Lynne Graham: Sold For The Greek's Heir

But at the end of her shift, when she got home to her father’s very comfortable small town house and crept into the bedroom she shared with her daughter, she realised that nothing was quite that cut and dried. Bella slept nestled in her cot, curly black hair dark against the bedding, her olive skin flushed by sleep, long lashes screening her bright green eyes. Bella was gorgeous, like a little angel, Lucy thought with her eyes stinging and, although she could be sorry for everything else, she could not find it in her heart to regret Bella’s existence in any way.

‘Come with us to this dinner on Saturday night,’ Iola urged over breakfast the next morning. She was a curvy brunette in her late forties with smiling dark eyes. ‘It would please your father so much.’

Lucy went pink as she washed her daughter’s face clean of breakfast debris. She knew that her dining out with them would please Kreon, but she also knew it would entail fending off the advances of at least two handpicked young men because her father’s current main aim in life seemed to centre on finding her an eligible boyfriend. In that line Kreon was old-fashioned because he refused to credit that Lucy choosing to remain a single parent could be a viable plan for the future.

‘Mum... Mum,’ Bella carolled cheerfully as she was released from the high chair and set down to toddle somewhat clumsily round the room.

Lucy steadied her daughter as she almost fell over the toy box and ruffled her untidy curls. Curls, aside of the colour, just like her own, frizzy and ungovernable in humid weather, explosive when washed. Lucy looked back at her stepmother uncomfortably. She felt like an ungrateful brat for her reluctance to do what her father wanted her to do. ‘I’m just not interested in meeting anyone at present...maybe in a few months I’ll feel differently,’ she added without much conviction.

‘You had a bad breakup and you went through a lot alone afterwards,’ Iola acknowledged gently. ‘But your father’s a man and he doesn’t get it. I did try to explain to him that this is more of a healing time for you—’

‘Yes, that’s it, that’s exactly it!’ Lucy exclaimed, giving the older woman a sudden impulsive and appreciative hug. ‘I’m not ready right now, not sure if I’ll ever be though...’

‘Not all men are like Bella’s father. There are decent caring men out there,’ Iola reminded her quietly. ‘Nobody knows that better than me. I kissed a lot of frogs before I met Kreon.’

Lucy grinned and then laughed because her stepmother really did understand her viewpoint. A few minutes later, she left the town house and set out to walk to the small select Hotel Palati where she worked. Sited in an exclusive district in Athens, the hotel catered mainly to a business clientele.

Her father had met Iola when he’d engaged her as a PA in a property rental business that had eventually gone bust. But then Kreon had led a chequered ‘boom to bust and back again’ life and had been divorced once for infidelity. Lucy had respected his honesty with her. Even on the subject of her late mother, Kreon had proved to be painfully frank. Kreon hadn’t once whitewashed his own failings or hidden the fact that he had gained a criminal record over some pyramid selling scheme he had got involved with as a younger man. Yet in spite of that honesty, Lucy still wasn’t quite sure what actually funded her father’s comfortable lifestyle.

She knew that Kreon gambled and took bets on a near professional basis and that he was always enthusiastically involved in some hopefully lucrative business scheme of one kind or another. Whatever he did, he seemed to be successful at it. Even so, she would not have been entirely surprised to learn that some of his ventures skated a little too close to the edge of breaking the law. But basically because he and Iola had given Lucy and her daughter both the home and the love Lucy had never known before, she closed her eyes to that suspicion and minded her own business the best she could.

After all, there truly were shades of grey between the black and white of absolute right and absolute wrong, she ruminated ruefully. Nothing and nobody was perfect. Even at the height of her passionate infatuation with Jax, she had recognised that he was flawed and all too human. He had been moody, controlling, domineering and arrogant and they had fought like cat and dog on a regular basis because, while Lucy might be only five feet tall and undersized, she was no pushover. At heart, she was stubborn and gutsy and quick-tempered. Even if Jax hadn’t let her down so horribly, it would never have worked between them, she reasoned, feeling pleasantly philosophical on that score and firmly stifling the painful little push of heartache that still hollowed out her tummy. So, she’d had her heart broken just as Iola and thousands of other women and men had. It had only made her more resilient and less foolish and naïve, she told herself squarely.

The hotel manager showed her into the lofty-ceilinged back room, which had been comprehensively redecorated only weeks earlier with an opulence that was calculated to appeal to the more discerning customers.

Sometimes when Lucy daydreamed she wondered, if she had come from a more fortunate background, would she have become one of the elegant well-educated young businesswomen she saw round the hotel. Unfortunately she had been handicapped at the outset of life by her birth. Her parents’ marriage had broken down after her mother had had an affair.

‘Annabel always thought some better man was waiting for her round the next corner,’ Kreon had said wryly of Lucy’s mother. ‘I wasn’t rich and I lived by my wits and she had big ideas. We were living in London then where she was struggling to get the finance to set up her nursery business. But my father had returned to Greece after my mother died and he fell ill out here. I had to go to him. When I left London I had no idea Annabel was pregnant and when I contacted her to tell her that I was coming back she told me we were finished because she had met someone else. Now from what you’re telling me, it seems she may have learned that she had this dreadful disease and she didn’t want me around even though she had my child. I can’t understand that, I will never understand that...’

And Lucy couldn’t understand it either because, just listening to Kreon talking, she had recognised that he had loved her mother and had planned to return to London to be with her. But the more Kreon had spoken of her mother’s beauty and her feverish love and need for fresh male attention, the more Lucy had suspected that there definitely had been another man and Annabel had burnt her boats for ever with Kreon shortly before illness had cruelly claimed her future.

Lucy had been two years old when Annabel was hospitalised and her daughter put into care. Her only memory of her mother was of a beautiful redhead lying in bed and shouting at her, so she wasn’t sure that the mother who had surrendered her to the authorities had been that much of a loss in the parent stakes. Kreon had described a flighty, selfish personality, ill-suited to the kind of personal sacrifices a mother was often forced to make. And when, to Lucy’s very great astonishment, Kreon had revealed that Annabel had actually had two other daughters being raised by her own mother somewhere in northern England, Lucy had been silenced by that shattering news.

Apparently she had two half-sisters somewhere, born from her mother’s previous liaisons. Some day Lucy planned to look into that startling discovery but she didn’t even know where you started in such a search because, not only had she no money to pursue enquiries, but also no names even to begin with. Naturally all these years on Kreon didn’t recall such details about Annabel’s background and history. After all, he had never met Annabel’s mother and had been stonewalled by Annabel when he’d asked to do so. All he had remembered was that Annabel never went to visit the two little girls she had left behind her and he had said that even then he had recognised that as a warning sign that Annabel’s attachments were of the shallow sort.