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She had a clutch of memories, most of them conflictingly good and bad, but she had seen pictures of her mother. She had gleaned information that she’d painstakingly read over the years. Her mother had been a beautiful opera singer and performer, but she’d also been an alcoholic and she’d died driving a jetski in the Riviera while on holiday with a co-star who she’d had a long-running affair with.
Claudia was nothing like Benita, and yet she didn’t want to say that to Stavros. It smacked of disloyalty, even to the mother who’d died so long ago.
“He loved her,” she said instead, and Stavros was quiet. “For all her faults, my father loved Benita. If I am like her, I don’t think he would mind.”
“She was reckless, careless, and she broke his heart. Have you never wondered why he didn’t remarry? Why he withdrew into his writing and his books?” He stood and paced towards her. “And you look just like her.” He stared at her face, as if cataloguing her features, making sense of what he saw. “You are nothing like your father. Did you know that?”
Claudia’s gut twisted painfully. The unspoken question sat between them and she didn’t want to think of it. She had faced a lot in her short life, but she wasn’t sure she would survive if she discovered a definitive answer to the question that had been inside of her for a great many years.
Was Christopher really her father?
How could he be?
He had been a renowned writer and she couldn’t even read. She looked nothing like him. Did that explain his coldness to her? Had he discovered that she was the product of an affair?
Emotions sledged into her from all sides, but they were not new ones. It was not a fresh pain.
“Yes,” she said bravely. “I’ve known that all my life.” She swallowed, the fine column of her neck shifting with the small movement. “Excuse me, I think I’ll turn in for the night.”
She brought her coffee cup with her, but she didn’t need it. With the thoughts that had been uncovered, Claudia knew she wouldn’t find it easy to fall asleep.
*
What the hell had he been thinking?
The conversation with Christopher had been private, when Christopher had known he had only weeks to live, if that. He had spoken honestly. Perhaps more honestly than he’d intended, helped along by the heavy doses of morphine he was being injected with.
“Sometimes I wonder if she’s even my child. She looks nothing like me. She shows no interest
in reading, writing, or stories, unless they’re movies. She’s like an alien to me.”
And Stavros could understand why his friend had felt that, though he’d long ago ascertained that she was, in fact, Christopher’s biological child.
Claudia had always been the spitting image of the gorgeous Benita La Roche, and now she seemed to have developed the same attitudes.
Well, that was going to change, if he had any say in it.
He just had to remember that his unwanted house guest was most definitely not going to end up in his bed. No matter how much she batted those sinfully long lashes and talked about her silk underwear, for Christ’s sake.
He reached for his whisky, swirling it around the glass so that the amber liquid formed waves against the glass walls, then brought it to his lips. He threw it back quickly. It was hard not to realise that he had bitten off more than he wanted to chew. Two weeks suddenly seemed like a lifetime.
Still, he’d choose just about anything over being home with his family.
His brothers and sisters, and his brother’s fiancé. The idea of spending Christmas as they always did, at their parents’ Florence home, unwrapping the silly gifts they’d selected, eating his mother’s panetone until they could barely move – he couldn’t face it this year.
It had been almost three years since he’d ended things with Rhiannon. Coincidentally, it hadn’t been long after Claudia had made her ill-thought out attempt to seduce him that he’d gone back to Greece and ended it with his girlfriend.
It had nothing to do with Claudia and everything to do with the fact that he’d woken up and realized he was in a serious relationship – and Stavros Aresteides didn’t do serious!
So why was he so angry that she’d turned up in his life once more, this time engaged to his brother? Apart from the squeamish idea of their having made love to the same woman, it was worse than that.
It was just downright weird.
His family’s acceptance of her, with open arms, made his gut twist.
He had no right to feel like this. He wasn’t a possessive bastard, and he hadn’t wanted Rhiannon any longer. But the idea of cosying up to her by the fire and saying, ‘welcome to la famiglia’ stuck in his craw.
So he’d bolted to England instead.
