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‘Do you enjoy your job?’
The blunt question jolted Lizzie back to the unlikely reality of being cocooned inside the most luxurious vehicle in London with the world’s most eligible bachelor.
‘Yes,’ she confirmed, lifting her chin. ‘I have great friends at the restaurant—especially Stavros. I’m exactly where I want to be, working alongside genuine people who care for me as I care for them.’
Damon seemed taken aback for a moment, and then he said, ‘Hungry?’
She was—and for more than food, she realised as Damon flashed a glance her way. She hadn’t felt like this in eleven years, but he only had to look at her for her to remember how it had felt to be in his arms. Which was a complete waste of good thinking time, she accepted, drawing her shabby coat closer around her trembling body.
‘Surprising even myself, I’m hungry too,’ he admitted.
‘You can take me back.’
‘Now, why would I do that?’
She stared down in shock as his hand covered hers. He’d better not be feeling sorry for her.
He drew the Bentley to a halt on the Embankment running alongside the river Thames. By the time she had released her seat belt he was opening her door. It was such a romantic view it took her attention for a moment.
‘Burger or hot dog?’ he said.
She almost laughed. Perhaps it was just as well he’d shaken her away from the romantic sight of the Palace of Westminster and stately Big Ben. It wouldn’t do to lose focus around Damon. ‘Hot dog, please.’
‘Ketchup and mustard?’
‘Why not be lavish?’ she said.
He gave her a look and turned away, allowing her to take in the powerful spread of his shoulders as he started chatting easily to the guy behind the food stand not far from where they had parked. Damon had always got on well with everyone—but how would he handle what she had to tell him?
Not yet, she decided. She would have to know this older, shrewder Damon better before she could tell him everything. She had to know what made him tick and how he lived his life.
As he handed the hot dog over their fingers touched and a quiver of awareness ran through her. It seemed that however hard she tried to remain detached, so she could think straight, her body insisted on going its own way. And her body wanted Damon as much as it ever had.
‘Thinking back?’ he said, reading her mind.
Thinking back to when she had been an eighteen-year-old virgin with nothing certain in her future except that it would change? Yes—unfortunately. ‘I’m thinking maybe I have too much sauce?’ she suggested.
‘You always had too much sauce,’ Damon observed.
She decided to ignore the jibe. Damon was standing under a street lamp, leaning back against it, and the spotlight suited him. He was so dark and swarthy—so compelling in every way. The shadowed light only enhanced his sculpted features.
‘I didn’t realise how hungry I was,’ she said, biting down hard on the delicious snack in an attempt to distract herself from Damon’s brazen physicality. And, truthfully, it was a treat to have someone other than Stavros buy her a meal and to care a damn if she enjoyed it.
‘Where did you disappear to after the trial?’ he asked with a frown.
‘Where did I “disappear to”?’ she repeated thoughtfully.
Good question. Not to a loving home—that was for sure.
‘Who’ll support me now?’ That had been Lizzie’s stepmother’s first question when Lizzie had returned home to find her suitcases waiting in the hall.
She should have known what was happening, but she had rushed up to her bedroom, thinking to bury her grief in her pillows, only to find her bedroom had been cleared. She had wasted a few precious minutes railing against fate before pulling herself together and accepting that this was her life now, and she’d better get on with it.
On her way out of the house she’d found her stepmother in her father’s study, going through the drawers of his desk. ‘I guess we’ll both have to work,’ Lizzie had said.
Her stepmother’s expression had twisted into something ugly. ‘I don’t work,’ she’d said haughtily. ‘And if you think you can persuade me to let you stay, you’re wasting your time. You’re one expense I can’t afford.’
That had been the last time they’d seen each other, and it had taken Lizzie’s stepmother less than a week to replace Lizzie’s father with a richer man.
She decided on a heavily edited version for Damon. ‘It wasn’t all bad,’ she said, thinking back. ‘The shock of finding myself homeless was good for me. I had to stand on my own two feet, and I found I enjoyed doing it.’
‘Sacrificing your dreams?’ He frowned.
‘Sometimes dreams have to wait,’ Lizzie said frankly. She’d done more than survive. She’d thrived, and had proved herself capable of far more than she’d imagined.
