Shock ripped through him again. For all his protest that this appallingly attired, rubber-gloved female with her mop and bucket just could not be Stavros Coustakis’s daughter, those eyes—so incredibly distinctive—proved his denial and disbelief wrong.
Thee mou—she really is his daughter.
Shock stabbed him again—and he saw the same emotion intensify in her frozen face as well.
‘My father?’ she gasped.
The mop clattered from Rosalie’s suddenly nerveless grip. Her vision seemed to be blurring, the world turning fuzzy...
She had heard the man who had just spoken say what surely to God he could not have said...
Because I don’t have a father. I’ve never had a father...never...
He was saying something in a foreign language. She didn’t know what—didn’t know anything except that the world was still turning fuzzy and she seemed to be falling...
Then, like iron, his grip seized upon her arm and she was bodily steered into the kitchen, forcibly propelled down on to the chair by the rickety table. At last the falling sensation stopped, and the world became less fuzzy, and she found herself blinking blankly.
The man was now standing in front of her, towering over her, and she was staring at him with that weird, blurry gaze. He was speaking again, and she forced herself to hear him.
‘Your father—Stavros Coustakis,’ he was saying.
She mouthed groggily. ‘Stavros Cous... Cous...?’ She tried to say the foreign-sounding name, but couldn’t make her throat muscles work properly.
The man was frowning down at her, and with a part of her brain that should not have been working she registered how the frown angled the sculpted planes of his face, darkening those incredible dark eyes of his to make him even more ludicrously good-looking than ever, doing things to her that were utterly irrelevant right now, at this moment when he had told her what she had never expected to hear in all her life...
‘Stavros Coustakis.’
She heard him repeat the name in the accented voice which went, she realised, with the foreign-sounding name he’d said—just as it went with the air of foreignness about him.
She blinked again, staring at him. ‘I’ve got a father?’
The question sounded stupid, because he’d just told her she had, but she could see it had an effect on the man, because his frown deepened even more, drawing together his arched brows and furrowing his broad brow, deepening the lines scored around his mouth.
‘You didn’t know? You didn’t know Stavros Coustakis was your father?’
There was incredulity in the man’s voice, and Rosalie looked at him blankly. ‘No,’ she said.
The man seemed to be staring down at her as if not believing anything about her. Not believing she was who she’d told him she was. And not believing she didn’t know this Stavros Cous-something-or-other was her father.
Her father...
The word rang in her head. A word she never used—for what would have been the point? It was a word that was utterly nothing to do with her, because he didn’t exist—hadn’t existed except for those pathetically few short weeks in her poor mother’s life, when he had seemed to bring romance before departing for ever.
But suddenly now, at this very moment, he did exist.
She felt shock ricochet through her at the realisation, and it made her voice thready as she asked the question burning fiercely in her head. ‘How did he find me?’
It came out in a rush, a blurting question, and she gazed hungrily at this man who had come here and dropped this amazing, incredible, unbelievable bombshell into her life—a life that had suddenly, out of nowhere, changed for ever.
My father knows about me! He’s sent someone to find me!
Emotion leapt within her, distracting her from the fact that the dark eyes looking down at her had suddenly veiled.
‘That is something you must ask him yourself,’ was his clipped reply, but she leapt onwards to the next question.
‘Where is he?’ Her voice was avid, hungry, the words tumbling from her.
‘He lives in Athens.’
‘Athens?’ Rosalie’s eyes widened. Her father was Greek?
In her head her mother’s voice echoed...
‘He was foreign—so romantic!—working in London...’
‘Yes.’
The man’s voice was curt. She saw his face tighten, as if he were shutting her out of something.
‘As for any other questions you may have, they can wait.’ He glanced around himself. She could see his expression tighten even more. ‘Get your things and we’ll leave.’
Rosalie stared. ‘What do you mean?’
That tight-lipped, angry look was back in his dark eyes.
‘I’m taking you to Athens,’ he said. ‘To your father.’
Xandros glanced sideways at his passenger in the chauffeured car. She still had that blank expression on her face, as if she was not really taking in what was happening.
Make that two of us, Xandros thought grimly.
He’d come to London with no intention other than to warn Stavros’s English daughter against her father’s scheming. But now his anger at Stavros had found a new cause. Hell, he’d always known the man was ruthless—his disowning Ariadne was proof of that!—but what he’d done to this wretched other daughter of his was...unforgivable.
Keeping her in ignorance about her father—keeping her in abject poverty...
Emotion roiled in him, and there was a dark, angry glitter in his eyes. Stavros wanted his English daughter delivered to him in Athens? Well, Xandros would be glad to oblige! No way could he just walk away from her, leave her there in that slum...
She’d come eagerly enough—but then, why wouldn’t she? She’d just discovered she had a father she’d never known about—of course she’d want to meet him! And why delay? There was obviously nothing for her here in London! Not if she was reduced to cleaning for a living!
So he’d waited as she abandoned her bucket and mop, shed her yellow rubber gloves, shrugged on a cheap, worn jacket, picked up a shabby tote bag and left with him—just like that. She’d put the house key back through the letterbox and climbed into Xandros’s waiting car.
She hadn’t asked any more questions and Xandros had been glad of it. Answering them would have been difficult—especially any about how her father had found out about her existence.
His mouth set again. Let Stavros tell her that to her face.
There had been practical issues about getting her to Athens that had required immediate intention. Most importantly, did she have a passport? The answer had been an affirmative, and she’d told him it was in her bedsit. The car had stopped there—on another rundown street not far from the place she’d been cleaning—and Xandros’s frown had deepened. The terraced house was peeling, its railings broken and rusty. Empty bottles and litter lay on the steps, and there were sagging curtains at the window. A total dump.