PROLOGUE
THE EXECUTIVE JET cut through the wintry night, heading north. Inside, its sole passenger stared through the darkened porthole. His face was sombre. His gaze unseeing. Looking inward, into the distant past.
Two boys, carefree, happy.
Brothers. Who’d thought they had all the time in the world.
But for one time had run out.
A knife stabbed into the heart of the man sitting, staring unseeing into the night sky beyond the speeding plane.
Andreas! My brother!
But Andreas was gone, never to return. Leaving behind only a weeping mother, a stricken brother.
And one precious, most miraculously precious gift of consolation…
The front doorbell rang, peremptory and insistent. Ann paused in clearing the mess in the kitchen and glanced into the second-hand pram, checking that the noise hadn’t woken Ari. She hurried to the front door, pushing back untidy wisps of hair, wondering as she opened it who on earth it could be.
But even as she opened the door she knew who it was. He stood, tall, and dark, face set like stone. Beyond him, at the kerb, a chauffeured car, sleek and expensive, looked utterly out of place in this run down part of town.
‘Miss Turner?’
The voice was deep, and accented. It was also cold, and very hard.
Ann nodded briefly, dread suddenly pooling in her stomach.
‘I am Nikos Theakis,’ he announced, as the breath caught in her throat in a shocked rasp. ‘I have come for the child.’
Nikos Theakis. The man she had most cause to hate in all the world.
Ann could only stare, frozen, as he stepped past her, inside, dominating the narrow hallway, glancing dismissively around the shabby interior before arrowing back on her, as she stood shocked into immobility. ‘Where is he?’ he demanded.
His eyes lasered into her—dark, overpowering. Her mind was reeling. Out of all the insane things to do at this moment all she could do was stare at him. Stare at six foot of lean packed male, sheathed in a business suit that shouted wealth, sable hair immaculately cut, and a face—Ann’s stomach clenched—a face that widened her eyes involuntarily.
Night-dark eyes, a strong blade of a nose, high cheekbones, steel-jaw and sculpted, sensual mouth.
She gulped mentally. Then, with a jolt of effort, she dragged her mind away. What the hell was she doing, staring at the man like that? As if he were anyone other than the man he had just announced himself to be.
Nikos Theakis—rich, powerful, arrogant and ruthless. The man who had ruined her sister’s life.
Because he had. Ann knew. Her sister had told her time and again.
Carla, always the golden girl, vibrant and glamorous. Partying her way through life. Then the party had ended. She’d turned up late last summer at Ann’s poky, dingy flat with no place else to go. Distraught.
‘He said he was crazy about me. Crazy! But now I’m pregnant and he won’t marry me! And I know why.’ Her beautiful face had twisted in hatred. ‘It’s that snobby bully-boy brother of his! The almighty Nikos Theakis. Looking down his nose at me like I’m dirt!’
Shocked, Ann had listened while Carla’s tearful tirade flowed on. She had tried to reassure her, to remind her that the father of her child had to support it financially—
‘I want Andreas to marry me!’ Carla had railed.
The months that had followed had not been easy. Carla had sunk into a depressive lethargy, forbidding Ann to make contact with the father of her child even to at least sort out maintenance for the baby.
‘Andreas knows where I am,’ she’d said dully. ‘I want him to come and find me! I want him to come and marry me!’
But Andreas had not come, and Carla’s difficult pregnancy had ended with an even more difficult labour that had left her with postnatal depression, brought on, Ann was sure, by Andreas’ rejection of her. To Ann had fallen the task of looking after baby Ari—for Carla, it seemed, had failed to bond, sinking deeper into depression, refusing all treatment.
The cure, when it had come, had been dramatic. A knock at the door—a young man, handsome, but with a strained, uncertain manner.
‘I—I am Andreas Theakis,’ he’d told Ann.
That was all it had taken. Carla had flown to him, her face transfigured. Her life transfigured. Or so she had believed. In reality it had been a little less romantic than Ann had hoped. Andreas had wanted a paternity test done.
‘I have to convince my brother…’ he’d said uneasily to Ann. But Carla had been viciously triumphant.
‘Oh, Ari is Andreas’, all right! And Mr Almighty Nikos Theakis is going to get his comeuppance! Andreas will marry me now—he’s promised me, because he wants his son—and there isn’t a thing his damn brother can do about it!’
Had Carla been tempting fate, to be so triumphant? Ann wondered, with a bitter twist of misery. It had not taken the malign will of Nikos Theakis to keep his brother from marrying her sister. It had taken a moment’s misjudgement by Andreas, whisking Carla away—glamorous once more, vibrant once more—in his powerful hire car on unfamiliar British roads. Nothing more than that.
And two lives snuffed out.
Ann had been at home with Ari, looking after him willingly while Andreas and Carla went off for the day together. He had been orphaned at a stroke.
Ann knew that the horror and grief of that day would never leave her. Andreas’s body had been flown back to Greece. None of his family had come near Ann. Ann had been left to bury her sister on her own. Left to look after baby Ari, all alone in the world now, except for her. She had made no attempt to contact Andreas’ family. They had clearly never wanted Carla—never wanted her child. Whereas she…
Ari was all the world to her. All she had left. Her one consolation in
a sea of grief. Grief for her sister and for the man she had so desperately wanted to marry. Anger for his brother—who had stopped them doing so. The brother who was now standing in her own hallway, eyes like lasers.
Demanding to take Ari from her.
Getting no answer, Nikos glanced into the empty room beside the front door, then strode down the narrow hallway to the kitchen at the end. His expression hardened even more. The place was a mess. There was a sink full of washing up, a plastic covered table with food debris on it. But it was the pram that drew him. He strode up to it and looked down. Emotion knifed through him. Andreas’ son! Out of this night¬ mare, one shining miracle. He gazed down at the sleeping baby, his heart full. Slowly, he reached a hand towards him.
‘Don’t touch him!’ The shrill whisper made him halt, whipping his head round.
Ann Turner was in the kitchen doorway, one hand closed tightly around the jamb. Nikos’s brows snapped together. Did the girl think he was going to take the boy there and then? Obviously he was not. He would return when he had all the papers drawn up, a suitable nanny engaged, and then make an orderly removal of his nephew. He was here now simply because he had had to come. He had had to see for himself, this baby who was the only consolation in the nightmare that had closed over the Theakis family with Andreas’s death.
His eyes rested a moment on the figure in the doorway, his mouth tightening as his gaze flicked over her. She suited the place. Shabbily dressed, with her hair tied back, an unkempt mess, and baby food on her shapeless T-shirt. She couldn’t have looked less like the girl who had got her avaricious claws into his brother. Carla Turner had been a gilded bird of paradise. This sister of hers was a scrawny street sparrow.
But Ann Turner’s appearance was irrelevant—only the baby in her care was important.
She was standing aside from the door now. ‘Mr Theakis, I want you to leave. I’ve nothing to say to you, and I don’t want you disturbing Ari.’ Her voice was sharp. Hostile.