The Secret Kept from the Greek by Susan Stephens

Author:Susan Stephens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarlequinUKLtd
Published: 2017-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

HIS LOST TIME with Thea had lodged in his heart, where it was lashing around, demanding an explanation. Lizzie thought that because he was acting so contained he felt nothing, when for the first time in his life he didn’t know if he could trust himself to handle this meeting as well as he must. He only knew that for Thea’s sake he had to.

In order to bring himself to talk to Lizzie at all, he had listed the good things she had done. Thea had turned out well. Raising her as a single mother with no family couldn’t have been easy for Lizzie. Eleven years ago she had been just eighteen and pregnant, with no home, no money, no family—no one at all to rely on but herself. She hadn’t just cared for Thea, she loved Thea without boundaries, in the same way that he’d been loved as a child, and Lizzie had raised Thea without the good fortune his parents had enjoyed.

He couldn’t claim any credit for Thea beyond her existence. She was all Lizzie’s work. That was why he’d found Lizzie washing pots in London. It all made sense now. She’d kept nothing for herself and had put all her dreams on indefinite hold for Thea.

But Thea was his daughter too, and he had been denied every moment of her existence—even the knowledge of it—up to now. So, although he could rationalise the situation and give Lizzie some credit, things could not go on as they were.

‘I won’t let you take her, Damon.’

He stared at Lizzie. He’d seen flashes of her vulnerability, but it would be a mistake to think her vulnerable now. His mother had always told him that there was no stronger opponent a man could face than a mother fighting for her child.

‘No court would allow any man to walk into a child’s life and take her from the mother who has loved her from the instant she first felt her stir in the womb—who has loved her unreservedly ever since—unless that man could prove both that he was the father of the child and that the mother was unfit to care for her. And no one—not even you—can prove a lie, Damon.’

‘I’m not just any man,’ he argued tensely. ‘I’m a father. Thea’s father.’

‘I will fight you every step of the way,’ she warned him. ‘I’ll fight your money, your power, and your legal team too. Do you really think you can defeat a mother in defence of her child? Even you don’t have the weapons for that, Damon.’

His feelings were rising. He felt fury that she would deny him Thea even now—and yet he knew acceptance, however reluctant, that his own mother would have said the same.

He wasn’t as callous as Lizzie thought him. She had been in his thoughts too. She’d never left them, really. In the desert, when he’d been working with his team, she had intruded on his thoughts at night, and in the day he’d kept her in mind to ease some of the horrors he’d seen.

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