Greek Affairs: Tempted by the Tycoons: The Greek Tycoon's Convenient Bride / The Greek Tycoon's Unexpected Wife / The Greek Tycoon's Secret Heir. Кейт Хьюит

cast upon its waters. She hunched one shoulder. ‘They were older when they adopted me. Late forties. They’d never expected to have children. Mum couldn’t.’

      ‘All the more reason to be overjoyed when they were given a chance with you, I would have thought.’

      She shrugged. ‘I suppose by the time I came along they were well set in their ways. A little toddler can be a burden, I know.’

      ‘And you felt like one?’

      ‘They never said it,’ Rhiannon protested, almost desperate to exonerate their memory. ‘It was just … there.’ She paused, remembering all the moments, the pursed lips, the disapproving looks. The feeling that if she could just act as if she wasn’t there, perhaps they’d love her.

      Silly to think that way now, she knew. Yet that was how she’d thought when she was six, twelve, twenty-two.

      ‘I remember one time,’ she began, the memory rushing back with aching sorrow, ‘I was hungry. Mum strictly forbade snacking between meals, but I’d missed lunch at school for some reason—I can’t remember now. She was out at a flower guild meeting, and I made myself a sandwich. I cleaned up afterwards, so she wouldn’t even know, but there was a drip of brown sauce on the worktop, and she was … furious.’ Rhiannon managed a rueful smile. ‘No dinner for me that night.’

      She was surprised to feel Lukas’s hand on her shoulder, slipping up to cup her cheek. ‘I’m sorry.’

      ‘Don’t be.’ She leaned against his hand; she couldn’t help it. The strength, the security radiating from him, from that simple gesture, were overwhelming. ‘It was a long time ago.’

      ‘But the scars are still there?’

      ‘Yes, I suppose they are.’ She thought of her mother’s pain-worn face on her sickbed, of how she’d cared for her endless day after endless day. Her mother had accepted those ministrations with pursed lips and hard eyes, glaring resentfully at the daughter whom she somehow blamed for her reduced circumstances.