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‘And you were happy to do that.’ Luke’s voice was flat. Condemning still.
She could not make out his face, not in the dim light of the car’s interior, but she knew it would have a closed, shuttered look on it. She should stop talking now, she knew, because he would not understand—could not understand. But she went on anyway.
‘No.’ A single word. And then. ‘But my mother was.’ She shut her eyes. ‘No one will ever understand, Luke, what goes on in the head of someone who is in thrall to a man who wants only to control every aspect of her life. I tried so hard, so often, to get her to see what my father was, but she kept blinding herself to it. My father knew it—knew I would never succeed, however much I longed to.’ Her voice became bitter. ‘And that became his way of controlling me, too. Because if I ever did anything that displeased him he would take it out on my mother. And then tell me that was what he had done. Any anger he had at her, from which she would flinch, and then make up endless pathetic justifications to excuse it, would be my fault! And if there was any attempt by me to break free of my cage, to exert my own will, my mother would suffer. My life was spent trying to reassure her, to soothe her jagged nerves, to calm her and support her—to protect her. I could never break free while she would be the one to suffer for it. And it takes courage to bear that, Luke. More than you know.’
Her eyes flashed open suddenly.
‘And then that one night, at that party, I dared to take a risk that I had taken only once before.’ Her face hardened now, with bitter memory. ‘The only time before I had ever dared have a romance of my own, my father meted out punishment for it. Oh, not to me—to the man. My father got him sacked from his job and ruined his reputation so he would never get another in the industry. And then he told me exactly what he’d done. So that I would never do it again. It was his way of controlling me.’
Her face was stark, her eyes bleak.
‘Even as you talked of escaping to the Caribbean I knew I could never take off with you, Luke. I couldn’t abandon my poor, helpless mother, and I couldn’t risk my father doing to you what he’d done to that young man. I knew nothing about you. I had no idea who you were. I knew only that you sported a fancy watch and stayed in an expensive hotel. But that would not have been enough to protect you from my father. His reach was long—he was a powerful man, and very, very rich.’
She gave a laugh—a hollow laugh that had no humour in it.
‘And all along—’ She took a ragged breath. ‘All along you were poised to take over Grantham Land. That was why I was deluged with desperate texts from my mother that morning! My father had disappeared off the face of the earth, and now, of course, I know why. Because you were about to finalise the acquisition of everything he possessed, reducing my mother and me to absolute penury. Penury that made me go begging to you, that made you think of me as you do.’ Her voice twisted with a savage bite. ‘That made you think that all I craved was to be your bejewelled and pampered bird in a cage.’
That hollow half-laugh broke from her again, then stopped abruptly. ‘How ironic does life get, Luke? Tell me that. You’ve turned out to be just another rich, ruthless bastard like my father!’
She heard an oath escape him in his native Greek. Its tone was harsh, crude, and ugly, though she could not understand its meaning. Then he was hurling words at her, in Greek and then in English, his eyes burning with a savage fire.
‘I am nothing like your father! Nothing like the man who killed my father!’
A razored intake of air seared Luke’s lungs like a heated blade. Emotion convulsed in him. He rounded on her, staring at her, but it was not Talia he was seeing. His gaze was into the past.
He began to talk.
‘My father owned a hotel—small, but beautiful. It had been his grandfather’s house, right by the sea, a haven of peace and tranquillity set in olive groves on an island in the Aegean. To my parents it was everything and they loved it dearly, dedicated their lives to it. But...’
His voice grew shadowed. ‘When I was a student, an earthquake hit and the hotel was badly damaged. They could not afford to restore it. So...’ He paused. ‘So when a wealthy investor—an Englishman—offered them financial help, they could not believe their good fortune.’
He paused again.
‘My parents were simple people. Naive in many ways. Dangerously so, you could say. They trusted this eager, enthusiastic Englishman and signed the paperwork he set in front of them, believing they had years to repay their debt out of future hotel profits. It seemed a fair deal.’
He could see Talia’s expression changing. He went on remorselessly.
‘But your father did not believe in fair dealing. What he believed in was profit—made any way he could. And what he saw in my parents’ place was not a small boutique hotel but the valuable land it stood on—shoreline, beachfront.’ He paused yet again. ‘Ripe for development.’
Luke’s mouth twisted.
‘You won’t need me to spell out what was on the paperwork that my parents so gratefully signed—a contract giving your father total control over the rest of the land. It let him bring in chainsaws to demolish the olive groves, bulldozers to flatten the terrain, teams of construction workers to build a massive high-rise monstrosity of a hotel right beside my parents’ hotel, dwarfing it, destroying all its charm, its beauty. It was ruined financially for ever. And then, when my parents were unable to repay any of the money he’d lent them, he simply foreclosed on them. He took everything from them. Everything.’
He realised his hands were still clenched around the wheel, as if moulded to it. Forcibly, he lifted his fingers away, flexing them. He looked away from her, out at the coastline far below.
‘Do you know the reason I knew how to do CPR on your mother? Because I made myself learn.’
His voice had changed again, and in it was something that struck fear into Talia,
‘I had to watch my own father collapse and die of a heart attack in front of my eyes because of what your father had done to him. Your father caused his death as surely as if he’d plunged a knife into his chest himself.’
His head snaked to face Talia.
‘Your father was doomed the day I buried mine. I vowed to ruin him, to bring him down. And, yes, the night of that party was the very night I’d finally acquired the means to do so. After ten gruelling years of turning myself from student to tycoon, forcing myself to build the fortune I knew I’d need to destroy him, I finally acquired a sufficient shareholding to take over Grantham Land.’
For a long moment Talia was silent. Then she spoke with a heaviness that was crushing her. ‘I walked back that morning into a cage that was no longer there. But I did not know it.’
He didn’t answer. The silence between them stretched. Then, ‘And if you had known it?’
