Claimed For The Greek's Child

Mary looked worse than the last time she’d seen her. From the day Amalia was born, Anna knew she couldn’t allow Mary to continue to live with them. She wouldn’t take the risk that her drunken outbursts could harm her daughter. She’d arranged for her mother to live with one of the only family friends Mary Moore had left. And their exchanges ever since had been loaded and painful.

‘What happened, Ma? Where did the money come from?’ Anna hated the sadness in her voice.

‘I thought I’d be able to pay off some of the mortgage... I thought...just one drink... I thought...’

‘Thought what, Ma?’ Anna couldn’t imagine what her mother was talking about, but she was used to the circulatory nature of conversations when she was in this state. The small flame of hope she’d nursed in the last few weeks as her mother had stayed sober and even talked of rehab spluttered out and died on a gasp.

‘Even when he got out of prison, I thought he was guilty...but when they arrested his brother...’

Oh, God. She was talking about Dimitri.

Her mother nudged at the newspaper. Beside the main article was coverage of the forthcoming Dublin Horse Race, with a black and white picture of three men celebrating a win in Buenos Aires. Her eyes couldn’t help but be drawn straight to one man: Dimitri Kyriakou.

‘And he has all that money...so...’ Mary Moore’s words were beginning to slur a little around the edges. ‘So I did what you never had the courage to do.’

‘What did you do, Ma?’

‘A father should provide for his child.’

A million thoughts shouted in her mind. She, more than anyone, knew the truth of her mother’s statement. But she had tried to garner his support...she had tried to tell him once about his daughter: nineteen months ago, on the day she, along with the rest of the world, discovered his innocence. She’d called his office and had been met with a response that proved to her that the man she’d spent one reckless night with, the man to whom she had given so much of herself, her true self, had been a figment of her fevered imagination.

‘Ma?’

‘At least you picked one with money...he was willing to pay fifty thousand euros in exchange for our silence.’

Sickness rose in Anna’s stomach. Pure, unadulterated nausea.

‘Jesus, Ma—’

The slap came out of nowhere.

Hard, more than stinging. Anna’s head rang and the buzzing in her ears momentarily drowned out the shock.

‘Do not take His name in vain, Anna Moore.’

In that one strike, years and years of loneliness, anger and frustration rose within Anna. She locked eyes with her mother and watched the righteous indignation turn to guilt and misery.

‘Oh, Anna, I’m so—’

‘Stop.’

‘Anna—’

‘No.’ Anna put her hand up, knowing what her ma would say, knowing the cycle of begging, pleading and justification that would follow. But she couldn’t let it happen this time.

Had Dimitri really paid a sum of money to reject their daughter? A hurt so deep it felt endless opened up in her heart. The ache was much stronger than the throbbing in her cheek.

Anna rubbed her chest with the palm of her hand, trying to soothe the pain that she knew she would feel for days, possibly even years. This was what she’d wanted to avoid for her daughter—the sting of rejection, the feeling of being unwanted...unloved. She wouldn’t let her daughter suffer that pain. She just wouldn’t.

Anna looked at her mother, seeming even smaller now that she was hunched in on herself. The sounds of familiar tears coming from her shaking body.

Eamon poked his head around the entrance to the snug. There was pity in his eyes, and she hated him for it. She hated this whole damn village.

‘I’ll make sure she’s okay for the night.’

‘Do that,’ Anna said as she walked out of the pub with her head held high. She wouldn’t let them see her cry. She never had.

Anna didn’t notice that the rain had stopped as she made her way back to the small family business she had barely managed to hold on to through the years. All she could think of was her little daughter, Amalia. Her gorgeous dark brown eyes, and thick curly hair. Sounds of her laughter, her tears and the first cries she’d made on this earth echoed in her mind. And the miraculous moment that, after being placed in her arms for the first time, Amalia opened her eyes and Anna had felt...love. Pure, unconditional, heart-stopping love. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for her daughter.

