by Julia James
He was speaking and she surfaced, finally hearing his words. She heard them, but could not take them in.
‘Talia—your father is dead.’
* * *
She seemed to sway as the words reached into her consciousness. With an oath, he caught her arms, holding her upright, supporting her weight as faintness swept over her. He gently pushed her back and down, into a chair he yanked off a table, setting it upright for her to sink into on legs that were suddenly cotton wool.
Thee mou, he should have told her more gently. But to see her again, to have her there in front of him... The physical reality of her presence was still impossible to believe. And that was without the changes he could see—her hair scraped back off her face in an untidy ponytail, not a trace of make-up, wearing only a white shirt and a black skirt with an apron around it, the discarded mop behind her.
She was working like a skivvy and his brain struggled to blend this with the spoiled little rich girl image he’d had of her for so long.
‘How...how do you know?’ Her voice was faint, her glistening eyes staring at the floor.
Luke hefted down another chair and sat himself on it. ‘I’ve been searching for him,’ he told her. ‘Him disappearing as he did made it harder for me to complete the finer details of the takeover. And besides that—’ He stopped.
Besides that I had to know what had happened to him...to the man I destroyed.
He took a breath. However bad this news for her, she had to give up on any hopes she might have that her father would come back to rescue her from a life of washing floors.
‘How did he die?’ She was still not looking at him, her voice remote.
‘He...he fell from a hotel balcony in Istanbul.’
Her eyes lifted to stare at him. She had heard the hesitation in his voice.
‘Fell?’ She could feel her jaw tighten, to stop herself shaking.
Luke’s lips pressed together thinly. ‘An accident. That will be what the official report says. And it is best to keep to that.’
Her face contorted. ‘Tell me the truth!’ she demanded. Her eyes were like stones.
He took a heavy breath. If she wanted the grim truth, he would tell her. Why should she not know what her doting father had resorted to?
‘Talia, in order to try and stave off financial ruin your father ended up borrowing money from some very unsavoury characters it was unwise not to repay.’
He didn’t say more. Didn’t need to. Whether Gerald Grantham had jumped or had been pushed, it came to the same thing.
He stood up. ‘I didn’t want you to hear it from the police—or read it in the newspapers first.’
She was looking at him, her expression masked. ‘So you came to tell me in person?’
‘Yes.’ His own expression was as masked as hers, but inside him emotions were engaged in a savage dance.
‘Well, you’ve told me, so now you can go.’ Her voice was as expressionless as her face as she pushed herself to her feet.
Those emotions broke through the mask of his face. ‘Talia, what the hell is going on? What on earth are you doing here?’ He swept an arm around the café’s interior.
Those stones were back in her eyes. ‘That isn’t your business, Luke. Nothing about me is your business.’
He took a step towards her, clasping her arms, emotions surging in him, hot and unbearable to endure. ‘Talia, talk to me—please. You owe me that, surely? After all we had together—’
Violently, she threw off his hands. ‘Don’t touch me!’ she cried.
And then suddenly, from behind the bar, where there was a door to the upstairs apartment, came another voice. ‘Get away from my daughter!’
Talia whirled around. Maxine was standing there, clutching her dressing gown to her thin body, her eyes sparking with fury. Two spots of colour burned in her cheeks.
‘Mum, it’s OK. He’s leaving. He’s leaving right now.’ She turned back to Luke. ‘Please go. Just go.’ She spun back to her mother. ‘Mum, please—it’s OK. Go back upstairs. I’m just shutting up here. I’ll be there in a minute. Please!’
But her mother was surging forward, bearing down on Luke where he stood, frozen.
‘Get away from my daughter!’ she cried again, her voice rising.
The cry was almost a shriek now, and Luke could see Talia’s mother hyperventilating, her colour mounting. Then, horribly, with a strangulated gasp, she put a shaking hand to her chest. Clawing frantically, as if in hideous slow motion, Maxine collapsed.
‘Mum!’ Talia’s voice was a scream, and then she was crouching down where her mother had folded, unconscious, onto the wet floor.
Luke pushed her aside. Talia gave another cry, but he thrust his mobile phone at her. ‘Get an ambulance! Now!’ he ordered.
Then he fell to work on her mother, lying mobile on the floor, seemingly lifeless.
He checked the pulse at her neck—no pulse!—then, ripping the lapels of the dressing gown aside, he found the end of her sternum and measured two fingers further up. He pressed one palm over the dorsum of his other hand and started a rhythmic pumping of Mrs Grantham’s stricken heart as memory flooded through him.
Suffocating memory of knifing fear and horror.
* * *
‘Is she going to make it?’ Talia’s stricken brain was trying to find the Spanish she needed. Whatever she’d said, the paramedics understood.
‘We’ll do our best,’ they said, and then the ambulance launched forward, siren wailing, down the street.
Talia had no idea where the hospital was, and it seemed to take for ever to get there. But her mother was hanging on—just. The paramedics, when they’d arrived, had taken over CPR from Luke, applying defibrillation, then got her on to a stretcher, attached her to monitors. And now they were getting her where her mother’s life might be saved.