‘You’ve got ketchup on your chin—’
She sucked in a fast breath as he wiped it off. His touch was still electric.
‘Next time I’ll take you out for a proper meal—’
‘Next time?’ she queried. ‘So you’re back for good?’ Her heart drummed a tattoo as she thought about all the implications of that.
He chose not to answer her question. ‘Stavros says you work too hard. You have to take a break sometime,’ he insisted.
What else had Stavros told him? she wondered. She had so much to lose. Damon had been absent from her life for a long time, but he was still a core part of her existence. He didn’t know it yet, but he could rip her world apart on a whim.
‘Soda or water?’ he asked.
‘Water, please.’ Her throat was tight and dry.
As Damon turned to speak to the vendor she thought back to her first deception on their night together, when she’d been a virgin pretending not to be, embarking on a romantic adventure with a handsome Greek—or so she’d thought. Her life had been in chaos at the time. She hadn’t been thinking straight. Hated by her stepmother, she’d been desperate for her father to notice her.
She’d failed.
She’d almost failed with Damon too. Clinging to him, begging him to take her so she could forget her wretched home life, she had exclaimed with shock as he’d taken her, and he’d pulled back. It had taken all her feminine wiles to persuade him to continue.
Of course she was on the pill, she’d insisted.
He’d used protection anyway.
Belt and braces? she’d teased him.
Damon had proved to be a master of seduction, a master of pleasure, and they’d made love all night. But there had been chances to talk too, and it had been then that they had discovered a closeness that neither of them had expected. Surprising both of them, she was sure, they had enjoyed each other’s company.
‘Let’s walk.’
She glanced up as Damon took the top off her bottle of water. ‘I’d like that.’
A walk promised a welcome break from the past. She could take in the majesty of London instead...that was if she could stop looking at Damon.
Life and responsibility had cut harsh lines into his brow and around his mouth, but those only made him seem more human. Harsh, yet humorous, ruthless, yet empathetic, Damon was an exceptional man.
‘When I’m in London I walk a lot,’ he revealed, glancing down, his eyes too dark to read. ‘Sometimes it’s good to be alone with your thoughts, don’t you think?’
‘That depends who you are and what you’re thinking, I suppose,’ she said, remembering how quickly their whispered confidences in bed had turned to mistrust the following day in court. It would take more than walking together to clear the air between them, she suspected.
At the time the press reports—coming on top of everything else that had been happening at home—had destroyed Lizzie’s confidence. She’d lost her self-belief, as well as her confidence in her own judgement. She’d lost her trust in everyone—and in herself most of all. But then she’d realised that with no one to pick her up she’d better get on with it, and so she’d rebuilt her life along very different lines, far away from privilege and trickery.
A pawnbroker had given Lizzie her first break, taking what few scraps had remained of her mother’s jewellery in exchange for enough money to pay her first week’s rent. She remembered begging him not to sell her mother’s wedding ring. ‘There’s nothing exceptional about it,’ she’d protested when he’d informed her that he wasn’t a charitable institution. ‘You must have dozens like it—’
‘Not with three seed pearls set in the centre of the band,’ he’d said as he’d studied the ring with his eyeglass.
‘I’ll clean your shop for nothing,’ she’d offered in desperation. ‘I’ll pay you back with interest, I promise...’
But life had caught up with her, making the necessity of keeping a roof over her head more important than her mother’s wedding ring, so it would have to wait. Maybe one day...
‘Something wrong?’ Damon asked as she bit her lip and grimaced.
‘Nothing. Why?’ she gazed up at him evenly.
‘You made a sound like an angry kitten.’
She made no comment. Being compared to a kitten would not have been her choice. She felt as if the past few years had required her to be a tigress.
‘Enough?’ he said, when she shivered.
‘I’d better get back,’ she agreed.
The Bentley sat waiting for them, gleaming black and opulent. It was attracting admiring glances from passers-by, and now they were attracting interest too, as they approached it. The elegant vehicle was a fabulous representation of privilege, and Lizzie thought it the most visible proof of the yawning gulf between them. She couldn’t imagine what people must be thinking about the suave billionaire and the shabby kitchen worker getting into a car like that.