The day she’d discovered that she was pregnant with Dimitri’s child was the day that his sentence had been handed to him by the American judge. She’d almost felt the gavel fall onto the bench, as if it had tolled against her own heart. She’d never wanted to believe him guilty of the accusations levelled at him, the theft of millions of dollars from the American clients of the Kyriakou Bank, but what had she known of him then? Only that he was a man who liked whisky, had driven her to the highest of imaginable pleasures and left her bed the following morning without a word.

Hating to think that her child would bear the stigma of such a parent, she’d determined to keep the identity of Amalia’s father to herself. But when she’d heard of his innocence? And tried to get in touch with him? Only to hear that she was just one of several women making the same ‘claim’? She practically growled at the memory. Her daughter wasn’t a claim. Amalia had been eight months old, and from that day she’d promised to be both mother and father to her child. She’d promised to ensure that Amalia would be happy, secure and know above all that she was loved. She wanted to give her daughter the one thing she had never had growing up after her own father had abandoned his pregnant wife.

As she walked up the path towards the front of the bed and breakfast she could see a small minibus in the driveway. The three customers who had checked in earlier that day were stowing their bags in the back.

Mr Carter and his wife saw her first.

‘This is absolutely unacceptable. I’ll be adding this to my review.’

‘What’s going on?’ she demanded, her interruption momentarily stopping Mr Carter’s tirade.

‘We booked with you in good faith, Ms Moore. I suppose the only good thing is that we’re upgrading to the hotel in town. But really. To be kicked out with no explanation at ten thirty at night... Not good, Ms Moore. Not good.’

Before Anna could do anything further, her customers disappeared onto the bus. She jumped out of the way as it backed out of the drive, leaving only one man standing in front of the door to her home.

Dimitri Kyriakou. Looking just as furious as she felt.

* * *

Dimitri had been pacing the small bar where he’d first met Mary Moore. Somewhere in the back of the building a member of Mary’s staff was holding his daughter in her arms and looking at him as if he were the devil.

From inside, he heard the irate conversation from one of the customers. She’d returned.

In just a few strides Dimitri exited the bar, passed along the short hallway and out through the front door, just in time to see the bus departing.

He’d let anger drive him out here, but he was stopped in his tracks the moment he caught sight of the woman who had nearly, nearly, succeeded in separating him from his child.

Tendrils of long, dark hair whipped around her face, her green eyes bright with something he could recognise. Anger was far too insipid a word for the storm that was brewing between them. She looked...incredible. And he hated her for it. She was better than any of his imprisoned dreams could have conjured. But wasn’t that how the devil worked? Looking like the ultimate temptation whilst cutting out a soul?

‘What are you doing here? And what have you done to my guests?’ she demanded.

The hostility in her tone was nothing he’d ever imagined hearing from her lips. But he was happy to hear it. Happy to have it match his own.

‘We need to talk; they were in the way. I got rid of them.’

Money was an incredible thing. It had been both his saviour and his destroyer, but this time he was going to use it to help him get what he wanted...what he needed.

The woman holding his daughter moved into the hallway behind him, drawing Mary’s attention. He watched as the mother of his child rushed past him, forcing him to back out of her way, and swept their daughter up in her arms.

They made a striking image, Mary’s dark head buried in the crook of their daughter’s neck. He’d so desperately wanted to hold his child the first moment he set eyes on her. But the woman employed by Mary had raged that she wouldn’t let her be held by a stranger. Christe mou, was this how he started as a father? Being denied the right to hold his child? Anger crushed his chest.

‘Thank you, Siobhan. You can go now.’

‘If you’re sure?’ the young girl asked, casting him a doubtful look. After a quick nod of reassurance from the woman holding his child, the girl brushed past him, letting loose a low tut as she did so.

Dimitri locked his gaze with Mary’s. If looks could kill...

* * *

It was all Anna could do to take him in. Dimitri filled the entire doorway, looking like the devil come to collect his dues. Tall, broad and mouthwatering. Anger slashed his cheeks and made a mockery of the taut bones of his incredible features. The long, dark, handmade woollen coat hung almost to his knees, covering a dark blue knitted jumper that, she knew, would stretch across his broad shoulders perfectly. Broad shoulders that she’d once draped with her hands, her fingers, her tongue. Even the sight of him drove away the bone-deep chill that had settled into her skin from the rain. Her body’s betrayal stung as it vibrated, coming to life for the first time in three years, just from his proximity. Desire coated her throat while heat flayed her skin.

