By then Suzanna was cautiously placing her little hand in his, and Alex’s full attention was back on the child.
It was a revelation, simply because Mia had never known he had it in him, but within minutes Suzanna had forgotten her tears, forgotten her woes. In fact, she seemed to have forgotten everything as, with amazing intuition, Alex breached the little girl’s natural shyness with men in general by encouraging her to describe—in lurid detail—every stage of her emergency dash to the hospital in an ambulance and the ensuing course of events that had led to her waking up here in this bed with stitches in her tummy.
‘They’re horrid,’ she confided. ‘They hurt when I move.’
‘Then try not to move too much,’ advised the man, whose simple logic seemed to appeal to the child.
‘Thank you,’ Mia murmured gratefully an hour or so later, when Suzanna had drifted into a contented sleep.
‘For diverting her mind from the horrors your father has fed into her?’ He got up from the bed where somehow he had managed to swap places with Mia so she had ended up seated more comfortably on the bedside chair. ‘That does not require thanks,’ he stated grimly. ‘It requires defending.’
He was right. It did. Mia didn’t even take offence at the comment. ‘He is not a nice man.’ She sighed. ‘He likes to control people. You, me, Suzanna—anyone he can gain power over.’
‘Which does not justify her being treated to that kind of mental torture,’ Alex countered harshly.
Mia went pale, but she nodded in agreement. ‘Maybe now you can understand why I had to marry you. I had to do what was necessary so I can remove her from his influence.’
‘An influence she should never have been exposed to in the first place!’
They had been talking in low voices by necessity in such close proximity to the sleeping Suzanna, but those words cut so deep into Mia’s bones that she could not sit still and take them on the chin as she really knew she should do.
She got to her feet and walked right out of the room on legs that were shaking so badly they could barely support her.
When Alex eventually came looking for her he found her standing in the corridor, staring out of one of the windows that overlooked the hospital car park.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said heavily as he came up behind her. ‘I did not mean to sound so critical of you. It was your father I was condemning.’
She didn’t believe him. ‘You think I am the lowest of the low for handing my child over to him,’ she murmured unsteadily. ‘And don’t think that I don’t know it!’
‘That is your own guilty conscience talking,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I only wish you could have told me from the beginning why you had been forced to agree to this marriage!’
‘What was I supposed to say?’ she said cynically. ‘Oh, by the way, I’m doing this because I had another child but I gave her away and this is the only way I can get her back again?’ Her eyes flashed, her cheeks blooming with anger. ‘That would really have made you respect me, wouldn’t it?’
‘And you want my respect?’ he asked huskily.
Her heart hurt with the truthful answer to that question. ‘I just want to get through these next few months without falling apart,’ she answered shakily.
Silence greeted that, a grim kind of silence that held them both very still in that hospital corridor. Alex stood behind her, a dominating force as he stared over her shoulder at the car park beyond.
Mia felt like crying. Why, she didn’t know—except maybe it had something to do with the need pounding away inside her breast that wanted her just to turn around and throw herself against the big, hard chest behind her.
‘Do you have copies of the adoption documents?’ Alex asked suddenly.
She steadied her lips and nodded. ‘Yes,’ she whispered.
‘Where are they?’
Mia frowned at the question and turned to face him. ‘I keep them with my other papers in my vanity case back at the villa in Skiathos,’ she told him. ‘Why?’
‘Because I would like to see them, if you have no objection.’
No objection? Of course she had objections as a sudden fear drained her face of its colour. ‘You want to use them against me, don’t you?’ she accused him shakily. ‘You think that if I gave my child away once then a court of law would not give me custody of a second child! You—’
‘You,’ he cut in angrily, ‘have a nasty, suspicious, insulting mind!’ He was so very right!
‘And that makes you feel very superior to me, doesn’t it?’ she flashed back hotly. ‘Well, let me tell you something, Alex. I won’t ever think you superior to me while you go on believing that a lump of rock somewhere in the Aegean is more important to you than your own DNA!’
CHAPTER EIGHT