Did there ever come a point when a cork stopped bobbing to the surface? she wondered as Damon opened the passenger door and saw her safely settled in?
No. She hadn’t come this far to give up now.
‘Home?’ he asked.
So he could see where she lived?
‘Back to the restaurant, please.’ She tried not to look at him. ‘There are things I need to pick up.’
She didn’t want him visiting her home. She couldn’t risk it. This had been pleasant, but there was more to life than Damon’s riches and his personal success. What Lizzie was protecting was infinitely more precious, and she had no intention of risking everything she cared about by acting carelessly now.
Damon had the power to steal everything away from her.
She wouldn’t let him. It was as simple as that. Whatever it took, that wasn’t going to happen.
He started the engine and the Bentley purred obediently.
‘Your mother was Greek, wasn’t she?’ he asked conversationally as he pulled onto the road.
‘Yes, she was.’
‘I suppose that accounts for your unusual colouring. I never thought about it before, but with your Celtic red hair and those chocolate-brown eyes and long black lashes your colouring is quite unusual...’
‘I suppose it is,’ Lizzie agreed, realising that she had never thought about it either, beyond the fact that when things had been at their bleakest she had sought refuge in the warm, home-loving Greek community in London, where there was always someone who knew someone, she reflected wryly. But wasn’t life like that? Paths crossed, then separated, and then crossed again.
‘I think we should see each other again.’
She stared at Damon in amazement, feeling a little defensive. ‘Should we? Why?’ Her heart thundered as she waited for his reply.
He shrugged. ‘I promised you a proper meal?’
‘I won’t hold you to that.’ But they would have to see each other again, she accepted. That was inevitable now.
‘We’ll make a date before I leave tonight,’ he said, glancing across at her.
Would they? Could she risk spending an entire evening with Damon? Could she risk becoming relaxed with him and yet not telling him about anything of significance that had happened in her life over the past eleven years? Could she risk her feelings for him only to lose him again—and for good this time?
She had never shrunk from a challenge yet, Lizzie concluded as Damon slowed the Bentley outside the restaurant, whether that challenge had been battling the demand for clean plates when Stavros’s industrial-sized dishwashers decided to pack up in the middle of service—or having a second meeting with the man who didn’t know he was the father of her ten-year-old child.
CHAPTER TWO
NO ONE—NOT even the tall, imposing figure towering over her as he opened the car door and stood back—would ever come between Lizzie and her daughter.
Thea had never asked about her father. In fact Thea had shrugged off all mention of a father, which Lizzie had come to think was for the best when it had proved impossible to get in touch with Damon.
Lizzie’s experience with her own father was hardly encouraging. She had never got past the fact that he’d rejected her. Lizzie’s mother had been an heiress, and had had an obvious use, but once her mother was dead and the money was spent Lizzie’s father had lost interest in her.
Lizzie had been too young to understand at the time, but she still remembered her wonderful mother being sad and wanting Lizzie to have a better and more exciting life. Maybe that had fuelled Lizzie’s night of rebellion with Damon. It was very easy to mistake lust for love at eighteen—as it was to take a late, loving parent’s suggestion and bend it to suit her own, hormonal eighteen-year-old’s will.
‘Goodnight, Damon, and thank you—’
‘Not so fast,’ he said, catching hold of her arm. ‘We haven’t made that date yet.’
‘Do you really want to?’
‘Do you need to consult your diary?’ he countered.
‘I do have other things to do,’ she pointed out.
‘But nothing important, I’m sure...?’
Damon’s black stare bored into her. She had to think of something fast—and that something didn’t include blurting out that they had a child together, here on a busy London street.
‘Why don’t you come back to the restaurant some time?’ And give me time to think and plan how best to tell Thea about this. ‘I’m usually there each night, and we can fix something up.’
‘No kidding?’ he murmured.
Letting her go, he pulled back.
She watched Damon drive away in his Bentley until the limousine had turned the corner and was out of sight. The logic she’d used at eighteen for keeping her pregnancy to herself felt more like a selfish cop-out now. Yes, she’d been facing huge upheaval in her life—and, yes, it had been a fight to survive, with her character largely unformed and her reaction to crises untested—but maybe she could have done something differently, or better.