He looked as if he’d just stepped from the pages of a glossy magazine. And there she was, soaking wet, an old, hideous luminous-green waterproof jacket covering ill-fitting jeans and a T-shirt that was probably indecently see-through from the rain. But it was his eyes, shards of obsidian and hauntingly familiar, so like the ones she’d seen every single day since her daughter had been placed in her arms. Though they had never been filled with such disdain.

‘You have five minutes.’ His voice was harsh and more guttural than she remembered. Cursing herself silently, she forced her brain into gear.

‘For what?’ Anna asked, thinking that this was an odd way to start the conversation she’d spent years agonising over.

‘To say goodbye.’

‘Goodbye to who?’

‘Our daughter.’

CHAPTER TWO

Dear Dimitri,

I didn’t mean for it to be like this.

INSTINCTIVELY ANNA CLUTCHED Amalia tightly to her chest.

‘I’m not saying goodbye to my daughter!’

‘Don’t play the put-upon mother now.’

Dimitri had taken a step towards her and Anna took a step back.

‘You,’ Dimitri continued, ‘who only two days ago blackmailed me with news of her. The transfer has been made, but I’ve come to collect. Because there’s no way I’m leaving my daughter in the care of an alcoholic, debt-ridden liar and cheat.’

Anna’s head spun. So much so, it took her a moment to realise that he had somehow mistaken her for her mother.

‘Wait—’

‘I’ve waited long enough.’

Anna watched, horrified, as another man appeared in the doorway. A man who had ‘legal’ stamped all over him. It didn’t make a dent in Dimitri’s powerful tirade.

‘Mary Moore of Dublin, Ireland. Mortgaged up to the hilt, with three drunk and disorderlies, one child and no father’s name on the birth certificate. You should have been on the stage,’ Dimitri spat, his anger infusing his words with misplaced righteousness. ‘The woman I met that night three years ago was clearly nothing more than a drunken apparition...with consequences. That consequence—’

‘Don’t you dare call my child a consequence,’ she hissed at him, struggling not to raise her voice and disturb Amalia, who was wriggling in discomfort already.

‘That consequence is why I am here,’ he pressed on. ‘Now that I am aware of her existence, I shall be taking her with me. If it’s money you need, then my lawyer here will draw up the requisite paperwork for you to sign guardianship over to me. Though I wouldn’t normally pay twice for something, I will allow it this time.’

‘Pay twice for something? You’re calling my daughter “something”?’ Anna demanded furiously.

His words provoked her beyond all thought. Blood pounded in her ears; injustice over his awful accusations sang in her veins; fury at his arrogance, anger at his belief that she would do just as he asked lit a flame that bloomed, crackled and burned.

‘I am sure that it would be possible, Mr Kyriakou, almost easy for you, even, to have your lawyer draw up paperwork, to hand over ludicrous amounts of money, money that would be yours, I’m sure, not taken from the clients of the Kyriakou Bank...’ she paused for breath, ignoring how his darkened eyes had narrowed infinitesimally, before continuing ‘...were I Mary Moore.’

His head jerked back as if he had been slapped.

‘Mary Moore is guilty of all the things you have lambasted her for. She is the one who contacted you demanding money for her silence. But I. Am. Not. Mary. Moore. I’m Anna Moore. And if you raise your voice to me in front of our daughter one more time, I’ll throw you out myself!’

In her mind she had been shouting, hurling those words against the invisible armour he seemed to wear about him. But in reality she had been too conscious of her daughter, too much of a mother to do anything that would upset her child. But she had caught Dimitri on the back foot—she could see that from the look of shock, then quick calculation as he assessed the new information. And she was determined to press her advantage.

‘I will call the police if I have to,’ Anna continued. ‘And with your record—even expunged—I think you’ll find that they’ll side with me. At least for tonight.’

The smirk on his cruel lips infuriated her.

‘My lawyer would have me out in an hour.’

‘The same lawyer that told me he’d pay me off, “just like the last one”, when I tried to tell you of our child’s birth?’

