“What personal matter are you attending to?”
“It’s my ward,” he said on a heavy sigh.
“Your… the La Roche girl?”
“Yes,” Stavros propped his elbow against the window frame, and through the distance her eyes skidded to the window he was at, pausing there for a moment. Her frown deepened and then she continued her idle inspection of the ancient home.
“You can’t stand her.”
“Yes,” he said, a firm nod confirming his brother’s summation even when something inside Stavros rejected the words.
“Yet you choose her over your family?”
“Christopher would have expected me to do this. I owe it to him.”
Stavros disconnected the call, a grim line equaling the grim sense of concern that ran down his spine.
*
CLAUDIA STARED AT THE water. It moved quickly, angrily, bubbling at the edges of the river. If she squinted she could see some kind of dark brown fish moving just beneath the surface.
She reached down, scooping a stone from the garden and palming it, her eyes reflecting a similar turmoil to that of the water. She lifted her arm and pitched the rock into the water, following its progress through the air and then watching as it disappeared from view altogether.
Her conversation with Stavros, from the day before, sat heavily in her heart and her mind.
She didn’t want to argue with the man about her father. She didn’t want to find herself in a position where she had to own the true feelings that ran deep within her. But the truth was, and she’d had many years to analyse it and make peace with how she felt, her father had failed her.
Apart from financially, of course, but then, how much she would have preferred to still have her father alive than to know herself in possession of such a significant trust fund? To be alive and interested in her life, no matter how disappointing he found it.
So she wasn’t a genius. She wasn’t smart. Not in the bookish way.
What Claudia excelled at was people. She charmed people effortlessly, and the results had led to great things for the charities she supported. She’d raised millions of pounds just by greasing the wheels and bringing people together.
She was a professional networker, and she did it without recognition and without pay. Perhaps if she’d sought more plaudits for the work she did, he would have understood that she wasn’t just attention-seeking. Maybe he would have realized that she was leveraging her exposure to connect people to charities, to raise money for those who needed it most. It was something she did because it was right for people with her kind of social media and celebrity platform to make a difference. How dare Stavros stand in judgement of her fame without attempting to understand it!
And why did it bother her so much that he was so scathing and condescending about her lifestyle choices? Why did she care? Did she want
his approval?
Of course she didn’t.
She sat down on the edge of the river, spreading her coat down to keep her bottom dry from the wet grass. It was still cold beneath her but she didn’t care. She looked out at the river and let it swirl her right back into the past.
“You’re very handsome, you know.”
“Are you drunk, Claudia?”
She hiccoughed, and pouted her bright red lips, lifting a hand and tossing her hair aside. “Only a very little.” She smiled and moved closer, breathing in her handsome guardian’s masculine fragrance. Every pulse point in her body went into overdrive and heat slicked between her legs.
“I left you alone for precisely thirty minutes. What the hell happened?”
Claudia’s eyes moved betrayingly to the table, to where an empty bottle of champagne now sat. “Umm, nothing?”
He followed her gaze and swore in his native tongue. “You finished the bottle? Jesus, you are barely the size of a child and you drank all that? You should be in A&E.”
“Perhaps you’ll need to keep an eye on me tonight,” she murmured in what, at the time, she believed to be a husky voice. And it must have conveyed something of her feelings because he’d frozen, and stared at her with a new look in his eyes.
“Oh, I will be.”