But when Thea had been born Lizzie had wanted to protect her from the hurt Lizzie had felt when her father had rejected her. She didn’t know that it wouldn’t happen to Thea. Why would Damon want a child?
As the years had passed and her conscience had pricked she’d tried to get in touch with him, but his people had kept her away. And then, in another unexpected turn, Thea had proved to be musically gifted—a talent Lizzie believed Thea had inherited from her mother. Lizzie’s mother had used to say she had music flowing through her veins instead of blood. And once Thea’s musical life had taken off, Lizzie had been completely wrapped up in that. Thea had recently won a music scholarship to a prestigious school in London, where she was a boarder.
Didn’t Damon deserve to know all this?
‘Back already?’ Stavros exclaimed with obvious disappointment. ‘You don’t look happy, Lizzie-itsa. What’s wrong?’
‘I had a lovely time,’ she insisted, determined to wipe the concern from Stavros’s face. ‘And I’ve come back to help you to clear up for the night.’
‘You shouldn’t have come back. You deserve a little happiness,’ Stavros complained with a theatrical gesture.
Did she? She was guilty of failing to contact Damon, because keeping him in the dark had allowed Lizzie to carry on her life with Thea without the interference of a very powerful and wealthy man. She would be lying if she said she didn’t feel threatened now.
She would have to tell him about Thea, Lizzie realised as she set to and got to work, but she would choose the time.
Which would mean seeing him again!
Anxiety washed over her in hot and cold waves. There was a more important thing to do first—and that was to prepare Thea for the fact that her father was back.
* * *
Lizzie Montgomery! He couldn’t believe he’d found her again.
Was it a coincidence?
Opening the front door to his penthouse apartment, located on the top floor of one of the most iconic landmarks in London, he accepted that he’d just visited one of the most popular Greek restaurants in London, and with the way the grapevine worked, someone had always been bound to know Lizzie.
Coincidence or not, being close to the woman he hadn’t been able to get out of his mind for more than ten years had been the most extraordinary experience. Seeing Lizzie again had reminded him of a night that hadn’t been just about sex—though the sex had been more than memorable.
Pouring a Scotch, he strolled to the window and stared out across the London skyline. The shallow society beauties he normally wheeled out for public events bored him. Where sex was concerned, they couldn’t keep up. He was a hard, driven, solitary man, whose life revolved around his work.
And he hadn’t been back in London five minutes before the first thing he did was to search out all things Greek.
Maybe to find Lizzie?
Okay, so he had. What of it?
He remembered Lizzie mentioning her love of her mother’s country, its culture and its cuisine, that night. She’d love to visit Greece one day, she’d told him when they had been lying side by side in bed, sated, with their limbs entwined.
He would see her again. It was inevitable. Eleven years couldn’t simply be dismissed over a hot dog with ketchup and mustard. Especially when his intuition told him that Lizzie was holding back more than she was telling him. He wanted to know why she was washing pots when she’d had such big dreams. What was holding her back?
He’d succeeded by working as his father had—alongside men and women who were his friends. Granted, he’d had every advantage. His father was a good man, while Lizzie’s father had been a swindler and a cheat who had sucked his victims dry, but that still didn’t explain why Lizzie was working in a restaurant, washing dishes.
Would she thank him for interfering in her life?
Did he care?
He took a deep swallow of Scotch and tried to imagine her life after the trial. However she’d played it, it couldn’t have been easy for her when he’d walked into Stavros’s kitchen to find her at the sink. He would buy her that meal. He owed her that much, and he wanted to know more about her.
* * *
‘Can I get you a drink, sir?’ the waiter behind the bar at Stavros’s restaurant asked him the next evening, when he returned to the restaurant.
‘I’m not staying,’ he explained. ‘Could you please tell Ms Montgomery that there’s somebody waiting to see her at the bar?’
‘Of course, sir.’
As the waiter hurried away he cast his mind back to that other night. He couldn’t remember talking to anyone as he’d talked to Lizzie that night. She’d trusted him, he remembered with a stab of guilt. He had never expected to find the happiness his parents had enjoyed for forty years, but that night he’d thought he could find some temporary distraction with Lizzie—until the shock of discovering who she was at the trial.