And through that long, long night, as Talia sat by her mother’s bedside in Intensive Care, the thread of life held still—though it was as frail as Talia’s grip on her mother’s hand was strong.
In the morning the cardiologist visited and carried out a careful examination. Her mother was to be kept under sedation, but it seemed, Talia was told, and she felt a relief so profound she was weak with it, that she would live. The CPR, instantly and correctly carried out, had saved her.
As Talia walked out into the reception area, numb with relief and exhaustion, Luke got up from a bench.
‘How is she doing? They will tell me very little.’
Talia stared. ‘Have you been here all night?’
He looked haggard. A thick growth furred his jaw and his eyes were sunken.
‘What else could I do?’ He took a breath. ‘So, how is she?’
‘She’s pulling through,’ she said, her voice hollow. ‘She’ll be kept in for some time, while she recovers from the operation, and then they want her to have some time in a convalescent home.’
‘I’ll arrange it,’ Luke said.
Violently she shook her head. Her emotions were shot to pieces, in a thousand jagged fragments. ‘Luke, this is none of your concern.’
She made to move past him. She had to get to the café to start work.
But her arm was caught.
‘Talia, we need to talk—’ Luke’s breath caught. ‘Especially now.’
She stared at him. Exhaustion, both of her body, from her long sleepless vigil by her mother’s side, and her spirit from seeing Luke again, consumed her.
She shook her head wearily. She wanted to pull away from him, but she had no strength left. Numbly, she let him lead her out of the hospital and walked beside him, saying nothing, down to the sea front.
He sat her down on a bench on the promenade and then joined her. She moved away from him, to the end of the bench. It was an automatic gesture. To be here at all with him was hard to bear. To be close
to him would be impossible.
Everything to do with him was impossible.
Impossible. Impossible. Impossible.
The word echoed in her head—useless and pointless.
He doesn’t see who I really am so everything is impossible.
She couldn’t look at him—could only stare out over the promenade. The beach below was starting to fill up, parasols unfurling, tourists settling in for another carefree day of their holidays.
‘Why,’ she heard Luke ask, his voice grim, ‘did you never tell me about your mother?’
Talia glanced at him, and then away. ‘What relevance does that have?’
‘That,’ he retorted, ‘is what I want to know.’
‘It doesn’t have any relevance,’ she said.
‘Did you know her heart was weak?’
She looked at him again. ‘Yes.’ Her eyes went out to the sea, so calm and still at this hour of the morning. ‘It’s why I wanted us to stay on at the Marbella villa for longer. She’d already been taken ill when I had to tell her we’d lost that, as well. She found it...difficult to cope.’
Her voice was stilted, reflecting her reluctance to speak. But she just didn’t have the strength to oppose Luke right now. Exhaustion was uppermost in her mind. And an overwhelming level of emotion that she could not cope with. Not now.
She heard Luke swearing. It was in Greek, and it was low and vehement.
‘And why,’ he asked, ‘did you not tell me that when you came to my offices to beg not to be evicted?’
Her head twisted. His voice was cold. Cold with anger. But anger was in her, too.
‘Tell you what?’ she spat. ‘That the wife of the man you’d reduced to bankruptcy wasn’t taking it too well? That she didn’t like the fact that she wasn’t going to have a lavish budget for topping up her designer wardrobe any longer? That she’d been reduced to nothing more than an eight-bedroom mansion with ten bathrooms, a swimming pool and a gourmet kitchen, on a millionaire’s estate in Marbella, which she couldn’t—oh, dear me, no—just couldn’t bear to leave? Why didn’t I tell you that?’
She saw his expression close at the violence of her tone.
‘And what would you have done, Luke, if I’d told you all that? You’d have told me to get real. That our days of being pampered pets—her a queen and me a princess—were over! I knew that. But—’ She stopped short.
She turned back to stare sightlessly over the Mediterranean Sea, dazzling in the sunlight, too bright to behold.
‘But my mother couldn’t face it. She was still clinging to hope. Still deluding herself with pointless illusions about my father sorting it all out and coming back to save us.’
And Mum’s thoughts were as pointless as the illusions I wove about you, Luke—the illusions you tore to pieces when you made it clear what you thought of me.
She wrenched her mind away. What use was it to remember the illusions she’d so stupidly had about Luke? Clumsily, she got to her feet. She stood looking down at him where he sat, hands held loosely between his thighs. His head lifted. His expression was unreadable.
She gave a heavy sigh. It was all too much right now. Last night her mother had nearly died... And the man who had put the ‘nearly’ in that sentence was before her now. He deserved her gratitude, no matter how he had treated her.
‘Luke, thank you. Thank you for what you did for my mother...’ She took a difficult breath. ‘At the café.’
He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, his expression bleak, he simply said, ‘Don’t thank me. If I hadn’t turned up like that she probably wouldn’t have collapsed.’ Wearily, he lifted a hand to run it through his hair. He got to his feet. ‘Talia—’
She shook her head violently. ‘Luke, no! I can’t take any more interrogation. I have to get back to the café. I have to start work.’
