The Greek's Acquisition. Chantelle Shaw

      The row that had followed had been a vicious exchange of words. Louise had said nothing, but her mother had said more than enough.

      ‘Do you think I don’t know what’s in your nasty, vengeful mind?’ Tina hissed to Dimitri. ‘It’s obvious you decided to try and seduce Loulou to get at me—out of some misplaced revenge for your mother.’

      ‘No!’ Louise interrupted desperately. ‘This has nothing to do with you.’

      ‘Doesn’t it?’ Tina laughed mockingly. ‘So Dimitri has told you about his mother, has he? That she took an overdose and that he blames me for her death? Has he also told you that his father has disinherited him because of the way he has repeatedly insulted me?’ Tina continued relentlessly. ‘Or that now he is no longer in line to inherit a fortune the woman he hoped to marry has dumped him? This has everything to do with me—doesn’t it, Dimitri? You hate my guts, and the only reason you’ve been sniffing around my daughter is because you want to cause trouble.’

      Tina’s accusations sent a cold chill down Louise’s spine. Her mother had always been over-dramatic, she reminded herself. Dimitri couldn’t have been pretending to be attracted to her. He had been so attentive, and the passion between them had been so intense that she had even begun to think—to hope—that he was falling in love with her.

      ‘It’s not true. Is it?’ She turned to Dimitri, pleading for his reassurance, but inside her head doubts were already forming. She had not even known his mother had died, let alone the tragic circumstances of her death. Not once in the past few days had he mentioned it.

      She had thought they were friends, and now they were lovers. But Dimitri had turned into a hard-faced stranger and the coldness in his eyes froze her blood.

       ‘Yes, it’s true.’

      His harsh voice broke the silence, and like a pebble hitting the surface of a pool his words caused shockwaves to ripple through the tense atmosphere.

      ‘My mother took her own life because she was heartbroken that my father had divorced her and thrown away the love they had shared for thirty years for a worthless whore.’

      He stared contemptuously at Tina, and then turned and walked away without saying another word. He didn’t even glance at Louise; it was as if she did not exist. And she watched him go, paralysed with shock and feeling sick with humiliation that she had been nothing more to him than a pawn in his battle with her mother.

      ‘Don’t tell me you were falling for him?’ her mother said, when she caught sight of Louise’s stricken face. ‘For God’s sake, Lou, until recently he was engaged to Rochelle Fitzpatrick—that stunning American model who is regularly on the covers of the top fashion magazines. He wasn’t really interested in you. Like I said, he just wants to cause trouble. A while ago Dimitri overheard me telling Kostas how keen I am for you have a good career,’ Tina continued. ‘He knew I would be upset if you dropped out of university to have an affair with him. I imagine he thought that if you fell for his flattery he would be able to turn you against me. And of course his ultimate goal was to cause friction between me and his father.’

      Tina prattled on relentlessly, unaware of the agonised expression in Louise’s eyes. ‘It’s lucky I came back before he persuaded you into bed. The villa staff told me he’s only been hanging around for a couple of days. Go back to university and forget about Dimitri.’ She gave Louise a sudden intent look. ‘You’re clever. You can make something of your life. You don’t need to rely on any man. And if you take my advice you’ll never fall in love like I did with your father. I swore after him that I’d never let myself care about any man ever again.’

      Shaken by Tina’s reference to her father, whom she had never known, and traumatised by the scene with Dimitri, Louise left Eirenne within the hour. She hadn’t expected to see him again, but as she climbed into the motor launch that would take her to Athens she was shocked to see him striding along the jetty.

      ‘Loulou … wait!’

      Wearing bleached jeans and a black tee shirt that accentuated his incredible physique, he looked unbelievably gorgeous, and it struck her then that she’d been mad to believe he could have been attracted to her. He could have any woman he wanted, so why would he want an unsophisticated student whose looks could at best be described as passable?

      Overwhelmed by self-doubt, she instructed the boatman to start the engine.

      Dimitri broke into a run. ‘Theos! Don’t go. I want to talk to you about what I said up at the villa.’

      ‘But I don’t want to talk to you,’ she told him stonily. ‘You made everything perfectly clear.’

      She felt a fool, but she’d be damned if she would let him see that he had broken her heart. The boat engine roared, drowning out Dimitri’s response. He looked furious as the boat shot away from the jetty, and shouted something after her. But she didn’t hear his words over the rush of the wind, and told herself she did not care that she would never speak to him again.

      She had been unaware when she had left Eirenne that a few weeks later she would urgently need to talk to Dimitri …

      Louise tossed restlessly beneath the sheets. She sat up to thump her pillows and flopped back down again, wishing the bombardment of memories would stop. Tiredness swept over her, and her last conscious thought was that in a few short hours she had to get up for work.

      She must have fallen into a deep sleep at first, but towards dawn the dream came. She was running down a long corridor. On either side were rooms like hospital rooms, and in each room was a baby lying in a cot. But it was never her baby. Every time she went into a room she felt hopeful that this was the right one—but it was always someone else’s child looking up at her.

      She ran into the next room, and the next, feeling ever more frantic as she searched for her baby. She was almost at the end of the corridor. There was only one room left. This had to be where her child was. But the cot was empty—and the terrible truth dawned that she would never find her baby. Her child was lost for ever.

      Dear God. Louise jerked upright, breathing hard as if she had run a marathon. It was a long time since she had last had the dream, but it had been so real she was not surprised to find her face was wet and that she had been crying in her sleep. For months after the miscarriage that she’d suffered, three weeks after discovering she was expecting Dimitri’s child, she had dreamed that she was looking for her baby. And each time she had woken, just as now, feeling a dull ache of grief for the new life she had carried so briefly inside her.

      Seeing Dimitri again yesterday had triggered memories buried deep in her subconscious. She had never told anyone about the baby, and had struggled to deal with her sense of loss alone. Maybe if she had been able to confide in someone it would have helped, but her mother had been totally absorbed in her relationship with Kostas, and as for Dimitri—well, it was probably better that he had never known she had conceived his child.

      No doubt he would have been horrified. But she would never know how he might have reacted, because he had refused to speak to her when she had plucked up the courage and phoned him to tell him she was pregnant. A week later, when he had finally returned her call, she had switched off her phone. There hadn’t seemed any point in telling him she had lost his baby. At the time there hadn’t seemed a lot of point in anything. The weeks and months following the miscarriage had been desperately bleak, and she had just wanted to stay in bed and hide from the world, she remembered.

      She had told herself it would not have been ideal to bring a fatherless child into the world. She knew only too well what it was like to grow up with only one parent, to feel the nagging sense of failure that perhaps it was her fault her own father had rejected her. She had tried to convince herself it was for the best that her pregnancy had ended. Yet even now, whenever she saw a child of about six years old, she imagined what her child would have been like and wished she could have known him or her.

      Tears filled her eyes and she blinked them away. There was no point in dwelling on