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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 h
er 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.