No one had ever stood up to him as she had. He admired her for that.
He glanced towards the kitchen, wondering what was keeping her. His body tightened on the thought that she was only yards away. Pushing back from the bar, he stood up. He couldn’t wait any longer for her to come to him.
‘No.’ Lizzie held up her hand as soon as she caught sight of him. ‘You can’t just walk in. You’ve got to warn me first.’
‘With a fanfare?’ he suggested with a look.
‘You can’t walk into my place of work, looking like a...a Hell’s Angel,’ she exclaimed with frustration as her glance roved slowly over him, ‘and demand that I leave with you right away.’
He lips pressed down and he shrugged. ‘You won’t need your overall.’
She huffed and gazed skywards. ‘Thanks for the charming invitation—but, no.’
Undaunted, he pressed on dryly. ‘It’s a great night for a bike ride.’
‘Then go and enjoy it,’ she suggested.
‘You don’t mean that.’
She raised a brow.
‘If Lizzie wants time off she can have it,’ Stavros announced, appearing like a genie out of a bottle from the pantry. ‘No one works harder than Lizzie-itsa. I keep telling her she should get out more—treat herself to some new clothes, and a hairdo while she’s at it—’
‘There’s nothing wrong with Lizzie,’ he said, maintaining eye contact with her.
‘Of course not,’ Stavros placated. ‘It’s just that she puts everyone else first.’
‘As do you, my old friend,’ he said, feeling guilty that he’d shut Stavros out. ‘Shall we go?’ he added to Lizzie, who was still staring at him mutinously.
She had never looked more beautiful. Her shapeless apron and clumpy overshoes tried to strip away her femininity but failed utterly in his eyes. Even with those bright red curls, made frizzy by the heat in the kitchen, peeping out from under the ugly cap, she was beautiful.
The loose ends from eleven years ago had never been in more need of tying up.
‘So you couldn’t stay away?’ she challenged.
The way she stared him directly in the eyes made his senses roar. ‘That’s right,’ he agreed.
‘You’re do know you’re in the way? This is a busy professional kitchen—’
‘Then leave with me and the congestion will clear.’ He angled his chin to smile into her eyes.
‘You’re impossible!’ she complained.
‘I’ll see you outside,’ he told her.
‘In your dreams,’ she flashed.
He had great dreams.
He caught a glimpse of Lizzie’s eyes darkening as he left the kitchen. If she only knew how he wanted to drag her away from that sink and lower her, naked, into a warm, foaming bath, where he would wash her, pleasure her and make love to her until she couldn’t stand up, she might not be reaching for her coat now.
How had he stayed away for eleven years? Yes, he’d been working tirelessly to rebuild the damage done to his father’s business, so his parents could retire in comfort, but he’d taken himself away to the furthest reaches of the world in an attempt to lose himself to everything familiar. And there, in the seemingly endless miles of the desert, he had found himself, and a purpose, which was to help those who had not been as lucky as he had. Why had he needed to get away, and to do this? Was it penance for the shame felt at the way he’d treated Lizzie—the way he’d turned his back on her after the trial?
‘Don’t keep me waiting,’ he warned her. He was eager to pick up the threads he’d left loose for the past eleven years and weave them into a pattern he could understand.
* * *
Damon was waiting for her outside on a bike. Whatever next? It was a monster of a thing—big and black, purring rhythmically beneath him. In the deep dark shadows of the night, sitting astride the throbbing motorbike, Damon Gavros was quite simply the hottest thing on two hard-muscled legs.
He handed her a helmet and helped her put it on. She tried not to react when his fingertips brushed her skin, sending tidal waves of sensation streaking through her.
‘Just a short ride,’ she warned—a warning for herself more than him. ‘Is there an approved way of mounting this thing?’
Damon laughed as he secured his helmet, lowering the black visor so she could no longer see his eyes. ‘You have to climb on behind me and put your arms around my waist.’
There was every reason not to do so.
‘You’ll have to relax,’ he said when she tried to keep her distance. ‘And hold on.’