And for her own.
‘Will you walk with me on the beach?’ Lukas asked. ‘There need not be enmity between us, Rhiannon.’
‘Is that so?’ Rhiannon tried to laugh; it came out brittle. ‘It’s easy for you to say that, Lukas. You’re holding all the cards.’
‘I think,’ Lukas said carefully, ‘we both want what’s best for Annabel.’
‘We might disagree about what that is.’
He nodded in acknowledgement, then shrugged. ‘It’s a beautiful moonlit night. The photographers can’t see us in the dark. A few moments…You haven’t had any fresh air since you’ve been here, and the island is beautiful.’
‘I can’t leave Annabel. If she wakes…’
‘Adeia will listen for her,’ Lukas said. ‘She’d love to.’
Rhiannon hesitated. Perhaps getting to know Lukas would help. It might soften him to her case, to her hopes for Annabel. ‘All right,’ she agreed, not nearly as reluctantly as she knew she should. ‘A few moments.’
Outside the sound of the surf was a muted roar in the distance, and the air was cool and soft. Lukas led her down a paved path to the beach, a stretch of smooth sand that curved around tumbled rocks into the unknown.
He kicked off his shoes, and Rhiannon did the same, enjoying the silky softness between her toes.
They walked quietly down the shoreline for a few minutes, the only sound the lapping of waves.
‘Has this island been in your family long?’ she finally asked, unnerved by the silence that had stretched between them.
Lukas gave a short, abrupt laugh before shaking his head. ‘No, indeed not. Only about twenty-five years or so; the Petrakides fortune is very new.’
‘Is it?’ Rhiannon had not read that in the papers, but then she’d only been looking for salient details regarding the man she’d believed to be Annabel’s father. ‘I didn’t realise.’
‘My father started life as a street-sweeper,’ Lukas stated with matter-of-fact flatness. ‘He worked his way up to becoming landlord of a tenement in Athens, before banding together with a few partners and buying a block of derelict apartment buildings. They renovated them, turned them into modest, affordable housing units. And he moved up from there. Eventually he didn’t need partners.’
‘A real success story,’ Rhiannon murmured, and Lukas acknowledged this with a brusque nod.
‘Yes.’
They walked quietly for a moment, Lukas seeming lost in unhappy thoughts.
Success wasn’t everything, Rhiannon supposed. It couldn’t buy happiness. It couldn’t buy love.
‘Your father doesn’t seem like a happy man,’ she ventured, surprised by her own candour as well as by Lukas’s swift, acknowledging glance.
‘No, he isn’t,’ he agreed after a pause. ‘If he seems in a bad temper, it is in part because he is upset over the press. My father has wanted to prove to everyone that he deserves the wealth and success he has earned. He feels any stain on his reputation is a reflection of where he came from—the street. Although…’ Lukas’s face was obscured in shadow, but there was suddenly a different darkness to his tone. ‘Things have not been easy for him lately.’
Rhiannon’s steps slowed as memories clicked into place. ‘He’s dying, isn’t he?’ she said quietly.
He stiffened, turned in surprise. ‘How did you know?’
‘I should have realised sooner,’ she admitted. ‘I’m a palliative nurse—I work in hospices. I’ve been around a lot of people in his situation.’ She shook her head. ‘I assumed he was speaking so slowly because he thought I was stupid, but it’s because he’s losing his words, isn’t he? What does he have? A brain tumour?’
Lukas nodded stiffly. ‘The doctors have given him at most a few more months. It hasn’t, by the grace of God, affected him too much yet, although he occasionally forgets things. Sometimes it is just a word, other times a whole event.’ He shook his head. ‘It is frustrating, because he knows he is forgetting.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Rhiannon whispered. ‘I know how difficult a dying parent can be.’
‘Do you?’ Lukas’s glance was swift, sharp, assessing, yet there was a flicker of compassion in those silver eyes. ‘Tell me about yourself, Rhiannon.’
She shrugged, discomfited by the turn in the conversation he’d so quickly and effortlessly made. ‘My parents died three years ago,’ she said, as if it were of no consequence. ‘I cared for them until their deaths. It is a difficult thing to do.’
‘Yes…I suppose it is. And in the time since then?’
‘I studied nursing, went into hospice care. It made the most sense after my experience with my parents.’
‘A rather lonely-sounding life,’ Lukas remarked, his tone expressionless, his face in shadow.
‘No more than anyone else’s.’ Irritation prickled at his judgement. ‘I like to think I make a difference. Help people in a time of need that most of us would prefer to ignore.’
‘Indeed, that’s too true. I only meant that spending time with people twice your age no doubt makes it difficult to find friends with whom you can socialise.’
Rhiannon shrugged. She could hardly argue with that. She didn’t have a social life—had never had one. She gazed unseeingly at the dark stretch of water, at the stars strung above in an inky sky like diamonds pricked through cloth.
‘Why did you come here, Rhiannon?’ Lukas asked after a long moment, his voice musing. ‘Most women in your position I believe would not have made such an effort. They would have sent a letter, or gone through a solicitor. But to come to the resort, to the reception, and think you could convince me I was a child’s father—!’ He shook his head, smiling slightly in disbelief, but Rhiannon was only conscious of her own prickling, humiliated response.
‘I admit it was foolhardy,’ she said in a tight voice that bordered on strangled. She was glad the darkness hid her flushed face. ‘I thought a face-to-face confrontation would be the…strongest way to present Annabel to you.’
‘To get rid of her, you mean?’
‘You have a strange way of looking at things,’ she retorted. She stopped to turn and face him. ‘I wanted to give her to her father—her family. I would have been ignoring my responsibility if I hadn’t attempted to find you. Wouldn’t I? To keep her to myself, to make no effort to find a family who might want her, love her…’ She trailed off, shaking her head. ‘That would have been selfish.’
Lukas was silent for a moment. ‘You wanted to keep her?’ he asked in a different voice.
‘Of course I did—do! She’s a baby.’
‘An inconvenience, as you said.’
She glanced sharply at him, unsure if he thought that, or if he simply thought she did. ‘All children are inconveniences,’ she said flatly. ‘If you remember, I said that didn’t mean they weren’t worth it.’
‘So you want her, but you’re prepared to give her up?’ Lukas said musingly.
‘I was,’ Rhiannon emphasised. ‘Now things are different.’ She turned to face him. ‘You should know that I won’t give Annabel up now. I may have been willing to earlier, when I believed you were the father, when I thought you would love her. But I realise now the situation is completely different. I don’t know how I can fit into the family you envisage for her—your family—but I will have some part. I’m not walking out of her life now.’
Lukas