Dimitri spun round to look at David in confusion. But David seemed just as confused as he. ‘It wasn’t me,’ his friend said, shaking his head. ‘I don’t know anything about that.’

‘What? When did this happen?’ he demanded, already beginning to feel unsteady on the shifting sands beneath his feet.

‘When you were first freed from prison nineteen months ago, I called your office. You may like to think that I purposefully kept my daughter from you, but I did try to reach out to you,’ Mary—Anna—said from over his shoulder. Reluctantly he turned back round to look her in the eye, needing to see the truth of her words. ‘He referred to himself as Mr Tsoutsakis. It’s not something I’m likely to forget.’

‘Theos, that was my ex-assistant and, I assure you, he will never work again,’ Dimitri swore, still trying to wrap his head around the fact that Anna had tried to reach him for something other than bribery or money.

‘I don’t care who it was. I was told, in rather specific terms, that I would be paid off, just like the other hundred or so women calling to claim they had carried the heir to the Kyriakou Bank. I had—and still have—no intention of taking money from you, or depriving whatever number of illegitimate children you fathered before, or since, your imprisonment of any child support.’

‘There are no other children,’ he ground out. ‘When I...when I was arrested certain...women sought me out, claiming that I had fathered numerous children unrelated to me.’ Their sordid attempts at extortion had snuffed out the last little flame of hope he’d had in human decency. To use a child in such a way was horrific to him. In total four women had jumped on the wrong bandwagon, assuming he’d pay for their silence. But none of them, neither his two ex-girlfriends nor the two strangers who had claimed an acquaintance with him, had realised that he would never, never let a child of his disappear from his life. Dimitri resisted the urge to reach out to Anna. ‘I swear to you. There were no other women, no other children.’

‘And I’m supposed to just believe you?’ Her scorn cut him to the quick. ‘So, this is your lawyer? Tell me, Mr Lawyer, what would the courts say to a man who turns up at ten thirty at night making false accusations of alcoholic behaviour, costing me three bookings and irreconcilable damage to my professional reputation, threatening to take my daughter away from me and trying to blackmail me?’

And, finally, it was then that their daughter started to cry.

‘You’re making her upset,’ Dimitri accused.

‘No, you are,’ she returned.

Feeling the ground beneath him start to slip further, Dimitri pressed on, ignoring his own internal warning bell.

‘It’s neither here nor there. You need to pack. Get your things—we’re leaving,’ he commanded. Even to his own ears he sounded obtuse. But he couldn’t help it. It was this situation...his childhood memories clawing their way up from the past and into the present making him rash, making him desperate.

‘I’m not going anywhere and I really will call the police if you try to force me. You clearly don’t know the first thing about parenting if you’re expecting it to be okay to just upend a child at ten thirty at night.’

‘And whose fault is that?’ he heard himself shout, immediately regretting his loss of control. Nothing about this situation had gone as he’d intended and that there was a grain of truth in her last accusation struck him deeply.

David shifted in the hallway, drawing their attention.

‘My recommendation is to sleep on this a little. Clearly there has been a series of misunderstandings and we each need time to reflect on the new information we all have. Dimitri, we should take the car back to Dublin and return in the morning.’

‘I’m not leaving my daughter,’ Dimitri growled.

‘Ms Moore, is this something that you are happy to accommodate?’

Dimitri almost couldn’t look at her, didn’t want to gauge her reaction. When he’d walked into this, he’d been so sure. Sure of his plan, of his information, of the situation. Yet the moment she’d revealed that she wasn’t Mary, but Anna, he knew she wasn’t lying. He’d felt the truth of it settle about his shoulders and, looking at it now, he was relieved. The woman who had given birth to his daughter wasn’t an alcoholic. Hadn’t been arrested. The woman he’d slept with and spent years dreaming about... Layers and layers of cloudy images began to shift, and when he opened his eyes he looked at Anna and they became clear.

Anna was looking down at her daughter, rocking her gently in her arms as she settled their child, making soothing noises that seemed to satisfy the girl...his daughter. And he held his breath before her pronouncement. He felt, rather than heard, her sigh.

