She gave him an assessing look, as if deciding whether he was to be trusted or not. ‘I have a teddy bear and a doll and a wabbit with one ear.’
‘What happened to the other ear?’ he asked, trying his best to disguise the choked emotion in his voice.
‘I cut it off when I was berry little,’ she confessed. ‘I found Mummy’s scissors and cut it off. I got into big twouble, didn’t I, Mummy?’
Charlotte’s throat felt too tight to get the words out. ‘Yes…I was very worried you could have hurt yourself.’
‘Will you read me a story?’ Emily asked her father. ‘Mummy always reads me a story and sometimes if I’m berry good she makes one up in her head. Can you do dat?’
‘I’ll give it a try,’ Damon said. ‘What sort of stories do you like?’
Emily wriggled underneath the covers. ‘I like the ones with a happy ending. Do you have any of those in your head?’
‘I guess I could try to find one,’ he said, scratching his temple.
‘The best ones start with once upon a time,’ she told him with solemn authority. ‘I can start you off if you like.’
He smiled down at her, his heart feeling so big it felt as if it was taking over his body. ‘That would be great.’
She took a little preparatory breath that reminded him so much of Charlotte he could scarcely inflate his own lungs.
‘Once upon a time…’ She gave him an impish grin. ‘Now it’s your turn.’
‘O-K,’ he said and settled himself on the bed beside her. ‘Once upon a time there was a beautiful little girl who was called Emily…’
‘IS SHE asleep?’ Charlotte asked when Damon joined her in the main suite some time later.
‘Yes.’ He pushed his hand through his hair and began to pace the room, anger and tension visible in each and every stride.
She twisted her hands together, her mouth drying in anguish. ‘Damon…’
He turned to glare at her. ‘I have missed out on so much. Do you have any idea what that feels like? I have nothing! No memories of her as a baby—nothing. You have taken that from me.’
‘I tried to tell you.’
‘You should have kept trying.’
‘For how long?’ she asked, her tone bordering on despair. ‘My mother was dying, my sister was going off the rails and I was juggling my studies with a difficult pregnancy. I know it’s hard for you to understand, but I felt I had no choice but to leave you to your life while I did my best to get on with mine. The words you said to me that last day…’ She stumbled over the memory and continued, her voice ragged with emotion. ‘I was so hurt. The way you spoke made me worried that if by some chance you did come around to believe me you might force me into having a termination. I couldn’t take the risk. That’s why I didn’t try and contact you again until I had passed the point of no return.’
‘I would not have asked that of you.’ His voice sounded as if it was coming from very deep inside him.
She gave him an embittered look. ‘Wouldn’t you? Come on, Damon, don’t you remember what you said to me? You told me I wasn’t to be believed, that I was a slut who had her eye on snaring herself a billionaire. Not exactly the words I wanted to hear when I was trying to do the right thing by telling you.’
He let out a heavy sigh. ‘I deeply regret how I handled the situation. But if you had persisted in trying to contact me I would have come around eventually.’
‘Yes and whipped her away from me as you’re threatening to do now.’
‘I want her in my life. I am not leaving without her. You have the choice of marrying me and coming with us or letting her go.’
‘That’s not what I call a choice. It’s blackmail.’
‘I do not care what you call it, Charlotte. I want my daughter and I am prepared to marry you to have her.’
‘Well, thanks very much for the romantic proposal,’ she said with a cutting edge to her voice.
‘What do you expect me to say?’ He glowered at her. ‘I am still so angry with you I can barely think straight.’
‘You should be angry at yourself, not me. If you hadn’t been so arrogantly assured of my guilt you wouldn’t have missed out on Emily at all. Have you considered that, Damon? What if I wasn’t guilty? What then?’
His throat moved up and down convulsively and it was a moment or two before he answered. ‘You have to be guilty.’
‘Why?’ She looked at him coldly. ‘So you can still be the good guy, the injured one, the one with victim written all over your face?’
‘There have been no thefts since,’ he said. ‘And certainly none before you came.’
‘So that somehow makes me automatically responsible?’ She looked at him incredulously. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Damon, surely you’re not that blindsided?’
‘I do not wish to talk about that incident.’ He turned away from her and began to pace again. ‘I wish to discuss how we will manage things from now on.’
‘I can’t leave until the exhibition is launched,’ she said. ‘I can’t let Julian down like that.’
‘All right.’ He turned to face her once more. ‘We will stay for you to complete your commitments to the exhibition, but in the meantime we will formalise our relationship. I will see to it tomorrow.’
‘It takes a month to procure a marriage licence,’ she pointed out.
‘I can apply for a special licence.’
‘Emily doesn’t have a passport.’
He frowned at her. ‘Why the hell not?’
She rolled her eyes scathingly. ‘Strange as it may seem to someone with the disgusting wealth you have taken for granted all of your life, other people, especially single mothers, do not have the money to travel the length and breadth of the globe. I have had to put food on the table and pay for childcare so I could work, even though I didn’t want to when Emily was a baby. It broke my heart leaving her with strangers while my breasts ached and leaked all day.’
His features twisted with anguish. ‘You struggled like that without once trying again to contact me?’
She turned away in disgust. ‘What would have been the point? I was sick of beating my head against a brick wall. Look at the way you treated me the first day you were here. You’ve made it pretty clear how low your opinion of me was.’
A tense little silence tightened the air.
‘I admit I left you with little choice that first night, but why did you agree to see me again?’ he asked. ‘You could have told me you were not interested and left it at that.’
‘I did tell you I wasn’t interested but you kept dangling threats over my head,’ she reminded him coldly. ‘Then when you said you wanted us to meet as friends…I thought it would be good for us to establish a relationship based on mutual respect…I thought that it would be a better way of revealing the truth about Emily. I didn’t want to spring it on you; neither did I want you to find out some other way.’
His hand carved another rough pathway through his hair. ‘I want to believe you, Charlotte, but everything in me warns me against lowering my guard. You ripped my heart from my chest four years ago and you have done it again by keeping