Keeping Her Close: In Christofides' Keeping / The Call of the Desert / The Legend of de Marco

Gypsy automatically started to take off Lola’s outdoor jacket, as she would be warm after her nap, and tried valiantly to ignore the fact that Rico Christofides would now be looking upon his own flesh and blood for the first time. Pushing that scary thought away, she thought surely now he’d balk at the reality of a toddler and leave them alone?

A child demanding attention was hardly conducive to discussing a one-night stand? Surely he’d see that she wasn’t in the market for that again? But even at that thought her lower belly clenched with desire, as if in denial.

Lola’s coat was off, and she sat up in Gypsy’s arms, more awake now. Having spied Rico Christofides she looked at him shyly, leaning into her mother more, sticking her thumb in her mouth—a habit she’d developed as Gypsy had tried to abstain from using pacifiers.

With the utmost reluctance Gypsy followed her daughter’s gaze, knowing what Rico Christofides would be looking at: a delicately built toddler, with wide slategrey eyes ringed with long dark lashes, slightly darker than pale skin, and a shoulder-length mop of golden corkscrew curls which habitually refused to be tamed. She was adorable. People stopped Gypsy on the street all the time to exclaim over Lola.

At that moment Lola took her thumb out of her mouth and looked at Gypsy, while pointing at Rico Christofides, and said something unintelligible with all the confidence of having uttered a coherent word.

She gave a determined wriggle that Gypsy knew better than to resist, and she had no choice but to put Lola down on her feet and watch as she toddled, still a little unsteady after her nap, over to Rico Christofides, to look up, clearly certain she’d get a warm response. When he just stared down at her, with a slightly shell-shocked expression, Gypsy felt foreboding surround her like a thick ominous fog.

Lola looked from Rico back to Gypsy and then, uncertain because of his lack of response, she came back and held her arms out to Gypsy, who picked her up again and held her close.

‘What did you say her name was?’ asked Rico after an interminable moment of tense silence, and Gypsy nearly closed her eyes in despair. He knew. He’d have to be blind not to know. They had exactly the same uniquely grey eyes, and now that Gypsy had seen him again she could see they shared the same determined chin…and forehead. She was his feminine miniature—a stunning biological example of nature stamping the father’s mark on his child so that there could be no doubt she was his.

‘Lola,’ Gypsy replied faintly.

As if forcing himself to ask the question, not having taken his eyes off Lola yet, he asked hoarsely, ‘How old is she?’

Gypsy did close her eyes now—just for a second. The weight of fate and inevitability weighed her down. She was to be given no reprieve, and even if she did try to bluff her way out of this now, and run, she’d have to change her identity to evade Rico Christofides. An impossibility, considering her already precarious circumstances.

‘Fifteen months…’

‘I didn’t hear you,’ he said quickly, curtly.

Gypsy winced at the harsh tone of his voice, and said again, with fatality sinking into her bones along with a numbness which had to be shock, ‘Fifteen months.’

For the first time his gaze met hers, and she could see what was burning in those increasingly stormy grey depths. Stark suspicion, realisation, shock, horror…all tangled up.

‘But,’ he said carefully, too carefully, ‘that’s impossible. Because if she’s fifteen months old then, unless you slept with someone else directly after me, that would make her…mine. And as you haven’t contacted me then I can only assume that she isn’t mine.’

Gypsy’s breath became more shallow. She tightened her hold on Lola, who was beginning to pick up on the tension. That sense of guilt surged back; she couldn’t deny him this, no matter who he was. She looked directly at Rico Christofides and swallowed. ‘I didn’t sleep with anyone else. I haven’t been with anyone else…since you.’ It killed her, but she had to say it. ‘And I wasn’t with anyone just before…you.’ She didn’t think it worth mentioning now that she’d only had one previous lover, in college.

Again too carefully, Rico Christofides said slowly, ‘So what you’re saying is that your daughter is mine? This little girl is my daughter?’

Gypsy nodded jerkily, going hot and cold in an instant. A clammy sweat broke out over her skin, making it prickle. And at that moment, with impeccable timing, clearly bored with the lack of attention, Lola started to squirm and whinge.

Gypsy seized on the distraction. ‘She’s hungry. I need to feed her.’ And she fled like a coward into the kitchen, where she put Lola into her highchair and started chattering to her saying nonsensical things. She knew she was in shock, close to hysteria—and acutely aware of the man just feet away, who now had the power to rip their lives apart.

Rico wasn’t sure if he was still standing. He’d never been so thoroughly shocked, taken by surprise, blindsided in his entire life. All of the control he took for granted had just crumbled around him like a flimsy façade, and he saw how precarious it had really been since he’d taken control of his life at the tender age of sixteen.

He knew anger was there, but couldn’t feel it quite yet. He was numbed. And all he could think about was how it had been just those four words which had made him stop: please leave us alone. All he could think about was what it had been like to look into that little girl’s eyes for the first time and feel as though he’d missed a step, even though he hadn’t even been moving.

When she’d toddled over to look up at him with such innocent guile his heart had jolted once, hard, and he’d felt as if he was falling from a great height into an abyss. An abyss of grey eyes exactly the same unique shade as his own, which he’d inherited from his own father. Right now, the most curious sensation flooded him—as if an elusive piece of himself was slotting into place, something he hadn’t even been aware was missing from his life.

It was too much. Acting on blind instinct, he crashed out of Gypsy’s apartment, through the main door and to his car, where his driver jumped out. Gasping, Rico yanked open the car door and reached inside for what he was looking for. He realised belatedly that it was still raining as he pulled out a bottle of whisky and unscrewed the top, holding it by the neck before taking a deep gulp of the amber liquid.

