‘I have searched the world to find you. I thought you were dead, but here you are, very much alive.’ His black eyes shot flames. ‘Thisdoesn’t end with me leaving you all alone in the dark.’
She needed this to end.
Themto end.
So, what choice did she have?
She hadn’t been trying to heal these last months.
She’d been hiding. All her life she’d hidden from the moments she shouldn’t have. The moments she should have stiffened her spine and planted her feet and spoken. However nasty it was to tell it. To say it out loud. The truth.
Léon was right. Right to make her face him. She needed to. But…
Her stomach dropped.
How many times had she run from confrontation? Away from her father? Hidden under the bed when she was too young to leave the house? Hidden in the park when she knew that was the furthest she could go on their estate? She’d never confronted him. Never told her mother the truth…
Poppy understood she hadn’t kept her father’s secrets only to protect her mother. She’d kept them to protect herself. To keep her father where he belonged.With her.
She’d wanted her daddy.His love.
What ten-year-old didn’t?
It wasn’t a special kind of love. He wasn’t a special man. He had no admirable qualities other than that he was there. So many of the children at school…their families were broken.Divorced.They’d teased her because she was the odd one out with her traditional family.Two parents.They’d warned her it wouldn’t last. Her daddy would leave. Just as their daddies had left them.
For so long she had thought her daddy wasn’t like other daddies.
She’d joined the dots in her teens. They weren’t simplyother childrenshe played with in the park on her Saturday afternoons out with her father. They were her family. Her half-siblings. Her father had a second family.
She’d wanted to tell her mother. Tell her the truth. Her father was splitting his time between two lives. Both a secret from the other. But she’d been afraid. Afraid to break up her family, however heavy the lie.
She wasn’t naïve any more.
Everything she loved about her father had been a façade.
He’d lied.To everyone.
He’d cared for none of them. Only himself.
Just like Konstantinos.
She stepped back.
‘I hate you,’ she said, her voice devoid of anything.
The pulse throbbed in his clean-shaven cheek.
With her head held high, Poppy walked past him, and ignored the drag of his scent on her senses as she missed grazing his shoulder by millimetres.
She zeroed in on the limousine—ignored his looming presence at her heels.
The driver opened the door, and she climbed inside.
Her gaze locked to the figure closing in.
She yanked the door closed before he could get in beside her.
With a heavy exhale, she settled herself into the luxurious interior, let the plush cream leather support her newly found backbone.