‘I’ll put him in one of the recently vacated rooms. I’m not comfortable with the way he’s done things.’ It irked him that she was directing her conversation to David rather than him, but he had to be fair. It was justified after the accusations he’d hurled at her. And Dimitri knew a thing or two about wrongful accusations. ‘But we do,’ she continued, ‘need to talk and figure out where we go from here.’

Dimitri followed David out to the car, assuring David that he wasn’t such a monster as to cause harm or fear to his daughter or the mother of his child, especially given that she was clearly not the woman he had thought from the report. He took several deep breaths of cool night air before returning to the small bed and breakfast. Peeking into empty rooms on the ground floor, he felt like a trespasser in his daughter’s home and hated it.

He followed the soothing sounds of a gentle lullaby that contrarily only fuelled the anger within him. How many nights had he missed the simple pleasure of putting his daughter to bed, knowing that she was safe, cared for...loved? He paused on the threshold of a dusky-pink room, gently lit by a softly glowing night light.

Dimitri looked at the nearly sleeping child in the crib. She was peaceful and angelic. He knew that was a cliché, but he couldn’t think of any other words to describe his daughter. It was the first time he’d really seen her, not hidden by the shoulder of a stranger or buried in her mother’s arms. Her skin was dark, like both her parents’, but the eyes—they were his. He knew that Anna hadn’t seen him yet, her body hadn’t stiffened the way it had every single time he’d come within a foot of her. But she was far from relaxed, and he deeply regretted that their adult emotions had come to interfere with his child’s sleep.

* * *

How had this mess happened? She’d been shocked by Dimitri’s accusations, his presence...all of it. For nineteen months, she’d forced herself to abandon the hope that he might come for her. The hope that her daughter wouldn’t grow up feeling that same sense of rejection that felt almost a solid part of Anna. But that was the thing—Anna’s father hadn’t just been absent, it wasn’t a passive thing...he had walked away. Had actively chosen to leave her and her mother behind.

She pushed at the adrenaline still pounding through her veins, desperately fighting the need to flee. Instead, she clung to the words she’d spoken to the lawyer. They really did need to find a way forward, now that he knew about Amalia, now that he claimed to want their child. Wasn’t that what she’d dreamed of when she first reached out to him? Never would she have chosen to raise her daughter without a father in her life...the way she had been raised.

As Anna watched her daughter in the crib, she marvelled at how she’d got so big. She was twenty-seven months old and before lying down on the soft mattress Amalia had held on to the bars and looked at Anna with big brown eyes. Anna had reached out and smoothed a soft curl of hair from Amalia’s forehead. She’d bent down and whispered a promise to her child.

‘It will be okay, sweetheart. It will.’ She’d hoped that she wasn’t lying.

Anna waited until she heard the sounds of her daughter’s breathing slow. She waited until she knew she couldn’t put it off any more and turned to leave the room.

But Dimitri stood in the doorway.

How many times had she imagined him standing there? How many times, during Amalia’s sleepless nights, the teething, the crying...the times when Anna had been so exhausted she couldn’t even weep? What would she have given to see him standing there, a support, a second hand, anything to help take away some of the weight of being a single parent?

But when she’d heard the lawyer—the assistant, as she now knew—dismiss her claims as one of the many women who had called Dimitri, she’d realised that she hadn’t known Dimitri at all. The disbelief and incredulity in Tsoutsakis’s voice had been the reminder she’d clung to each and every night that she had been right to hang up the phone, to end the conversation before she could reveal any more of herself, of her daughter.

But now? What did it all mean? That it hadn’t been Dimitri who had outright rejected his daughter. That he was innocent of the imprisonment that had made her sure she couldn’t let a criminal be the father of her child. Now that he was here, standing before her.

‘I don’t even know her name.’ Anna read a whole host of emotions in that one sentence: pain, regret...anger.

‘Amalia. Her name is Amalia.’

For a second, he looked as if he had been punched in the chest... He closed his eyes briefly but when they opened he wore a mask.

‘She’s mine.’ It was a statement rather than a question. But for all his seeming arrogant certainty, she could tell that he needed to hear it from her. It was as if he was holding his breath.