‘My mother? No.’ Anna shook her head vehemently, instantly understanding his concern. ‘No. It’s been years since she turned up here like that.’
‘Who else do you employ here?’ It wasn’t perhaps the question she’d expected. She’d imagined Dimitri would haul her over the coals for her mother’s appearance. Anna was still trying to gather her thoughts from the breakneck speed of his inquisition. She still hadn’t turned to face him. She needed just a moment more to gather her strength.
‘Siobhan helps out when we’re at capacity. Which we would have been today, had not all my customers been removed to a hotel in Dublin.’ With this she finally turned to take in the broad expanse of the man who had no damn right to look that good after a night in the smallest room she had.
Instantly regretting it, she turned back to the room, picked up the cleaning basket and made her way into the en suite bathroom. She put on the rubber gloves and spread a healthy squirt of bleach on the scrubber as if she could clean away either the sight of him or him completely.
She got onto her knees, realising that this was perhaps the most ridiculous way to have a conversation, but, needing something to do with her hands other than throttle the man behind her, she pushed on.
‘I’ve been thinking, and I would like you to have a relationship with my—our—daughter.’ She told herself it was the smell of the bleach that had her stomach twisting and turning worse than any morning sickness she had experienced. ‘I’d be happy to grant visitation rights, but you must understand that we will be staying here. My life is here and so is my daughter’s. I will not uproot everything she’s ever known.’
There. She had managed to get the words from her mind to her mouth without crying, or sounding weak. She needed him to agree to this.
* * *
For a moment, just as he had done the night before, he felt almost sorry for her. She had no idea that her life was about to change irrevocably. But from the first time he’d heard of his daughter, Dimitri knew that he wouldn’t settle for visitation rights. He wanted his daughter with him. All
the time.
He was man enough to admit that the knowledge that he currently didn’t have any legal rights to his child was nothing short of terrifying. The fear that had gripped him in those first moments of this shocking discovery had been nothing like anything he’d ever experienced. Nothing. Even when he’d arrived at his father’s house at the age of seven for the first time, not knowing if he’d take him in. Even before that, when the police filling the tiny apartment he’d shared with his mother were saying unintelligible things that he struggled to make sense of years after they had left his life. None of it scratched the surface of the deep well that opened up when he realised that there was a tiny life out there, his flesh and blood...
‘I don’t want you to miss out on things,’ Anna was saying as she furiously scrubbed at the toilet, before picking herself up off the floor and turning—still with her back to him—to the sink.
‘You don’t want me missing...’ His sentence trailed off as incredulity hit him hard. ‘What, like the first sonogram? The first sound of my daughter’s heartbeat? Tell me, Anna,’ he said, reaching out to pull her around to him, so that he could look her in the eyes, so he could see the truth written there in them when she answered his next question. ‘Does my daughter even know the word Daddy?’
He regretted touching her the moment his fingers hit the bare skin of her arm beneath her short T-shirt. He tried to ignore the flames that licked out at him from just one touch; he tried to ignore the rush of memories he’d held at bay for the last two days. He had to. Instead, he focused on the mounting horror in Anna’s eyes.
‘What? Did you think I wouldn’t have wanted to be part of those things? Christe mou, Anna, did you even think of me at all?’
Dimitri cursed again, but this time silently. He hadn’t want to reveal that much. He needed to get this back on to an unemotional level if he had any hope of persuading her to his cause. But the more and more he thought of all the things he had missed out on, all of the things Amalia would have grown up with, the stigma of being illegitimate in a sternly familial culture...and at how he hadn’t been able to protect her from that... He knew how much damage could be done to a child when they were unwelcome, unwanted...
So, no. No. He’d never put his daughter through that. He would do what he had to do. Because that was what Dimitri did. He put aside anything that would prevent the required outcome. He cut off the thoughts of the past, his mother, his half-brother’s betrayal, thoughts of the time he had spent wrongfully incarcerated in prison. They had no place here. Here was his daughter. And the mother of his child. And he needed them in Greece.
‘This is getting us nowhere,’ he said, looking around the small bathroom. ‘Can we... Do you have coffee? Can we sit and have a proper conversation, when you’re not...?’ He gestured towards the cleaning products and the hideous yellow gloves Anna was wearing.
* * *
The smell of coffee seemed to have a calming effect on his nerves, but the moment the insipid, thin liquid hit his tongue he regretted it. Dimitri kept his eyes trained on Anna, who had yet to stop moving, either around the small bathroom she’d been cleaning or the impressive, sleek chrome kitchen he’d been surprised to find tucked away from the main part of the old cottage.
He supposed the small staff area could pass as cosy and compact. But while he sat pressed up against the wall, his long legs barely fitting beneath the wooden table, his patience finally wore thin.
‘Sit down,’ he demanded.
Anna stilled, freezing against the command, but finally she slipped—easily—into the seat opposite him. Though her body had finally stopped moving, her eyes seemed to take everything in but him.
‘I want you to come to Greece.’
Ah. That did it. Anna’s gaze zeroed in on his.
‘No.’
‘No?’ he asked, his eyebrow raised.
She let out an incredulous laugh. ‘How can I go to Greece? I have a business here, my mother, my...life is here, Dimitri. I can’t.’
This was nothing he hadn’t expected, but the email he’d received from David that morning had confirmed that everything was in place. In fact, in just five short minutes Anna would see how pointless her arguments would be. He didn’t want to use her mother’s behaviour from the night before against her. But even if Mary didn’t live under the same roof she was still an influence on his daughter’s life, she could still put his daughter at risk. So he would use it if Anna forced him to. First he’d try a softer approach. And if that didn’t work...
‘Anna. The situation you’re in can’t be easy. The bank is about to take all this away from you.’ He ignored the small gasp of shock that fell from her mouth.