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‘Have you found her?’ he demanded.
Her tear-stained cheeks trembled as she shook her head in denial. Tara had been with them for the three years since Meredith had deposited his sister on his doorstep, a seven-year-old who had spoken not even a word of Greek and had since found the language deeply difficult to master.
He bit out a curse and ran his fingers through already tousled hair. He stalked to the bottom of the staircase in the hallway and shouted, ‘Annabelle,’ as loudly as he could. Hoping that if she were somewhere in the house, the sheer ferocity of his tone would draw her out. That she would sense his fear and come running. But only silence met his call.
He spun round on the poor upset woman just as Célia reached the entrance to the estate, staring confusedly between him and Tara. He didn’t have time for this, didn’t have time—or words—to explain to Célia what he’d brought her into.
‘What happened?’ he demanded.
‘I don’t know... She had been upset all afternoon. She didn’t want to go...’ At this, Tara cast a look towards Célia, clearly unsure about what she could and couldn’t say in front of this stranger. Loukis waved a hand—he’d deal with that later. Now, he just needed to find Annabelle. Tara took a deep breath. ‘She doesn’t want to go to her mother. I’d put her to bed at seven this evening, just like always, and when I went to check on her, she....’ Tara’s eyes welled and a half-wail threatened to undo him.
She could be anywhere. Panic, like he’d never known before, reached into his chest and pulled at his breath. His hands began to tremble as if he no longer had control over his own body.
‘How old is she?’ Célia asked, continuing in English, clearly grasping the situation from the brief conversation.
‘Ten,’ replied Tara.
‘And did you go somewhere this afternoon, or are there any favourite hiding places she had?’
Loukis’s mind flashed back to his own childhood. His own favourite hiding places and the many, many times that he’d run away himself.Christos, Meredith had been back in her daughter’s life for only six months and the effect on Annabelle was already devastating. She had never run away before. She had never run fromhim.
He eyed a vase on the table stand in the hallway and wanted to throw it against the wall, anything to expel some of this fear, this anger, this rage.
‘Did you check the pool house? I’m going to check the pool house.’
‘Should we call the police?’
Tara’s question stopped him in his tracks. Should he? He hated the fact that the first place his mind went was not the immediate safety of his sister, but the long term. If he called the police, it would be on record, and it would desperately affect the custody battle—no matter that Meredith would have been the main cause of it. But if something had happened to Annabelle...
‘Do you think that she could have left the estate?’ Célia questioned. ‘Would she have been able to leave through the front door—or anywhere from the garden?’
Tara shook her head. ‘I’ve been in the sitting room, so would have known if she’d passed me to get out through the front door. And the garden is walled and gated...’ but she shrugged her shoulders helplessly.
Célia rubbed Tara’s arm a little—a gesture of consolation and support for a complete stranger that struck him deeply for just a second, before all the fears and thoughts crashed through his painfully chaotic brain.
‘Then we give it an hour, I think, before calling the police. But perhaps you could ask the driver to check the surrounding streets, or any parks she liked to visit?’
Tara cast a hopeful look towards Loukis, who nodded his assent. The nanny disappeared out into the night while thoughts of Annabelle being alone out there in the dark shook him to the core.
‘Why don’t you go and check the pool house, as you said, and perhaps any other places in the garden. In the meantime, I’ll head to the top of the house and work my way down. Perhaps fresh eyes might help.’
He was as thankful for her calm efficiency as he was irritated by it. He was usually the calm head in the crisis,heusually knew what to do. But this?
‘If I find her...’
‘She speaks English fluently,’ he said, before heading out into the night himself, his only thought to find Annabelle.
As Célia made her way up the large sweeping marble staircase, she struggled for some of the calm she had somehow been able to project on two people who seemed absolutely terrified beyond their wits. Had she made the right suggestion not to call the police? Was it actually the height of stupidity not to do so?
But that was only one path her mind took. The other was that Loukis had a ten-year-old child. He must have been quite young when she was born, not that that mattered. But the fact that he had apparently been living a playboy lifestyle while his child had been in nappies? Was it possible he had not known about her then? Indignation about his playboy lifestyle all the while he had a child reared in her mind. Could he have done that knowing he had a daughter? Her mind was spinning with all the unanswered questions.
As a child Célia had never run away. It had simply never occurred to her to disappoint her father even more than he already had been. She had grown up with impossible wealth, but the cost of it had been loneliness and emotional distance. Célia’s birth was traumatic for her mother, who had then been unable to carry another child, thus failing to provide her father with the heir he had so desperately wanted. And so he had simply removed himself from her life, long before she could do and had done the same. She would spend hours trying vainly to catch even a glimpse of him when he finally returned from his office, or the few days he might be home at the same time as her boarding school holidays. All that hope, all that yearning still ran through the pain and anger she’d drawn around her in the last five years.
But she forced those aside as she came to the top of the large estate, sighing at the sheer number of rooms and spaces that a ten-year-old could hide in and not even knowing where to begin.
She walked along the hallway all the way to the end and opened the door to a master bedroom. Instantly she was hit by a familiar scent—Loukis’s aftershave. Lit only by the moon, the room was cast in shadow, but she could make out an impossibly large bed with dark sheets, perfectly made. Everything about the room was neat and tidy, and Célia struggled with the feeling of imposing, of trespassing where she should not. But she did have a missing girl to find, so she quickly and efficiently looked wherever she thought this Annabelle might be able to hide. Beneath the bed, the deeply impressive walk-in wardrobes, the en suite bathroom. All the while unable to shake the sense ofhimaround her. Having thoroughly investigated the space, she left, quietly closing the door as if somehow that could excuse the intrusion she felt she had made.
The next room down on the left was...completely different. The lights had been left on, so the beautiful soft pink walls seemed to glow. White, fluffy fairy lights hung against the wall beside another impossibly large bed with a princess canopy. Célia couldn’t help but smile, thinking it close to every little girl’s dream. Unlike the near ruthless tidiness of Loukis’s room, Annabelle’s was strewn with open books, stickers, pens and cut pieces of paper. Clothes were scattered on the floor, stuffed toys in various heaps marked the edges of the room, shoes and a dressing gown discarded lazily by the wardrobe.