His driver quickly ducked back into the car, clearly sensing his boss’s volatility and his need to be unobserved. With his hand clenched around the bottle, clarity slowly returned to Rico and he welcomed it. This woman had betrayed him in the most heinous way. The worst way possible.

He’d believed that his own biological father had turned his back on him, but in fact he hadn’t. His mother and his stepfather had seen to it that he had believed it, though.

And here was Gypsy Butler, repeating history, blithely bringing up his own daughter—his flesh and blood—clearly with no intention of ever letting him know. She’d tried to get him to leave!

He’d vowed at the age of sixteen that he would never be vulnerable or powerless again. That vow had become his life’s code when he’d finally found his father and learnt just how terribly they’d both been lied to—for years. Since then, for him trust had become just a word with useless meaning.

The flimsy chance which had led him to choose that restaurant last night made him shudder in horror; at how close he’d come to never knowing of his own daughter’s existence. He looked back towards the still open front door and took in the shabby excuse for a house. Resolve solidified in his chest, and he threw the bottle of whisky back into the car.

He knew that his life was about to change for ever, and damned if he wasn’t going to change their lives too. There was a deep primal beat within him now not to let Gypsy or his daughter out of his sight again. The fierce and immediate possessiveness he felt, and the need to punish Gypsy for her actions, were raging like a fire within him.

Gypsy was shaking all over, and had to consciously try to calm herself as she finished feeding Lola and listened out for Rico’s car taking off. The speed with which he’d left the apartment had in equal measure sent a wave of relief and a wave of anger through her. While it was her worst nightmare to be in this situation, how could he reject his daughter so summarily?

She felt a surge of protectiveness for Lola, and cursed Rico Christofides while acknowledging that she’d expected this to be one of his possible reactions. Straight denial and rejection—just as her father had done with her initially.

She told herself that this was a good thing; she’d salved her conscience by telling Rico Christofides, and Gypsy knew that in the long run they’d both be better off. At least she could tell her daughter as she grew up who her father was, and that it just hadn’t worked out between them. Guilt hit her again when she thought of how her daughter might perceive the disparity in their circumstances, but Gypsy reassured herself that—as she knew well—the fact that Rico Christofides was a multibillionaire did not a father make.

Her own life had been changed for ever when her ill and penniless mother had begged her father to take Gypsy in. He’d been the owner of the company where Mary Butler had been a menial cleaner. An impossibly rich man who had taken advantage of his position and taken her to bed, with all sorts of promises, only to drop her and fire her as soon as she’d told him she was pregnant. Unable to get another job or make rent payments, she’d soon become homeless.

Gypsy had spent her first few months in a women’s refuge, where her mother had gone after she’d given birth at Christmas time. Slowly her mother had built up her life again, finding more menial work and eventually getting them both a council flat in a rough part of London.

Gypsy had known from a very young age that her mother wasn’t coping, and she’d learnt to watch out for the signs so that she could take care of her. Of them both. Until she’d got home from school one day and found her mother passed out on the couch, with an empty bottle of pills on the floor.

The emergency services had managed to save her—just. And the only thing that had stopped them from putting six-year-old Gypsy straight into foster care had been her mother’s assurance that she would send her to live with her father. And so Gypsy had eventually gone to live with the father who had never wanted her, and she’d never seen her mother again. She’d only found out later that her father had comprehensively shut her mother out of Gypsy’s life.

Forcing her mind away from sad memories, she strained to listen out for the car and still couldn’t hear anything. What was he doing? She made sure that Lola had a firm grip of the plastic cup she was drinking from and stood up, heart thumping. The door to the apartment was still open, and she crept over to close it.

With one hand on the door, she heard heavy steps. He was coming back. Panic made her clumsy as she tried to shut the door completely, but it was too late. A hand and foot prevented her from closing it, and as she jumped backwards in shock at how quickly he’d moved she heard a laconic drawl, edged with steel.

‘You didn’t think it would be so easy to get rid of me, did you?’

Chapter Four

SHE watched, dry-mouthed as Rico Christofides stepped back into the room, closing the door with incongruous softness behind him, angry grey eyes narrowed intently on her, face impossibly grim. Rain clung in iridescent water droplets to his hair and jacket. She had an awful feeling of déjà-vu—the same feeling she’d had that day when she’d found her mother unconscious. Everything was about to change and she was powerless to stop it.

The anger she’d felt moments ago at thinking of him rejecting Lola dissipated under a much more potent threat. Just as her father had belatedly and reluctantly swept in and taken over when she’d been six, now Rico Christofides was about to do the same. This was the other reaction she’d expected and feared.

She fought through her fear and bit out through numb lips, ‘I don’t want you here, Mr Christofides. I never intended you to find out—’

He uttered a curt laugh. ‘Clearly you never intended me to find out. How serendipitous, then, that I just happened to choose that restaurant last night, out of the many thousands in London.’

His sensual mouth firmed, and he looked angry enough to throttle Gypsy, but she felt no sense of danger.

‘Believe me, it makes my blood run cold to think how close I came to never knowing about this.’

Gypsy heard herself say, as though from a long way away, ‘You didn’t let me finish. I didn’t intend you to find out like this. I was going to tell you…at some stage.’

He arched an imperious brow, derision all over his handsome face, ‘When? When she turned ten? Or perhaps sixteen? When she was a fully grown person who’d built up a lifetime of resentment for the father who’d abandoned her?’ His voice became blistering, his accent thickened. ‘Undoubtedly that’s what you’d planned, no? Feed her lies and tell her that her father hadn’t wanted to know her? Couldn’t be bothered to stick around?’

Gypsy shook her head. She was feeling nauseous at the condemnation in his tone. ‘No, I…I hadn’t planned that at all. I was going to tell her—and you—I promise.’