She heard a low male groan as soon as she opened the door, her heart instantly tripping in alarm.
‘Come on, baby, give it to me,’ the stranger’s voice said. ‘I paid you double the money—now deliver.’
Charlotte shut the door with a snap and turned to face Damon’s thunderous frown, her back pressed flat against the door. ‘W-we can’t go in there…’
His jaw tightened until she could see a pulse leaping at the side of his mouth. ‘Your sister?’ he asked.
The colour of her shame answered for her. ‘Yes.’
‘How often does this occur?’ he asked.
She knew he wouldn’t believe her but she felt compelled to defend herself. ‘It hasn’t happened before, I swear it hasn’t.’
She was right—he didn’t believe her. His disgust was evident on his face as he made his way back to the pavement with Emily still asleep in his arms.
‘Damon…’ Charlotte rushed after him. ‘I swear to God, Stacey has never done this before! She would never dream of betraying me like this.’
He sent her a withering glance as he reached with one hand for his mobile, somehow managing to keep Emily secure in his arms. ‘Your sister is just as untrustworthy as you. How dare you expose my daughter to such depravity?’
Tears spilled from her eyes. ‘She promised me she would get help! She gave me her word.’
His dark eyes narrowed. ‘To get help for what?’
Charlotte felt her chest cave in as she realised what she had revealed.
‘To get help for what?’ he repeated, his voice scraping along her nerves like the blade of a serrated knife.
She lowered her gaze, her stomach churning in anguish and dread, her voice coming out flat and empty. ‘She’s a heroin addict…ever since our mother got sick, she became involved with an unsavoury crowd…I couldn’t stop her…it went downhill from there…’
‘So she sells herself to feed her habit?’ he asked, his dark eyes almost closed in fury.
Charlotte couldn’t meet his narrowed glittering gaze. Shame felt like a searing brand all over her. She felt its imprint on every surface of her body—even her eyes were stinging with it.
She heard his harshly indrawn breath in the aching silence. ‘You have allowed my daughter to be exposed to this?’
‘I didn’t have any choice,’ she said, dragging her eyes back to his. ‘What could I do? Abandon my sister? I am all she has. I wanted Emily to grow up knowing her aunt. I had to do what I could to keep Stacey alive, even if it meant at times compromising myself in the process.’
‘You have not just compromised yourself but my daughter!’
‘I had no choice!’ Charlotte fought back. ‘Do you know what it’s like to watch someone you love destroy their potential and be unable to do anything to stop it? I have tried everything. I have begged, I have bribed, I have given her chance after chance, and time and time again, just when I think she is turning the corner, she lets me down.’
‘Then get rid of her out of your life.’
She sent him an accusing look. ‘Like you did to me?’
‘As far as I was concerned, you were guilty. I saw no reason to continue our association.’
‘It’s so easy for you, isn’t it? Anyone who steps over your boundaries, you cut out of your life, but she is my sister. My only living relative, apart from Emily, and I won’t write her off like you did to me. She is guilty of being weak—yes—but she needs help and I will not give up on her.’
‘I will not allow my daughter to be exposed to such a person,’ he said as a cab pulled into the kerb. ‘You will not be returning with Emily to your flat. I will make arrangements for your things to be moved to my hotel immediately.’
‘A hotel is not the place for a small child,’ Charlotte argued as he bundled her into the cab.
‘Neither is a back yard brothel,’ he threw back as he settled Emily between them.
‘I told you—she’s never done that before. She promised me she was going to go to detox. I planned to take her to a new clinic. That’s why I took your money—to pay for it. It’s expensive…I couldn’t do it without—’
His eyes cut to hers. ‘You used my money for that whore?’
Charlotte tightened her mouth. ‘You sit so high up in your ivory tower seat of judgement, but what price would you have paid for your sister to get well again?’
Damon looked at her in dumbstruck silence. She was right. He would have paid any price to get Eleni well again, but no amount of money had been able to achieve it.
‘You don’t know what the real world is like, Damon,’ she went on as the cab tyres swished over the rain-slicked roads. ‘I’ve done everything possible to help my sister. She’s broken my heart so many times but I won’t give up on her. I don’t believe in giving up on people, unlike you, who with just one whiff of suspicion threw our relationship away. You didn’t give me a fair trial; you had made your mind up and nothing I said was ever going to change it. As far as you were concerned, I was guilty, but only because you wanted me to be guilty.’
‘I did not want you to be guilty.’ Damon spoke the words but he wondered deep inside if they were true. Had he been looking for a way out of their rapidly escalating relationship? His family had always married within the Greek community. A bride had already been selected for him—Iona Patonis, a pretty young woman who had all the makings of a submissive wife. She had been a close friend of Eleni’s and so everyone had assumed that in time he would settle down and make her an offer…and yet…
‘I did not want you to be guilty.’ He repeated the words, but even the second time around they didn’t ring with any more conviction.
‘Yeah, right,’ she said, flicking him a disdainful glance as she drew her daughter closer. ‘Your so-called love for me didn’t last the distance, did it, Damon? If you had truly cared anything for me, nothing would have stopped you from defending me, but you let me go the first chance you could.’
‘If it is any comfort to you, it was not easy for me to do so,’ he said, looking down at his hands resting on his tiny daughter’s pink pyjama-clad bent knees.
She gave him an embittered look and turned her head to look at the raindrops beading on the window of the cab. ‘Then you escaped lightly,’ she said. ‘The hardest thing for me was walking away from you and staying away.’
But she hadn’t walked away of her own free will, Damon reminded himself with a deep pang of regret as he settled back in his seat, his hands still on his tiny daughter’s legs.
He had sent her away…
EMILY started to stir in Charlotte’s arms once they arrived at Damon’s hotel.
‘Where are we, Mummy?’ she asked, blinking at the bright lights of the hotel foyer as the cab drew to a halt outside.
‘We’re at a hotel, darling,’ Charlotte answered. ‘This is where your…er…daddy is staying.’
‘My daddy is here?’ Emily asked with wide eyes.
Charlotte caught the tail-end of Damon’s look and felt another wave of guilt crash through her. He was so very angry but in amongst the anger she could see he was deeply hurt. His dark eyes shone with it, the pain evident every time he looked at his little daughter.
‘Yes,