to party with for a few nights.’
Perspiration broke on Lucy’s short upper lip and she wanted to punch herself hard for letting herself drift even momentarily down that bad memory lane, because hindsight only made her more ashamed of how stupid and naïve she had been. It was not as if she hadn’t known what men were like, not as if she had grown up in some little princess castle, always protected and loved. She should have known better and she had yet to forgive herself for her rashness.
But at the end of her shift, when she got home to her father’s very comfortable small town house and crept into the bedroom she shared with her daughter, she realised that nothing was quite that cut and dried. Bella slept nestled in her cot, curly black hair dark against the bedding, her olive skin flushed by sleep, long lashes screening her bright green eyes. Bella was gorgeous, like a little angel, Lucy thought with her eyes stinging and, although she could be sorry for everything else, she could not find it in her heart to regret Bella’s existence in any way.
‘Come with us to this dinner on Saturday night,’ Iola urged over breakfast the next morning. She was a curvy brunette in her late forties with smiling dark eyes. ‘It would please your father so much.’
Lucy went pink as she washed her daughter’s face clean of breakfast debris. She knew that her dining out with them would please Kreon, but she also knew it would entail fending off the advances of at least two handpicked young men because her father’s current main aim in life seemed to centre on finding her an eligible boyfriend. In that line Kreon was old-fashioned because he refused to credit that Lucy choosing to remain a single parent could be a viable plan for the future.
‘Mum... Mum,’ Bella carolled cheerfully as she was released from the high chair and set down to toddle somewhat clumsily round the room.
Lucy steadied her daughter as she almost fell over the toy box and ruffled her untidy curls. Curls, aside of the colour, just like her own, frizzy and ungovernable in humid weather, explosive when washed. Lucy looked back at her stepmother uncomfortably. She felt like an ungrateful brat for her reluctance to do what her father wanted her to do. ‘I’m just not interested in meeting anyone at present...maybe in a few months I’ll feel differently,’ she added without much conviction.
‘You had a bad breakup and you went through a lot alone afterwards,’ Iola acknowledged gently. ‘But