An oath broke from him. ‘It’s absurd that you should be working there!’
She lifted his hand from her arm, and even to touch him was unbearable. ‘Luke, I have to go! I’m late. I have to open up the café.’ She took a ragged breath and then said what it would cost her everything to say, but say it she must. ‘I...I don’t want to see you again. Please leave me alone.’
She didn’t look at him. She could not. Instead, head bowed, she hurried from the promenade, diving into the narrow streets through which she could make her way towards the harbour and the café.
* * *
At the café, Maria’s nephew was shocked at her news, and told Talia he’d get a friend to wait on the tables that evening and she must go to her mother. Gratefully, she conceded.
When she set off for the hospital at the end of the day she stopped off at the bank, checking to see if they could afford a week at a convalescent home to help her mother recover.
After that... Well, after that her mother would just have to recuperate in the apartment above the café. She sighed, but knew that anything else was out of the question. They just did not have the money for anything else.
Like a luscious but poisoned fruit, Luke’s offer to pay her mother’s nursing fees dangled in front of her. She thrust it aside.
I can’t—I just can’t. It would...
It would reduce her to what she would have become if she had stayed with him. What he thought she was—what he had always thought her—even when he’d held her in his arms. Pointless. Pathetic. A useless bauble.
She gave a muffled cry of pain and hurried into the hospital. It was no use to think of Luke or to agonise over what was in the past. No use at all. She must focus only on her mother—as she always had, all her life. And now, when she had come so close to losing her, her mother was more precious to her than ever.
A shiver went through her. In all her terror for her mother, and in all her personal anguish over seeing Luke again, she had hardly given the news Luke had brought her about her father a second thought. For a moment guilt went through her. Her father was dead—surely that should elicit some emotion from her? Some sense of grief?
Her face hardened. Her father had been nothing but a malign, controlling presence in her life. And in the life of her mother.
The life Luke saved!
Oh, she could tell herself that had Luke not come to the café as he had her mother might not have had her heart attack, but that did not take away the fact that it had been Luke’s prompt action that had saved her.
Talia felt her heart constrict. For that she would be for ever grateful.
She was grateful too—abjectly so—that her mother, propped up on pillows, wired up to monitors and on a drip, could greet her with a weak smile. Talia hugged her carefully, closing her eyes in a silent prayer of thanks that she had not lost her.
But as she straightened her mother spoke in an agitated voice, one thin hand clutching at her daughter. ‘Darling, that man! That dreadful man!’
Immediately Talia was soothing. ‘Mum, he’s gone, OK? He left. We won’t be seeing him again.’
Even as she said the words she felt pain strike her. To have seen him again...to have had him so near...
Her mother’s grip tightened. ‘Darling, you mustn’t go to him. Not after what you told me.’
Talia shook her head. ‘He didn’t come here to try and persuade me to go back to him,’ she said heavily.
She paused, took a breath. She had to say this, and maybe telling her mother here in a hospital, where there was a crash team on hand if necessary, might be the safest thing to do? Her mother had changed so much since they had left the villa in Marbella. She had become strong and determined. Perhaps she could take this final blow as well? Talia could only pray so.
She took her mother’s hands, held them in hers. ‘Mum, Luke Xenakis came to see me to tell me...’ She took another breath, then told her mother the grim news.
For her mother’s sake, she kept to the official report that it had
been an accident. Whether her mother believed it or not she would not press to find out.
Her mother listened, then loosed her hands to pick at the bedclothes, her gaze turning inward. ‘I think I’ve known all along he would never come home. You were right about it from the start, darling.’ Her voice twisted, became infused with pain and regret. ‘He never cared about us at all. Not really.’
She looked at Talia, her gaze troubled. ‘Never give your love to someone who does not—who cannot—love you back.’
Slowly, her eyes filling with tears, Talia bent to kiss her mother’s cheek. Only two words sounded in her head.
Too late.
Desolation filled her.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
LUKE SAT OUTSIDE the hospital in the car he’d hired, his eyes peeled for Talia. He knew she was visiting her mother because he’d checked at Reception. In his head burned the one desperate question he must ask her. Only one—and he had to get an answer to it. However many times she told him to leave her alone, he needed to know why.
His expression was stark, his eyes focussed only on the brightly lit hospital entrance. And then suddenly she was there, head bowed, shoulders hunched, walking away. He gunned the engine, drew up alongside her and vaulted from the car.
She started in shock.
‘Let me give you a lift. Talia—please. You look dead on your feet!’
She made to walk on, but he took her arm, feeling her tense instantly. He yanked open the passenger door and for a moment thought she would resist. Then, as if running out of energy, she sank down inside with a weary sigh.
Luke resumed his seat, moving the car off into the traffic. ‘How is your mother?’ he asked.
He kept his voice neutral. It was an effort, but he did it. To have her so close again, to catch her scent, to feel her presence pressing upon him, was torment.